Journal 10: Some thoughts from my brain.

To undergrad theatre students everywhere:

                    Be yourself. And I don’t just mean listen to the music you want to listen to and wear the clothes you want to wear without worrying about what people think. I mean don’t be afraid to share with people the things that make you tick. Stand up for what YOU believe in. Don’t try and fit in for the crowd for the sake of fitting in. Let your personality shine through in your work. Be involved when you want to be involved but you don’t have to do everything. Be able to help people, just out of the kindness of your heart but know how and when to say no. Love your friends and be loyal to them but remember you don’t have to go along with the crowd all the time. Be thoughtful. Treat other people how you would want to be treated. You don’t have to be friends with everybody, but be kind to everyone and keep an open mind about other people. We are all here for the same reason: we love theatre. So know that the person next to you is here for the same reason and never underestimate anyone else’s passion for theatre. Always put yourself in the other person’s shoes before you make a judgement or get upset. Especially if it’s someone you don’t really know, you never know what that person has been through or what they have really going on. 

                     Pick your battles wisely. Know when and where to keep your head down and when you should stand up for an opinion that may be unpopular. Do the work that you want to do. Get good grades, finish school, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, but by no means listen to people saying you should do this or that. Do the work you want to do the place you want to do it with the people you want to work with it. Remember there’s more to your college experience than college itself. It’s four (or five) whole years of your life. Have a life outside of school. Stay close to your family and your old friends. Have hobbies and interests outside of school. Have a way to unwind whether that’s painting a room in our house or cooking yourself a nice meal at the end of the week. Don’t wait until you graduate to plan for the future. Do lot’s of research, look for opportunities, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Be okay with being alone. You won’t always live with a bunch of roommates or be able to be constantly surrounded with friends so find the joy and the peace in just being by yourself. 

                  Don’t worry, no one else know’s what they’re doing either. We are all just trying to figure it out together. Everyone else feel’s like they don’t have their act together either. If you feel behind and like you have a million things to do just make a list for yourself and check it off one thing at a time. If you’re worried worrying is not going to help. Take it one step at a time. Being productive feels really good. Set up a system where you reward yourself for being productive. Complete a reading assignment? Watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix. Write a paper? Go and get yourself a milkshake. I don’t know about you but when my space is neat, my mind is neat. Hanging up the pile of clothes in my room or cleaning that sink full of dishes really makes me feel like I have time to sit down and think about that project I have to do. 

Journal 9: Am I annoying? Is this annoying you? Are you sure? How bout now?

I feel like my self worth goes back and forth across various extremes. I also feel like my self worth (and admittedly this is a little unhealthy) is directly related to stress/productivity and success/outside validation. The little voice (I typed “vice” the first time on accident ironically) goes from “Wow look at you, that was successful. Things are great. You’re talented and beautiful and you deserve happiness and success” to “Who are you kidding. You’ll never succeed and you’ll be miserable because you’re not very attractive, you're not talented enough, and you’re dumb and lazy.” Like I said, extremes. Particularly the last couple months i’ve had the latter attitude about my self worth. Between being behind in school work and not having much success personally or for my career I’ve been in a bit of a slump. I’m at one of those points where I’m thinking, “Okay, somethings got to give. This thing coming up is gonna work out. This is gonna go great and be the thing that breaks this cycle of negativity.” Then I don’t get whatever it is and the self worth sinks a little more. I will be the first one to admit that I need to look more to myself for positive self worth and positivity. I don’t generally consider myself a negative person, but I think I have a bad habit of looking for validation from other people to get me going. A lot of times this validation comes from getting cast in a show. Anyone who has known me for a long time can tell you. I am my happiest when I’m in a show and i’m at my most unhappy in long chunks of time where I am not working on a show. I guess subconsciously when someone puts me in a show it’s kind of like them saying, “Hey it’s valid that you love theatre because you’re actually kind of good at it and by the way, you’re attractive enough that people won’t mind having to look at you on stage for two hours.” I’m aware that this is silly and I should know and believe these things automatically it’s just one of the little things about me I need to work on. I would like to find a happy medium between these two extreme states of self worth. I would like to be able to think about myself and say, “Hey, you're pretty smart and you’re a good person and you deserve happiness. You’re gonna be okay it’s gonna be a great day.” But it’s just a really hard thing for me. I blame part of this “looking for  validation” thing on rough experiences in elementary and middle school. I didn’t have a lot of friends and the kids I went to school with were pretty mean so I kind of felt like something wrong with me. I remember when I was in Annie was 11 and I invited a couple of the other orphan girls over to my house. I asked one of them if I was annoying and told her to make sure to tell me if I was being annoying and I would stop. It was really sad but I just assume that people weren’t going to like me. While I have lots of wonderful friends and have had lots of success since bing that award middle school girl there’s still a part of me that still feels the need to check in with people to make sure that I’m still okay and still an acceptable human being. I think once I can figure out how to just be comfortable and confident on my own I will be a little bit healthier of a human being. 

