secret hideouts

new york city, 2015, various

“Erika, you’re not breathing.”

Acting Teacher Who Shall Not Be Named To Protect Their Identity and Also Feelings Because I’m Not A Heartless Monster’s voice wafted out from behind the camera.

I blinked and peered around the camera lens. “Sorry?”

I could feel Acting Teacher Who Shall Not Be Named To Protect Their Identity and Also Feelings Because I’m Not A Heartless Monster’ (fuck it, we’ll call him Justin) inspecting me. He had a streak of gray hair in his side swept bangs, which I thought gave him the countenance of a warlock… or an aging 90s star.

“You’re not breathing,” Justin repeated.

I looked down at my script, and tried to quiet the thought in my head. The thought that said, “Erika, if you weren’t breathing, I’m pretty sure you would have passed out during that unnecessarily long Gilmore Girls monologue Justin just made you do.” But instead I simply tilted my head and stared back at him.

“I’m not?”

“No. Let me show you.”

Justin motioned for me to come around and join him in front of the monitor. The remaining seven students in that afternoon’s acting class watched attentively.

We rewound the tape, and Justin pressed play. He watched over my shoulder with one clenched hand covering his mouth, the other crossed over his stomach. I stared at the replay, anxiously anticipating the moment when I ceased to enact the natural human rhythm of inhalation and exhalation.

“There.” Justin reached over and paused the tape. “Do you see? You stopped breathing. Your heart’s no longer open to the scene.” He gestured with agitation at my raised shoulders on the screen. I peered closer. Okay. sure. They were maybe a little raised. Perhaps it had to do with the relentless Rory Gilmore tirade I had been tasked with (seriously wtf Amy Sherman Palladino?!), perhaps it was because my heart was no longer open. Who is really to say?

Justin was.

Justin inspected me like I was a specimen under a microscope. Which, as an actor in an on-camera film class, I sort of was. “What are you hiding from?” He perched his chin on a clenched knuckle, and I found myself thinking he looked like a marble statue I’d seen in the British Museum during my semester abroad, studying Shakespeare. I’d spent a lot of that semester learning ‘how to breathe’; primarily in speech classes led by cardigan’d RADA professors who made us roll around on sticky dance floors and exhale sounds into the fluorescent air.

“I’m sorry, I just went…somewhere else in my brain,” I replied, scratching my ear nervously. “What was the question?”

“You're closing yourself off, so obviously some part of you does not want to be seen. What’s making you uncomfortable?”

“Well, I…” I looked up at Justin expectant eyes.

You know that moment in therapy when your therapist asks you to elaborate? And you don’t want to disappoint them by having nothing further to say? So you make something up? (Or are you a normal person who can control such people-pleasing impulses).

“I guess…maybe I want to be perfect, like the… character?” Justin nodded encouragingly. “And so I’m…sabotaging the scene because I’m trying to make the scene perfect?”

“Bingo. Let’s try again.”

Justin had just enrolled in a pyramid scheme life-coaching program, and I was starting to feel like his unwilling guinea pig. He sat down on the other side of the camera, placed his hand over his heart and took a deep breath, insinuating I should do the same. I stole a glance at my friend, Kristin, who was reading the scene with me. She gave an oddly pained smile, then turned her attention to the script as I began again. I don’t remember thinking anything other than, “BREATHE. YOU. IDIOT.”

**********************************************************************

“What did you think of today?” Kristin walked with me towards the subway, our purses and brains jostling with the litany of things it takes to survive as a young actor in Manhattan.

“Honestly? I have no fucking clue what I did differently the second time, if anything at all.”

Kristin nodded.

“Yeah, and tbh I thought it was pretty good the first go already.”

We walked in silence for a little bit, trying to figure out why we were spending our hard-earned waitressing and gym greeter money on something we weren't feeling the benefit of. More specifically…something that made us feel like shit. We understood work wouldn’t pop out of the sky just because we took a class; on a professional level, both Kristin and I understood time and commitment were two of the most important ingredients. But, on a personal level, I left most of Justin’s classes feeling confused and doubtful of not just my worth as an actor but of my ability to simply exist as a human. I mean, apparently I couldn’t even BREATHE right. And yet I kept going back because something about his confidence, his conviction that he alone saw what I couldn’t…it was addicting.

**********************************************************************

Acting is a desperately elusive craft: the people who excel in the field often hesitant to analyze what makes them so good. They smartly understand the reason they’ve made it to the Actors on Actors roundtable or the NPR studio opposite Terri Gross is because they don’t cross-examine their work. To pin down a finite reason for their success would be to purport the thesis that successful artists know what they’re doing in a way that can be boiled down to a simple “process,” a methodical list of “do’s and don’ts.” Yet, that is precisely the type of clarity a young actor is often seeking. And who rushes in to help us with this search?

Acting coaches. Mostly men.

Later that night over dry, oven-cooked chicken and slimy asparagus, I shared the story of the day’s acting class with my roommate. CJ was 6 foot 3, and looked like the epitome of a Hitler Youth, minus the problematic allegiance to a dictator. Despite the various females in our college theater program who had fawned over him, I’d never found CJ attractive. Perhaps that’s why we made good roommates, despite my ingratiating habit of refusing to replace our toilet paper supply.

