mad pride. bipolar disorder and playing characters going mad.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder at around age 16. I was hospitalized 3 times before the age of 21. The roller coaster of medication and finding the right cocktail of drugs, the involvement of family members whose opinions were skewed, the switching and changing of doctors and therapists, the view that my personality is my disorder. The changing diagnostic criteria. The nearly 10 years off of meds, mostly on my own, sometimes making bold and successful choices in the luck of my mania and who could catch me when I was unstable. Catatonic Depressions. Auditory Hallucinations. Scary choices, wild choices, suicidal ideation, spiritually enlightening hallucinations and finding how they could be both valid and disruptive. Going back into treatment. Finding the right cocktail again. Finding that I had identity beyond the diagnostic criteria. Being given a second really helpful and empowering diagnosis (ASD) that reframed and gave context to my whole history. Grappling with the pain of “Oh I wish it was just ASD! Maybe it is just ASD! Should I go off my meds?” and then realizing—-no—-it is both. I have Bipolar I and ASD.

So that’s my history. I want to note that when people are candid about their mental illness, especially online, that we are rarely looking for pity or sympathy. We’re often just sharing experiences the way we might share an experience of any life event. I am tentative about writing this stuff online not because I still carry shame but because I think peoples’ responses often show that they don’t understand why I wrote what I wrote. The reason we share our stories is often as a beacon for other people who share the struggle. Sometimes it is just to get things off our chests. Sometimes it is because we need to try and communicate something that is misunderstood about us. People who have had a rough time don’t need pity. They need to be listened to. So I wanted to just make that very clear.

Now I want to get to the part of my life that is performing. I am an actor. The easiest roles for me to play are people going mad. And I have really opinions Bipolar Disorder and ASD are shown in films and television. For the most part I see actors with skill and empathy and they serve the story. But there is often something missing. Something I can’t put my finger on but it is along the lines of “I know my kind when I see them.” That’s something that’s often on my mind. That I should be considered for these kinds of roles because of my experience in the same way that my experience as a nonbinary person would be important to playing a nonbinary character.

I don’t have a conclusion for this whole thing, by the way. I am on the edge of loving certain Madness performances and hating some. I feel more irked by the ASD and trans stuff—-autistic actors should play autistic characters and trans people should play trans characters. I’m firm on that. But with Bipolar and the general Tradition of MADNESS that exists in storytelling—-my opinions are tricky.

The thing I grapple with the most is that disclosing the severity of my illness and experience with hospitalizations —-could lose me the job. You don’t want to go in and say “Yes I understand madness I could bring a lot to this role because I have had real mania, real hallucinations, real hospitalizations and Don’t Worry I have a lot of support now! I have the right doctors and therapy and family and friends!” That’s not really something you can bring up. Which is weird because it is such a huge part of my life. Monitoring myself during certain seasons and tweaking the meds during the year, etc. has been my life’s work in many ways. Accepting that this is the reality, being OK with it, allowing it to play out and allowing for experimentations with treatments until something works, facing side effects, etc. This is an enormous part of my everyday life. It’s not some huge dramatic moment most days. In stories we show the most extreme moments of madness. I am intimately familiar with those. It’s just really hard to feel like I can’t share the reality of my life when I audition for certain roles. It feels risky. I have a sense of humor and I’ve grown that sardonic gallows humor that many chronically ill people have. The sense of humor that sometimes jars people.

There’s also The Switch. Like when you tell someone you have Bipolar Disorder or have been hospitalized or have ASD. Something happens. This thing happens where many people just start treating you differently. Like they’re scanning for the symptoms. Like they’re going to catch a glimpse into this thing. To be fair, though, over the years whenever I’ve disclosed I’ve gotten more and more people who have been educated about mental illness. People who have a sister or an uncle or a story they’re willing to share. Something to make me feel like less of a novelty. And that’s cool. I can often tell when I’m with another person with ASD or Bipolar. I just know. And I disclose and we’re at ease and the understanding is there in a deeper way, in a way it can’t be with others.

