Well, the answer is simple. Because we need it.
Dennys and I needed an escape for our creative mind. We are theater actresses that have been through a lot in the last couple of years and we couldn’t perform for many, many reasons and so we felt frustrated. We felt like something was missing. We didn’t understand what it was at first, we just thought we missed acting (which we do, by the way) but no, it was something more.
Because of our difficult experiences in the last years, we also realized that we needed therapy, both of us. In particular, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when I was 19 and I have lived with that diagnosis ever since. I have gone to therapy with great psychologists but I lived in Venezuela and there was a moment where going to therapy was just too expensive, so I had to stop. In the meantime, I was working at my theater school Grupo Fábula, along with Dennys and, for some reason, missing my therapy sessions didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would. And something similar happened with Dennys.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Dennys and I had to leave our country behind and our acting careers as well and we started to feel our mental health going down the drain again. We also had some terrible experiences during these last years, so everything went dark pretty quickly and that’s when we started to feel like we needed our “medicine” again.
We realized that acting was our medicine. Theater was our therapy. And yes, art therapy and drama therapy exist but we didn’t know that then. We just knew that we always felt better after every rehearsal, at least emotionally. So we decided to bring that feeling back and help others along the way.
I have always been inclined to psychology for some reason and being an actress demands you to know about emotions and how to control and differentiate them. Acting and psychology get along very, very well. So, Act on Yourself was born. A podcast about art therapy, a service for anybody who needs a friend or a coach. This is not about us anymore, this is about you. Act on Yourself is for you, we help you act so you can become the best version of yourself that you can be.
Irene “Mila” Casanova