Andra notes

A new theme that goes round my mind, triggered by the other text I'm working at. The more painful one. GUILT. Sometimes I think of my last five or six years as an experiment, to see what happens to you when you dive in Romania so deep that not even the devil can get you out at some point. When you invest all your enthusiasm, contacts, money, every fucking thing you have, into this place because you actually love it, in a twisted way, and you think it matters. Change matters, you tell yourself, and you just dive, enroll, plunge into the abyss. Looking at it now, seems a bit stupid. On the other hand, maybe you need this kamikaze sort of energy to move the big inertial stone. I started to work on the story line of "Should I stay or should I go", putting together all the ideas me and Sorin discussed over the last years, and I was struck by how dangerously fucked up Andra is. Confused, not able to say her own opinion, with all these "plans" which are supposed to fill her actions with meaning, actually so depressed that she can't even realize her own depression. And, most of all, guilty. She feels guilty for everything, guilt is the great force that moves her around. It's not even because of Adi, it's something deeper. It's incredible how strong this comes out as a feature, and scary how much I became this character in the last years. That's why I started to consider this as an experiment rather than my own life. What I learned lately through the "Write Yourself" experience is that you are more than your persona, more than this contextual identity built by circumstances. I try to understand and reconnect, slowly, with who the fuck I am besides the context. What do I like to do? I like to write plays. Then fuckin write plays, build yourself a playground and live in it for at least one hour a day. If there is something you need to defend, it's THAT freedom. Write your plays, send your plays to contests, do your thing. What else is there to do. The context always changes, there's always struggle for money, there's always things to take care of, there's always stuff to worry about. But the core of it, the resistance, the land where you are more than just this- is there. Maybe that's how I started to look at Andra without remorse or hate, and finally write this story line. After 5 years. Because it's clear to me how fucked up she is now. Her breakdown is scary, really scary, it's a girl who can't stop crying for 3 weeks, there's so much confusion and fear there, and presion, that she just can't not cry any time she's alone, and this IS fuckin scary, because she is representative for a young person who is supposed to be of value for her country, for her culture, and she is on the verge of going mad in the RCI attic, in the richest area of London. So I would like to dig deeper and see how this happens, what is the mechanism that leads her there. I have no idea where to start this serach, but I feel it's vital to understand how the girl that got back to Romania from London in 2009, fresh and ready to start so many initiatives and bring stuff that she learned, after a year of actual bliss in which she finally feels she actually learns something in school, and she makes great progress, on every level, the girl that writes this great dissertation, and has such a clear view of what to do, ends up only two years later in this situation. I won't lie if I say I have no idea what happened in the next years, as something definitely changed in that month of July 2011 and after that many decisions Vera takes are just because she tries to live on, but with a double. The broken puppet mechanism just continues. 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, no sign of interior life, growing depression, the only meaning she finds are in the islands of connection she finds with the people from "Write Yourself", but she constantly breaks this connection because she has to ask money from the same people she works with, always more, debts she can't pay back, or before the date settled by the common agreement, and so on, so guilt becomes even bigger. Because the most valuable thing for her is human contact, and it is precisely what is attacked by the managerial enterprise that she and her colleagues are fighting to sustain without any government financing or any funding at all. So all the bridges for her are basically burned. That is why depression leads to constant suicidal thoughts, during a year or two, and this is how in six years the girl that comes back to her country after a glorious scholarship, gets to become this broken puppet. It's very hard for me to write this, because I am this puppet, and I still live here. But, after reading "I refuse to grow up" again, and realizing that it's actually a good text as it went very deep into the reality of this girl who works as Peter Pan statue on South Bank, I just decided it's time to shape this experiment called "going back to Romania" in the character of Andra, with everything she contained, good and bad, and attack one of the darkest episodes that built Andra's identity: the two months residency in the Attic Arts, 2011.