Journal Entry 8: Not your mama's belief system.

I think a big part of growing up for everybody is realizing the things that have been sort of imprinted on you as far as your beliefs and customs and asking “Why?” and deciding what you’re gonna keep and what you're gonna throw out. It’s kind of like cleaning out your closet. You know that dress really worked for you 4 years ago when you wore it to your cousin’s wedding, but it’s not 2011 anymore and it just doesn’t fit you the way it used to. I think it’s hard for us to understand why some people believe the things that they believe. I think some people take more from their upbringing than others. Some people do a complete 180 and don’t want anything to do with their pasts and their families and some people stay in one place all their lives and believe everything their parents told them to. I think both of these can be unhealthy to a degree. I’ve definitely made my own decisions about what I believe and stand by, or maybe more so what I don’t believe in. I think people are scared to question and wonder and scared to have those hard conversations. Often times (and I especially notice this with my mom and people of her generation) I will ask her why she believes something, and her response is something like, “That’s just what I believe.” There’s no real explanation or reasoning. I think in my mind at least there’s a pattern in people of my mother’s generation (the whole fear of God generation) especially living in the south, where they just accepted everything their parents told them about race and religion and sex and never asked “why?” or “why not?”. I think as artists we have a responsibility to ask “why?” Especially as an actor, I might be asked to be play someone with beliefs completely opposite of my own. I need to then, as an actor, be able to look at that character without judgement and try to find something in their belief system that I identify with or a reason why they believe what they believe. I’ve gotten to a certain point with some things that I just know to avoid talking about them to my mom. Religion and LGBT rights are two topics that I know mom and I will just have to agree to disagree on. The difference is, I feel like I’ve thought about “both sides” of the situation and have chosen the most ethically sound option where as I feel like my mom just chooses whichever side has been planted in her head is correct. Maybe this thinking isn’t fair to her, but that’s just how I see it sometimes. I feel lucky and grateful to have escaped the “regurgitating of parents exact beliefs” syndrome that seems to be especially prevalent in the ultra conservative south. There’s a certain life model that is the “norm” I guess for most of the people where I’m from and that is, “Grow up, graduate college, find another white, straight, catholic person to marry, have children and a job, and take care of your parents when they get older (all of which you do in the same 30 mile radius” I feel like as someone who is consciously breaking some of these life pattern norms it is very important for me to form strong opinions about religious, political, and social issues and not just believe them but be able to back them up and have civl grown up conversations with anyone who wishes to talk to me about these issues. 

Journal 7: But i'm not Asian...

For me, probably the greatest moment of sychronicity in my life was being cast in Avenue Q at Theatre Baton Rouge. It came at a time in my life when I was beginning to doubt that I had a future in theatre, or the kind of future I wanted in theatre. I was in my junior year as a theatre major at NSULA and with each year in the program my hope of being successful in the program dwindled more and more. From the day I first auditioned for the program I was consistently told that I was very talented and had a fantastic voice but for whatever reason time after time I would audition and not be cast. At NSU, there was a musical theatre concentration that you had to audition to get into, and part of that was a dance audition. I was never a great dancer, but I would be in dance classes with people even less coordinated than I was and I would see them get into the concentration and not me. It was very frustrating. I was cast twice, once to come on in the last 10 minutes of the show and sing a single line of a song, and the second time I was more or less a costumed stage hand. I had to keep on taking voice lessons and working on my own to try to keep my love of theatre alive. I was pigeon holed into working in the costume shop and being a costume designer by the department because they knew I could sew and I had a love for fashion, but they just didn’t understand that that wasn’t what I wanted to do. A friend of mine at school told me that her dad was  board member at Theatre Baton Rouge and they were going to be doing a production of Les Mis during the summer and that I should audition. I did go and audition and got several callbacks but in the end I was not cast. For some reason though, that part of me that has drive and ambition and forces me to keep going kicked in and I decided to see what other shows they were doing in their season. The next show was Avenue Q, and it was going to be over with the day before I started school so I could feasibly do the show and then go back to Natchitoches for when school started. That was when I hit my limit with school. One of the faculty members that was a mentor to me told me that it was very possible that we were going to be doing Thoroughly Modern Millie in the coming season. She wasn’t the only one, we were hinted at left and right that we were almost certainly doing the show. Millie is one of my dream roles so I immediately thought to myself, “This is my chance. This is meant for me. I’m the best person for the job.” So because I was obsessed with the 1920’s at the time and I had been thinking about it anyway, I bobbed my hair in the hopes that it would help my professors “see me in the part.” Well the joke was on me, because the following week the new season was announced at the big musical was going to be Hairspray, not Millie as we had been told. I was so angry that I marched straight to the office of the most despicable professor in the department (who controls everything whether she’ll admit it or not) and basically yelled at her about how hurt and mistreated and underused I felt (not my proudest most professional moment but it was true all the same). That’s when I decided that I couldn’t stay there anymore and I would transfer to LSU. The following weekend (with my newly bobbed hair) I went to Baton Rouge to audition for Avenue Q. I was thought that the only part I would possibly be right for was Kate Monster, but largely thanks in part to my hair I was called back for Christmas Eve and got the part. Not only did this renew my faith in myself and my future in theatre, but I found a family and a home away from home and some of the best friends I will ever have. The next year was the happiest I have ever experienced. 

