The End of My Beginning & The Beginning of My End

As part of this series, I have been wondering when I first realised the contribution financial health gives to being an effective communicator of Alexander’s Discovery. 

For me, I think it was in 1991.

On the 19th of August of that year, Boris Yeltsin climbed up on a tank in Moscow and urged the Russian people to defy the coup that was underway against Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. I  was watching it on a TV in New York in the apartment of an actor that I had met at Marjorie Barstow’s summer workshop just past. He kindly offered a vacant room for which I could pay the rent later - because I was broke. I was using an old American Express card I hadn’t used to buy groceries, with no idea how I would pay it back.

I’d gone to New York to work with a vocal coach - at $US250 per session - on developing an American accent for a part I had landed in a film. The production company was paying the bill. My friend Curt Truniger had cast me as Peter in a feature film “Looking for Michelangelo” - ask ChatGPT or Bing - and I had banked on getting that money, but when Curt delayed the film, 1991 became my nadir, my rock bottom. 

I scurried home to Sydney feeling like a cockroach in the dark.

I returned diminished, skint and sleeping on the couch of my gay friend Lenny’s flat in Paddington (thank you Lenny), wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. I was already a skilled Alexscovery teacher of more than a decade, and I didn’t have a penny to my name. Or any work.

Because I had been publishing and editing Direction Journal for 5 years, I got a desktop publishing job designing corporate presentations for a little shoehorn operation in Strawberry Hills. I felt like a fake about to be exposed, but I was paid. 

And suddenly ecstatic. And amazed - that doing a something-nothing job could give me such joy and hope again. I realised that day the full emotional tyranny of unemployment - how it slowly destroys your sense of worth. I had no money, no home, no students and a massive American Express bill yelling at me every day. I think that was when the genesis of my later success with BodyChance in Japan was born.

In that year, I seeded into my mental continuum the declaration that I would never, ever put my Self in this position again. And I still had this to face - 

How would I pull myself out of the deep hole into which I had plunged?

This is the sixth in a series of daily emails exploring my challenges in communicating Alexander’s Discovery.