Why I Chose to Share My Story

When my 5-year-old and I arrived at the airport a few days ago for our flight to France, I initiated a pre-flight stretch at the gate. She started with downward dog and I went for a quad stretch. An older woman seated near us watched with interest while rubbing her arm. Then she started talking to my daughter. After a few minutes of conversation, the woman got up and started to stretch, too. We had our own little yoga session right there at gate B16. At one point the woman, who I learned had recently had arm surgery, said to my daughter, “Thank God you’re here because I wouldn’t have had the courage to do this myself.”

I have been thinking about what that woman said ever since.

Because my daughter was not trying to be brave. She was just being 5. She wanted to stretch. So she stretched. She did not scan the gate to see if people were judging her form. She did not worry that downward dog was too much for a public space. She did not think, “What if this makes people uncomfortable?” or “What if someone thinks I’m weird?” She just put her hands on the floor.

That’s not to say I believe all public yoga is reasonable. I once saw a dad doing yoga next to a slide at a playground in the 2nd arrondissement while his kids played nearby, and he looked ridiculous. There are limits.

But this was different. My daughter was not performing serenity. She was not trying to be a person who “moves through the world with intention.” She was just stretching before a long flight.

And somehow, because she did it without apology, someone else felt allowed to do it too.

A woman who had recently had arm surgery wanted to stretch her arm. She needed to stretch her arm. But she did not want to be the person at the airport stretching alone.

Then my daughter did it first.

And suddenly it was allowed.

I think this is one of the reasons I like improv. I like watching one person make a choice and then everyone else decides, okay, this is the world now. We are all in it. Someone says, “I’m a wizard,” and another person says, “Dad, not again.” And now we have a family drama about a wizard father.

This is also why I like puppets.

A puppet can say something a human being cannot. Or maybe a puppet can say something a human being can say, but only after hiding behind felt and cardboard and the thin but very important fiction that this is not exactly me talking.

Which brings me to my solo show.

For a long time, I wanted to tell this story. I just did not know how to tell it without feeling like I was exploiting myself. I did not want to stand onstage and say, “Hello, please enjoy my pain.” I did not want to turn my brother into a character in my story in a way that felt cheap or unfair. I did not want to talk about the car accident that nearly killed me when I was 16, or childhood neglect, or addiction, or recovery, or mental illness, or prison, or shame as if I had neatly packaged all of it into one very brave and inspiring evening of theater.

I have not. My life remains stubbornly resistant to clean narrative structure. My motto is: I don’t do slow and I don’t do easy.

But I have wanted to find a way to talk about it. I have wanted to tell the truth in a way that felt helpful and not self-exploitative. I wanted the story to say: we are all human. We all carry things. This is not a contest.

I am here because I want to be with people in their stories.

That is my agenda.

I want to connect. I want to help people carry the things they think they have to carry alone. I want to hold up a story and turn it around and look at it from different angles. Not erase it. Not fix it. Not slap a lesson on it and call it healing.

Just look at it together.

My solo show, Condemned to a Life, is basically my coming out. A debutante ball to rival the one at the Crillon Hotel in Paris. Fun fact: I actually worked for the organizer of that ball when I lived in Paris because I desperately needed a job.

Condemned to a Life is about two siblings who start in the same place and end up in radically different lives. One is condemned in a courtroom. The other is condemned in quieter ways and then has to figure out how to live anyway.

It is dark. And puppets help to make it funny.

The puppets give me and the audience distance from the story. They let me tell the truth without me spilling my guts onstage. They make the unbearable a little more bearable. They let me be honest and ridiculous at the same time, which is probably the only place I feel fully comfortable.

And sometimes it does feel exposing. There is no way around that.

But I am starting to understand that exposure is not always the same as danger.

Sometimes exposure is how we find each other.

I spent a long time believing that the most painful parts of my life were the parts I had to hide if I wanted to be loved, respected, employable, invited places, etc., etc.

But hiding does not make those parts disappear. It just makes you lonely with them.

And I do not want to be lonely with my story anymore. I also do not want other people to feel lonely with theirs.

That does not mean everyone deserves your story. They do not. Some people deserve a brief nod and maybe a weather-related comment. Some people should not be trusted with anything more intimate than “Can you believe this heat?”

But I do think we are meant to be real with each other. To feel things with each other. To be moved and embarrassed and cracked open and still connect.

I think exposing yourself, in the right places and with the right people, does not push people away as much as we fear it will. Sometimes it brings them closer. Sometimes it gives someone else permission to stretch their own injured arm at the gate.

That is what I want people to know.

I chose to share my story because silence did not protect me. Shame did not protect me. Trying to be palatable did not protect me, though it did make me very tired.

Every time I tell the truth, some part of me comes back into the room.

And maybe someone else sees that and thinks, thank God you’re here because I wouldn’t have had the courage to do this myself.

Condemned to a Life opens in Chicago this August and will be performed in New York this October at the United Solo Festival. Ticket links are now available for both the Chicago shows and the New York performance.

I am also hard at work on my fundraising campaign because making art requires money, and I do not believe people should work only for passion. If that were the case, doctors and lawyers and plumbers would be giddy to work for free. I have a lot of good people helping me put this show together, and I want to fairly compensate them for their time and effort.

If you want to support the production, you can make a tax-free donation to my campaign on Fractured Atlas, buy a ticket to a show in Chicago or in NYC, share the show with someone who might connect with it, or simply keep reading while I continue making sense of why I’m doing this in public.

Thank you for being here.