I would like to play monsters, people who are A PROBLEM, people whose behavior disrupts, people who are going through it, whose minds aren’t working in a typical way. That’s the domain I want to exist in. But it is so so hard to carve out that niche sometimes. It constantly feels risky. But it feels like there are pathways in my body that know a kind of freedom of mania and a weight of depression that lend so wonderfully to my work. I know what colors are on my palette as an actor. I’ve added more, of course I can do more. But someone neurotypical is likely going to get a neurotypical role. And someone who hasn’t been through the painstaking process of trying four million bipolar meds and deciding which side effects they can handle—-is probably going to get the Normal Secretary with Five Lines role above me. And I want them to. They deserve it. I’m not really a normal day-to-day person. I don’t have that experience at all. That’s not a foundational part of my life the way it can be for other actors. I go into rooms of other actors and I can feel that it isn’t a huge challenge for them to not be an alien. And I love aliens, I love monsters. I am monsters. I feel alien and those are the kind of roles I want.

The word “unhinged” was in a character description the other day. I was full of glee. I know unhinged. I live a life almost-unhinged. A life where we delicately get as much stability as we can on the hinges and I’ve mastered grounding the hinges enough to live a wonderful rewarding life. I know wildness, though. I did 7 paintings in 2 days of unhinged-ish manageable energy the other day. I have access to the memory of FULL unhingement. The word UNHINGED was like “Yessssss” and it soothed me. It isn’t a challenge. It is a domain I know how to exist in. And existing in that domain in the sealed safety of performance is really helpful for me. I know I can put all of my wildness into the performance and work hard and get tired and feel like my experience is lending to something rather than disrupting life. I always sleep better when I’m doing a play or a film that requires I be unhinged. Strange, uncanny, etc—-these are all so comforting as character descriptions for me.

I think one of the weirdest parts of all of this is that people wouldn’t want to be me. They wouldn’t want to have a certain wildness. Because it is disruptive. Because that’s not who they are. So when I go in for headshots or something, I often get styled into Presentable. And then I look Presentable. and I feel trapped in myself. I’ve worked hard to try to get closer to the mark on the presentation of who I am but people always seek to smooth it out. I don’t want it smoothed out. And I sometimes think, though, that if I try to express it all on the surface that it’ll be an imitation of what it feels like. Portraits are better than “headshots” and I really feel ill at commercial industry standards. There’s no place for me there. And I always feel deeply rejected and sad in those spaces.

People like me should be your monsters and your madmen and your wild eyed unraveling disruptive people. We know it. I remember I was playing Lady Macbeth once and I told the director that I knew about madness. And I shared a bit with her. She told me “If I would have known I would have cast you as someone else.” And I was furious! No! I’ve had a miscarriage! I’ve had unraveling mind! I want this sort of thing. I believe in exposure therapy, I believe in facing these roles head on and being able to bring my nervous system’s real memories to the role. I was so upset that she wanted to “protect” me. I don’t want to be protected. Performance is one of the only spaces on earth that I can unleash this part of myself without everyone freaking out and rejecting me. It’s important!

I have no way to end this.

Soft Meat, Big Claws. Crab Characters.

For the last month I’ve been exploring a character. I initially called them a character. It was sort of based on my instinct toward the feral, toward interacting with the environment in an abstract way. But it wasn’t a character the way my clown/sketch characters are usually characters. It was a lot more of a straight-up reveal. Like my Pure Clown Self. Or just a pure showing of my soft underbelly. I think that’s often the goal with me in clown, to find the soft underbelly—-show it or accidentally show it—-get laughed at or offend with it—-react to the laughs or responses—-use the response to feed myself.

