People, Places & Things

I suppose it all started when I was much younger and met this guy. I bet that’s how a few of these stories start, right ladies?
She’s trying to be funny but is failing.

Drugs and alcohol have never let me down. They have always loved me. There are substances I can put into my bloodstream that make the world perfect. That is the only absolute truth in the universe.

EMMA:
I shouldn’t be here.
DOCTOR:
It’s pretty obvious that you should.
You came here for a reason. That was a good impulse.
EMMA looks at her hands. She’s shaking.The DOCTOR refills EMMA’s water.
Your addiction will fight any progress. It’s a parasite and it will fight for its own survival until you’re dead. But progress is possible.

With a play you get instructions. Stage directions. Dialogue. Someone clothes you. Tells you where to be and when. You get to live the most intense moments of a life over and over again, with all the boring bits left out. And you get to
practise
. For weeks. And you’re
applauded
. Then you get changed. Leave through stage door. Bus home. Back to real life. All the boring stuff left in. Waiting. Temping. Answering phones
and serving canapés. Nothing permanent. Can’t plan. Can’t get a mortgage or pay for a car. Audition comes in. Try to look right. Sit in a room surrounded by people who look just like you, all after the same part. Never hear back. Or if you get the part it’ll be sitting around in rehearsal and backstage making less than you did temping. Make these friendships with people, a little family, fall in love onstage and off and then it’s over and you don’t see them again. You try not to take it personally when people who aren’t as good as you get the parts. When you go from being the sexy ingénue to the tired mother of three.
But you keep going because sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you get to be onstage and say things that are absolutely true, even if they’re made-up. You get to do things which feel more real to you, more authentic, more
meaningful
than anything in your own life. You get to speak
poetry
, words you would never think to say but which become yours as you speak them.
When he shall die
take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.
,
It feels like Lydia wants me to acknowledge some buried trauma but there isn’t any. I played Antigone and every night my heart broke about her dead brother. Then my own brother died and I didn’t feel anything. I missed the funeral because I had a matinee. I’m not avoiding talking to the Group because I’ve got something to hide. It’s the
opposite. If I’m not in character I’m not sure I’m really there. I’m already dead. I’m nothing. I want live a hundred lives and be everywhere and fight against the infinitesimal time we have on this planet.
Acting gives me the same thing I get from drugs and alcohol. Good parts are just harder to come by.
,
I really
I really miss my brother.

God.
Mark, my brother, he believed in God. He wasn’t as bright as me. He didn’t really stretch himself. He once told me that he believed the entire universe was happening in his imagination and that when he died everything would be snuffed out. But then he died and everything carried on, so
that’s that hypothesis disproved

my brother had a brain haemorrhage while reading
Pinocchio
to a group of five year olds. Mark. He was two years younger than me and never touched drugs or alcohol. He ran fucking marathons. For charity. I should have died a thousand times but it was him who
,
if I tell you I was sexually abused or the child of alcoholics, if I tell you I returned from back-to-back tours of Iraq and started to self-medicate wouldn’t that all just be a massive simplification of the complexity of just being a human fucking person?

I am not the product of the decisions I’ve made or the things that have happened to me. I will not be reduced to that

there is no
meaning
to anything. There are no beginnings, middles and ends. No final authorities. No fate or pre-determination or grand plan. History has ended. There are no new ideas or experiences. No free will. Identity is a construct and the brain is incapable of objectively introspecting itself

You want me to conceptualise a universe in which I am the sole agent of my destiny and at the same time acknowledge my absolute powerlessness. It’s a fatal contradiction and I won’t start building foundations on a flawed premise

I wake up in wet sheets. In places I don’t recognise. With bruises I can’t account for. Men I don’t know. I’ve stolen from people. I’ve slept on the streets. I’m in trouble. I know that. But this book, this
process