The Storm Before the Calm

I was looking back at my journal, at some of my entries from my summer in Singapore and I came across something that I had completely forgotten I had felt and written down. Here’s an excerpt:

10^th August 2018

It’s just about a week until show time and I don’t know what I’m doing. This is so unlike me. It’s almost as if I don’t care, as if I’m just going to wing it. I don’t know if I am just too exhausted or can’t be bothered.

I don’t feel like dancing at all, I’m not getting my body ready either. If this show means so much to me, then why do I care so little? This has never happened to me before. It’s like I’m just throwing away everything that I and everyone else has been working so hard on. Maybe it’s the pressure? My heart just isn’t in it and that makes me so so sad. I don’t love it anymore.

Why am I sharing this? Because this was reality and I’d forgotten about it. As with any production that anyone puts together, it’s exhausting, challenging and very annoying at times. Yet, boundlessly rewarding. And that’s the part that keeps you going through it all.

This production was particularly emotionally demanding for me and I had been detaching myself from it, which was easy in the turmoil of all the other production work and everything else I had been experiencing with university and friends through the summer.

This summer felt like an endless storm. Having the entire production on my shoulders (with of course, support from my mum, Guru and so many others) was a lot for me to handle. To the audience they see the tip of the iceberg. And I was seeing myself in nightmares of bottomless whirls of brochure designs and about the sound and lights going completely wrong. And I felt this way, as if a storm was brewing but not yet reaching its peak the entire summer, and had no idea how to put into words what I was feeling, unable to express it to anyone. It’s only when I turned around at 2.10pm on the 18^th of August,as a poem about hope rang through the auditorium speakers, when I saw the pitch dark hall with just enough light shining through the doors to see slight glimmers of faces, and I could feel the heat of the lights shine directly on my body, that I felt myself at peace for the first time that summer.