award season, god, and turning 25
I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.
I’ve written before about dedicating my life to performing, and how my connection to it has warped over the last few years. I wrote about how I was working on finding other outlets, and slowly but surely learning how to be happy and fulfilled in my life without performance. I was starting to believe that maybe I could be content without an acting career. However, I have to admit it is far more challenging than I could have expected.
I know success looks different for everybody. For many people, success is having a baby and raising a family. For others, it is making tons of money and being able to retire early and take all the glamorous vacations you want. Money or children, for myself, are not measures of success, at least not in the way I am working towards it. As we are in the midst of award season, it’s brought me to a clearer realization of how I define success for myself. It isn’t about winning the award, or even being nominated. But when I see the actors and musicians at their tables, drinking champagne and mingling with their fellow union members, these people are known. They are respected and admired. I too want the respect and admiration of these artists. That is how I would see myself as truly successful. As I get older and each year passes by at a more blinding speed than the last, seeing people younger than me becoming extremely successful in their creative fields hits harder and harder each time. The idea that an acting career might be less attainable now gets harder and harder to swallow. I was always told I would be the one to “make it” and honestly, and probably selfishly, I believe I have every ability to. I believe I could hone my talent and my skills to receive that respect and admiration. I want nothing more than to “make it.” I don’t necessarily want fame: crowds chanting my name or brand partnerships or my face on a screen in Times Square. I don’t need a 10 million dollar house, designer bags, and a private chef. I want to be known. I want to be known for my talent and my skill that I have worked so tirelessly to improve upon. I want to be respected in my craft by my peers and my colleagues. Unfortunately, this desire for respect and acknowledgement just doesn’t feel the same in a non-performance field, when looking at myself and my career. It's not like I don’t have other goals or aspirations. I would love to work in a photo studio. I would love to design cheese boards for events or be a journalist for a magazine. All of these things interest me and I am passionate about them, and frankly, I think I could have an objectively “successful” career in those fields. But after all of this internal turmoil, it just makes me come to the conclusion that there will never be anything like performing. I feel like I could have a successful career in any of these fields, but they still wouldn’t fill the void that performance has left. Yes, I can establish other creative outlets, but it still wouldn’t be completely fulfilling.
Say I dropped everything and started prioritizing auditioning and performing. How do you manage it? How do you afford the self-tape set up, living on a server’s wage, taking jobs that don’t pay very well but give you footage for your reel? When all of your friends work standard 9-5 roles, and you’re working all kinds of strange hours, how do you maintain those friendships? How do you work enough hours, somewhere that you make enough money, where you can still have health insurance, all while auditioning every day and making sure to stay healthy in the process. For, my artistic success has nothing to do with money, but how do we survive without it? For now, that question remains more rhetorical than compulsory, but being in my twenties and living in New York City, it is always spinning around inside my head.
To speak frankly, I was born to perform. It’s the reason I was put on this earth. I know to some, it sounds ridiculous that I have this esoteric path set out, but I almost feel like this path is one that was set in place for me when my soul came into this life. Hear me out. I know it sounds like I think everything revolves around me, but that’s not the case. I know there are other people who have this unrelenting feeling that they have a goal and a purpose, similar to myself. Maybe if I were religious it would help give this feeling a holier meaning, that it was God that instilled this passion in me and sent me on this journey. Truthfully, I don’t think divine providence is the reason for all of this. Does it put more or less pressure on something; feeling like you are failing yourself and your own personal goals versus feeling like you are failing God and the journey he put you on? I guess God would always know what your journey is going to look like, so you can’t really fail someone who already knew you wouldn’t succeed. But I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe that we are all confined to the one preconceived pathway that a deity has decided for us. I am meant to perform and to be successful, but that doesn’t mean it is set in stone that I will. The choices I make are what will ultimately decide the pathway of my life.
I’ve never been someone that is particularly afraid of aging. However, with turning another year older, I have suddenly been thinking about my own personal success in a much more existential way. As gruesome as it is, I thought of laying on my deathbed, never having accomplished my dreams or achieved my grandest idea of success. It is completely and utterly terrifying. I don’t fear the “nothingness” after death, I fear the dread that would come before. If I had all of those years of my life behind me, and throughout all of them, I was never once able to fulfill my dreams, THAT would be the most devastating part of it all.
I don’t want an “ordinary” life. I have tried over and over again to redefine success for myself, but it always comes back to performing. I can run away from it as much as I want, but every time I turn around, that version of success is still lingering, and I don’t think it will ever go away. Do I want it to go away? I don’t really know. This isn’t to say my life is completely derailed. I am so fulfilled in the other aspects of my life; I have amazing friends, an amazing family, and an incredible partner. I live in the greatest city in the world, I have a soulmate bond with my pet, and I have my health. I don’t want it to seem like I am taking all of these precious things for granted, because I understand how lucky I am to be in the position I am in. That’s why I almost feel guilty for saying I don’t feel complete without my creative performance success, because I don’t want to take away from the fantastic parts of my life.The fulfillment of all of these other aspects of my life is different from the fulfillment I get from performing. I try not to compare my fulfillment from my relationships with others to the fulfillment of performing, mostly spare my mind of even more contention between convincing myself that I am already fulfilled, and the fear that I never will be.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a story where it all gets tied up with a ribbon at the conclusion. More than anything, this is a stream of consciousness that has been building up as I approach the conclusion of my first quarter of a century. As scary as the passage of time is becoming to me, it will be interesting to look back at this in a year and see who I have become since writing this. I never know what lies ahead, and maybe right now needs to be a little darker so that my future chines that much brighter.
grace nyberg
