My Private Whispers and Light Blog

A Role That Stayed With Me

A role I played as a teenager stayed with me and quietly shaped the way I understand story, grief, and endurance. *True Story from My Past*

A Role That Stayed With Me

Some experiences settle quietly into us and stay. We don’t recognize their weight right away. They wait, shaping how we see the world and how we eventually tell our own stories.

Acting was one of those early shaping forces for me.

I began acting in sixth grade. The first role I ever landed was one of the lead children in Mr. Popper’s Penguins. From there, I went on to perform in The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd and several other productions. We were a traveling troupe, performing in different locations and sometimes doing two shows a day on weekends. It was exciting, exhausting, and formative in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.

Of all the roles I played, one left the deepest and most lasting impression.

The play was A Narrative of the Captivity.

It told the story of a Puritan woman in early America who was taken during an attack on her settlement. She was a wife, a mother, and a strong settler woman trying to survive a brutal moment in history. During the attack, her baby was struck by an arrow and died in her arms. The character had to recount that loss, along with the deaths of nearly everyone she loved.

I worked closely with the director on a long monologue describing what had happened. The challenge wasn’t memorization, but restraint. I was seventeen. The woman I portrayed was strong. She did not collapse into hysteria. I had to tell the story clearly and truthfully, allowing only the faintest hint of tears. That restraint made the role harder, not easier.

Her entire family was gone. Her baby, whom she had been holding, was gone. And yet she endured.

After the attack, she was taken captive and forced to live among people who were not kind to her. Wanting to do justice to the role, I sought extra help and convinced my parents to hire an acting coach. She taught me how to stay present, how to hold emotion without letting it consume me, and how to finish a scene even when every instinct told me to break down.

Every time I stepped on stage, the role tore at me. I was young, but I understood enough to feel the weight of what those people endured. Though the play was a dramatization, it echoed real history. These things did happen. People lived through horrors like this, and some survived to tell the story.

That experience stayed with me.

That woman survived. Her strength still stays with me, years later, reminding me that the most powerful stories are often told in quiet voices, spoken simply, and carried forward by those who endure.