Why I chose to act.
By: Chris Yim
Tags: Healing, Life Lessons, Authenticity, Acting, Emotions

I’ve been asked “why I chose to study acting?” recently, and it’s been pushing me to articulate how I came to this place where I chose to leave behind my life in the Bay Area to pursue a study in something that I don’t have much experience with.

First off, I’ll say that I’ve never studied acting before, besides an 8-week film acting class last fall. Previously, I had studied improv, took a drama class in middle school, and I once tried out for a play in high school. So you can practically say that I’ve never actually spent any “meaningful” time studying acting technique, which is what I’m here to do in Brooklyn.

I’ve always been into movies and film as a consumer, which I know is different from the art of acting, but I think that’s where I began to see and understand that people played roles in stories. When we were young, my parents would often bring us to work with them on the weekends when they couldn’t find a babysitter. In the office of their restaurant, my brother and I would watch movies, one after another until the business closed and my parents could take us home. Next door to the restaurant was a Blockbuster that we frequented to peruse their aisles and rent a few videos to hold our attention while our parents hustled.

Movies propelled me into other worlds. My earliest memories were of watching martial arts movies, like those of Jackie Chan, the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flicks, and 3 Ninjas with Tum Tum, Colt, and Rocky. As a result, I used to think I knew martial arts or was a ninja. I would role-play and become these characters (my fav was the brooding Colt). Movies gave me ideas for characters to be, and when I became those characters, I would lose myself.

While movies provided some ideas for characters to play, I’m sure that I played roles prior to those trips to Blockbuster. Children act all the time, living in worlds that they create with their imagination. I admire their ability to immerse themselves in realities that are their own.

Role-playing and “being” someone else has always interested me. Since I was a kid, I always felt like I was performing. This started when I began golfing (white and bougie AF, I know) at a young age. My dad followed me, and I was always under his watchful eye. I became very aware that someone was observing me, and that feeling on the golf course bled into other areas of my life. In middle school, I became a Christian, and I then became aware of God surveying my actions and my behavior in private. Even before I identified myself as a Christian, I held this belief that I was part of something greater and that my actions affected people and had some impact in the world — that I played a role. If it wasn’t on a golf course during a tournament in front of competitors and my dad, then it was at school wondering what my teachers thought about me. It kind of felt like I was Jim Carrey’s character from The Truman Show.

This performative aspect of life has made me wonder about my relationship to authenticity. I’ve recently been asking myself the question What is authenticity? On my first day of acting class, my teacher Terry Knickerbocker asked us to define acting. Consequently, I’ve been thinking about the difference between authenticity and acting.

Studying acting is guiding me through this question about authenticity. Recently, a friend of mine shared with me her intention of wanting to be authentic across more areas of her life. For her, being authentic meant showing up as herself no matter the environment and social context. This meant conveying her values, ideas, cares and needs regardless of what those around her were going to say or think. When she explained this, what came to mind and surfaced for me were the moments when I experienced showing up as an inauthentic version of myself. One of those spaces is with other guys when men engage in “locker room” talk. In the past, I’ve shamefully engaged in and fueled chatter that has been demeaning to women. More recently, I have wanted to speak up and shut down misogynistic talk. However, I would often disappear and shy away from the dynamic out of fear that saying something would pit me against the group. This fear created inauthentic behavior because I wasn’t acting in accordance with who I am and the values that I espouse. Being authentic takes courage, and it’s important to me because I can’t be a part of the world that I want to live in without being completely authentic.

For admission into the program, we had to read Sanford Meisner’s book On Acting, where Meisner (his technique is the one that I’m learning in school) defines acting as “behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” My teacher Terry pushed us to give another definition, and we landed on “behaving” as another way of saying “doing.” He asked us to add two four-digit numbers in our head. After giving us a few moments to add these numbers, he asked us if we were actually adding them or if we were acting like we were. This activity conveyed his depiction of acting — it means “to do”.

