*Play, Roleplaying, Stereotypes, Love, Trust, Doubt and Adolescence*
by Kenneth Udut 5/16/14 12:34pm inspired by @109733092546229227136
How you react to someone else’s drama is what makes all of the difference. Do you react with drama in kind? Are you able to retain your sense of self while being dramatic, or do you lose your ”self” in the process and get absorbed into the roleplay, as Method Actors often do?
And deeper issues: Trust. Oh, trust. Well, what is it? Well, we each have a set of rules that we follow, typically unwritten, unspoken… assumed.
Sometimes individuals play by the same rules.
Sometimes they have a different set of rules than you.
Scripts.
Life is often like being thrust into a play without a script in hand and you must play your part perfectly or lose your mind and break your heart. Who is directing the play? Where is your script? What if you are reading off of the wrong script? What then?
Part of the trouble with human relationships (and animals as well actually) is roleplaying that becomes all too real. When we are little, or puppies and kittens or baby horseys, we play. We absorb the big giant world around us and act it out in a fun way. Animals pretend to bite and kill without actually hurting their friends. Human children do the same.
But then… we grow up.
We forget that we’re in a play.
It becomes serious.
”Ha ha, you fooled me!” becomes ”I cannot trust you anymore.” because we forgot how to laugh at our own absurdity.
It’s not easy. Adolescence is the worst time and most critical for knowing your lines because it is the time where roleplaying becomes stereotyping and digging to the core of Truth behind the masks is difficult because – are they roleplaying? Is it a game? Is it real? Am I playing a role? Am I being real?
Feelings suck and they’re also awesome.
Your brain is flooded with its own liquids from all sides, changing constantly, making you go from happy to sad to miserable to melonchaly to bored to lovestruck to lovesick to shocked to awed to apathetic. And sometimes we get stuck on one or two emotions for hours, days, weeks, months…. it seems like forever.
So, how do you react? What’s your next line? In groups, stereotyping people makes it easy if everybody is playing the same game. ”I’m the ”guy everybody likes” – and this is what they expect from me”. ”I’m the nerd and this is what they expect.”
But then there is a point where we can’t use those crutches anymore.
Doubt in Love and friendship leaves you trying to stand up, barefoot with two broken legs on a pile of sharp razors and you reach out for a hand to help but you don’t know if they’re going to pull you out or throw you face down in the sharpness and pain.
Thankfully, it is a maze that we can find out way through. Not everybody makes it unfortunately and there are many casualties – lost lives, broken hearts, shattered dreams and lost hope. But it is possible. And well worth the struggle.#
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