If you don’t share what you have, you’re gonna live a lonely life.
– David Bamberger
It’s been 2 years since I’ve started acting and 1 year since I’ve been writing. I ask my self now, in this moment of selah, this moment of reflection, what have I learned? What have a I achieved? What is next? I have learned that perspective is vital and important.
This past year has been a tumultuous year. I was cast in my first stage production, as well as my first film production. Both of those projects being wildly different experiences and lot of long weekends. I added on to my class repertoire to be a full-time 5 night a week acting student. I started a web series film project with two close friends and stepped up my audition outings. It has been a blur of a past year with learning to deal and manage my new busy lifestyle.
In looking forward to next year it only seems that my life will get busier. I have the opportunity in front of me for this next year to be the busiest and most successful, or for it to be a year of total failure. This dichotomy of possibility has absolutely thrilled me but mainly it has abjectly horrified me. I’m scared. I feel like I am losing my mind. The more I learn the more I feel I don’t know. I feel like I have no idea what acting is. The scariest feeling being that I feel like I don’t have a direction at the moment.
See, every year I have a goal or plan on what I am going to do. I had a goal last year to get out and audition more and I did that. Which, in turn, led to my first two productions. This next year there are a lot of goals for different productions and a goal for getting into a training program abroad. As well there is always the overarching goal of moving out to LA and making the big leap into the professional acting world. These all sound nice in looking forward to this next year but I feel like I’m doing that on very shaky ground. I’m suddenly out of my comfort zone and with that comes the instinctual desire to want to seize control. I want to steer this ship back into that comfort zone but at the same time I still have these goals, dreams, and aspirations. My ego and my soul are locked in battle and so my mind drifts off, trying to stay afloat, with no direction clear as of yet.
This is where perspective comes into play. I’ve been in the trenches too long, not lifting my head to see the greater scope of it all. That singular focus has led me astray and festered all my fears of failure and rejection. I am very much out of my comfort zone. I’m putting myself out there, in this next year, to potentially face failure at every turn. That scares the shit out of me. Yet, I know that I can never go back to my comfort zone. I will never be happy there again. I have to step out.
I went to a premiere of Macbeth up in Flagstaff the other night to see a friend perform. She was magnificent. There were a lot of magnificent actors up there that night. And I could see at times some nerves come out in some, it was an overbooked sold out opener, but even greater than that I could see their eyes alight and alive in the thrill of being up there on stage. Meeting them after the show they were so full of energy and buzz. They were truly alive. It reminded me of why I do this. Why going back to my comfort zone is impossible now. Why I can stand up against the possibility of outright failure in this next year. Because without that risk of failure there is no chance, no opportunity, to take part in the highlights and the thrills our art can afford us.
…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
– Theodore Roosevelt (The Man in the Arena)
That perspective shift has given me my direction for this year. Nothing risked is nothing gained. This next year will be a year of huge risk taking, that I am sure of. What comes of that, be it abject failure or amazing success, time will tell. Either way I’m going to go for it and will continue to go for it into the next year and the year after that. I can accept the failure. What I cannot accept is living with the regret of never putting it all on the line.