A best day ever dramatic turn

Today is the best day of my life, which is very easy to say right now, because I'm sitting backstage after the first performance of the short play I am performing in this weekend.

It went awesome.

This morning I wasn't sure if it was going to go awesome. I was merely a receptacle of nerves and regret for signing up to do this. Which wasn't fun, mostly because of the feelings of nerves I think, oh and the regret.

I think the nerves were sourced by the fact that while acting in this play I had to act on a stage in front of scores of strangers, something that is nerve racking. Also regret, because I was regretting doing something that caused all these nerves.

It was quite an ordeal. A nervous and regretful ordeal.

But then there was a change. I performed, and riding a wave of nerves, but replacing regret with adrenalin, I did well. We did well. The play did well. The show went well. And if I am honest, I enjoyed the heck out of it. Which is good because that’s why I signed up to do it.

I think I finally know what people mean when they say ‘things took a dramatic turn’. They mean they felt one way about something, and then performed an act of dramatic art, and having done so things had changed for them, you could even say they had taken a ‘turn’. (I’m not sure what it is when it’s more than a one act play).

And that’s the power of dramatic art. It can really make those who participate change how they are feeling from nervous to no longer nervous. That’s powerful.

Update: Things have taken a dramatic turn. Figuratively this time, and this may be the first time anyone has ever said that before.

I wrote those powerful words above while backstage after performing in my short play today. Reading them back they really make me see how things can sometimes turn from accelerating nerves to no longer facilitating the feelings of nervousness. That’s powerful. But in reading back these powerful words I realize I missed another powerful truth. While sure, performing dramatic arts can change something from being nerve encouraging to instead being no longer nerve inducing, and that’s powerful, I missed another part of the equation.

About to act in a play = nervous and regretful.

Dramatic turn = no longer nervous or regretful.

That’s clear, and powerful.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. You see, as I caught, re-reading the above, I didn’t merely remove regret. No I replaced, or to put it another way, substituted it, regret that is, is the thing I swapped, and by that I mean that I traded it for adrenalin. This led to the dramatic turn, to once again use it in it’s traditional and more common literal way, and it was then that things turned awesome, which led to the now lack of feelings of nervousness or regret.

To put that mathematically.

Remove regret and replace with adrenalin = awesome life in everyway.

That’s clear, and powerful.

Wow, the dramatic arts really are awesome.