The following Career Dispatches essay was written by stage and screen actor Marin Ireland, who stars in the new season of Netflix’s “Umbrella Academy,” now streaming.
I want to write something for all of you artists out there that will help. Something cheery and brassy and inspiring, something charming and hopeful yet wry, something that will make you like me but also linger forever. But I am going to fail at that. This is me failing. This is a strange and sad time, a time where many of us are trying to think about why we do what we do, where our sense of purpose as artists lives now—from existential grappling to systemic dismantling to deeply personal excavation. In the space that my privilege allows me in this moment, I’ve been trying to reckon with (among many, many things) dreams that don’t come true and dreams that do, and how to balance gratitude and ambition.
I thought I’d make it personal today. And share some thoughts. Fragments of thoughts. It’s the best I can do, in case someone else out there can relate. It might feel like we’re holding hands.
How to Audition for Netflix I was supposed to be working now, working on something I had attached all kinds of hopes and expectations to—I was demanding internally, desperately, that something more needed to happen for me, that where I was in my life and my career was not enough.
I think because the little girl in me had the fantasy that when I achieved the level of success I dreamed of, I would know it by this sweet, warm honey of ease and relaxation that would spread through me. My extremities would feel like they were always socked and mittened. I’d feel Right.
And one day last year, I was driving home at 6 a.m. from a low-low-budget night shoot in the middle-of-nowhere Texas, and I was hit so hard with this one thought that it actually took my breath away. Like I’d been hit in the chest with a baseball. I couldn’t breathe in. My eyes started to well up and I pulled over and started gasping for air. I was crying but not in any way I’d ever experienced before. I felt like I was inventing a new way of doing it.
The thought was, Why aren’t I big enough? Why do I feel so small? Did I think this was the size I should be? Maybe when I hold myself up to people I think are big enough to deserve expression and find myself wanting, I’m looking through a lens I scrounged out of junkyard shit that absolutely does not fit medical-grade standards.
When I think of my work as an act of service, as a devotional act, I feel good about myself. I feel, finally, useful. I feel like my life has meaning. Devoting my time to my own self feels like shrinking. It smells like solipsism and reality TV and microwave dinners. So, how do I let the idea that I am big enough to be worthy somehow build a bridge to genuinely being useful on this enormous, wounded planet? My carefully constructed house of extreme humility was my only way to understand usefulness.
READ: How to Reclaim Your Power as an Actor
But in the middle of all this, in the middle of all this suspended time, I keep thinking about letting go. What if we let go of what we thought things would look like or feel like right now or in the next few months? Can we all let go a little of the old tools we used to gauge ourselves?
If I’m climbing up a mountain, and it keeps getting rockier, and I don’t see the top (if there is one), what if there’s a sign right here that says, “You made it!” Maybe we could sit down here for a moment. And just breathe.
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