so i used to be extremely obsessed

with other people's belongings as a child. right? i couldn't keep my hands off them. i would feel them and smell them and chew on them and play with them, sometimes inevitably destroy them in my enthusiasm, and i would become terribly upset if an adult tried to take away my toy. it felt like emotional robbery. how dare they??

i'm not talking toddler, either. i was completely infatuated with strangers' stuff well into my adolescence. not in a weird cleptomaniac way where i wanted to make it my own: i just wanted to be close to it. like, an all-senses-involved-kind of close. and if ever there was a time when a stranger noticed and graciously gave me the thing i was so consumed by, why then it instantly ceased to be of any interest to me.

i still vividly remember that feeling of rapture, and i think i understand the reason behind it, too. it was the foreignness of the objects that i found so intoxicating, the fact that they had a life within the life of someone else who wasn't me. like they carried within them the essence of another person; a neatly wrapped package of alien humanity that i was desperate to explore... well, it's hard to explain, really.

in later years, i've equated my infantile need to interact with the belongings of others with the need many a fledging mechanic has to take electric fans apart and put them back together. except in my case, it wasn't about the inner workings of actual things. what i wanted to experience was the people who owned them, and the only way i knew how - remember, i was a fairly socially inept child - was to attack the physical manifestations of their personality. maybe this also betrays an instinctively sensual approach to life in general, i'm not sure, but i do know for a fact that the pursuit was intellectual in nature: i simply wanted to understand how other people went about being... well, other people.

objects have stories, you know. they don't have to be especially dramatic or eventful, as most real things are not: they can be as mundane as that time you spilled a drop of wine on your leather wallet and it stained the edge, and now i'm looking at it and i can see the discoloration, but it's been years since the drop of wine was spilled and how could i ever wrangle a context out of it? yet the context exists, out there, beyond mine and even your own reckoning: the restaurant you were at, where they served a really awful pasta salad, and how hard your date laughed when you told her the story about your dad catching you masturbating in the bathroom at his birthday party, and a million other things besides. so many stories. and if i couldn't get them all from one hands-on reading of your personal effects, i would make them up, filling in the blanks. your life - or at any rate, my interpretation of it - passing before my eyes. for a split second, i can be you. i can imagine being you. it's the same thing.

this is most likely how i started being an actor. it begins in your gut. whether or not i would have ended up actually acting is a whole different matter.

the other version of my backstory to being an actor involves watching a really bad river phoenix film as a teenager and being moved to tears, but really i probably just had a crush on him - it's the novelty version that people always dig. i mean, there might be a modicum of truth to it, but i don't fundamentally believe people decide they want to act from just watching someone else do it and being impressed. i think, at that point, it's no longer a decision. you just need a good source of inspiration to bring certainty to the surface. river phoenix was my trigger factor.

anyway, this is what i've discovered, years since and many foreign belongings handled, characters dissected, and parts played:
1. understanding how people work and trying them on for size are not even in the realm of being the same.
2. playing is not exactly being, theatre is not exactly reality: but it is the next closest thing and, when come by earnestly, ought to be no further away than an entirely plausible version of it.
3. being everybody feels the exact same. how you think, reason, and react within the parameters you're given is all kinds of different. but how being a person feels is the exact fucking same, in the end.

so don't tell me i wasn't there, because i could have been, and my imagination is sharper than a pitchfork and i have spent my whole life learning how to walk in other people's shoes.
well, that, and sniffing their wallets.


Let nothing that is inherently human
be foreign to you
- Stanislavski