Everyone changes and thus so do I

This isn’t an easy decision to make. After two of the gloomiest incidents of my life (quitting graduate school of playwriting in Taipei National University of the Arts with deep disappointment both with myself and with the limited faculty, and an episode of bipolar disorder after which I felt completely incapacitated for writing anything again), I was in a constant state of disillusionment. I was afraid to touch again what I was once most passionate about, what I once considered to be more important than my own life: the theater. I was afraid to look at it. I began to be, or tried to be, indifferent. This was partly because I ceased to be overwhelmed by most theatrical works in Taiwan after my dramaturgical involvements in some pieces that I considered to be real art and after I watched HBO’s production of Angels in America in 2007 and Tainaner Ensemble’s production of Two Gents in 2009. I felt that the theater was gradually dominated by wannabes and therefore deteriorating and I was so tragically incompetent to revive it because of my lack of experience.

When the time had come for me to resign from my job upon figuring out that administrative assistant is by no means a career that I want, I decided to leave. And this time, I am going to delve deeper. I am going west, where most of my influences came from: from the early influences of Broadway and off-Broadway’s musicals, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Beckett, to more recent influences such as Gertrude Stein, George C. Wolfe, Anne Bogart’s viewpoints, Robert Wilson, Tony Kushner and many more. I was afraid at first, or, call it by its right name, timid. Very, very timid. I even felt I was doomed before I start to prepare for the required materials for application because I failed to succeed in playwriting back in TNUA. I spent almost two years to figure out what went wrong and made me quit.

And it became clear to me: It was because of my impatience. I was unable to face failure, and it was because of my love and passion towards theater that made me overly susceptible to my own work, as, after four years of English education, I had difficulties expressing myself in certain genre of script writing, the kind which my instructor demanded. Now I realized this is the most unforgivable kind of failure and I won’t ever going to be defeated again.

I’ve always known that what I want in my life is to create and express. I don’t care whether what I create is going to be eternal since I believe immortality is consisted of transience, just as I believe what is most sacred is secularity. And the eternity of the transient moments in theaters is exactly what I am willing to devote my self to. It’s just that I used to think that I could do it at ease, without deadlines and pressures and the relentless harvest of unripe works. But now I suddenly found that there are some things that cannot be achieved all by myself. experience is what I want! I need experiences in theater because I have too little of them. So I decide to accelerate the realization of my goal, to work with people, work for real, in the best theatrical environment in the world. I KNOW I will be influenced by these people because I have been influenced by people who used to be students to them. Life’s too short. It just dawned on me that fear and don’t work. They are supposed, or considered, to be the thing that drives us towards some kind of success. But now I realized that no. Real success was never driven by fear of failure. Never. I want to be able to look back to my life and say "if I could change anything in my life, I wouldn’t want to change anything." I want to be able to look back at my past, at all the pain and defeat and embarrasment that hurt me, and let go of them, becaused I have overcome and even conquered them. I want to inspire people the way my teachers did by creating something. I want to tell my students or friends and even strangers in the future that "hey, I have some great things to show you and share with." I want to be challenged, though I know it is going to be unbearable to me at first. I will encourage people to challenge me. And I want to tell people or my students in the future that "you know, I used to be vulnerable to any criticism and challenges when I was like twenty-seven or something. Now I loved to be challenged and encourage you to challenge me. I don’t want to win. I want the chemistry." And I want to be a testament that any painfully shy artist can express themselves without being hurt.

I have now completely learned from my failure. Or so to speak, learned to let go of what had tortured me, but maybe not appropriate to be defined as a failure because (I have realized) it is not as easy as it seems. It has never been. My teachers are trained professionals so they made everything(the creation of art) seemed easy, whereas it’s not. Even geniuses said it’s not. Tennessee Williams said it’s not. Tony Kushner said it’s not. They’re sometimes surprisingly depressed and diffident. My fear suddenly became less odd. I will not let it get to me and defeat me again. This is the most important lesson that I learned from the past. I am no longer afraid anymore. I have let go all fear and I will do whatever it takes to live by my reason for living: create and express.

Now I’ve changed in a way that even I wouldn’t believe I could. All people change. And thus so do I.