by Constance Jaquay

There were days throughout the end of 2023 and the entire 2024 where I couldn’t move, days when my body felt like it had forgotten itself. I cried for weeks on and off. I felt stuck. I had forgotten how to move in my body. I had to re-learn how each body part worked.

It took time. 

It took intentional healing. 

It took remembering how to live inside my own skin again.

Slowly, I found my way back.
Courage, I learned, isn’t fearlessness.
It’s learning to move through fear |
fear of the unknown,
fear of lost dreams,
fear that an idea may never manifest.

Thirteen years of making work with little funding or support had finally caught up with me. The exhaustion had affected my nervous system; it was bone-deep. For a moment, it felt impossible to continue as an independent artist.

In 2024, I realized Theatre Roscius needed to slow down to understand how it wanted to evolve. After twelve original theatre & performace art works, four short films on Super 8, digital, and 16mm; four original physical scripts; my first exhibition; a new compilation of experimental pocket plays; two installations; numerous physical photography collections and two new sculpture series built from natural materials, it was clear I had earned rest and I took Tricia Hersey’s call to Black women to rest and reset as church. I felt I had earned the space to imagine the next chapter, and to act later.

In the midst of this self renovation, I fought to hold on to the voice I had spent years building. I felt it was violated at times and challenged by others. I had to sit with myself, it took long, lonely hours, until I found my authentic voice again. I had to listen to all the voices that lived within my head…and then I remembered: Alyson Mead. 

I think about Alyson Mead often. We met during the early LAFPI Sam French days; she took me to lunch when I needed it most. Being an outlier in a city where it feels like everyone already knows everyone was difficult. She told me I would find my tribe, that my artistic voice would sharpen with time, but that the road would be hard. She was right. 

Those first years after school were shadowed by hard times and scary nights, making work no one might ever see. Somehow, naivety, immaturity, and obsession with the work outweighed any sense of my reality. I kept going. 

Then I found love, and my partner stepped in as unexpected support, taking on roles he never anticipated, and somehow we’ve made new work every year since 2013. And though I didn’t find “my tribe” in the way Alyson spoke of or how I imagined, Instead, I found with time something else: an international constellation of support that has been unexpected, powerful, and sustaining.

Time heals.
Not gently, but truthfully.

Life bends, breaks, and reshapes us. And if you keep going, despite disappointments, despite violence, despite the impossible, you eventually meet the support you prayed for years before. I don’t know what would have happened without the emergence of residencies, fellowships, and grants. Maybe I would have continued self-producing. Maybe I would have walked away. Maybe I would have collapsed into a grief that swallowed me whole. But the “what ifs” are dead ends. What matters is this: time keeps moving. And we must too. Keep loving, keep empathy at the center, keep faith alive, and keep walking towards the light even on the darkest of days. 

And 2025 arrived like a whirlwind.
The last three years // the work, the political climate, the loss of life around the world // left my nervous system frayed. Sudan’s famine, Palestine’s devastation, Ukraine’s fight for survival, Lebanon on the brink… the world still feels unbearably heavy.

The past few years have been unimaginable, but I am excited for the now and the future. I believe there is always light inside darkness. I believe that moving toward hope changes the frequency of the universe. I believe theatre and performance shift the world, that every piece made in grace and with care transforms a small corner of our collective ugliness into something more beautiful.

“It’s funny the things you remember and the things you don’t.”
— Karen, All About Eve