Kevin Linder

It is already my last day here in LA. I can’t believe it’s over already. I have mixed feelings of being sad but yet excited. Sad of leaving this place as I’ve grown used to it and in some ways attached. It’s been my home and nice to be living alone again. Excited to get back to my own place, own neighborhood, see friends and familiar places.

For the past week and a half I’ve been super busy working on my scene for my class. I was given a scene and told I had to memorize it. It was 6 pages and at first I thought I would be able to do it without an issue. This belief faded after a few hours. I started to get frustrated and upset that it was taking so long and seemed to be impossible for me to remember 10 sentences. I couldn’t even imagine how I was going to be able to memories 6 pages. Then I started to get distracted. I was checking my email, chatting with people on IM, going for walks, anything. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing. I started to think maybe I had adult ADD or something. I spent all Friday and Saturday learning lines. When I woke up on Sunday I see that I had only gotten half of the lines memorized that I needed. I was frustrated and thinking I should just quit now and go home. I then looked at it in a different way. I realized that I had actually memorized half of what I needed to. I was having a problem with just a few lines but I now am half way through. I then started to tell myself that I could do this. If I can do half of it, I can do a little more and have the whole thing. After all there was a time when I was in a play and one monologue I had was a page and a half (typed) and I memorized that. At this point my progress was leaps and bounds better than it was previously. I believed I could do it and I was doing it. I was able to learn the rest of my lines by the end of day Sunday. A lot quicker than I learned the first half. I believe it was because I thought I COULD do it. I was no longer telling myself I was going to fail or I was not going to do it. Once the talk became positive and I believed it, I was making it happen.

This was very interesting as I have never experienced it before. I then started to think about my belief that I had “Adult ADD”. I realized that I was distracted and doing other things because I thought I was going to fail at memorizing my lines. I didn’t want to do it nor did I want to fail so my attention and desire were not in it. Instead anything that came along, I’d rather be doing and often did to get away from what was making me frustrated. Very interesting indeed. I wonder how many others think they have ADD and are taking medicine for it when all they have to do is realize what I just did. How many other “medical conditions” are related to our brains and emotions? I suspect quite more than we give credit for now.

Tonight is my last class and I have to showcase my scene and the work I’ve done on it. I’m quite nervous as my scene requires me to get emotional (in the scene my wife is having sex with another man and I confront her about it - only to learn she doesn’t love me and is leaving me). Before my class tonight, I am starting the long process of packing my stuff and cleaning the studio I’ve been using while down here. Hoping I won’t be tired tonight after class and doing the 6 hour drive to Arizona to drop off my car and visit with my family before returning home to San Francisco. If I am too tired tonight to make the drive I am going to get up as early as I can Tuesday morning and start. I’m going to try to avoid as much traffic as I can and hopefully as little heat as possible.