While Dean Harrison signs the check after dinner, I suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to her. Though she has pressed how inescapable the call is, there is still a choosing. An acceptance. She chooses to give freely so much of her time and wisdom. No question is stupid or off-limits. There is never judgment or frustration. She is so clear and unobstructed without internal friction. I wonder if adults—real adults, not nineteen-year-old beginners like me—should spend more time ironing out their insides before they try to teach us anything. Maybe if they faced what they have buried, they could be more available and hold better space for us.

“We all do the best we can,” she says.

“Hey!”

She smirks and hands the waiter the check.

“You said you were Yoda. Can I call you that?” I ask, taking one final swig of water.

“No, please, I wouldn’t like that at all. It was just a metaphor.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I’m always afraid of what Professor Nielson will make us do in her workshops. We haven’t read any scripts or done anything related to theater five weeks into the semester. Winter Carnival is only a few days away and midterms a month out. At this point, I have no idea when we will start actually performing. “Before you can do theater, you must examine yourselves, which is a lifelong practice,” Professor Nielson says with her stretched-out syllables. “College will end. Self-study won’t.”

I’m tired of examining myself. There is so much to learn. I thought there would come a point when the learning was done and you can stand on the mountaintop of self and claim victory. I wonder how much more I will have to figure out.

All of the initial theater classes are dedicated to self-study. In the first session, we sketch our childhood inspirations and present them to each other. I choose Maya Angelou (who reminds me of Dean Yoda) since she overcame similar obstacles as me and seemed very internally balanced in her later life.

“Maya Angelou,” Professor Nielson says, stretching out her syllables even more. “Interesting. That tells me a lot about you.”

“What does it tell you?”

“That you have the soul of an artist or healer.”

Professor Nielson asks us to split into small groups and discuss our fears and angers in the second class. Each person has to sit in the middle of the circle when it’s their turn to be “witnessed in raw form.”

“How can you transmit the range of human emotion,” Professor Nielson says intensely, “if you don’t know what’s buried inside? Usually fear and anger are pushed down the furthest.”

Today, in class, she tells us, “We are going to do mirror work.”