Representational nature of theater

One of my favorite things about theater as a medium is the conventions that are peculiar to it. I particularly love that it is acceptable for theater to be highly representational as opposed to strictly literal in its portrayals. For example, a single tree on stage can be understood to stand in for a whole forest, a woman dressed and carrying herself like a man is understood to be playing a male character, or a puppet with the puppeteer clearly visible can be accepted as a child or a dog or a spirit. Due to that conventions, audiences will go in to see a piece of theater with the willingness to suspend certain disbelief and buy more readily into the conceits of the representation. You'd never get that in a medium like cinema a higher degree of literal realism is expected, and people constantly complain about effects that look fake. I tend to really enjoy pieces of theater that make use of this. I could see myself leaning towards writing a lot of things that require an interesting representation to depict something that is not easily exactly imitated onstage. 

Pathways in my brain

A little while ago I had a conversation with v_cat that gave me a very useful way to think about my emotional situation. Vik is a psychology grad student on her way to becoming a therapist. Though not her personal approach (which is, if I remember correctly, the really fascinating idea of helping people construct a personal narrative of their identity when they have previously never had or felt they had the agency to determine those definitions for themselves) she told me about the theory that your emotional experiences shape pathways in your brain that affect how your thinking works. If you spend as much time as I did in such a negative, hopeless mindset, your thoughts get stuck on the negative, hopeless pathways that get created as a result. After a while it just becomes how your brain works.

I am certain that's what's been going on with me. I got so deep into the negative ruts that good things couldn't bring me out and even the slightest bad thing pushed me back down. The thing that yanked me out of it was an extended period of being overrun with busy, productive, more positive things that kept me on busy, positive, productive thoughts. And I have been doing better lately. But all the bad pathways are still in my brain. I spend less time on those paths, but when I'm not doing well, I'm still all too easily prone to falling down the holes. So I know the problem still needs fixing. I need to start building good pathways, so that small things don't knock me down so hard. So that I stay hopeful even when things get rough. But I've got a lot of building and fixing to do before I've got that. Still, it's helpful to think of it like that. When I have a paradigm for the problem, it's easier to figure out ways to make it better.