When you first start out in stand-up and, probably, as any performer, you enjoy the attention so much, and even though that hasn't died down on stage, it certainly has satiated whatever was in me that was needing that much attention. When I'm off stage, it's not something that I really need.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a journey of self-awareness and understanding of the balance between seeking attention on stage and finding satisfaction off stage.
Tig Notaro highlights the evolution of a performer’s relationship with attention, expressing how the initial desire for recognition transforms over time. While enjoying the spotlight and appreciation from an audience is part of being a performer, Notaro notes that this need diminishes in her personal life, suggesting a deeper understanding of self-worth beyond external validation.
In practice
In a workshop about self-esteem, this quote could illustrate the balance between seeking external validation and internal satisfaction.
I get kind of, um, bored by all the sexuality and gender labels because I feel like that's where the problem comes in, when people feel that they need to have these particular identities. If you didn't have these labels, and you just acted on how you genuinely felt at any point, then you wouldn't have anything to contend with.
People write me every day. It feels like this cycle that keeps giving, because as far along as I get in my happiness and success, hearing other people's stories is a constant reminder of where I came from, where people are, and how much help everybody still needs.
It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.
It's important that when you do standup, you do small places like coffee shops and also big places like colleges. It helps you find the little nuances in your set that don't work, and you can shave off the excess.
Before I had a double mastectomy, I was already pretty flat-chested, and I made so many jokes over the years about how small my chest was that I started to think that maybe my boobs overheard me... and were just like, 'You know what? We're sick of this. Let's kill her.'
People have responded to my stories so well. They come up after a show and say things like, 'Your album really helped me,' or 'I have stage four cancer. I'm terminally ill.' Somebody told me it gave them the courage to die.
I'm not a builder of buildings, I'm a builder of collections.
I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.
For a film maker, an Oscar is like a Nobel Prize, you know. So I am very happy... delighted. There is nothing more after this. I cannot hope to get anything more prestigious.
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
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