"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake"

This is a semi-serious post. Let me start by saying that my family/good friends never discouraged me from doing theatre. Nor did they pressure me to pursue things I didn't want to. And the perfectionism? That just kind of comes with being me. Though, I've gotten rid of a lot of it. It's a long post fyi

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"It is sometimes wiser to follow the dreams of your heart than the logic of your mind"

I improvise because it contradicts what people once thought of me. In middle school I was the quiet one, the smart one. Around strangers I didn’t talk. I listened, observed, but I didn’t talk.

When I was young, a lot of the people told me to be a lawyer when I grew up, a doctor, a politician. Hell, the 8th grade career test told me I enjoyed helping others. That I should be a nurse, a counselor, a teacher. And I figured, why should it be any other way?

I improvise because it contradicts what I once thought of myself. If I could travel back in time to fifth grade and tell myself about how I’d gotten up the courage to improvise, I’d laugh (my fifth grader self, you guys). I’d fall on the ground, shake. Then I’d quietly get back up, take a seat at my desk and finish my history questions.

But secretly, I’d be jealous. I desperately wanted to be the class clown, not the smart girl. I was to cautious, though, to believe that could actually happen. So I accepted the role others had handed me, and forgot. I dreamed but never went any further.

I improvise because I’m allowed to fail. Something the fifth grade me couldn’t imagine doing. In middle school I got a ‘C’ on my interim and cried. I cried because I thought everyone expected me to get perfect grades (they didn't). A ‘C’ wasn’t good enough. It was average.

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I walked into my first improv class scared to death. Not because I was afraid I wouldn’t be funny but because I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough to say. Like I’d suddenly run out of words in the middle of a scene and, well, it’d be the end of it.

That never happened, though. I gradually became less and less nervous. I took chances. I made people laugh. I made people laugh. I didn’t run out of things to say. I didn’t run out of things to say.

“You’re taking an improv class,” a person at school snorted one day. “I didn’t know you were funny.”

I brushed it off and carried on. What did he know? I had the power to make others smile. He didn’t know the half of it.

Improvisation has made me more open, social, free. It has made me more of who am I. Who I should have been all along but was to afraid to be.

I soar. I leap. I forget about safety nets. It’s like skydiving minus the physical danger. There’s some damage to the ego but nothing a laugh from a fellow improv classmate can't fix.

And sometimes I cry for my younger self. Like while I was writing this. I didn’t know what I was missing. I was scared of breaking the roles I’d thought I'd been assigned. But I eventually found improv. I learned my lesson. That’s all that matters.

I continue to be mostly soft spoken. But I’ve realized that some of my favorite improvisers are soft spoken when not performing. I have a feeling they also had to realize that performers don’t have to be loud. Or constantly entertaining others.

I stand by them. I understand.

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It is so important to follow your heart. Logically I shouldn’t be improvising. Logically I shouldn’t have traveled to Chicago to take a class at Second City. Or been allowed to help teach a few days ago at an improv workshop.

Logically doesn’t always work out.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do in life is to turn off your brain, or the yapping judgmental voice in your head, and just be. Be what your heart yearns to be, what it tugs at.

Simply follow it without protest. It might just take you down a path you didn’t expect.