Why You Shouldn’t Skateboard
I fell off track.
I fell off the face of the earth.
All cuz I fell off my skateboard.
At the end of March, my roommate and I had our first skateboarding session of the season. Long story short, I tore part of my MCL (in your knee) in mid-air just above a quarter pipe. For the next three weeks, I could only limp and overall I could do … diddly friekin squat! So I got bummed out and developed an unquenchable thirst for booze.
It was a phase, I guess, and April snowballed into details I’m not going to share. A lot went down. But something was confirmed for me:
When you’re an artist, you don’t stop being an artist. You still see things through those oh so introspective eyes and you come out with your heart a little torn, stretched out but beating harder than before. And with it comes some excellent shiz to write about – monologues, scenes, journal entries, scribbles.
I guess my well had gotten empty, so life filled it. I felt misery and fear, defeatism and futility – one of my core values was completely challenged to the point where I could write a play about it.
And it’s all neither bad nor good. There is no bad or good – not in my vocabulary. There’s perspective and choices.
Now, I’m back “on track” (though I believe I’ve been on track this entire time – just in a different way). Life is coming together out of nowhere and its times like these – when I’m a ball of mess, trashing my health and traipsing about – when the universe pulls me out and puts an audition in my lap and a healthy night. It says, “Learn from what happened. Now here, take this. This is what I’ve planned for you to do. And you know it. So just shut up and say thank you.”
Well … thank you.
Count your stars and stay true, kids. Life is good. Even when it’s horrible it’s good. Especially when you’re an artist, everything is so win/win. Something turns out dandy so you win. Or something turns out not so dandy and you receive this incredible junk that inspires your work. That’s why we can’t complain – we can only thank our heartbreakers.
An image from the set of The Shelter Presents Art by The Shelter Theatre
The Green Room 
That totally stinks! I think we all have life events that throw us off course temporarily. What separates the boys from the men is the ability to get back on track 🙂 Glad you’re feeling better!
Thanks! Also just wanted to share with you lovely readers Filling The Well- An Artists’ Retreat. First some words from its curator, Diana Oh, that I feel are especially pertinent to this particular post of mine.
“You can’t create something when you’re barren, when your resources are depleted, when you’re inspiration is dull and dried out. You have to experience life in order to create something out of it. I’m a true believer in that. Playing is as important as hunkering down and spending those wee into the night hours banging out that first draft of your magnum opus. Playing is not the enemy. It is the disciplined artist’s friend.”
Highly recommend this artists’ retreat and am currently on the waiting list to go, myself. I’ve seen some incredible work that originated at Filling the Well. Great stuff. More info: http://www.fillingthewell.org/index.html
Reblogged this on Katelyn Collins and commented:
Click above for the full post, brought to you by GreenRoomBlog.com under my pen name, The Newbie Actor.