I'm just gonna jump right in here:
I'm having a hard time.
Not an awful time, no. But a hard one.
I've felt for a while that life is about balancing, and freelance life perhaps even more so. And freelance life with a child? EVEN even more so. So...I know this. But the seesaw has just been even more extreme these last few months, for some reason. Is it that I have a full-fledged toddler now? Is it that this is my 35th year on mama earth and that is a thought that is striking me weirdly hard? Is it that one of my first shows of the year tapped into some tough new places for me? So I did this really hard thing and found some new artistic territory and now, months later, I am still emotionally reeling but my career is probably in the exact same place as it was before the show, or even a year ago, or even two or three years ago because this profession does not care how much experience I have, how much time or heart I put into my craft, if I don't look a certain way then there may not even be a role for me in a company's season to begin with, much less the chance to read it, then the perfect alignment of things allowing me to get cast?
Is is because what I do for a living is manipulate AIR? So there is literally nothing to show for any of the YEARS' worth of plays I have helped to make? My "body of work" is a list on paper...the fragments of impressions in my brain, in scattered others' brains...when I want for my body of work, my LIFE'S work, to CREATE A WHOLE NEW FRICKIN' MOUNTAIN somewhere upon the earth?
Sitting on the couch, feeling the sullen resentment of not-another-audition. don't make me. I don't want to. I will NOT practice my pieces. I will NOT share my heart anymore. Seeing the way the season has bent. The way the last year has bent. The little imps in the knots of your hair begin to whisper-maybe it's a sign. Maybe you aren't who you think you are. Maybe you just get two really good years and you already had them. Then you see a post like this one. What?! THAT person feels this way too? Well I know for certain that what has or has not come about thus far means nothing in regards to who she is, the unique voice she offers the world, the certainty that if anyone is, SHE is a REAL artist. So then maybe I am too. Maybe we just all in this incredibly up and down heartbreak and joy business together. That always looks better from the outside or afar or on facebook. Like Ann Lammot writes in Grace (Eventually):
ReplyDelete"That's me trying to make any progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image: scootch, scootch, stall, scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark."