Aadya’s Experience (Participant) [she/her]
“The memory has entered your mind, but it must be ‘discovered’... Chance in its mysterious workings may help you along, or it may hold you back”
As I often like to say, everything we know- our experiences, our emotions, our knowledge of others, our interactions with them- resides in our brains. That is all we know and that is all we will ever know.
But, what does that actually mean to me? Who am I and who will I be?
Every session, I confronted these questions with my mind and body; watching them intermingle, destroy and create as I searched for answers
Performing over and over what sat with me, what was important to me, what merely came to me, I realized, physically, what I was not able to understand through words.
“Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”
Must I absolutely know the answer to who I am and who I will be for me to continue living as a human being? Perhaps not.
Rather than being frustrating, it was exhilarating to experience the feeling that I could continue forward without having all the answers or putting these answers into words.
Soon, Saturday evenings became an opportunity to just exist in the space. For three hours I would temporarily remove the shackles of my past and present, my doubts and insecurities, my goals and desires. Instead I sought refuge in the dark floor that stuck to my sweaty feet as I moved, black heavy curtains covering the mirrors, four succulents on the wall witnessing our transformation and sounds of stuntmen from next door.
“The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one… of those things. If that is the case with a concrete, and relatively simple entity, then what must happen with a thing that is abstract and variable—ondoyant et divers?” Ondoyant et divers, like a person.
This, however, was not just my own journey to take. It was a journey taken together with 7 others, as we explored the spaces within and in between us. I found that words didn’t have to fill these spaces, be they spatial or temporal. I found that I did not have to restrict my space in order to exist with others, that our spaces could intermingle without me having to demand less of myself.
Did I struggle and falter? Almost all the time. Having been conditioned to the need to understand fully and help the person in front me, I was uncomfortable and unsure when they struggled with themselves and me. My impulse to keep everyone happy and satisfied with me was the strongest and hardest to break. Could I not be fully open with another without trying to control their feelings towards me?
And here I confronted my paradoxical nature. I knew no one could control my thoughts of them because they resided in their heads and me in mine. So, why did I have a need to control their impression of me? As soon as I let that go, I found comfort in knowing that as long as I approached them honestly, openly and with a desire to connect, that was enough. And when we connected, I appreciated that all I would get is the possibility of knowing them in that instance of time. Nothing more, nothing less.
“A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities”
[Quotes from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Shakespeare’s Memory]
