the raw nerve's private zone

Theater is standing up and convincing people you know what you're doing -- eating oysters with a smile when the only fish you've known has been canned tuna or catfish fried in cornmeal. Theater is going to bars with strangers whose incomes are four times your own; it's wearing denim when everyone around you is in silk, or silk when they're all wearing leather. Theater is talking about sex with enthusiasm when nobody's ever let you in their pants. Theater is pretending you know what you're doing when you don't know anything for certain and what you do know seems to changing all the time.

I've been reading and rereading a fair amount of Dorothy Allison this weekend. The sudden voice in my head has said, "It's because you need to write about your mother, your bloodkin, and you've got all that anger and love and betrayal in you." And I suspect the voice is right, and I'm reading writing by a woman who has managed to balance those in ways I'd like to invoke, if not duplicate.

And there's a lot about facing people from my past, and facing my future, that matches her description of theater. I have to act as if I know what I'm doing, as if I am sure of what I know; and I have a long history of being with people who explicitly told me that I don't know what I know, who tried to convince me that my perceptions were wrong and therefore to be atoned for. That blurs with theater, in some ways, and with the concept of pretending to be brave, pretending to be strong, pretending to be beautiful, pretending to be powerful, until I could grow into those pretenses and make them realities.

Sometimes it's terrifying to realize that you've grown into the virtues you pretended to have, that the good theater has become not just a part-time aspect of your world, but a full-time one.