Despite · Life

Today was not a very good day for me.  This weekend I played in TMA.  I can't tell you anything about my character due to the nature of the LARP, but those who've spoken to me about it will understand that this is a very satisfying and enjoyable character to play.  I enjoyed the weekend very much, but it took a lot out of me, and I was left wandering around my life today without a very good sense of what I was doing.

I've come to understand a little better what it means to be an actor.  What it means to take on roles: the satisfying roles, the thrilling roles, the disturbing roles, and the stressful roles.  What I've come to understand is that I never feel very good afterward.  The worst I've ever felt after a LARP is after finishing Alice.  Now, bear in mind, Alice is a fantastic game, and I played a great character.  But it was also a very depressing character, and I play roles very wholeheartedly.  So when the game was over, my character felt absolutely hopeless, and so did I.  I saw in his failures all of mine, not because I had "lost the game" or played the character poorly, but because I had played him so well and come to feel the dire weight of his situation so profoundly that I got dragged down in his struggles.  This took some recovery.

Now, my most recent character was a very successful one, but this unfortunately did not make me much happier in the aftermath. Certainly, there was the thrill of becoming the character for a weekend.  But this wore off overnight, and I woke to the grim realities of life.  All of my character's successes were absent in my own life, it seemed, and I could only strive for and fail to achieve the singular joy of that kind of victory over life.

I have to ask myself: what role am I playing?  What hole in the universe am I supposed to fill?  I often feel as though my life can most easily be summarized as a vast potential that remains unrealized.  Whether realizing my potential is an impossibility or merely a matter of time, I'm not certain, but I can't help but feel this constant tugging towards a seemingly impossibly distant future.  I can't help but feel, with every false step forward and every frustration, that I'm failing in my ultimate goal.  That I'm failing to reach my true potential.  And what would be my reward even if I do everything I'm meant to do in my life?  Will filling my hole in the universe fill a hole in me?  I can and will rely solely on faith, as always.