I Have this Obsession with Telling Stories

Lately I've been in what feels like an artistically dry period. I've spent this last year and a half not focused as much on acting but focusing on myself, my spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health. With that being said, this past eighteen months have be HARD (I had to capitalize that).  Hard because I wasn't just confronting my pain, and the things I wasn't letting go of, but I was mainly confronting myself and my own demons and calling out myself when it came to my own toxic traits, and how I tend to hold myself back. I shed a lot of tears, both happy and sad. I went through the process of feeling guilty, full of shame, feeling worthless, not enough. I had to face the mistakes I made that led me to dark places, the decisions I made that I lived with regret about for so long. All of that to be where I am now. At some point after graduation when I feel into one of the deepest depressions I have ever been in, I made a decision to get up and fight. Fight for my life, fight for my art. Fight for my dreams and fight for my family. I didn't imagine that I would have grown this much in such a short amount of time but God is gracious and sometimes He's moves at a quick pace.  

It wouldn't be life if it wasn't a rollercoaster right? So here I am, not back where I was before but this is unknown territory. There's this burning in me to share so much of myself to share my art, and all the stories that are in my journals and saved in my google drive. But there's also this fuzzy feeling that I'm stuck. I'm trying to find a way and nothing seems clear. I'm a bit uneasy and I've been restless for weeks, because I have no idea where to start or what step to take next. 

As I was driving around today, getting frustrated because I couldn't find anywhere to park and I was very hungry, I found myself so irritated and angry not just because of my current situation but because artistically I'm frustrated. A lot has been going on for me personally and I think sometimes the smallest things can set you off when you're emotionally exhausted and trying to hold it all together. Once I got back home I started going through all the documents on my google drive of things I had written, ideas, scripts, stories and I came across this one that kid of set me back in place. I wrote this January 28th,2018 where I explained what storytelling is to me and why I seem to be obsessed with it. I want to share:

January 28, 2018

I’m in a play right now, Sonnets For An Old Century by Jose Rivera. This is a play full of monologues, there is no dialogue because these people take turns telling their stories. They are at a point where they do not know whether they are going to live or die so they take this opportunity to tell one last story. It’s a beautiful play, but when I first read it I did not think about the stories they were telling or even consider that they were telling stories, I only thought of it as a monologue, a speech. As we continued to work on it, I started to realize that these are people’s lives, they are telling stories and sharing moments that have impacted them in such a way that it is the thing they come back to in what could there last moments. With that being said, I cannot stop talking about how powerful I believe stories are and how much power there is in the telling of a story. Whether it is an author writing a book, an actor playing a character and bringing it to life, or my grandmother talking about growing up in the Jim Crow South. Every story can touch someone in a different way and can reach beyond the physical shield and grab the heart. What I love about telling stories is the different ways in which they captivate you, they can make you cry, fill you with empathy, or throw you into a fit of laughter. It is the most beautiful and genuine way of connection with humanity.

As an actor, the question we often get is why we do what we do, and for me the answer is simple, I love telling stories. To me, storytelling is magical. The magical part is having the opportunity to create a world that no one has known before, and making that world familiar to the very people who were strangers to it when the story started. As an actor and writer, I want to make people feel like that are a part of these worlds. I get to invite people out of their own comfortable environment and take them into the unknown, if only for ninety minutes. I get to take people on a journey. I am so in love with story telling that I can talk about it all day. Whether a story is fiction or nonfiction, the thing they all have in common is life and experience. To me it doesn’t matter through what eyes or lips the story is told, it matters to me more that the story is told. For example The Lion King, it’s one of my favorite movies, but so is Mona Lisa Smile and Remember the Titans. Each one of these completely different stories, both fiction and nonfiction has had an impact on me in different ways. It doesn’t impact me less because The Lion King is told through the eyes of a lion, Mona Lisa Smile through the eyes of a female artist fighting against all odds for women to see the worth in themselves, or that Remember the Titans is about a black man trying to bring unity to a segregated school and  community through football. The fact is, The Lion King taught me at a young age not to be afraid. It taught me not to run away from problems, and never let the people who are wrong about you win. While at the same time teaching me that sometimes it’s okay to take some time to find ourselves and become the person we were always meant to be, which in most cases is the person we always wanted to be. It taught me to use my voice and stand up for those who are depending on me and for those who don’t have a voice. Last, it taught me to listen to the people we often think are foolish because they have more wisdom than we think (Hello Rafiki!). While Mona Lisa Smile taught me that there is no specific way to be a woman. Being a woman is not fitting a mould created for you but it is about choosing the type of person we want to be and becoming that. Just because someone’s choices are different than our own it doesn’t make them wrong, we all experience life in a different way, that makes us human. Remember the Titans is a example of what can happen if we just try. If we look adversity in the face, and set a standard for ourselves and the people we are leading, we can change the hearts of man. I could go on forever, but these stories are stamps in time, they take us away from our reality for a split second and send us back with something we didn’t possess before. 

Stories have the power to change us, give us hope, motivate us, make us fight for something so much bigger than ourselves or teach us to fight for ourselves. Not every story is told through the eyes of an actor or a writer, some of the best stories are sitting in our living rooms with us. They are the years of wisdom our grandparents impart to us. We are living, walking, breathing stories. We all have a story to tell, a story that we have lived, or are living, and we all have a story to finish, that’s the important part. The way I see it is, no matter how much we think we aren’t living or no matter how much heartache and pain our life has been filled with, eventually we will look back and be able to tell the story of where we were and how we got to where we are. This is so fascinating to me because we as humans all want to live a glorious life and leave a great legacy behind, myself included, but we fail to realize that legacies are built on stories. The legacies we leave behind tell the story of our lives. They tell the story of who we are, who we were and who we would eventually become. That is why the story is so powerful. We are living on piles and piles of stories. We exist in a story, and our stories do not stand alone. They are intertwined with the people we love, the people we meet, the people we have a random interactions within our day-to-day lives. In those moments we become a part of their story and they become a part of ours, forever. It is the power of storytelling that will bring unity to humanity. Once we start sharing we will all start realizing that we are one in the same. We are human, and we exist together. 

How beautiful it is to be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves. I've learned, this life is so much bigger than me, I'm just grateful to make an appearance.