Fragile

28 MARCH 2022

I’m a woman. I like being a woman. I like dresses, sandals, skirts, long pants, wide, tight, short, three-quarters, blouses of all colors, especially lipsticks. I like the spring that is coming now, I can’t wait for the flowering trees, the light, the rays among the trees. I had long, short hair, a brush, redhead, blonde, brunette, with strands. I cut my bowl twice. I like to be beautiful, without being any beauty, I like heels, their fragility and the wind, the smiles of children, when I reach them. I love being a mother, I love everything, and fatigue, and nerves, and when I hug them I never get tired. It’s good, it’s warm and good, here in me.

But it was also bad. It happened to make me sick – in my childhood, in my youth, at about 40 years old and about two years ago, at 45, when my husband cheated on me a second time and I got lost, I left and I didn’t I could see myself again. My dead eyes and so many salty tears overcame me, I couldn’t and didn’t want to get up, I was like a knife blade pointed at me, I felt my veins so close, and blue. I looked in the mirror and saw my children – the boy is blond with blue eyes, the girl is brown with brown eyes – and then I remembered that I was an actress. I got on the phone and called an actor. I did a show. About us. We didn’t know each other. We only knew each other by sight. I had learned that he was soon out of a relationship, it hurt. I was determined to do a poetry show with him. The pandemic has begun. We met to work, but all we did was talk about our pain, longing, memories, then lives, parents, siblings. And then he said, “We’re going to put on a show about this.” About us.

I was scared. How do I tell people about me like that? At the theater I play characters, nobody knows what I suffered when I was little, big, why I’m ashamed. I only talk about it to my loved ones, how to go out in front of people who don’t know me and tell such intimate, painful things, some of which I’m ashamed of, which I even hide from myself. I was scared. And I did. At the same time, together with other beautiful women, we began to think about the Fragile Society, a place where we could try to heal ourselves through art, to show that out of pain, things can be born that can help.

Art helped me. I took my broken love, my eyes dead, and fought. I showed to the people who came to the show, all my pain, alive, without hiding behind some characters. At the beginning, it was just me and my colleague Istvan in front of the spectators. He had the idea that at the end of each show we would have a guest, a playwright or a therapist and to talk openly with the audience about what they saw, about our traumas and I was no longer afraid. Because all the people in the room were talking to us and they were like us – fragile and open, people who don’t know each other, all different and all the same, united by the desire to go through the pain, to not be afraid of it. I understand that if you let her be visible, if you don’t shy away from her, if you don’t deny her, if you give her the right to be, to live her moment, the pain helps you get over it, to understand that it’s life, it’s more. And for the first time, I was happy to be an actress and I felt that I could help myself and that I could support others in this way.