As I explore living, I am finding that I am diving into what it means “to do” and “to be”. There are many things that I want to be in this life. I want to be a kind human being. I want to be a person who cares about justice in the world. I want to be a good son, brother, and friend. I want to be a good partner and lover. In all these roles and behaviors, I have to distinguish for myself whether I am “acting” like I am something or whether I actually just am. I believe that there are moments where I’ll act like a good human being, an advocate of justice, a good son, a caring partner, etc. There will also be many moments where I’ll be the opposite. Amidst these actions, behaviors, and the thoughts that fill the space in all of it, I am the one processing my own authenticity.

Acting is a way that I get to shape who I am by being something. I get to integrate authentic kindness, compassion, and love into myself through doing.

In the challenges of my life over the past year and a half, one thing that I’ve taken away is that there is so much complexity in each human being. I’ve had to learn how to sit with the fact that I’ve done shitty things and hurt people in my life but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a shitty human being. The lesson has been to learn how to see myself differently, to reimagine who I might be, and to figure out what it means to actually be that person. For me, being the person that I want to be and serving my purpose — to create the world that I want to be a part of — has everything to do with connection, the connection that I experience with and to myself, and others. I’m diving into this acting endeavor because I want to be able to constantly reframe who I am to myself, to constantly transform, and to never stop morphing into shapes that fuel connection. This is a practice in healing.

I am healing the Chris who sees himself in ways that are blocking him from being the person he wants to be, a person who is capable of radical love and changing the world for the better. An aspect of this healing that I am working through is diving into my emotions. Somewhere in my early 20s, I convinced myself that feelings weren’t “productive” or “valuable”. To be fair I know around the time that it happened — I fell in love for the first time in college, and I had my heart broken. At the time, I didn’t know how to cope with my emotions or how to process these really intense feelings. As a result, I became paralyzed — my grades tanked, I couldn’t support my friends, I became less fun to be around. When I eventually got out of that paralysis, I told myself that I didn’t ever want to have that experience again. I didn’t ever want to be that shaken by my emotions and paralyzed like that. I told myself that I wouldn’t ever care that much.

The crazy thing about being in love in college (or when I was a kid) is that I felt these amazing highs like I was on a cloud. The flip side of that is that I also experienced these intense lows when things weren’t good. When I made the decision never be paralyzed again, I told myself that I no longer would ride to the bottom of the emotional roller coaster. What I inadvertently did was also limit my ability to reach the peaks as well. That’s what happens when you care less. You don’t experience as intense of heartbreak, but you also don’t get to experience as serious a love.

Breaking up with Grace and getting divorced over the last year thrust me back into feeling again. I felt sadness that I hadn’t felt in nearly 10 years, and over time, I realized that I had robbed myself of the experience of being human. I have many criticisms of capitalism, but one of the biggest criticisms that I have of capitalism is that it eliminates room for things that aren’t productive, for things that don’t hold economic value, like feelings. (When was the last time you tried to share something difficult that you were going through with someone and had that person tell you to think about the positives or look on the bright side? More to come on this later…) In the same way that an adult may not cry over a skinned knee the way he/she/they used to as a child, I think that I’ve also learned how to process my feelings so that it’s not as overwhelming. Yet, there is still this connection to the trauma I experienced as a child and in college because intense emotions were always coupled with pain.

Now, I’m in this place where I am really interested in what it’s like to feel all these emotions, to dive into them, roll around in them as I would in mud or a pile of leaves, and experience just what it’s like. Sometimes, it’ll be uncomfortable, but I think there is something to also uncover in the discomfort. This is what it means for me to be human, and this is what it means for me to experience the entire spectrum of life. This is also where I know I’ll learn so much about who I am and how I want to connect.

I moved to New York nine days ago to study acting at the Terry Knickerbocker Studio. I have a lot of questions about what it’ll be like. People often ask me what kind of acting I want to do as the first question. While I can’t answer that one quite yet because I don’t even know whether or not I’ll like it, I can answer this question of why I chose acting and what it’s about for me. This is where it starts. I’m sure it’ll change, and I’m giving myself the time and space to be okay with it changing. In six months, I could decide that I don’t like it, and I’ll have to figure something else out. I’ve accepted that I’m okay with that, and I’m curious as to what I’ll learn in the process. It’s scary and daunting as hell at times, but it’s also exciting because I get to choose who I want to be, the type of person I want to explore becoming, and how that is expressed in the process.