So this character wasn’t really a character, it was a lot more of a stripped-down self. I don’t usually use white face paint or a lot of extra makeup. When I build a character, I like to have light washes of nudging toward something but a feeling of incomplete-ness about them. I don’t do full on masculinizing makeup for my Victorian Gentleman character or my Medieval Prince—though I’m thinking of adding sideburns and only sideburns to the Victorian Gent. And I don’t go over the top with looking like a freckled cute doll when I play my Little Kid By The Seaside. I really like just light washes of color and shade that push toward the look. I never want to lose myself under the makeup. But a bit of makeup sometimes helps me risk something. And so for the past month I’ve been using a wash of white foundation and rusty red mouth and eyes. It isn’t stark black-and-white. It is rusty earthy red and sort-of-white-sort-of-my-skin. I like how dark the rust is on the mouth, I use my mouth a lot to find speech, to kiss my hand, to wonder at the world. And I think the mouth has, since back when I built a Bride of Frankenstein performance years ago, a place from which my characters attempt to lurch themselves into existence. How do I talk? How do I hold my mouth? How do I make sound come out?

Yeah so the makeup this past month has been more than I usually wear for characters but also kind of revealing of me: a creature, a monster. Not some high and finished concept, just a mirror for questions. This character asks questions. This character knows nothing. And in that way, I think they are not a character at all. They are just me: a really confused child, trying to gather data about How to Be A Person. How do you kiss? How do you love? What do you say when…? These are the questions I’ve asked of my small audiences. And I want to know. Me, Athena, I really want to know. How do people love? What is their answer? I think the thing I love the most about crowd work (and by extension, soliloquy when I get to do Shakespeare) is how much I need the audience. My approach is never to entertain from an audience, it is TO SEEK! I seek something from them. Advice, information, validation. With this more pure clown I’ve been doing in my vaguely The Crow-like face and vaguely Gollum-like posture —-I really need them to tell me how to be a person, to be like them. I want to mirror them and I mirror them in whatever way I can—-kind of in the body of a monster or a child. I’ve learned so much over the past month of performing like this. I’ve given up so much control and expectation about how a performance should go.

And I’m slowly going toward constructing a show starring one of my most charming and extroverted and “in control” characters. We’re doing an hour long show! Of John Newspaper! An entrepreneur! An Inventor! A charmer! And I am so glad I reverted to my primordial form this month as a monster baby. Because it has taught me how to break down again. I’ve really needed to break down again, I need to break down regularly in front of an audience, to be a broken heart and a tired soul and to look people in the eyes and see that maybe they feel that, too. And of course they do! We’re all hurting. None of our pain is unique, really, just like or joy and love are not unique. And that’s a good thing—-that we share all of that. So I’m really happy I have given these more broken open performances this month so that I can find the moments to break apart as my more Put Together characters. I’d been missing that for a long time. I think I created my more put-together characters—-strong knights and charming inventors—-so that I could feel strong. And it worked. I spent about a year finding these powerful stances, these people-so-confident-they’re-stupid personas. Reveling in the “I don’t know how stupid I am! I am going at this with supreme confidence!” Like—-DIGNITY—-having so much dignity and self-importance that it’s hilarious. And then sometimes getting OFFENDED at audiences who do not comply or who laugh at me. I love that dignity position. I love those characters——I think they’re a blast.

But now I’ve gotten back to my roots. And my roots really are in the most delicate and vulnerable kinds of characters. Characters with such wounded places that they might be dangerous. There’s a danger in being the crab with the soft meats and the big claws and the indirect way of navigating space. Something about having my legs out while I’ve done this character has become important to me. I have had a lot of insecurity about the way I walk in my life. My confident characters have mindful over correction of my medically unique inturned hips—-and reverting back to my basics means—-a kind of shyness that can come from an inturned set of legs. And the legs being unstable. Being unstable in front of people physically, emotionally—-daring to need them deeply and not hiding the need. And I see now that all of my characters are soft crabs but their claws are different impressive shapes, their shells are painted distractions. The soft meats are just as soft as ever on the inside.

The Body Abstracted in the Mind.

