Imperceptible Change
The first musical I performed in was A Chorus Line.
For those unfamiliar, A Chorus Line is a musical about 16 people auditioning to be in the ensemble of a musical.
They all stand in a line on stage and take turns singing numbers about their childhood trauma between dance combos.
Just like a real audition.
This means that everyone in the line is supposed to react to the person auditioning (without detracting from their performance of course).
It’s a fine balance.
In the moment, I thought I was nailing this balancing.
I reacted correctly to everything.
A polite chuckle at the performative Bobby, a concerned eyebrow furrow for the ditzy Judy; a bored eyeroll here, a wry smile there.
None of that came across.
One night, someone’s parents were there filming, and it was all totally lost.
I look like a statue down at one end the line.
Probably from my practice as an altar boy, any expression more than a milimeter from neutral felt like a tectonic plate shifting that would force the audience’s attention to the earthquake on stage right.
Where I thought I was performing this delicate balancing act, I was actually standing about a meter to the side of the balance beam with my arms out trying not to fall off the floor.
Despite being injured most of the time, I also competed in multis (Heptathlon and Decathlon) at a D3 school.
Seeing as it wasn’t my main event, that means I probably had some of the least practice of anyone who’s ever competed in pole vault.
If you’re imagining a Mondo Duplantis type rocketing himself feet-first into the air to turn and barely miss the bar, yes that’s what it’s supposed to look like, but stop imagining that.
When I learned pole vault, I started with a large pole that wouldn’t bend at all.
I would just try to get a good jump off the ground, hang on to the pole, and lift my legs over when I got to the bar.
If my coach was lucky, I might turn and face the bar going over like I was supposed to, but that was mostly up to physics and chance.
Anyhow, after doing this for a couple weeks, I came in to practice, he gave me a thinner pole and told me it was time to try bending the pole.
It was mostly the same process as before (run, jump, hang on for dear life), but this time, when I got into the air, it felt like the pole was going to break and I was going to fall of the side of the Earth.
When he showed me the video, I bent the pole 5 degrees from vertical, 10 if I’m hyperbolizing to sound cool.
Either way, a tiny fraction of what it would take to send me to a different dimension.
I think I’m a very different person than I was in high school.
I think you can see where I’m going.
If it’s so easy to fool myself about how drastic imperceptible physical changes are, how easy it must be to fool myself about how drastic personal / lifestyle / value changes are.
Then there’s always the possibility that this is a totally false analogy, but since there’s no film footage of my whole life to go back and look at, it’s impossible to tell.
I think the closest I can come to a solution on this one is that this is what journaling is for.
If you keep a log of who you are as a person, you can create a sort of low resolution video of your life and changes.
Otherwise, at any one time, you only really have access to the person you currently are and your own faulty and biased memories about your past selves which are probably about as reliable as my on-stage internal perception of my expression.