The last time I was in SATURDAY'S VOYEUR was in 2003, when blogs were in their infancy. Seven years later, the pace of technological advancement is still freaking me out; we’re almost certainly on pace to achieve a Terminator-style apocalypse in my lifetime. Ask me to write one of these in seven more years and I’ll be telling you about how A BLOG KILLED MY NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR OH MY GOD IT HAD A HUMAN FACE.

For now, though, the only real terror comes from trying to figure out what to write about. We’ve got a ridiculously smart, talented, funny cast this year, and for once I’m not the only non-white person in the room, so I’m a little bit at sea when it comes to subject matter. And in spite of what most actors think, you can only spend so much time talking about yourself before you turn into a one-man production of Sunset Boulevard, mincing and swooning and striking poses in imaginary mirrors. You know who you are.

So. There are maybe some things of value that I want to share that I’ve been hashing out in my head, and maybe this is the place to talk about it and maybe not. And I like writing about things as a way into understanding them. If this stops making sense, please feel free to jump ship and navigate on over to boingboing.net, where I promise you’ll find something to read that will waste your time in a entertaining way, guaranteed.

I’ve experienced a unique variety of gratitude this summer that can only come from returning to the stage. By the way, when I say, “returning to the stage,” I’m acknowledging how possible it might have been for me to never come back. It’s been seven years since my last Voyeur and four years since I acted at all, and in the intervening years I began the process of gradually weaning myself away from acting. I’ve managed to stay involved on the outskirts—I’m moving into my third season as the Wardrobe Supervisor at Pioneer Theater Company, and I’m the Director of Publicity and Marketing for Utah Contemporary Theatre—but it’s really, truly great to be back on the stage proper.

Every person I know who earns a living by creating, writing, making, performing, et al., secretly believes that they’re cheating the system, that if everyone knew how amazing this was they’d be doing it too. The feeling comes and goes—jobs are jobs, and there are days when the work you do onstage feels like its own form of drudgery, except with the added benefit of making you simultaneously terrified and bored out of your mind, which I’ve really not experienced anywhere else.

But the bottom line is that nearly everyone I know who acts for a living is aware that they are stupid-crazy lucky to even have the chance to do this. I don’t know anyone out there with something to say who wouldn’t jump at the chance for a captive audience. And not just a captive audience, but one that—for the most part—wants to connect with you, to hear and empathize with and understand you as surely and as desperately as you wish yourself to be known. With that sense of good fortune comes an equal and opposite fear: that you’re a fraud, that someone will catch on to the little racket you’ve got going and tell you that the president/prime minister/Jesus saw your little “act” and that you don’t get to perform or make art anymore because you were never actually any good—even your grandparents think you suck—and they put you in the back of a windowless black van and drive you to Indiana where you have to work as a health insurance call center rep for the rest of your life.

I will not go quietly when this day comes.

I need this, man. And it’s not the applause—I’m not Tinkerbell, and I learned long ago that no amount of praise from an audience or reviewers or from my fellow actors is ever going to fix my personal brokenness.  I need this because acting is the only profession I know of where all the versions of me, of who I was and who I have become are actually, specifically, useful to me. And I don’t mean in the “live and learn” kind of way, “experience is the best teacher, blah blah blah.” I mean in the sense that, no matter how loathsome or regrettable the memory or personal trait, mine or someone else’s, I can probably use it to make art. Bear that in mind the next time you decide to behave poorly in front of me. I keep notes. I think it was Anne Lamott who said something along the lines of, “if they didn’t want you to shape a piece of writing around it, they should have behaved differently.” Ahem.

I need to keep acting because I suck at Whack-A-Mole. I assume you know the game I’m talking about, where you use a mallet that’s basically a stick with a coffee can- sized foam pad jammed on the end to smack down the little identical brown gopher heads that pop up out of the holes in the game console. Here’s why this is germane: most people I know had some pretty shitty times in junior high and high school, and most of their twenties—I know I did—and, as a result, the inside of my mind is like some perverse Whack-A-Mole game intended to keep me humble. Just when I’m feeling good about how my hair turned out, up pops the mole marked “7^th Grade Yearbook Picture” or “School Dance Footage, 1993 – 1996” and I wilt inside my skin like old fruit. And the mallets that life gives you—affirmations, accomplishments and laurels, therapy, alcohol—are too small, poorly weighted, the wrong shape for the job.

But every year I get better at the game. And acting is part of the reason. When these memories pop up, sometimes they’re just the voice of the inner censor, kvetching and pissing and moaning like a cloud of mosquitoes, saying something rude about my weight or the color of my spray tan. And you crush them quickly and mercilessly because life is too short. Sometimes they’re the genuine voice of self-loathing, the psychological equivalent of the suet-faced mole people from the Westboro Baptist Church with their asinine picket signs, telling you that God Hates YOU. And you ignore them or dismiss them or educate them or laugh them into silence.

But there’s another reason acting is good for my mental health. Ignore the grinding sound of my transmission as I shift gears into a totally different metaphor, because it’s a good one. There are a couple of schools of thought as to why whales breach. (Bear with me. I promise this pays off.) You know the behavior I’m talking about, I assume, since the days when only your richest friends had cable are from a distant elementary-school past. I’m talking about the inscrutable, showy behavior where a great whale, usually a humpback, breaks the water’s surface in a huge vertical leap, twists in midair and lands hugely on its side—occasionally destroying boats in the process, as we saw in the news recently.

Two of the theories about this behavior stick out in my mind. One idea is that they do this to scrape off the quantity of barnacles and dead skin that accumulates on them in their slow, patient travels. Another is that breaching is a recent response to the increase in ocean traffic—a way of seeing and being seen to help both ship and whale avoid injury. And if these parts of me didn’t heave themselves to the surface occasionally to slough off the crap that obscures them, or simply to remind me of what still swims in the abyssal trenches, I would be…less. Less able to know what makes me, and by extension, others, tick. When I’m acting, or writing, or making a piece of art, I know myself better than I could under any other circumstances. The shipping lanes of my mind become clear and navigable and varied; the deep waters hold less fear.

I love that SLAC is located in an old chapel. I especially love that it’s a converted Mormon chapel. It reminds me that no past chapter of your life is a guarantee as to the uses the world will have for you in years to come. The Catholics believe in transubstantiation, where the Eucharist becomes flesh through the holy mystery of Communion. I believe in alchemy, but for the same reason. I believe that when we commune in these places—theaters, museums, galleries, the printed page—we change the substance of our selves for the better. It’s why I act. It’s why I write about acting. And I’m unbelievably grateful to have the chance, at long last, to do both again.