Think about the ever-changing beauty standard. Wild, right? Duh though. We all know it’s bullshit, it makes so many of us feel bad. It is so rarely fun to compare ourselves to others and figure out how to do the work to make our bodies, our faces, look a certain way. Thinking about ourselves from the outside-in is more common than feeling ourselves from the inside-out. And it is a crazy abstract thing we do, how we think about our bodies in pieces or groups of pieces. How we can hone in on a hip, a leg, a part of the skin, a nose. Our minds break apart our bodies, our eyes look down at ourselves or in the mirror and the mind starts to organize and label things. Most of the labels come from external sources. Value judgements begin. We are sold things to change our opinion of the judgement. The people selling the things help us create new places to look, new insecurities. We are sold the solutions to new insecurities.

The power behind this is how changeable and abstract it is. And how we buy into someone else’s random construction of what our bodies should be. Our minds begin to look at ratios and textures and the words and images installed in our minds from the outside form opinions. That’s pretty powerful, though. What if we picked our own words, our own values? When you’re obsessed with your nose, you become a nose, when you are obsessed with your cellulite, you become your cellulite. The mind enlarges the “problem area” and multiplies it. The perception is distorted. But if cellulite became the new and celebrated skin texture, the “beauty area” would be increased. The social conditioning is intense. But it is no way to live.

My practice is abstracting the body from the inside-out. With my own language, my own labels, my own decisions. I hone in and breathe into pain areas, pleasure areas, neutral areas. I notice when I have a headache that I become a head. And I try to remember: I have a foot that is feeling neutral. I am a whole being. That doesn’t make the pain go away but it does remind me that I am more than my pain. When the virus of judgement plagues my eyes and I feel terrible about my skin or something—-I notice it. Is this my value? Whose value is this? I start to break apart the thoughts and conceive of the body more abstractly. How are my feet interacting with the ground? What can my skin feel? How does it feel to have a beating heart?

I’ve done Somatic Experiencing Therapy and Somatic Descent Meditation. I’ve also taught Embodied and Movement Meditation and Embodied Voice. I’ve learned and practiced Alexander Technique for a long time. I’ve thought a lot about what the body holds, what the mind projects and how useless it is to think about the body from the outside-in. We ignore so much when we don’t know how things feel on the inside. Starting from the inside is important, sensitizing the actual physical feeling apparatus of the body has to happen before we project from the outside.

I remember being a kid and hating the feel of jeans. “They’re too hard!” I remember telling my mom. But I wasn’t allowed to wear sweatpants to school for some social approval reason I didn’t understand. The jeans never fully got comfortable, I just got used to living in discomfort in jeans. “That’s what people do.” and “That’s just the way it is.” because internalized to the extent that I wasn’t even sensitive to my own skin. I feel the same way about many garments. I don’t wear jeans as an adult, I wear only what feels right. I go from the inside out. I care for my skin before I care for other peoples’ assumed judgements. The byproduct is being more comfortable in my own skin and physical body, the byproduct is moving through the world with ease. The byproduct is that people who would judge me over something stupid are likely deterred.

Doing what feels right from the inside out, from the body’s needs, often results in better personal style. It results in choices being made from comfort and joy. Colors that please us, textures that please us, things we can move in. The personal stamp exists in every choice, in every purchase. Formal and casual looks can be found in every physical comfort zone. And being more at ease in your body is always the best accessory. Starting from a foundation of physical pleasure—-whether it is tied up and laced together or loose and soft—always creates authenticity in personal style. You can tell when someone is trying to replicate a look they saw with their eyes onto a body that is disagreeing with the garments.

I think the way our clothes interact with our bodies inform how we interact with our environments and other people. Something is touching our skin all day. Something is keeping us together or keeping us at ease or keeping us protected or allowing us to communicate ourselves with others. Covering up and revealing both have their own powers. It just depends: what do you need to be doing? And when? Knowing yourself from the inside out is always going to help you choose what is best for your body. Projections from the outside are irrelevant.

