2023: Some notes on impermanence and brave attention

Alternatively, a young artist counts her losses before welcoming the next thing

A few days ago, everything that I saved for my 2022 year-end collage was soiled in some mysterious inner pocket oil. I (insist that I) am a neat person, and I recall neatly bundling these items together: stickers, a used movie ticket, a cheeky Christmas gift tag. Nonetheless, I spent the first Monday of 2023 with oily scraps of paper in my hand and a hard look of confusion on my face.

I found little consolation in the surplus of group photos sent to our family chat, but a lot of amusement. Sifting through these photos, I was reminded of my twelve-year-old self, face lit by an overheating iPod Touch as I struggled to choose between a 45° angled selfie and a 45.5° angled one.

It's a new year, and I could easily tell this story as a reassuring comedy wherein all major events in my life, from birthday to blunder, will be diligently preserved in multiple copies across multiple devices. But I am soon moving back to the city that I abruptly left in March 2020, already with high hopes for a project that I vowed to abandon in 2021, and already homesick for the town I insisted I'd grown out of in 2019. What you're getting instead is an attempt at understanding my apprenticeship with impermanence.

Nick Cave once said that through impermanence, we become "witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present— a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises." I've only just come to understand how weirdly accurate this 'emergency' is: the very thing that made me fall in love with stage acting nine years ago, and the very reason I quit it to focus on climate justice action. The motivation behind our urge to photograph, and the reason that the uniform neatness and reproducibility of each family photo in our group chat is evidence of something that is lost rather than safekept.

Maybe that’s pretentious of me to say. I very much adore taking photos, and like everyone, secretly wish more photos were taken of me. My camera roll is the primary site for my daily exercise in gratitude—even more so, my fantasies of people taking flattering photos of me, out of gratitude for who I am. I figured out recently that I fond over those black-and-white portraits of prolific musicians lounging between shows not because of their cool apathy to the picture-taker but because of the picture-taker’s unmistakable attention. Their capacity to see the person underneath the performer.

In a For The Wild podcast episode, photographer Josué Rivas poses a challenge to image-takers and producers. He asks: in the age of different kinds of storytelling, how do we maintain intention?

I'm writing this with the keen awareness that my intentions for the new year are inextricable from my relationship with attention. Everything about where I am, where I've been, and where I wish to go is informed by what I pay attention to, and the different kinds of attention I witness around me.

There is the kind, for example, that compels an impatient person like me to continue taping together an unsalvageable gift tag; or to rediscover indecent doodles in old college notebooks and pray that the people who drew them stayed irreverent. Our house still has a drawer full of tin DVD cases that my dad used to bring home after work, sometimes with a box of Mister Donuts and a puffed chest saying, “look what I got us!” I don't have to scroll through my entire Netflix catalog to know that I won't find anything as joyful as someone else's thoughtfulness. This joy, this attention, reminds me that sometimes the invisible, illegible things are the most real.

On the other hand, there is a kind of attention, or a corruption of it, that tells me I must package my moral values into 280-character provocations if I wish to be seen by others. It insists that the survival of the causes I care about depends on their ability to assimilate into the gold rush of Instagram reels. It criminalizes boredom, as Bo Burnham once put it. It hijacks and capitalizes on our natural interest in others, as per Jenny Odell. It increases the perception that we should always be doing and striving for more, as per Thatcher Wine.

I believe it's also why I stopped taking acting projects at around the same time I deleted most of my social media; or why despite the growing line-up of in-person theater productions since 2021, I remain cautious of the promises that the community is recovering. In fact, the more I look at the direction that local mainstream theater companies are taking this year (e.g. closed auditions, reinstated power trippers, reruns of productions that have been repeatedly accused of harmful sexist tropes), the less I'm convinced that the pandemic's revelations on what needs to be done and what needs to stop being done, have truly registered. That is, unless we look past the illustrious billboards announcing the comeback of illustrious names.

Once we do, we might surprise ourselves with the contagious sensitivity and vigilance of high school students who write, design, and assemble their own showcases about taking their youth back. I personally found encouragement in the pay-what-you-can offerings of young collegiate troupes, in regional efforts to organize performing arts guilds for ecotourism, and in religious drama that doesn't concern itself with which disciplines to identify with. Theirs is the creative landscape that comes to mind when I revisit Ross Gay's exploration of attention, which he likens to:

I would like to be an artist that is guided by faith. I want to be where I am, and evolve without asking for anything in return. I want the courage of taking part in something that exists as it is going out of existence, like sound. Or breath. I want to nurture stories that resist precision and are entangled with other stories, other species. I want to select that one magic word to aspire to for the year, and give myself permission to change it later on.

And I say all this not because I’ve successfully resisted disillusionment, but because I bear the knowledge that it’s real, and I believe that like an illness, it’s a bid for something else. Something better.

In 2021, my magic word was anger. I learned what it really meant to befriend it—to finally hear the kind of words that would escape me and discover they did not sound like the social justice books I read. To watch the world news everyday and still discover new depths of disappointment each time I caught my reflection in the window as I pictured what my early 20's would have looked like outside. To know the right words against militarism and sexual violence, and then smile in the face of directors that shout at me, steal my backstory for professional gain, and use misogynistic rhetoric to humiliate my peers.

It was my anger that allowed me to articulate my desire for organized action and protection from further abuse; and the collective anger of my peers that reassured us when our material reality was questioned by the colleagues we admired and expected support from. When the distrust I so easily harbored for public figures, politicians, and their enablers reintroduced itself to me in my own home, it was my anger that allowed me to make a decision, for my health & safety, to quit acting. To amputate my gasoline rainbow childhood dream before it exploded on my face.

In 2022, there was a clearing for new hobbies, abandoned habits, and the language of joy. It allowed me to see abundance in my life, to nurture a kind of love that does not simply protect with a righteous rage but renews and renews and renews with delight. I found my spirituality again. I was caught in unfamiliar projects, new advocacy organizations, and growing networks of communities, friends, and beyond-human mentorships. In joy, I was able to create more freely. I was able to locate myself not according to a social food chain but within a great interstitiality that could hold and heal everyone.

I believe I'm heading into 2023 in a place that can equally hold anger, joy, and everything else that emerges in between. Is the word bravery? I mean, I would like to be brave. I would like to hold space for both: acting as the thing that brought me devastating truths and the thing that nurtured the same sensitivity that keeps my activism alive. The thing that made me betray myself and also showed me the wisdom of listening to my body, my collaborators, and my environment. The base from which I begrudgingly and lovingly strive, no matter what, to keep finding the most caring, sustainable path.

And so, in faith that I am treading that path now, I allow myself the admission that acting is and always will be a great big love of mine. It is neither something I seek nor despise. It is neither my past nor my future. Instead, I think it's something I remember whenever they say true change, radical change, always comes at a cost. When they talk of transformation as the gift and curse of giving up something important to you.

I no longer identify as an actor, but there remains, of course, a little actor inside me, preparing me for the risk & relief of my many upcoming transformations. Anger, joy, bravery, and sometimes all of them all at once. Right now, I think I'm in the shape of an activist pursuing ecofeminist practices in the arts & education sector. Tomorrow, I'll be a citizen scientist posting infographics about stray animals & mushrooms. Next year, who knows, I might step on stage again? Or become a wildlife comedy photographer with calendar merchandise?

Wherever my wild hopes take me, I'll follow.

There's a place in my brain

where hate won't grow.

I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.

Something pokes us as we sleep.

It's late but everything comes next.

from Red Suitcase (1994) by Naomi Shihab Nye