The shared experience of sitting through an entire film with no subtitles and laughing not only at a film you can barely understand but also the absurdity of the situation was something that probably wouldn’t have happened with just a general audience. Our audience knows they are part of a group, they recognize each other from the various screenings over the years.
This is a very powerful of our identity as a community, or even an audience.
I can still remember to this day, some twenty years later, that feeling of helpless suspension on the monkey bars. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I take on a new endeavor that I am unsure of.
I think we all get this feeling from time to time, and yet we learn more about ourselves and the world by pushing up against limits and fears. I think. I may have blanked on that. Your story reminds me a similar story, but mine involved a waterfall in upper Maine, where I finally climbed to the top and froze ... and remained frozen in place (I couldn't even find the mindset to climb down the way I climbed up). Finally, after close to 30 minutes (with friends yelling at me), I jumped. Once. I jumped once. But I jumped.
I have to admit, writing and telling my story fulfills a biological need for me just as much as the next girl, and using words is just as imperative to my psyche as painting is, but it is much less work and takes less commitment in order to delete (or burn) a paragraph or two (or ten pages, as it were) than whitewashing another canvas.
This is such a powerful quote here, as she thinks of the visual vs the word, and all I can think is: I am exactly the opposite, and how interesting it is that we all view how we express ourselves in such different ways -- depending on background, comfort and trying to say what we need to say ...