My practices with abstract movement include remembering the stories I associate with my body: the story of many bones broken in my foot, the story of what people have said about different body parts, the story of the way I sit and how my hips feel pinched. The conceptual stories are important to examine. What is a story and what is the physical reality of the body part in the moment? Am I moving my body based on a previous experience or am I really here now? Here’s the pain of the headache again—-but this headache is a new headache, a new circumstance exists outside of me—-and I may have learned many things from my memories and stories around My Headaches. How many of them apply here? Where’s the information I need to be noticing this time?

Sometimes we can perform activities based on the last time we did the activity instead of understanding our internal and external circumstances are different than last time. The new information needs to be included. I am here now. If I’m playing guitar—-of course all of the other times I’ve played are with me, the skills I’ve learned, the things I remember—-but I am also different today than I’ve ever been. Where am I at? Where am I internally? And what is the environment like? The lesson of How to Play Guitar is a map, not a territory. The territory is the present circumstances internally and externally.

Ok that’s all I’m writing right now.

directing and performing at the same time

There are so many moving pieces.

When I’m a performer, most of the moving pieces are internal and personal, with my own body. Those are the only ones I have control over: my process, my work, the care and preparation and recovery of my body. The external pieces will move as they will—my scene partner, the state of the audience, etc. It is this dance of listening, noticing, responding.

When I’m directing or painting or writing music—I have control of the medium in a different way. There are a lot more choices to make. With directing, the moving pieces are people. And space needs to be made for all the people. But I need to build a structure for the performers to move within. I’m directing right now—and it is kind of a loose project. I can point to the structure and hold the vision and bring the performers into the structure. And then I just have to trust them. Which should be easy with this project because it is clown—-and it is more like a loose collection of bits that follow a story —- open to many different outcomes. Clown is so much about the audience. They’re a chaotic external circumstance each of us must dance with.

I’m approaching my process and the world building and character creation through mini films first. Each character has their own little textural vignette. It’s been a fun way to have some control over the world, to give this interesting feedback loop of transmedia. I’m excited about it. My plan is to send out the mini videos to the mailing list over the weeks leading to the show.

Right now the whole administrative part of the show is kind of alluding me. I don’t feel comfortable pitching to venues until we have a couple of more rehearsals. The whole admin part is torture for me lol.

Directing and structuring while also being the main character is a lot. I definitely want to bring in a few outside voices to view and some trial audiences. It’s a character I’ve done so many times and he’s really easy for me—-I could do an hour of him alone and it would be no problem. I think I’ll be able to lace it together through the character himself and create structure with him for other people to feel safe with. It was hard at our first rehearsal to bring it all performance-wise and then pop out into directing the others. But I think we have a good idea of the shape now so I’ll be able to bring full power to rehearsing as the character.

It’s kind of crazy, too, because I’ve been helping some of the performers with costume pieces. I’m more of a stylist and arranger of garments than I am a costume construction person. I have basic skills and I’m pretty good at coming up with concepts. But my spouse is the one with actual practical sewing and construction skills—-and he’s busy finishing a degree at the moment. So I’m mostly cobbling things together. I think it’s cool, though. I think it’ll be cool. Here’s some of my vibe drawings for a few characters:

lifelong dream

Yesterday I achieved my lifelong dream of making people laugh by falling through a whole bunch of metal chairs. I was at a callback. And it was appropriate for the scene. It was fantastic. I’ve always wanted to do that. I have done so much physical comedy in my life but never falling through chairs like that. So even if I am not cast in that play, at least I have a personal win.

I love comedy and I’ve spent the last two years (or maybe a little more) making sketch comedy on film and creating character comedy and performing live clown. I hesitate to call myself “a comedian” even though it is clearly part of what I am. Identity labels are so weird for me, especially professional. “Comedian” seems to imply stand-up. And I tried stand-up and I kind of hate doing it. I don’t even always like watching it. I love absurd, colorful, escapist fantasy worlds and bizarre experiences.

finishing the unfinished

I was without paint for a long time and I had these dregs of oil pastels that were OK, that I did some shapes with, but that I wasn’t totally happy with. I liked the creatures I made from the oil pastels but in the past I’ve used oil pastels along with acrylic or I’ve just used acrylic alone.

