On Saturday night, I went to watch Footloose at the Nelson Mandel Theatre at the Civic Convention Centre in downtown Jozi. It was well-acted, very energetic, and entertaining. I found myself laughing out loud at the brash innuendo and well-time jokes. The girls were hot. The guys were on point. The accents were often off, but they genuinely tried. It was worth the time and money.
There were two plot lines happening on the night: the one on stage and the one in my mind. And as I watched more, remembering my love and passion for acting and theatre in high school, the memories of always being second fiddle, never being able to clinch the main role, and loving being on stage – just not spotlight – all flooded back.
I don't think it was a conscious moment I stopped wanting to act. Even after high school, I was heavily involved in drama in university. I was Cliff in Look Back in Anger, I co-directed Cross Purposes, and I soon became President of the Oxford Brookes Drama Society after a void left by previous councils. It didn't last very long; people didn't turn up and I mismanaged certain situations that left me with no one. I was going to be the Colonel in Peter Schaeffer's Black Comedy, also co-directing it with my friend Trevor Ferdy. It didn't work out; we didn't know how to get people to come through. The production folded. My last attempt, after Trevor had moved away, was to stage a satirical comedy, whose name eludes me. It was a few weeks before I went off on my year of sandwich placement in Basingstoke. When I got back, I was a different person altogether, wanting to pursue arts in the church rather than in the secular world.
In high school, I had written a play called Silent Cry in the Desert. I directed it and put it on stage as part of my IB Theatre Arts course. It was an intensely personal, allegorical, and semi-autographical play, following Cain as he grapples with school, bullying, nightmares, and pursuing his love interest. It ends in Cain's suicide. The play drew on my nightmares and deep-seated identity issues, which no one understood, not even my greatest mentor at the time: my English teacher Greg Vanderheiden. The play used a lot of poetry, drew on lyrics I had written, and tried to recreate images from my deepest fears. It was the beginning of being misunderstood by people, and also the culmination of my writing, acting, and directing.
Later on, I went on to write C for Conquer during my ministry in London, the next play under my belt. (This will be soon adapted to a pilot short film and then hopefully a feature film screenplay under Enflesh Films.) That play never saw its launch on stage, as it was not approved by the arts council due to one scene, where a young couple fall to temptation. Nothing was shown on stage, only implied. I tried to tone it down as much as possible without diluting the scene or killing it altogether, but censorship and social prudishness won that day. Not one of my other plays, sketches, mini-musicals, lyrics, and songs written during that period was ever accepted or allowed to be produced. I will write soon about the pursuit of arts in the Coptic Orthodox Church.
I watched the girls twirl and dance, and the guys drawl their lines. I started to tear up. I had realised something. I am chasing Time, trying to rape Time and subdue Time because I want to do something about my other wife.
Regret.
I think you've met her already. Even if this is the first time I perhaps make it so clear and explicit, I think she's always been there, standing silently in the background, the Ice Queen, watching me squirm and waste away in the inability to beat her into submission.
I spent the rest of the play, going through almost every regret I've ever had and feeling that hollowness grow deeper and wider inside of me. Here I am, 28, and nothing achieved like I ever wanted. Nothing!
I regret that I am not on stage or doing acting. I regret so much in my life. I regret that it's so late into my 20's and I've lost so much in life. I regret that I didn't fight my corner more in church while I was serving to see my work recognised and produced. I regret that I wasted so many yeas in England, struggling with depression, abuse of alcohol and other substances, and medicating my state with the very elixirs that just pushed me deeper into despair. I regret that I wasted so many years in university not studying what I wanted to study, rather doing what my parents wanted me to do. It's so long ago now and I often think that I'm over it, but it was that moment at the theatre where I realised that no. The regrets are still there. The resentment and bitterness and self-pity lays low, hidden away, only brought to surface by the covalent bonds with similar feelings or experiences.
It was an epiphany of sobering, sad proportions. It was good to finally be aware of the relationship between Time and Regret in my life. It made sense how lately the recent events of past weeks have managed to bring me down to a point of inability. The covalent bonds. Recent failures or non-starters with girls I really liked finding their counterparts in past experience and awakening vicious schools of piranas, aimed straight for my self-esteem and health and time management. The past weekend, small spats with my parents, activating most painful memories of the past months, I feeling worried and anxious that it's all starting again.
I want to act again. I want to write, like I'm doing now, all the time, not just for a while. I want to be on stage again. I want to lose weight and be like Ren McCormack on stage with the washboard abs. I want to write plays and direct and put them on stage. I want to do workshops again. I seriously, deeply want to act. I don't want just to be comedic to medicate. I want to act for art. I gave up and threw away this dream so many years ago because I believed, with every ounce of my being, that I will never amount to a real actor. Because I could never be Danny Zuko in Grease.
I watched the complex dance numbers and I imagined myself Danny Zuko in a South African production of Grease. I can do it. I started daydreaming and I got lost in deep fantasies, not involving girls or intimacy for a change. They were deep fantasies about my most precious, cherished, yet tarnished dreams.
Because it seems like most of my dreams and endeavours are precious, cherished, yet tarnished. Special yet easily surrendered. So integral to my existence yet I can forget about them and come up with every intellectual and pragmatic rationalisation for letting go of them. As if, I have every capacity to dream and to act on my dreams, but I truly believe that I don't deserve to.
I wanted things to work out with M. So much. So, so much. I liked her so much. I was thoroughly besotted with her. And when things started going wrong, it hurt me to the very core, to that gelatinous part of my heart that I thought would never be soft again. And I hardened. And I pursued my medication to deal with the most inscrutable heartbreak. And then C. came along, I was deeply skeptical but I eventually believed. I softened. It ended. And I hardened again.
Things going wrong at work and it triggers every minefield of mindfuck.
This post has been the culmination of 4 days of living, thinking, thinking, and medicating. I felt that I had to write this before doing anything else on my long tasklist because these feelings have been clamming up my life. It's been important to acknowledge the impact regret has made on my life and how it drives my life. And this is no way a resolution. This is the beginning of the healing process, to which my mind likes to apply a enddate so I don't feel so shit about being this fucked up, but in reality and in the way I want it, I don't know when it will end or how or when I will start to see real healing take up in my heart, mind, and soul.
I am worried about my parents. I was home briefly this evening and I met a third person in the living room, sitting watching BBC Knowledge, the Person who made life hell in that house because of my mom's allegiance to Him. She's going into that space again and I am terrified. And as I am considering moving back home at the end of my flat lease, I'm scared and apprehensive. Is this going to be the new reality?
Are we back to black?
Driving home from the parental home, I started chanting hymns and going through some thoughts.
I really don't believe in myself. I really want someone to believe in me, to constantly believe in me, not give up on me when I struggle and think that they have to fix me. That's why I miss the former fiancee-to-be. She really believed in me and I loved her, just for that, so much for it. She empowered me in ways no one else has been able to do so far. I miss her. And I want to believe in myself. It's the secret of my success.
I really, really want to believe in myself. And I want her, the girl I will one day commit to and marry, to do so too.