I asked a friend if he’d be my ChatGPT if I asked him a question. Which is to say, I asked him to be a confident and enthusiastic advisor. He took me up on the offer. Below is our correspondence:
Pete:
Dear ChatGPT,
Bear with me as I formulate this question. I think that actors have something to teach me about belief in myself, about confidence, about defying my old stories about who I am, what I am not, my boundaries, my limitations, my capacities. Especially the capacities part. Like some actors will learn the frykkn drums or piano or ASL for a role. Also, I think actors, maybe, have some kind of more fluid, more queer relationship with self identity that allows them to take on roles and "become" that person even if it's not the person they were raised as.
Okay, I think I can feel my question coming.
What do you think actors have to teach us non acting folk about stepping into the aspects of our lives that are calling us but feel somehow new/foreign/risky/unattainable/uncharted? If a person wants to grow and become more of themselves but has hang-ups about who they know themselves to be, what do actors know about how to work with/break through/integrate the opportunity to expand into more of themselves rather than avoiding it or downsizing their dreams?
Thank you!
A friend embodying his inner ChatGPT:
Dear Pete,
Thank you for this question, my friend.
I will do my best to answer.
For starters, actors, like humans, aren’t totally in control. We are given our roles. That having been said, if we’re lucky as Actors and at a good point in our career, we can be selective and even picky about the roles that we choose to play. I suspect it’s similar for humans. We may well have chosen to be ourselves before we were born. And this is a good thing to keep in mind, I suspect, when remembering the lifelong work/play of becoming and embodying what we came here to do. Because at the end of the day, we chose this role, and we are the ones who get to play it. So lean into what you love, and try not to frame your life as a death sentence. I find the more I trail into framing my life as a kind of death sentence, the more danger I find myself in and the less aligned I am with my purposes. So remember, you chose this role, even though it was given to you.
As for the stepping up and out and into the “greater” aspects of oneself. I know that this was not your exact question but it is hard for me not to interpret it in this way. I have spent a lot of my life wondering about who I could be, in fact, I spend a lot of my days now doing the same. That doesn’t mean I’m not still skeptical about the notion of “becoming.” I wonder about notions like these, notions that there are greater parallel versions of our own lives occurring somewhere else if we had been daring enough to take the leaps required to get there. I suspect every avenue we choose has infinite other losses associated with it. I know people intimately who have dared greatly and spend their lives staring in the rearview, wondering what went wrong.
Remember that daring greatly requires humility. But more than anything, it requires faith and a love of the most basic things. Remember that life isn’t always about aspiring, love is about returning and remembering and saying thank you too.
I find lately, the greatest things I do aren’t aspirational. They’re acknowledging what’s here. I don’t try and catch a plane that’s already in the sky. I try to catch the ferry that’s just a few feet from my door. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up on a plane someday soon, but that’s not entirely mine to call.
I guess I’d just say, have faith in who you are, what you love to do, and enjoy the small things.
Take everything you love and make it basic. In other words, fundamental. The thing you wish to do, or even become, if that is at all possible for us to do, “become”, is in all the tiniest steps along the path of doing what you love.
A friend of mine told me recently that there’s great beauty in a simple life. I think that’s my answer to your question. In your reaching, don’t forget to come home. Don’t forget that everything you’ve ever reached for steams and sings from your mother’s tea kettle. Don’t forget that it’s all happening inside of you right now.
As an actor, we make the most of what we are given, and we don’t try and change the script(oddly). You might say, well then what about Martin Luther King? I’d argue, as none of us have seen or felt the blueprint to his soul, that he knew his role and said his lines. You could further argue that he was a playwright, who came into this world with a story to tell, and he told it. Don’t get bogged down in the metaphor as a form of being trapped or of not having free will. Remember, we chose our part, we chose to be here, and every day we have the choice to do as we please. Even as an actor, you have the option to never say your lines. Not saying that’s a good idea, but it’s an option. It’s all an option.
And all of it is a privilege,
Thank you for your question, one who wonders.
You are great at pulling thread out of those willing to listen.
But really, thanks so much for this question, Pete.
I’m grateful for the chance to have answered it and I find myself humbled by my own words. And that I have new clarity heading back into my own life, a life that has been dogging me lately with the same old questions and not always enough answers for my liking.
Truly though, thank you.
Love,
Your friend pretending to be ChatGPT
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I hope you enjoyed this correspondence.
With love and anticipation,
Pete