I love open houses.
Not because I’m shopping. I rarely am. I go because I want to stand in someone else’s life for a few minutes and feel what it would be like to wake up here. To make coffee in this kitchen. To watch the light come through these particular windows.
The houses we live in shape us. They shape how we feel, what we notice, what we stop noticing. The crack in the ceiling you saw for one week and then never again. The view that thrilled you on day one and faded into background by day one hundred. We are formed by the rooms we move through, even when we forget the rooms are there.
So I walk through other people’s houses and I imagine. What would I become in this space? Who would I be at this table, in this light, with this view?
This week I’m doing a bigger version of that.
I signed up for a week long acting workshop.
I have taken zero acting classes in my life. None. I’m not even sure I’ll like it. I might walk in on day one and want to walk right back out. That’s a real possibility, and I’m letting it be one.
But here’s what pulls me in. It’s not the houses I want to step into now. It’s the people. The other lives. The chance to put on someone else’s fear, someone else’s joy, someone else’s way of holding their shoulders, and feel what that does to me.
I’m not asking can I act.
That’s the small question. That’s the ego question. The one that wants to know if I’ll be good, if I’ll be safe, if I’ll be spared the embarrassment of being a beginner in a room full of strangers.
The question I’m actually carrying is different.
What might I uncover in the process?
Because here’s the thing about stepping into other people. You don’t just find them. You find the parts of yourself you’ve never been introduced to. The version of you that gets to be loud. Or fragile. Or cruel. Or tender in a way your real life never quite makes room for.
Those parts are in there. They’ve been in there the whole time. We just don’t build many rooms where they’re allowed to come out.
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t step out of my comfort zone as much as I’d like to these days.
I know the shape of my comfort zone too well. I know its furniture. I know which chair I sit in. And like any space you live in long enough, it has blended into the background. I’ve stopped seeing it. I’ve stopped noticing how much of myself stays tucked inside its walls.
This year I told myself I’d explore unfamiliar things. An acting workshop is a door. And I’ve learned that the discoveries are never in the room you already know. They’re on the other side of the boundary you keep meaning to push.
So this week I’m pushing.
I don’t know who I’ll meet in there.
I’m hoping some of them are me.