Now that I have paint, I’m in a frenzy to use up every drop. I love when paint lives thickly on the canvas. I’m wasteful with it, I put huge globs directly on my canvasses and I like seeing heavy pools of paint. I love when it takes a long time to try. I love when it is messy. I like pushing liquids around and seeing what they do.

So I had a few creatures. A dog, a frog and a fox. The fox was, in its other version, a lioness, but globbing the paint on to enliven and update her, a fox revealed itself. Who am I to stop the fox from being birthed from the lion? When I first did this one a while ago (before the version you see now)—I had a dream of a lioness standing on a high sand ledge in a Sietch Tabr-like place. No people were there. This lioness looked down on me. She was covered in paint/blood. Red. A small twisted tree was next to her. I was scared of her, she is a wild animal! She looked like she wanted me to come near but I was too scared. If you’re an astrology buff, please know that I have Venus in Leo in the 12th house and the Ruler of the 12th in the 11th in Cancer. ;)

So when I painted over the lion and it revealed a fox, I thought of that dream. I hope I don’t upset the lioness. but maybe this new creature has something to say as well.

For a long time, the oil pastel version of The Frog was on our bathroom door. He’s vulgar and has something happening with his vagina. It always looked like pee or something crazy. I don’t know. I felt like he should definitely be made of paint and he’s the one who looks most like his original form. I was really excited to do splatter on this canvas because I think it reminds me of going to the bathroom and everything going wrong. We’re going to have to get him back on the bathroom door. He’s a denizen of strange swamps.

Then there is the dog. I really love the colors on this one. I’d done a metallic Jupiter symbol for my Jupiter altar a while back. And I’m currently moving away from planetary magick to move toward a less structured practice. Especially because my dreams and canvasses are visited by these beings. I think it’s more important to build up my own internal consistency with these symbols right now. Rather than try to impose an external symbol system upon them. I don’t want to organize them into existing esoteric categories, I kind of want to know them for who they are. But because this canvas initially had a metallic Jupiter symbol on it, I’m not sure I can separate the esoteric Jupiter from this painting. It reminds me a lot of a sketch I’ve had up for a while in our house: my alien dog. But this dog feels like it is a robot companion.

Something incredible was happening with the colors on the layering of this painting and I haven’t yet figured it out so I think this might be unfinished. Or it might have a companion piece that expands on what I found here:

It feels really nice to have these creatures in our apartment at the moment. I may or may not sell some of them in the future but right now I’m just getting to know them. I used to sell my art but it’s so hard to get rid of my creatures. I start to love them. They’re part of the family. I think sometimes that I’ll put them in my online shop, beside my astrology offerings, but selling a painting feels like it takes something from me while doing astrology consultation feels like I’m giving something to someone. I think it is because I am a total sponge of information and theory and astrology is a deeply social thing. It’s about society and psychology and history. It is a communication format. I don’t know if I’m necessarily communicating when I paint, I think it is closer to adopting pets or talking to gods. Which really might be the same thing. Oh, I wish I could have a pet but our finances are too unpredictable at the moment. It would be a lot for us. But I get to watch my friend’s cat at the end of the month and I’m looking forward to that. At my house I can really just afford these strange painted pets. I was doing pet sitting for money for a long time and I loved it but it is pretty difficult to be running around town while also needing to carve out time for astrology and auditions —-which is where I prefer to make money. I wish I could do it all. But at least I get to see my friend’s cat. We have a great friendship, me and that cat. And my friend of course.

back to my roots

i've been getting back to my roots lately. so much of my work over the past few years has been about structuring and buttoning things into new shapes. the roots of what i do are very feral and i am, underneath everything, a wild creature.

I think I came to art because art lets you decide which shapes to make. On paper, with voice, through instruments--the artist is making shapes. My main instrument is body/voice and part of my gender experience is the experience of that body-voice as an extremely abstract thing.

