Where an actor's job is to be something other than what he really is, a musician's job is to be painfully, brutally honest about his life. Such was my friend's observation to me as we sat on this blustery, rainy June day waiting for The Fray to begin their set. It was one of those insights that continues to softly play with my mind hours and days after its origin. For one thing, it is a thoughtful and unique way of looking at these arts. As polar opposites, perhaps? It explains the horrendous musicians-cum-actors and vice-versa who are poisoning entertainment these days. Further, it pokes at the psyches of the people who might become involved in said professions in the first place. The escapists and the brutally honest ones. I've always been a better actor. I've always wished to be a musician.
As I stood watching The Fray, and specifically frontman Isaac, I often found myself taken aback in awe. At the end of several songs, it literally looked like Isaac's breath had been taken out of him, that he didn't want to end a song, as if he was actually, physically connected with the music. I'd stop belting out the song at that point, drown out the crowd noise around me, and just watch Isaac. The end of "How to Save a Life", in particular, gave me goose bumps, my eyes glued to Isaac and his piano as if the 10,000 people around me simply did not exist. Isaac wasn't putting on a show - he was feeling this stuff for the umpteenth time - the pain of the story that brought him to write that song - the same song that strikes at specific events in my life every time I hear it. Yes, this was honesty, on a grand scale, a baring of part of this man's soul. It's why, I now understand, songwriters sometimes guard their music so closely. It's why we beg them so desperately to share their music. It's honesty to which we can relate, but which we do not have to bare ourselves. It's the honesty we can admit to ourselves, if not to the outside world. It's publicly sanctioned and approved. It's why I, the actress, delight in listening to music, but do not write it (at least not for public consumption).
When I was in Kindergarten, I was taught that honesty meant telling the truth if you'd done something wrong - not lying. When I was in grade school, it meant taking your test by yourself -not cheating. When I was in high school and college, it meant citing your sources - not stealing (credit to The Fray for my blog title, by the way...). Not having really engaged in any of those activities, I considered myself an honest person. As an adult, I'm learning there are a few more elements to this concept we treat as so elementary. Honesty is all those things - not lying, not cheating, not stealing - but it's more than an opposing force. It's a positive entity in and of itself that, in my head, loosely translates to "dealing with stuff," or, to use a negative once more "not pretending"..."not acting." It's what Isaac is doing when he's crooning for The Fray. To use an example from real life, it's what we don't do when we turn our heads away from Darfur or Dubai, pretending that genocide and exploitation do not exist. It's what we didn't do when we were busy kidding ourselves that the Holocaust wasn't real. It's what I'm not doing when I tell myself "Everything's ok" when it's not.
Real honesty is a very scary thing - this facing demons, not running away from fear business. Real honesty shared is even scarier (hence my admiration for musicians). I've recognized a pattern in my relationships over the past several years that involves an awful lot of sparring, name-calling, and general I-don't-really-mean-it nastiness. Of course, in my mind, these are crucial elements in any healthy relationship (if you can't joke with your friends...who can you joke with?), but I sometimes feel as if I take them to the extreme. I seem to have this idea that throwing an "I love you" in there every now and then will convince people that I actually do love them in spite of all my posturing. Recently, I've been called on this behavior a few times - this seeming fear of ever letting anyone know how important they really are, that I really don't know if I could live without them. Or, less intensely, this apparent fear of just simply being nice - as if I don't think that's enough to bring or keep people in my life. It concerns me that maybe no one really knows me - and through no fault of anyone's but my own - because I'm just so damn afraid of being found out. What scares me even more is that maybe, as a result, I don't really know anyone else, either - again, because I haven't left myself vulnerable enough for anyone else to take a chance on me.
When, I wonder, did I construe some lesson into thinking I had to act so tough all the time? Did my rather unorthodox childhood screw with my psyche THIS much - and is it fixable before it's too late? I remember, very vividly, being in first grade and given a picture of a flower to color. I refused the flower, angrily announcing to my teacher that, "Flowers are for WIMPS!" I wish someone would have seen me then for the scared kid I obviously was.
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