AS IF
There’s a trick I often use to get beginning creative writers past the first hurdle, which is usually a flaming sharknado of terror that prevents them from putting down a single word: I ask them to imagine they’re writing to someone in particular.
Narrowing the audience from “the world that wants to eat my guts while I’m still alive and watching” to “my friend Benny from 5th grade, the one who picked his nose” is a stakes-lowering mechanism I preach often and could stand to practice a lot more.
Knowing your audience is handy for a number of reasons. Having an idea of whom you’re targeting usually sharpens your language and clears out a lot of what my son calls “the junks,” for starters. Plus, remembering that communication is fundamentally at least a two-person project tends to disabuse us of the notion that we have to perform only mic-drop-worthy moves in our lives.
Deciding whom you’re speaking to can also change both you and that person.
The easiest example is perhaps the four-year-old. First, try imagining 1) you are talking to the most cantankerous and contrary creature on the planet, and 2) you need it to put its underwear on. What do you say? Probably something like FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY JUST PUT THE UNDERS ON. The creature, of course, either runs the other way and stands on its head, still naked, or throws the unders in the sink and turns the cold water on full-blast.
And now imagine, instead, you’re talking to a capable human and you need it to put its underwear on. You probably say something like “oh yeah, here’re these things for ya when yr ready dude,” in passing, while you chew on that chocolate bar that has you feeling rather cared for, and leave the Blippi tighties on the coffee table as you walk away with a reasonable level of confidence that the project will be completed before you die.
Admittedly, there is only a 6% difference in outcomes between these two trials, but that’s more than enough to be statistically significant, and every percentage point counts when you’re just trying to get by in the dumpster fire of late-stage capitalism. The point is: in the case of the “capable human” decision for the audience you’re speaking to, both parties undergo a bit less stress, and sometimes the results are slightly better than naked-headstand.
Where I’m most interested in the “chosen audience” phenomenon, though (which, let’s be clear, is very much a function of imaginative framing), is where it has even larger effects— namely, what it looks like when I behave as though the people I’m talking to think I’m a shit-stain versus what it looks like when I behave as though I might be cherished like a slow sunset.
That almost absurdly powerful choice is, it turns out <looks around frantically> entirely up to me, and it often has measurable effects both on me and on the people I’m talking to.
*
In my thirties I took six semesters of acting classes at the Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, where I learned, among many many other things, that “pretending” is not the same thing as “faking it,” and “acting” isn’t the opposite of “real life.” On the contrary— as any avid reader or writer will tell you, inducing an imagined state of being is an extremely potent way to access real emotion, and the emotional experiences you can have while in an imaginatively/creatively constructed state are more “real,” in many cases, than most of what we tend to experience in our daily lives.
One way the instructors taught us to build these emotional realities was by assembling the tools we needed to access specific states, such as rage, joy, grief, aggression, and romantic arousal. Each person was different, but what the studio called the “emo prep” was a period of time during which you set the conditions, backstage, to be able to access one or more of these states— often involving a brief narrative, music, and/or physical actions— so that when you emerged from the prep, you carried the “bruise” of the feelings you’d just experienced on your own forward with you into your time on stage with a partner. This was a helpful and powerful way to open up improvisational vectors, but it took a lot of doing.
One quicker, almost “shorthand” way to access a similar and potentially even more complex palette was to use the “as if.” Enter your improvisational period with another actor on stage “as if you’re just starting to get chicken pox,” “as if you’ve just been chased by a person with a knife,” “as if you are a drunk box turtle,” etc.
What I observed in the other student actors using this method was that a lot of emotional, intellectual, and physical information got encoded in that single, compact act of welcoming the imaginative landscape created by the “as if.” I saw this trick work across wildly varied personality terrain, from college mathematicians to grandparents in retirement.
The thing about the “as if” is that it’s really, at its core, an “is.”
Once we imagine something, if the channels are clear and we practice doing it in a committed way, it becomes part of our emotional, intellectual, and physical reality.
What happens if you look at the scenery on your commute as if you’ve just landed in a foreign country for a vacation? What happens if you greet your asshole supervisor as if she were just another tired human who could use a donut? What happens if you behave as if the tool who cut in front of you in line is actually a lonely kindergartener?
Whether these imagined scenarios line up with “reality” is far less important than the extent to which they have the capacity to build a reality that contains, for you, more freedom, enjoyment, inspiration, and kindness. I can’t think of anyone who couldn’t use more of all of these.
*
When I speak to others, it occurs to me, there’s always a lens I’m looking through, whether I’m especially aware of it or not. The more I work to notice these lenses, the more I can see that I’ve usually made baseline assumptions that make me smaller, less real, and a shit-ton less fun than I am: “they must think I’m babbling,” “I’m inconveniencing them,” “I must sound like a horse’s ass,” etc. [An especially hurtful side-effect of these grubby lenses is that they often bring to fruition the very thing they fear: when I am afraid I’ll sound like an idiot, I start to stumble and fragment and apologize and we’re all tired and bored and hungry by sentence three.]
What happens if I behave as if I might have something worthwhile to say? In short, you’re looking at it. Whether everyone who reads this thinks it’s the bee’s knees or not is less vital to me than the fact that some of us did an amazing thing: we had an imaginative experience together, one that elicited emotions, thoughts, and sensations, as a result of a series of strange little bug-like symbols I put together on a screen while I drank a rather poor smoothie. In the end, you take what you can or will away, and I get to know your eyes moved over these things I needed— I need, I am needing— to learn.
There are so may gifts embedded in these actions, on each side, that I find I can show up and deliver myself into the fields of wondering and wonder, over and over, as if there were enough there to get us through.
When my daughter was about 10 years old, and was learning to jump obstacles on a horse, she had a blessed teacher who told her, "When you come to the hurdle, throw your heart over and jump after it." Yea, as if. Yet I do know that when I am willing to visit the seat of my desire, it tends to open a vastness that cannot be contained as it calls forth wonder. Again, thank you.
“ what it looks like when I behave as though I might be cherished like a slow sunset.” <— absolutely beautiful writing.