I've always been more comfortable in the abstract, in the receptive state. I think that's why it's hard for me to finish endeavors like writing or recording and why many of my film projects take so long. I'm a receptive creature at my core, really built for live audiences, I experience it as vessel.

I take a lot of joy in the care and keeping and training of the vessel and then the entry into the ritual space of stage as a service of the present moment. it is extremely abstract, i have a natural willingness to let moments inform me without my overly heady stamp of ideas.

I love work that allows me to project onto it and I hope people project their dreams and ideas onto my work because I feel like the purest form of art is a conversation of projections. I never want to tell anyone what to think or feel. That's never my aim. I want to enter a dream with people.

And then we can both wake up and decide what the dream meant to us. Or not decide. Just let it sit as ephemeral experience, never to be replicated. And whether the work is discussed or not is irrelevant. We both entered the dream together and walked in a strange world.

astrology practice notes

I have a weird relationship with astrology. My obsessive learning habit has led to a unique practice and I feel I have helped a lot of clients and friends understand things about the world through symbolic language. I love getting to know people and I think I was initially drawn to astrology because I really wanted to understand people. Initially, I was just amazed that astrology was an entire birth chart interacting with an entire present chart in the sky. Two systems, moving pieces. I was amazed that it was actually more complicated than the column in the newspaper. And then I felt seen and understood by the language of astrology. The psychological astrology part of things gave me words to understand my feelings. But then, to understand others, to ask people questions, to find that the language I was developing and learning about certain placements and transits—-was at all accurate—-was life changing for me. A lot of people like astrology so it was easy for me to make friends with people and connect through astrology. I like people a lot. And I’m always seeking common language with a person—-do we both like food? Do we both like Game of Thrones? Do we both have brothers? Whatever it is, I am always just trying to seek that common ground. My favorite thing is when people tell me what they care about the most and I get to learn from them. Everyone has little pieces of information.

But, yeah, my relationship with astrology is weird because I go through times where I don’t look at my own chart at all. I have memorized the degree of all of my planetary placements so I generally know what’s going on. But sometimes I just want to live the astrology without labeling it and planning. I do, of course, try to do at least my monthly forecast for the podcast. And I’m super aware of the transits because I do client charts. I know what’s going on. But I don’t want to overthink about my own life. I’d definitely rather go to another astrologer for a different perspective. I think in the same way that a therapist can’t really do therapy on themself. It is impossible to to my own astrology! So I try to just let my chart exist in a hazy distance sometimes and focus on the clients and the world events.

It’s important to just LIVE the transits sometimes and let life come at you and then look at it through the astrology language after. I think that’s what’s produced the most internal consistency in my vocabulary toward clients. Some months I just don’t look at my chart at all—-and then I go back through my journal and see what happened along with certain transits. It helps me a lot more with my predictive work than being a prepper for a bad transit or hoping and relying on a good transit to “do something nice for me”. I also just watch the lives of friends in the same way. Big life event? I’ll have a look at their chart. I think this is the work of astrologers, this noticing. To be interested in history and the news, to be interested in psychology and the domestic life, to be interested in the ambitions and dreams of people—-this is the work of astrology.

Look—are there certain transits I’d avoid traveling under? For sure! Are there big events in life where, leading up, I’ll want to look at how it’s hitting my chart just to brace myself? Sure. And are there times where I choose to look at my chart and see only the stuff I fear. Absolutely. And I think it can get me all tied up. And I’ve seen other people get all tied up about it, all nervous or expectant—-and I think it sucks. I think the reason a lot of people don’t go to professional astrologers is because 1) a lot of us really are expensive (but I always have sliding scale pricing so email me anytime) and 2) they have apps and tons of information online. But peoples’ attitudes toward astrology are the main problem. Sorting that information and understanding how to prioritize it and how not to use it—-that’s important. I think a good astrologer will consider their delivery method and vocabulary based on how you need to communicate. I think going to a person who has internal consistency with their astrology is very important. I see so many people just doomscrolling and some of it is astrology tik toks or whatever—-but I think it’s so hard to digest that information. To ground it. To apply it. I think it takes a steady hand and experience and care to really know what to do with astrology.