I started to get worked up, retelling the story of the personal exposure Justin has summated me to early that day. CJ help up a massive hand, stopping me. “I’m confused, what did he do?”

“What do you mean what did he do? He like, analyzed me. In front of everyone!”

CJ chewed his chicken methodically, washing the dry meat down with a swig of protein powdered water.

“Isn’t that his job?”

“Well, yes,” I replied. “But also. No. No it’s not. He’s supposed to give me notes on my work, not notes on my existence as a literal human being.”

“In our field, isn’t it kind of the same thing?”

I fell silent.

“Look, I’m not saying he’s right, Erika. But if it bothers you so much, just tell him to fuck off.”

But I couldn’t tell Justin to fuck off. I relied on his praise like a miracle elixir. I stared at CJ enviously, a mass of audacious male confidence that I did not possess. Instead, I relied on external sources to affirm I was on the right track. And, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps because this is how the world has been designed for centuries: most of those external sources were men. My inner compass had deteriorated after years spent swinging my needle towards anything with a Y chromosome and an authoritative voice.

I don’t recall the direct origin of this terrible habit; the moment I stopped trusting my own gut and instead turned to men around me to define who I was and what, exactly, made me worthy. It perhaps happened gradually, death by a thousand cuts. As a middle-schooler, I don’t remember feeling any of this. When I was on stage, I felt certain, solid: I knew I had something to offer. Something intrinsically mine. The purity of that was not just intoxicating but empowering, like steel beam running through my body which propped up all my other waffling insecurities: I may not be hot, or witty, or athletic, or super great at math, but this. I had this. By high school, however, I began to equate my passion with affirmation. The steel beam began to waver.

Women outsourcing their value to men they’re interested in sleeping with is, unfortunately, an all too common tale. I followed this unfortunate pattern on a pretty semi-regular basis between the years 2010-2016. My rotating door of online dating conquests and quasi-boyfriends was proof enough that I spent more time chasing male validation than excavating the long buried well of self-worth that would have fed my thirst in healthier, less volatile ways (but that’s an essay for another time heyyyoooo!). But outsourcing one’s artistic worth to an educator dealing in one of the most subjective art forms of all time (Acting™) is another matter entirely. Sex or a relationship isn’t the thing on the line. Your personal identity as an artist is.

“Alright, Erika, remind me what scene did I give you?”

I was back on the stool at Justin’s.

“Uh, it’s from Law and Order. Cammie and Isaac, they’re in the kitchen…”

He nodded in recognition. Justin’d coached these scenes thousands of times before. He probably knew what he was going to say before I even opened my mouth. Kristin was reading with me; I always asked her to be my scene partner. She felt like a tiny lighthouse, blinking in the fog of self-doubt which would inevitably descend upon me every time I got up to do a scene.

Justin pressed record, then leaned back against the wall. His height ensured I could still see him out of my periphery. I began the scene. About six lines in, I saw him flinch. A few beats later, he flinched again. At this point, my familiar panic of being judged in front of everyone started to flare. I clawed at the fringes of the scene, desperate to fix it, to make it better, to be more interesting, more funny, more whatever. Anything to get Justin to STOP. FLINCHING.

The scene ended. Justin pressed the record button and stared at me. A warm, spiny feeling started to work it’s way up the back of my throat; that terrible sensation I always get before crying in front of an authority figure. He stared at me for a long time. Perhaps he was just trying to choose his words carefully. Perhaps he was aware he was dealing with that most vulnerable of breeds, a Young Female Actor. Out of the echo chamber of my brain, where all my little inner demons like to hole up at least four times a week to discuss What Exactly Is Wrong With You, Erika?, a tirade of mental sewage threatened to pour forth. But before I could fully descend down the spiral-

“Erika? How are you today?”

Uh….

“I’m good, why?”

“Just trying to get you out of your head.”

Note to acting teachers: telling a student you’re trying to get them out of their heads only makes them immediately more in their heads.

“Oh. Right.”

“You’re doing the same thing as last week. You feel that, don’t you?”

I blinked away the hot prickly feeling. I mustered up the courage to push back a little bit.

“I don’t really know what you mean? Do you mean I’m not breathing? Or, it’s just, uh…”

I trailed off, flailing desperately for some sort of guidance.

“We just gotta break you of this thing. Whatever it is.”

“Not breathing?”

“No, no. It’s just not….hm. It’s not there. Right now. Go again.”

Eric pressed record. I felt like I had whiplash. What was the thing he was talking about? My anxiety? My nerves? My search for perfection? There was no time to keep pondering, the red light was flashing. I took a break and looked up.

“You have the first line,” I reminded Kristin.

“I know. I’m just giving you a beat,” she responded.

She stared at me, placidly, allowing me a private interlude to calm down and collect myself. I thanked her silently, a quivering arrow of communication shooting between us, “What the fuck did all that mean?”

