Here is an excerpt of a short piece that I have written for my performance. This is to be said to a camera and fed via a live feed on a television to the audience, as I believe that this makes it more raw; almost as though it is a confessional video tape.
Here awaits a thunderstorm behind a computer screen. A tornado that will catch your eye and pull you in.
I will take you on a journey
To find myself.
I was told that I am mine before I am anyone else’s,
That if someone doesn’t want me then the world will not end, but if I don’t want me… but I don’t want me.
At some point, the need to be accepted is born. Before that, we don’t care whether we are accepted or not. People’s opinions are not important, because we just want to play, and we live in the present.
The fear of not being good enough for someone else is what makes us try to change and create an image. Then, we try to project that image according to what they want us to be, just to be accepted.
We learn to pretend to be what we are not, and we practice being someone else. Soon, we forget who we really are, and we start to live our images.
I am only the parts that I want you to see.
Embellishments of myself.
And so, I turn to you,
My online saviour
Though foolish and blind and light enough to be pulled in by the winds of my hurricane,
You saved me.
You let me lie to you as part of my therapy
As part of finding myself
And in return you gain a friend,
So I don’t see the harm
I am always kind
And in turn I offer you a lifeline too
Because why else would you fall in love with a stranger online unless you too needed saving.
But this isn’t about you,
I recognise that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick.
I am the thunderstorm behind your computer screen
And I will take you on a journey
To find myself
As you can see, I included a short extract from the Mastery of Love transcript, as it moved me so much that I wanted to use it somehow, and I believe that it perfectly sums up my fascination with the ‘images’ that we project.