There is a temptation in life to try to be someone else, to conform to the masses, to people please, or change in order to be liked. Especially in the film industry.
I was nineteen when I moved to LA, and my first week out here I got an audition for a music video. I was so excited as I drove to that first Los Angeles audition, parking my car and hustling up to the door, I can still remember it like it was yesterday. I sat down across from the director and he explained a little about the music video, and the “bitchy” character he was casting. I sat there listening, intently nodding my head. Then he said, “So are you a bitch?” I was taken off guard with this question, and hesitated saying, “No, I’m not, but I can act like a bitch.” He then said, “Well do you get aggravated easily, do you fly off the handle and get pissed off easily?” I replied again shaking my head “no actually I don’t, but I can act like I do.” The director stood up and went to the door, he opened it smiled and said, “Thank you.” I grabbed my bag and headed out the door. As I walked to my car I thought, “wow, I just blew that audition.” I was thinking the whole drive home, “man I should have just said I was a bitch.” I spent the rest of the afternoon kicking myself.
A few hours later the director called me and said “you booked the role, you were the only girl who told me the truth, everyone else just told me what they thought I wanted to hear, that they were a bitch, I liked that you were honest.”
I booked that first audition in LA and it was all thanks to the fact that I wasn’t jaded enough yet to know any different than to tell the truth, and be honest about whom I really was.
I wish I could say that experience kept me from becoming a person who would conform or change in order to be who I thought people wanted me to be. But sadly I still got caught up in the game of wanting to be liked, trying to be the right type, even if I was grasping at straws about what “right” was.
As an actor it is easy to get desperate, and want so badly to be chosen that I would constantly be running like a hamster in a cage trying to figure out how to please the people in the film industry.
I remember a good friend once telling me that I was too nice, and that could be the reason I wasn’t booking jobs, because casting directors might have thought I was being fake. So I started trying to figure out how not to be myself, which is a super happy bubbly girl with a lot of enthusiasm and energy, I think I was born with an insane amount of Serotonin running through my veins. I began desperately trying to figure out how to change. I even found myself apologizing for who I was, which became an exhausting way to live.
It took me many years to finally embrace my true self, and to accept me, without anyone else’s permission. I am the kind of girl who’s energy is a bit crazy. I’m loud, talk really fast, and get extremely excitable and passionate about things, and that’s ok ’cause if someone doesn’t like it then they don’t have to spend time with me. My husband says sometimes my energy is bouncing off the walls and he has to leave the room for a minute. But that’s who I am and I can’t change, even with all those years of trying to. I finally gave up the fight, and it was the most freeing feeling in the world. To be comfortable in my own skin, and to give up the desperate attempt to be someone I am not. To love and accept myself is a beautiful way to live.
I recently saw this very touching clip from the Oscars, where actress’s were asked what advice they would give to young girls today, and the answer’s all mentioned “embracing who you are, and not trying to be someone else.”
This is the best advice anyone could give someone else. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to figure it out, but now that I have, I live in a much more peaceful, pleasant, place in my mind. And I know that the people I surround myself with, really do love me because, they are seeing who I really am, and not a front of whom I think they might like.
Embrace and love yourself and you will attract the people and the career that is meant to be in your life.Life is too short and precious not to exude your unique “you” into the world. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, maybe you’ll take from Dr. Seuss.
“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”—Dr. Deuss