I recently met up with a fellow actor friend for coffee. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we had a lot to catch up on. We finally got to the part of the conversation where we both talked about our challenges this past year, how we felt stuck in certain places in our respective careers. We ruminated over some projects that fell apart last minute or how we were this close to booking that role that could’ve changed everything. We talked about how it can feel like you’re in the middle of a career desert sometimes, one so vast that you convince yourself you may never, ever get out of it.
It’s a common back-and-forth among the majority of my artistically minded friends. It’s very rare to get together with any one of my actor friends and have them say they’re doing spectacularly. Sure, it’s great when you’re actually working, but you don’t want to rub it in, and you also know that job will eventually come to a close as well. It can feel like there’s a constant deficit when you’re in the downtime. My friend told me she was looking forward to having consistent work this spring; she’d booked a job that came to her through happenstance. It was simply a fun experiment with friends that morphed into a fully funded project. It was a great example of letting rhyme and reason go in this business, trusting that if you just do what speaks to you on an intuitive level, things will eventually fall into place. But she also talked about the preceding 10 months, during which she fell into a tailspin after not booking anything or even enjoying auditioning.
We talked a lot about that cycle and how it’s easy to get stuck in your own narrative. You start to justify things to yourself in order to rationalize the irrational and self-protect. I’ve told myself a variety of things to impose some sort of order: “Well, I guess I’m just a New York actor and L.A. doesn’t respond as well to me….”; “I guess I play this type of character now since I’m getting older….”; “I just don’t feel like looking for new representation because no one seems to get me….”
Sure, it’s easy for people to tell you not to limit yourself, to tell you to “think outside the box,” and to just keep hanging in there. But at a certain point, we have to construct these rationalized excuses to make sense of the chaos. I don’t know if there is any way to prevent oneself from doing this. I think I’ll always have moments of doubt and I will make up a variety of excuses for why I feel the way I feel. The important thing is to practice breaking these narratives and tossing them out the window. A new narrative will eventually pop up in its place, I’m sure, but it’s so much easier to negotiate once you know you’ll break free of it. It’s almost like the monster under the bed—it seems ever-present the more you think about it until you actually lean down and realize there’s nothing there.
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