Every show is different.
…Outside of the obvious, I mean it in the ways that they affect you; Even down to the basics of blocking rehearsals, and early French scene runs…before you’ve even gotten to the really meaty, everyone-off-book, part.
The last show was a laugh-fest of hams personifying humans, waltzing around making merry. Which meant that, naturally, we all wanted to carry it on afterwards…usually to the local watering hole…where we would continue our antics (unscripted), with the boosting cheer of alcohol.
This show is more, hypertension, caged-animal fighting, sinus-weeping at max, with a couple of inappropriate jokes in between. Which means that, naturally, we all want to carry it on afterwards to the local watering hole, where we can kill it with a couple slugs of good whiskey, neat.
…The problem with that being: I don’t like alcohol as a medication for feeling like shit.
…”Emotionally,” that is.
(I’ll hot-toddy the sniffles to death in half a second, if given the opportunity.)
…But depending on a drink to loosen the stays of the emotional corset I’m wearing, three to four hours a night, (and up to eight, on weekends) will NOT help me in the end. It will only service me a new laundry list of problems. So I have to be smart about how to deal with what is “left over”…my little host of nightly scars and unresolved emo-haunting…and not take them out on a bottle of something, expecting it to act as a cure. Or even to, “take the sting out.”
I wanted this job.
I knew what it would take.
I gotta put on my big-girl-panties, and do it.
…And because I know “me,” I gotta have a plan of attack to help even myself out afterward…or this could very well become the kind of sleepless obsession-state that’ll drive me into some kind of nervous breakdown.
I thought that maybe, instead, I’d not have one…as I’m kinda busy right now.
…Which means, I go back to my little mental toolkit built back in my days of Shrinkdom. Do some of the thinky-exercises to deal with extra-emo kinda things, I write in m’blog as needed, and return to the regime of morning and nightly Yoga.
…Just breathing exercises in the morning, but a full session every night before bed.
No matter how exhausted I am.
…And to follow that: only wash, and bed.
This was my old regime we had set, “back when,” giving me the most resolution to a hard day, the best start of the next, and a sort of defragmenting to my general software in the brain: releasing any little left-over burps and farts of aggression, sadness, frustration and fear.
A good plan, I think.
…And a good task at taking care of the “me” that will be taking and giving mental and physical beatings every night, from now into February.
…Which is NOT to say, I don’t intend to go out and have fun with these peeps, when the occasion arises.
It just means I am self-aware that “fun” is what is being had, that healthy solutions to feeling like crap are made, and that I am full of fuel and ready to hit the gas, full-throttle, come the next rehearsal…with no holding back.
And speaking of: another good one in the can.
Awesome Yoga session: complete.
Blog: now written.
…And now to wash and bed.
Namaste, cuties.
~D