**********************************************************************

Around this time, Justin started to invite me and a few other students over for communal meal prep. He’d buy a ton of meat and produce in bulk from some butcher upstate, and have a few students over to cook with him. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh no….this is one of those stories.” I promise you it is not. Or maybe you’re thinking, “Meal prep? Dear god, were you that poor?” The answer is no. I could totally afford to buy my own un-bulked food and cook it myself, at home, on my own terms. But I couldn’t deny the invite felt like a sort of accomplishment: I was being invited from the mitochondria of this little community closer to the nucleus, closer to this person I had instilled with the power to absolve of me of my deepest insecurities.

“So I was thinking we start with the veggies. Chop, season and roast, and then we can move on to the beef and rice?”

Justin surveyed his tiny kitchen. Kristin and I had brought our own Tupperware boxes over, which would later be sealed tight with the fruits of our labor. Both of us hoping to be nourished not by the pounds of meat and cruciferous vegetables in front of us, but by something money can’t buy: your acting teacher telling you you are Good.

“Sure, sounds like a plan.” I got busy dicing the onions and broccoli, something about the rhythmic chopping soothed my inner anxiety that I wouldn’t have anything interesting to contribute to the conversation. I needn’t have worried. The conversation was mostly Justin discussing himself.

As I slowly chopped onions, I had an odd feeling, as if I was watching myself from the outside. What was I doing here? This man was not my friend, he was my acting coach. Why was I listening to him talk about his ex-girlfriend, his relationship with his mom, and, even worse, how he felt about other students? Was I that desperate for a morsel of his affirmation? This was weird right? Though I felt and was perfectly safe, I couldn’t help but hear strains of a small voice in my ear saying something was off. My compass had swung too far out of whack. It’s normal for actors to hope their work is seen and appreciated. But I’d gone a step too far in seeking that assurance.

I wish I could say I had a lightbulb moment in the middle of Justin's kitchen that day. A moment where I went, “Wow, this is NOT working for me. Why am I allowing this 38 year old man who invites students over to batch cook ground beef and broccoli with him to tell me if I’m good or not.” But I didn’t. I stopped going to Justin’s acting class not because of some jolt of feminist clarity but from a gradual accumulation of feelings I started to have outside of his classroom.

Kristin and I began self-taping together, and I found that the process of working with someone I trusted as an equal and not an authority helped bring about a clarity and confidence in my work I hadn’t felt once in Justin’s classes. I booked a job where my nervous, anxious “thing” (as Justin so delicately put it) is what got me the role. As rehearsals began and I grew more comfortable, I was able to accept that “thing” as part of myself, a part that could show up on stage as opposed to being ignored or squashed out by some acting-quasi-life coach who charged 100 bucks an hour. And I also had the privilege of working with directors and coaches who had the bravery to look at me when I asked a question and say, “I don’t know the answer. Why don’t you try a few things.”

The big secret is that nobody really knows what they’re doing. As a young twenty-something, Justin’s approach to coaching felt so personally intrusive that I assumed he did know. I’d watch him interrupt scenes to ask actors how things were with their partners, to interrogate how they were feeling about their bodies, or to simply reference some inside tidbit of information they’d shared with him. I thought he saw something nobody else did: some kernel of truth inside each actor that he was trying to pull forth if only we could breathe and allow him to do his work. Perhaps this method worked for some people. For me, it only stretched me further and further away from myself. Further away from that steel beam inside me that trusts the work I am doing. It is hard, sometimes, to realize the well-meaning coach, friend, lover, director, teacher in front of you may be unwittingly compromising this pillar of inner fortitude we all possess. Perhaps getting older simply means attuning our gut more quickly to people and moments where this happens.

There’s a VHS tape somewhere of my family and I on trip to Lake Tahoe with another family of all boys. I remember these boys and the trip hazily; if a shaky steady-cam account of the trip didn’t exist, I’d probably have no recollection. In one moment, someone behind the camera is following me and the boys through the woods. My older sisters are in the foreground, yelling about a secret hideout they’ve found. You can see my younger self seize up, aware the boys are about to take off running to get a look. I reach for the smaller one’s hand and ask in a voice that is equal parts squeak and gravel, “Brian, wait! Do you wanna see my secret hideout?” I’m gesturing rapidly to something off camera, probably a collection of twigs or some shit that I had assembled against a tree stump. He pushes me, and runs off, but not before the voice behind the camera can say, “Brian! Be nice to Erika.” In hindsight, this is absolutely hysterical. The bid for his attention is so transparent, so juvenile; his rejection even more so. We were kids, we hadn’t learned the way to politely decline someone yet. I don’t remember anything about the trip, let alone my feelings being hurt, so clearly the pinch didn’t pack that large of a punch. Yet what is most interesting is what I do after the push. Instead of running up ahead to join Brian and regain his attention, I fall back. To stay at my secret hideout. “Screw them, I’ve got my own special place,” my little four year old self is signaling. It’s taken me about ten years of dealing with people like Justin (and Brian….sorry Brian) to return back to that 4 year old. To not feel like my little kernel of me is up for debate or inspection. Covet that little secret hideout within ya, chickens. Prop it up with the strongest beam you can find. I promise it will protect you.