If my acting career and I were in a relationship… it was until recently an abusive one.
I think it was a year ago that my then fiancé told me he felt like I was in an abusive relationship with my career and he hated seeing what it was doing to me. And, for a long time I was dismissive of this assessment… clearly he didn’t get it because he isn’t an actor… this is just the type of thing actors have to put up with… there are good days, too… But the more I started to think about it, the more I realized that he was on to something.
I guess I’d never thought of it like this before because my career isn’t another person, but this analogy definitely made sense to me in terms of what it was doing to me emotionally. My career made me feel ignored, it didn’t call me back, didn’t appreciate my full value, and at its worst left me feeling downright terrible about myself… even my worst ex-boyfriends were never this bad!
Why then was I putting up with this abuse from my career? The answer though slightly cheesy: I love acting from the depths of my soul and the bottom of my heart! That being said, in any healthy relationship there needs to be more than just love. There needs to be mutual respect, kindness, and clear boundaries. Acting is no different.
Then a few months ago, I got an audition for a project I was really excited about. It was “perfect” for me on so many levels, and I was beyond pumped to audition for it. I spent my weekend reading and re-reading the script, I created an entire world for my character, memorized my lines, picked out the perfect audition outfit. However, during the actual audition, I completely fell apart. My hands started shaking at the beginning of it and I forgot my lines. At one point in my heightened state I sort of yelled a line in a super high-pitched voice foreign to my own ears. I made awkward small-talk with the casting director and directors. I was a mess. Who was that person that just auditioned?
I got home, and a tsunami of emotions flooded from me. I cried as I beat myself up because I “should have” prepared better for the audition. I cried for the embarrassment that I was feeling from having showed such a vulnerable side of myself to a room full of strangers. I cried for the missed opportunity and the disappointment I was to myself and in my mind everyone who has ever known me and believed in me. I cried because my entire identity as a human being worthy of love was somehow tied into this one audition. However, after I stopped crying, I felt this lovely emptiness inside and a clarity sprung forth. Not only was I in a bad relationship with acting, I’d also managed to make it my entire identity. This bad relationship I had was more serious than I thought… identity loss is the sort of behavior a person in a seriously abusive relationship adopts. I had given too much of my own power over to my career and it had left me a shell of myself.
I couldn’t ignore my now husband’s insight and my own insight any longer. It was time for me to reclaim my identity from my career and end the bad relationship. As I started to feel better, I realized that I missed ME! I missed just being myself and feeling proud of that. I missed being happy for no good reason. I missed having fun for fun’s sake. I missed feeling smart, important, valuable… and I realized that it is actually pretty awesome being me when I didn’t let my career dictate how I felt about myself. In hindsight, it’s really crazy how I’d let this “bad relationship” diminish me as a human being.
Fast forward a few weeks later: I got an audition for a commercial, the first audition since the disaster of an audition I chronicled above. I felt determined to conquer it and put into practice some of these realizations. The character actually had a lot of dialogue, and so I worked it, created a character, and when I did that first audition I nailed it. In the casting director’s words, “You killed it!” However, and I’m not proud to admit this, I became unnerved at the callback (I still have some work to do). It wasn’t a fail of an audition, but since I got into acting because I enjoy doing it, it’s a hard pill to swallow when I don’t enjoy doing it.
The next week I had another callback, one I felt much better about. However, in the days that followed I found myself irritable and on edge. When would my agent call? And, that’s when it hit me. At some point, before I met my husband, I had managed to learn an important dating lesson. I learned not to be bothered by guys that didn’t call me back. I stopped blaming myself, and I looked at it as their loss. And, just like that, I stopped thinking about the callback. It would occasionally pop back into my mind, but then I would gently remind myself that I no longer think about jobs that don’t call me back.
Listen, to those of you out there who have managed to have more “normal” or at least healthy relationships with your careers, kudos to you! I truly commend you. For me, it’s a work in progress. And for those of you who are currently struggling with an abusive relationship with your career, I genuinely encourage you to work hard to shift your perception. No one said this career path of ours would be easy, but it shouldn’t be painful. We are perfect whole human beings just the way we are and nothing – not even an unfulfilling relationship with acting/other career/another person – should dim the light that each of us possesses… In fact, an acting career should have the opposite affect. It should make us shine brightly!!