Why I'm Not Rayron

Today I was talking to a friend of mine about how I went from being Rayron to the man I am today.

As I went over everything that happened to bring me from then to now, I came across a realization:

I owe all of my personal improvements in the last six years to the existence of Glennda Bayon in my life.

This isn't a mushy "she makes me better and that's why I love her" thing, because that idea really is kind of selfish, I think.

It's more about stakes.

As a director, one of the most powerful tools we use to evoke genuinely meaningful performances from our actors is to raise the stakes. We take the situation that the characters presently face, and increase either their reward for success or their penalty for failure. Or both.

For example, I had an actress play the character of a lonely woman who spends 5 minutes pleading with her ex-husband to come back to her. She didn't seem desperate enough, so I told her that her character was pregnant. Out of the blue, she hit the degree of emotion that I was looking for. None of the lines hinted at a pregnancy, and she didn't reference it with her body language - it was just a seed that I planted in her head, and it stayed there - but it changed everything she did.

That's what happened when I met Glennda. Sure, I was growing up slowly and aimlessly, but I had no real reason to improve, other than the fact that I hated who I was. No one would suffer if I didn't mature, and there was no real reward waiting for me on the other side of adulthood.

But then, I met her. And we connected.
And we knew that we would spend our lives together.

All of a sudden, the stakes were raised. If I didn't grow and figure out my life, her future would suffer. But if I took the reins and learned how to be the man I needed to be, her life would improve too.

So again, the mere existence of Glennda in my life made me try that much harder to get from there to here, because she raised the stakes. I suddenly had something to lose. I had a lot to gain.

I had a reason to grow up.

And to this day, that's still the only reason I do anything to improve who I am. In that conversation with my friend, I made the comment:

"If I had never met my wife, the person standing in front of you would be an empty relic of who Rayron once was, hollow and only slightly less clueless."

This is all for now
-R.