Journal 6 - The Present is called The Present for a Reason.

While Julia Cameron’s definition of the word Kriya may be a bit off technically I don’t think her definition and the actual definition are completely unrelated. While she describes a psychosomatic occurrence that comes after a time of duress, this could be a sign that we need to take action (the literal definition of the word) and change our circumstances. Sometimes there are circumstances outside of our control of course, but sometimes we just need a change. A change of scenery, a change of habits, a change in fortune, a change. No matter what our situation we can almost always take some sort of action to make things better for ourselves. A Kriya, in Cameron’s sense of the word, is the warning sign that our body and mind have reached a sort of limit or that we’ve reached some fork in the road. I know for me personally, many time a Kriya comes in the form of a cold sore. I have since I was little been prone to getting cold sores. In recent years I have come to associate them with particularly stressful or upsetting situations. A breakup, a big project i’ve procrastinated on, a stressful finals week, juggling a particularly hectic schedule. There’s the cold sore like clockwork. I know i’m in a particularly stressful situation when I find myself thinking: I bet i’m gonna get a cold sore. And I’m usually right. Either that or I’ll get sick. 

Now for task two. I find it difficult to think of myself as eighty years old. I hope I live a long, happy, and fulfilling life, but I’m one of those people that is usually either looking back and analyzing things i’ve said or done or looking forward to the next big thing. If I don’t have a “what’s next” I find myself being very unhappy. That’s probably partially why the last couple months (and the upcoming few most likely) have been hard for me; because i’m graduating and I don’t know what’s next. I don’t know what the next source of excitement is going to come from. I don’t know the next show i’ll be doing cause I don’t know where I’ll be or who I’ll be with. That being said, reflecting on my distant future is difficult because I’ll kind of be done with the “what’s next”. I won’t have anything to look forward to. I don’t want children so I won’t have grandchildren. It’s hard for me to imagine myself married so I might be all alone with nothing to look forward to and no one to care about me and  nothing to look forward to and that’s really scary. So i guess if there’s any advice I can give myself (to apply to my life now) is to stop worrying about the past and the future so much and just live in the present. Because the fact is you can’t change the past and you can’t predict the future so there’s no use worrying about bad things that might never happen or things that you might have done differently. I would tell myself to find the joy in every day. Handle the disappointments with grace and seize every opportunity that comes your way. Don’t forget to breathe. There’s no time like the present. And find happiness in any form you can get it in. And once you find that happiness share it. 

I find this blog post to be a particularly emotional one for me to write for some reason. I think i’m having a sort of mini Krya as a result of letting everything build up. If you keep on worrying about all the stuff you have to do but you keep on putting it off anyway then it’s not gonna get better. Anywho. What would I tell my eight year old self? You are so special and beautiful and loved. The other people your age don’t understand you because you have wisdom beyond your years and a great big heart. Don’t worry about whether they like you or not. I know even now that fitting in and having everyone like you seems awfully important and that you let yourself get hurt but your life is going to be so completely different from all those other kids. You are going to be an artist. You are going to create art and beauty that bring you and others joy. You will love yourself and you will be loved by others. I’m not saying it will all be easy and fun, because it won’t be. You’ll have to work hard. For God’s sake keep taking dancing lessons. You’ll need it later. Keep singing. Keep wondering. Challenge the world around you, that’s okay. Have fun in whatever way you’d like to have fun. You will never grow out of playing dress up and that’s a beautiful thing. When Mawmaw says other people aren’t nice to you because they’re jealous I know you don’t believe her but she’s right. And I love you.