I’m sitting at the airport, leaving Denver after 5 fever days of art and friendship and catharsis. My mouth was moving faster than my brain and body could keep up, as I performed SUGARCOATED once, then twice, in a heart-opening Denver premiere. The room was full of strangers, fellow artists, hometown friends who have since nested here in Colorado, new friends with whom I share the kind of intimacy so often reserved for old friends. The room swelled with joy and held their breath with grief, surprising even me when they held onto it, my own defenses wanting to make a dark joke and move on.
This morning, my eyes began streaming and I couldn’t stop laughing, cry-dancing to a jubilant Spotify playlist, finally catching up to myself as I rolled in like the tide.
In the wake of its crest, these are the only words to emerge from the surf:
I honored every version of me.
This time last year, I had just brought my most tender, terrifying, wounded truth to a cohort of strangers. The Big Bad was more police blotter than prose, wrangled into its ugliest form to wrench it from the Mariana Trench of my brain.
(It did not go well.)
I was jangled and raw from plumbing these depths, and my new companions had no idea what to do with this grey shark of a story that thrashed and bit.
In the thick of it (tucking my tail/crying/pizza), I wrote The Big Bad. Then I did it again. Wrote it in iambic pentameter. Wrote it like Palahniuk, like Spielberg, like my incessant critic, like a fly on the wall. Abandoning myself, defending myself, over and over, a JAWS marathon in hell.
Eventually the writing of it drew less blood. Draft by draft, it began to shift, glinting and slipping through water. I was finally swimming above the beast as it glided silently, undisturbed. Previous terrors lost their bite. I could say more. (More surprisingly, I could also say less.) I could even say it to a human being. Then another one. Maybe someday, I could even say this to several human beings, all at the same time.
As the weeks before Denver closed in, the critics in my head rose to a frenzied, babbling scream, certain that I could not do it, that what I’d crafted was pure trash, that I too was pure trash, and I may as well just torch my script and never say a word to anyone. In a thunderclap of pure divine wisdom, I lowered my head and kept working. The searing panic sounded the alarm that I was too close to something good.
When I performed SUGARCOATED for the first time last Saturday, it was the photo negative of how I felt in that writer’s room last summer. I felt safe and capable in sharing myself, and leading them to the sparkling shores of this deep and murky water where I co-exist with my Big Bad. They were so generous with their hearts, present and responsive. They sat down and leaned in, letting me invest in them, play with them, lay myself bare for them.
It was the most beautiful connection with an audience I could have hoped for. But even if it hadn’t been—never an actor’s favorite thing, but even if that—it still would have been worlds away from crying into my tomato pie last summer. After a year of grappling and confronting and swimming away, terrified of My Big Bad, I am finally left floating in awe and appreciation of my own depths, which can hold it all.
Happy Birthday, SUGARCOATED. I’m so glad you were born.
xx Jen