/ book astrology with athena here (the podcast is there, too)

paintings from today

One of my favorite things about painting is that I hardly have any formal training. That means I don’t know whether I’m getting something wrong or not. If I hate something I paint, I don’t have to show anyone. And there’s no pressure to meet anyone’s expectations. I really try to bring this attitude into the rest of my work.

I think having tons of training in an art form is an amazing thing. I’m really proud of my Master’s in Acting. And I’m really proud of how much time I spent learning music when I was young. But when you learn something with teachers all around you, there are things that can get stuck in your head, things that follow you. Guidelines you grow out of and rules taught to you that don’t fit who you are. I love all of the technical things I have deeply learned because I love to learn. But painting is a free place for me. Nobody is expecting anything from me and I have no idea what I’m doing. It is entirely my own rules.

Painting also teaches me how to go back to my other art forms and let go. That feeling of jumping off a ledge and seeing how it goes. It’s just art. The ledge is not even real. It just means risking making mistakes, looking stupid, being vulnerable, fucking up loudly. That’s all it means. It is actually this feeling of safety and danger at the same time—that’s what performance is for me. And that balance of safety and danger is my favorite thing as a performer. But I’m really happy that I have painting—-a place where I feel only safe.

One night I was workshopping a Hamlet soliloquy in New York with a bunch of other actors and directors. A few people would put up what they were working on and the room would give feedback. Afterward, as everyone was walking to the bar, an older fellow told me that I shouldn’t go to drama school. He said that I already know everything I need to know, that drama school would just put rules on me and get me in my head. And that I did awesome Hamlet that night. It meant a lot to me. But I was like “I really like to learn.” And it’s true. I really love the technical stuff. I loved having that conservatory sealed off safe space to really become obsessed with little details. But I’ve also spent years shedding some of the things I’ve learned that stuck to me that aren’t working for me. I wonder what that guy saw, whatever raw thing he saw that he felt he needed to tell me about.

I remember that time, though. Before I auditioned for my Master’s program. I was in a play at the time and it was extremely emotionally unsustainable for me. I had no idea how to recover from the darkly comedic, physically taxing, getting raped as my character every night, choking a guy to death, singing, never leaving the stage performance I was doing in a black box theatre. I was raw and cracked open and the only way I knew how to do things was to punch myself in a wound, somewhat randomly, really abstractly, and reach into a space that had weird energy. My personal life and health suffered for it. I felt brittle all the time. I think that’s why I chose to go to drama school. How do I do this safely? How do I recover? Can I keep doing this? I love doing this but should I be doing this? Is there a way for me to do it? And, yes, I found that way. I used what I learned and built that way.

I think one of the best things I ever did was learn Butoh a few years ago. It was only a few months before the pandemic where I was taking classes and building a personal practice of Butoh. But it restored me, restored my nervous system in really profound ways and it has healed me. it’s like my painting but full-body. Painting and Butoh, those are the two places where I feel the most free.

Today I’ve been learning three scenes for a callback. I’m excited. It’s a play I like. And I’m trying to make sure I spend as much time in an abstract, restorative place as I can. And keep myself in that space for the audition. The adrenaline and the lines will give the stakes, they always do. I don’t really need to hype anything up. I just need to spend a lot of my time unwinding, it’s part of the process. All of my work has this build and release of winding up and winding down, etc. And I’m planning to paint a lot more and bring my Butoh practice into my life because both of those things are gifts to me as a performer. They just free something up. They make me a better singer, too. It’s so hard to learn enough about something to the level where you could be a teacher but then turn off that analytical, scholastically hungry part part of your mind in order to just do. But I’m getting better. It’s the line we’re all walking all the time. Meditation helps. Painting helps. Butoh helps.

Anyway those are my paintings there.