The View at Mount Bonnell
The days have felt like minutes, the months have felt like weeks, and September has come unannounced. I’m learning about photography now, and it’s kind of exciting to see the world through a lens. You start to look at things in terms of composition, and you notice beauty more often.
I’ve been feeling at times spent and overwrought, at times energized and fulfilled. My motor has been running pretty hard since I arrived here in August, and today it was time to take a breath.
When you’re burning the candle at both ends, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn about your knee jerk reactions and bad habits. You also learn about how resilient and strong you can be. You’ve got to ask for help because you just don’t have the energy or the time to do it alone. The great part about having a team is you can always go to them for ideas and ask them to do things for you that would take you months of YouTube tutorials and tears to figure out.
Right now the group is focusing on our individual projects as well as our upcoming production, Cabin 13 (more on that later). One of our members is working on a production where a non-dancer will become the prima dancer of an improvised dance show.
Another of our members is creating empathy training simulations. An example of this could be the kind of training that doctors go through so they can learn about how to interact effectively with patients. They practice interpersonal techniques with an inter-actor that will throw emotional challenges at them that they’re likely to face at the hospital.
I’m working on two things at the Deep Dive (as well as skills acquisition, designing interactive experiences, and doing play tests): a workshop that will help people overcome social and performance-related fears, and a play that weaves stories from my life, tools for fearlessness, and scenes played out by myself and audience members.
I was working on my play this week, and I wanted to practice a piece of it with a non-actor. There was a lone staff member in the kitten room (we were quarantining a kitten in that room because apparently someone at Imagine Art had an allergy, poor guy). I was anxious about approaching her because the only time I had worked with spects before, it was with the team in a structure called the StoryBox. Never alone.
So I tried something. I just starting walking in before I knew what I was doing. I petted the cat, and then I started talking before I was ready or even knew what I was saying: “Would you like to improvise a scene with me?” And so we did, and it was as easy as putting peanut butter and jelly on my waffle every morning. Yes that’s what I eat for breakfast every day. #adulting #dontjudgeme
If you ever want to do something you’re scared to do, just start doing it before you’re ready and let word vomit do the rest.
On Wednesday night the group prepared to go do some networking at the VR Austin Meetup. As a person who has never come into contact with this kind of technology, it was an exciting evening. General tech nerds, weirdos, hopefuls, programmers, designers, visionaries, and a smelly guy wearing cat ears and a tail all gathered to eat, drink, and play with some very expensive toys.
It turns out there are myriad VR applications for helping people deal with fear. A company called Indiego was dedicated to helping people overcome fears like heights, public speaking, and claustrophobia (among addressing other areas of interest like health and wellness, PTSD therapy etc.). I can imagine VR worlds where people have the chance to practice: asking someone out, giving a presentation to a crowd of people, performing a piece of music or part of a play, firing someone, having difficult conversations, giving a sales pitch, asking for a promotion etc. VR is great way to practice life without having real life consequences.
I wanted to see what these Indego people were all about, and I waited in line to demo their fear of heights world. Each level comprised of you standing on a roof and looking down, but the roof became smaller and more terrifying as you leveled up.
I was feeling pretty anxious the whole time, but nothing was like the paralysis I experienced at level 5. They were asking me to walk off the edge of the building.
Now, to the unsuspecting onlooker I was standing in the middle of a small, carpeted office space, and nothing could have been simpler and more mundane than watching a grown woman do what she’s been doing since the age of one.
But I couldn’t do it.
I was close to tears and with every fiber of my being believed that I was going to die if I walked over the edge, knowing with every fiber of my intellect that there was in fact no edge. I had to take the hands of the demonstrator to move forward and get through the end of the demo.
I took off the heavy goggles and backpack, in awe of what it was able to do, annoyed at myself for what I was unable to do. Why do we always feel like we’re going to die in life when we’re really just taking two steps?
