Fireside Chat

Artist Statement            

            Opening up about my life on a non-superficial level has always been a source of anxiety for me. I wonder about how I will be received, how I will be perceived, and most of all how the listeners will use my words, because once uttered aloud they are no longer just mine and people can use them however they want to. So, within the vague parameters of the Fireside Chat assignment, I felt that I was walking a balancing act between revealing too much, and not enough.

            The assignment called for a discussion of my beliefs, which seems simple enough, but underneath is such a striking idea. What better way is there to learn about someone intimately than to listen to his or her most closely held values? I thought of all the basic beliefs that I have, my religious persuasions, my political ideals and my cultural limitations could all make for an interesting and completely superficial discussion about myself. So, then I thought about what I hold deeper and closer to my heart. I thought of all my health problems, my recent challenges, and my hardest trials and then as I traced each of these back to their source I found that stunted emotions were at the epicenter.

            Armed with the concept for my speech, I then found a physical way to describe my utter lack of any emotional capacity by dressing up as a fictitious figure with zero emotions, a zombie. This conceptualization provided me with a literal and figurative mask that I could still hide behind while discussing something that is actually so personal it makes me shrink at the very idea of allowing the world to hear it. I could use pop culture and the recent zombie frenzy to help others understand something, which is, in all actuality, impossible to comprehend without experiencing. The recent film Warm Bodies provides an excellent backdrop to my discussion as it comically explores the idea that zombies may actually be just like us, but trapped inside their imperfect bodies that cannot experience emotion and empathy the way living humans do. I didn’t feel that I had to specifically refer to this film, but simply implied that meaning when I adorned my undead makeup.

            Never the less I worried that I would become an anomaly similar to the victim of gross misunderstandings found in Tillie Olsen’s short story I Stand Here Ironing. This story beautifully examines the life of a girl through her mother’s eyes, a mother who saw all the pain and hurt that her child went through, but was unable to help her. While I feel that some of those same circumstances have been true in my life, I didn’t want to be seen by my peers as some broken girl. Thankfully, some of the anxiety of revealing too much of myself to an audience was alleviated when technical difficulties arouse during my presentation, forcing my focus to shift. While this was an unforeseen complication, I think that it may have worked to my benefit by calming my nerves and allowing me to just say what I needed to. Then as I watched the other students perform, I appreciated the ones who chose to go to that deeper level and allow us to see what is just behind the walls we so carefully construct. The realization that we all have those things that we vigilantly protect and hid from the world, allowed me to view my own presentation in a different light. Perhaps it will be meaningful to others that I was willing to put myself out there, or perhaps it was only a learning experience for me that no one else will remember.