Today, at the John Hewitt International Summer School, my colleagues and I presented the culmination of our month of work in Armagh to a crowd of unsuspecting strangers. I know, right? We were pretty stoked going into it, as you’d expect, since many of us aren’t actors. But, still, filing up the stairs from the basement bar/lounge to the stage, we were cool as goddamned cucumbers. Words fail me, so I leave the demonstration to two of the only men in the history of time that have ever effectively captured our level of coolness on film: Captain Jean-Luc Picard and First Officer William Riker.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Now, of course, when we got into the space where the performance would take place, we all melted into big puddles of nervous muck, performing yoga and throat exercises and spinal reconstructions. Well, most of us were nervous mucks. I wasn’t. This isn’t a bragging point (seriously), I just wasn’t. There was no knotted sensation in my gut. My fingers didn’t jitter or tap. My breathing was steady and natural. I was simply there. Joan Weber said (paraphrasing here), “It’s good if you’re nervous. It means you care.”

Did I not care about what I was doing today, then? Certainly not. I cared about enjoying myself out there. I cared about not hurting myself when I threw myself off of my barstool. I cared, probably most importantly, about delivering the proper respect that ought to be afforded to the work of my fellow writers who allowed me to perform their pieces. But I didn’t care about the audience of strangers or the lights or forgetting my lines one bit. And since I was supremely confident in my ability to realize the aforementioned elements I cared about, I was not nervous in the slightest (and in two of those three circumstances, my confidence was completely founded).

So, if this were a story, this would be the point where the hero, who is handsome, but too arrogant for his own good, is confronted with his comeuppance as a result of his hubris and learns something about himself in the process (and, this might be a bias here, doesn’t die or tear out his eyes like some sort of tragic Greek figure). But my confidence in my acting didn’t matter in the end, as far as this story was concerned. I was an arrogant rich boy chasing a life he won’t allow himself to embrace. I was a great bull sea, beckoning my lover back to the sea. I was a Zyrkonian in a man’s body, confessing his love in the most cheesy way possible and only injuring himself superficially when falling from his bar stool. They went well (I’ll leave it at that for the sake of maintaining this well-established façade of modesty) and I thoroughly enjoyed myself during my performances.

No, my downfall came in a way that I did not consider: that my play would not be successful. It’s no fault of the cast; Kimberley, Joan, Kelsey, and Savanna all performed admirably and memorably in their respective roles. But, despite their best efforts, the audience, as consensus, laughed fewer times than it would take two hands to count. My comedic farce of a play scarcely inspired a chortle from the audience.

I was assured after the fact that my play served as the opening act to a surprisingly tough crowd, some of which plainly stated things like, “I came in not expecting much. . .” That my play was a necessary warm-up for the crowd and that it got the audience geared into that suspension of reality that is so necessary for theatre. We all told each other that we had done a fantastic job.

But I know better. I know that nigh everyone after the show that spoke to me during the talkback had endless praise for my turn as the seal and the alien, that I had embodied those words and emotions fully, that I was a natural actor, and no words for the piece I actually created. One person spoke to me about my play: her criticism was that the surnames of the reverends were not strictly accurate, that they were most likely Catholic names rather than Protestant. My explanation that the names were an obscure reference to two ancient Celtic tribes that warred over control of the Drumsaillech, which would eventually house St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, 1500 years ago were not enough to assuage her concerns. My play did not seem to leave an impression on the audience, at least not a big enough one to draw them to me. It was not funny enough to inspire a consistent chuckle in the audience. It was not insightful enough to force conversation, at least from my analysis. Despite how much I love everything about the play, I see it for what it is: a failure.

So what did I learn from this experience? In brief, I learned that I am simultaneously a terrible and terrific writer. I’m a terrible writer because my work was not as inspiring, effective, and insightful as I wanted and needed it to be. I’m a terrific writer because I care.