When I was a senior in high school my boyfriend brought his family to see me perform in the school play. It was a Terrance McNally farce where I played a vapid socialite trying to give her life meaning by throwing her money into producing a play. I spent two hours flitting around the stage babbling non-sense and having a great time. After it was over, I met up with my boyfriend and his sister and his sister’s-boyfriend, and as I received my congratulatory hugs, the sister’s boyfriend exclaimed, “I never thought you could talk that much.” After a year of attending all the same family gatherings, my boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend had no sense of my ability to speak. Or at least speak with any volume and over the course of time. And what’s worse, I wasn’t surprised.

Throughout my life many people have mistaken me for quiet and shy because I have acted like a quiet and shy person around them. But in truth, I am not quiet or shy. I started talking at six-months-old and it took my little brother twice that long because I insisted on doing all his talking for him. If I trust you want to listen, I pretty much have something to say about everything and can say it for hours on end. But long ago I started to guard what I expressed in mixed company. I hate confrontation and deeply worry about the disapproval of others. I choose not to compete with large personalities. And that tricks most people into thinking that I am not a large personality myself. Somewhere along the line I came to think that that was unacceptable. This quietude was a way to control people’s perceptions. This is probably why I became an actress in the first place—to be myself by pretending to not be myself.

My mom asked me last week if I wished she had encouraged me to take a more conventional path when I headed off to college. Maybe we all naively believed I was on the road to stardom instead of years of struggle. But regardless, the things I learned studying theater are invaluable to me. That is where I began to truly speak. I was eighteen-years-old taking a scene study class from a chain-smoking, Parsi, existentialist. The whole thing was more intense than anything my suburban background had ever encountered. I was assigned a raw and ragged scene from Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. In it I had to confront betrayal and fear and desire, and every time I tried to raise my voice it would shift up into a squeaky register. I had no power. It became a major point of critique from my teacher that I wouldn’t breath into these strong emotions to give them a strong voice. Over the course of the next four years I practiced breathing my feelings. And I practiced showing my feelings. And I practiced speaking my feelings. The passion, fury, and grief I worked so hard to subdue in my daily life was suddenly not just permitted but encouraged. Someone else gave me words I hadn’t allowed myself to say and a big, wide stage to say them on. It became the training ground for me to take on my own betrayals and fears and desires. Growing up from girl to woman, I’ve learned the hard way that people will take power from me when I don’t tell them they can’t. In the process of playing out the emotional lives of so many different types of women on stage, I’ve become less afraid of playing myself. But it does still scare me. It scares me because I know it has power. It has power that I can’t always control.