IV. affirmations

dreams, jobs, and dream jobs

We have made it to our three-week Airbnb stay just outside of Salt Lake City. The kitchen is beautiful and already well-loved. The vibe is kind of a cross between hype-house and theater camp. The room with the best light has been set aside for the revolving door of self-tapes and someone is always singing or playing ping-pong or suggesting a movie by naming everyone who is in it. I have learned that I missed the chaos of a bunch of people doing ultimately the same thing but on individual planes (i.e. college) and that I don’t know enough actors by name. The grind of the workload has started to set in: eleven alarms going off in fifteen-minute intervals starting at 4 a.m. to face another ten to twelve-hour day replete with manual labor. But also this is the dream?

The dream in relation to the job is proving tricky to me at the moment. Without question, booking this job was dreamy. I fantasized about it and then talked myself out of the fantasy so I wouldn’t be devastated if rejected, and then when I finally got the email, I ugly cried on the subway. But, for the two months between booking the job and starting it, I didn’t give the actual work much consideration. The only analogous feeling I can point to is when I tore my ACL and was a month away from surgery. My parents told me they would fly out for the procedure and I was grateful, but couldn’t tell if it was necessary. It was my first surgery, and because of that I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t really anything…I didn’t have a point of reference. Surgery was just a thing on my calendar. When I got this contract, I was thrilled. One, because I wanted the part, which is not always the case when auditioning; and two, I got that crucial bit of validation. Yes, you are in the right business. Yes, we choose you. However, I hadn’t done any theater since 2019 and my longest run of a show was five performances over four days. So, no tangible point of reference. The job was a dream, an exciting block on my calendar, until it became a very intense reality.

I am exhausted. And kind of rocking a persistent low-grade nausea from waking up in the middle of REM cycles. And I am so happy and fulfilled. And I am constantly waffling as to whether or not I am doing well; specifically as to whether or not I am a good actor. I know this way lies madness, but anyone pursuing something they really love who isn’t preoccupied with if they’re actively doing a good job or not is either a sociopath or has reached a level of self-enlightenment I am not evolved enough to comprehend. In a truly prescient move, my best friend sent me off with a series of letters to open at different moments on tour: first rehearsal, first show, “I have found myself in a strange landscape & now, I am maybe crying.” In the First Rehearsal letter she wrote, “Ok ok ok. I’m fine. You’re fine. No one is freaking out. In fact, everyone is being incredibly normal…” She invites me to review the basics and lands on the most important fact first, “A. you already have the part so let’s fucking go on that account.” I got the part. I auditioned and was chosen which is what every performer wants to be. So why this notion that I can’t do it? That I shouldn’t do it, that I am not good enough.

One of the things we were hired for is our ability to teach workshops. In a normal world order, there are three different types of workshops and we play along with the students. Due to covid restrictions, we lead workshops from the stage. Everyone is masked, and we try our best to hold their attention for an hour from a raised twenty-foot distance. Today, we had a last-minute workshop addition and the kids were much younger than we anticipated. I affectionately call them “littles.” They are my favorite audience members, they ask the best questions, but they’re menaces to teach. Faced with about forty littles fresh from lunch, I decided to go for broke and teach a game that required silence and focus. (There’s a tweet somewhere that says acting class is just walking at different speeds. I wish I could refute it, but the exercise I taught is called “sit, stand, walk, run.”) They began seated in a circle. As an ensemble they had to stand, begin walking, slow to a stop, and sit down again without words and without any one person leading. I led them through a few rounds until they tried the whole sequence themselves without me as designated leader. Of course, there were goofballs—kids who wanted to be the first to stand or kept walking long after everyone stopped—but they stayed silent and, for the most part, moved cohesively. There was a moment, when we were all sitting crosslegged and I led them through a round of deep breaths to center their energetic little bodies, where I thought: I’m a good teacher.

Though I have always liked kids, I have never wanted to be a teacher. Thus, the question of my ability is not an existential, anxiety-making one. More importantly, I have never been told I was a bad teacher. I have been told, only once but it was clearly influential, that I did not have what it takes to be a good actor. Why does that one comment (from a peer who took it back by the way) have so much sway?

I think what propels the dream into reality, into the actual job—and I am using job here as neutrally as possible, as in the thing you sustain your life with—is a healthy dose of delusion. It is delusional to think the life you’ve dreamed up, fantasized, idealized, is tangible. That’s bananas. People toil. They do things they don’t want to do. They are born into impossible circumstances. Or, even scarier, they do not achieve their wildest dreams, but live pretty well. When faced with a choice between delusion and the more logical conclusion that you are not special, it’s hard to choose the former. It takes a lot of audacity not just to go for it, but to believe that you deserve it. Not to make this into a motivational Ted Talk.

For those who knew me pre-college, especially my family, it was incredibly random that I majored in Religious Studies. When people ask why, I always tell the story of my first RLST class: Philosophy of Religion. It was great, taught by a great professor, I won’t get into the weeds. Long story short, he was addressing a comment in class about believing the accounts of the mystics we were reading which detailed vivid, personal experiences of God. He said that of course we could logically chalk it up to starvation-induced hallucinations, plain lies, or cases of undiagnosed mental illness, “but isn’t the world so much more interesting if it’s all true?” That broke my brain.

In this case, I guess I’m asking myself: isn’t the world of delusion, where I actually keep hitting the gas on this career that I want so badly, and I’m on stage, and I write films, and I work with the creative powerhouses that I’ve always admired, isn’t that so much more interesting, so much more worthy of attention, than boring, logical doubt?It’s one thing to ask that, a whole other to answer it, but the question is intriguing. What if you’re actually good at the thing you are trying to do?

Seven and a half hours until my alarm goes off. I will drag myself out of bed before the sun rises, something I hate. I will perform for anywhere from 20-400 people, something I love. A draining, delusional, dreamy, job.

a Japanese curler wrote this note on her hand and now we say it before every show: “I am a good curler. I have confidence. Let’s have fun!”