Oh shit, I've locked myself out...

Sitting in my kitchen with the new Florence album blaring and two scripts in front of me I am struck by a revelation. What used to be a fairly natural process for me, opening up, is now increasingly hard to do. First I have to find the keys to my heart that I threw away, then I have to unlock the million locks the keys access. After that is the iron door, which is really too heavy for one person to push open alone and then I have to ride the glass bottomed boat over the river of memories which lies between here and the shore. Somewhere on the shore at the other side is the positive, warm, open little girl who thinks the world and everything in it is wonderful. This little girl is an actress born of impulse and a delight in feeling and experiencing new things. She's shy but once she starts she won't stop. I can't find her. It's a little too painful to try and open to what the script is demanding of me. I find I don't want to touch any emotion...regardless of what it is. And being an actress is the opposite of that. I'm very numb right now. And lost. I've never ever been switched off like this before but opening up just exposes me to too much pain. Because my hearts been broken. And I don't mean by my ex, by me. I broke it when I was in Paris, when I chose to let my life at the time break my spirit. And that is not the fault of someone else or a load of clowning fools. It is entirely me. I took that little girl and I crushed her and now she doesn't exist. So what of the actress inside her? Did I kill that too? I'm really starting to worry that I did. I've never found it so hard to engage with a character or another human being in my life. I don't listen anymore, I just work out my next move like some little puppet, marking her way through the motions we call life.

Is this the actors equivalent of writers block?

When you finally see life as a series of experiences, all viewed from a point of view that no one else can share because they see it from their own. And when you begin to accept that all humans are strange and wonderful and different and no one will ever be to you what they are to you because what they are to you is simply your perspective and their perspective of themselves and their relationship to you will always be different and vice versa, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember the innocence with which we fall in love. And the character I'm auditioning for is in love. Get this. With. Her. Boss. Surely this role was made with my name on it, one might think. Apparently not. Because the little girl who fell in love with her boss, who I am trying to recreate, is no where to be found. She grew up and discovered that although she still loves him, it is in the more complete sense of a sane person who sees things clearly and not through the haze that is a new emotion. This emotion has been lived in, through and out. It's no longer a simple feeling, powerful, but clear. It is a complex variety of feeling, intelligence, acceptance and has been let go to grow to another kind of love, one that loves without needing the love back or even the person in front of you. You love them, they are someone you think a lot of and they are no longer your person, your partner, your home. They are free to be someone else and to be with someone else and you smile just to have known them as your person once upon a time. It sounds quite beautiful and it is but it's also a very distant feeling to the emotion that consumes you with it's power, that takes up your daily thoughts and controls your behaviour until you don't quite recognise yourself. Now that love is terrifying when you've lived through it and been forced to come out the other side. It's frightening to look back at and to imagine going through it again. You never want to feel that way again. But I'm an actress. I have to feel it again in order to play it. And I don't know how to even access it. Shit.

And for the millionth time I pull my tights up and curse as I simply succeed in pushing my toe further through the growing hole. The actors life...