Trust

"Tonight I have to leave it."

-- Shout Out Louds, "Tonight I Have To Leave It"

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For the first time since main stage auditions finished in early August, I have actual, productive, solid work to do at the office. Not that I haven't been doing anything. Far from it: with the move, script writing, and workshops here and there, there has always been something to do. But with the new ArtReach season beginning next week, my priority is to get the tour's call sheets ready.

It's not complicated. Mainly, just a series of phone calls, emails and Word documents--confirming the details is the biggest hassle--that ultimately help others do their jobs better (namely, the actors), not just something that no one else wants to do at the moment. No more lifting or shifting things around, and the creation of random errands is coming to a close, and now I have the end of a conference table as my desk space...and work to do. Glorious, wondrous work.

And with rehearsals in the evenings, there is pressure on daytime work, that extra incentive to make the office time absolutely worthwhile.

In other words, summer is over. The school year, which for a children's theatre is for all intents and purposes the fiscal year, has begun.

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Made an odd discovery today. In all of our new office building's space, with all of us crammed into offices on the top floor and a barrage of construction in the basement (current noises are of the thump-thump and mechanical groannnnn variety), there is no microwave. I'm told it is still in the moving trailer, sitting silent sentry in the parking lot. The fridge, too. So lunches brought to the office are stored in one of two mini-fridges, and nothing can be heated up. There is a microwave stand in the conference room; however, what sits upon it is not what you'd expect, but rather a small coffee station. I'm surprised that this has never come up as a topic for discussion at the weekly company meetings, which ironically take place in the same room as the microwave stand without a microwave.

All this goes to say, I just ate cold leftover meatloaf.

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Nights, so far: Rehearsing alongside tweenagers with unchanged voices and adults savvy to the peculiar world of children's theatre, I feel at once unjustly elevated and inconsequentially omitted, a stranger to the space, as if I'm a new in-law or in-between--not quite an older person, not exactly young, unknown to most in the room. It's very strange, to lose one's confidence with immediate speed but without conceivable reasons. To strut in, only to sit timidly down.

And it's not just because I can't read music, either. There's something else.

As a good friend texted me last night, though: You just have to go for it and trust yourself.

Too trite, to trust?

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Trust. It's a thing not much talked about in terms of how you see yourself (we usually think of it as a relationship thing, an agreement of sorts between people), but there is a difference between self-confidence and self-trust. I think it has something to do with knowing what is going on--that's confidence--and having no clue but believing you will figure it out soon enough--that's trust. It's the difference between seeing the present and waiting on the future.

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I am confident that the microwave will return. I trust that eating cold leftovers for another week won't kill me.