I know it’s been a while since my last update, but this is the big news.
Well I did something I’ve been thinking about for a long time the other day. I filed my forms for FAFSA and had the government send it off to a bunch of graduate schools. I also filled out most of my paperwork for this years URTAs in February.
Scary.
What brought all of this on you ask? Well, that’s a good question. I think there are a few contributing factors.
First–
Need to change.
I’ve been feeling a little restless lately I’ve never been one to let my life become too static and I feel very much at the end of my proverbial rope with my current workplace. There’s not anything wrong with where I work (other than the usual day-to-day gripes of any office job) but I’m just not very happy here. I remember the title of a book that my parents had when I was a little kid, it was called Do What You Love and the Money will Follow. I was far too small to actually read the book at the time, and there’s certainly no guarantee that it contains any deep secrets of occupational bliss, but every once in a while I think about the title and silently agree with its sentiment. I feel like I’m far too young and responsibility free not to be doing what I love.
Second–
It’s not impossible.
After I got a real job and started living on my own I had mentally filed going to grad school as something whose time had passed, but something happened to change that about a month ago when I was sent to a conference for new academic professionals as a prize for being the âœoutstanding new academic employee of the yearâ at work. The conference was meant for people in the field of academic administration, specifically in student affairs. The funny part is I am not really involved with student affairs at all; I’m a computer technician who happens to work within student affairs. This made for a rather dull weekend, probably 95% of the conference had no bearing on what I do, but there was one segment (called a “break-out session”, a term that conjures up all kinds of incorrect imagery) that was about getting graduate degrees that got me thinking about grad programs. The people on the discussion panel were telling us their experiences in grad school and generally what a wonderful experience it was. More importantly they discussed it in ways that made it seem less impossible. They talked about how to raise money for it and how to make time for it. Some of them did it while raising large families and holding down full time jobs. If they could do it, I thought, why can’t I?
Third–
I realized why I studied acting.
I tried twice to get into the North Carolina School of the Arts, once before my freshmen year of college and once after my freshmen year of college when I had decided that UNCA wasn’t for me and I transferred out (which is another story for another time). Before each audition session the man who ran the auditions gave a little speech to us and one of the things he said that stuck with me was that true actors don’t act because they want to, they act because they have to. For a long time I convinced myself that’s the way it was with me. I believed I’d simply become an un-happy wreck of a worthless human being if I wasn’t acting, that my very soul burned to be on stage all of the time. I put a lot of pressure on myself to live up to this idea; after all, it would be pretty tragic if I wasn’t very good at the one thing I had to do.
I can remember the moment I started to realize I was wrong. I was sitting in Don’s acting class listening to him give someone a note about their scene. I understood the note but whoever was receiving it didn’t quite follow what Don was saying and I had the sudden urge to try to help Don explain. I scribbled down my own interpretation of their note on my notepad and the thought entered my head:
“You know, I love this. I’d love to have Don’s job. It’s got to be the best thing in the world to help people learn about acting…”
It was one of those moments when you consciously recognize something you have known for a long time, it was as simple a truth as 2 + 2 = 4.
As the afternoon wore on the implications of that thought slowly began to come to me. If I’m not acting I won’t die, my soul doesn’t burn to be on stage every second of every day. I love acting but I don’t want to be a professional actor. I enjoy the rehearsal and the classroom far more than the performance– that is where I need to be.
It took me a few days to get my head around all of this. A part of me was relieved because I was finally admitting all of this to myself and another part was terrified that I might have just spent three years trying to become something that I wasn’t right for. I went to Don and asked him about becoming a college professor. Don told me he understood how I felt and that for now the best thing would be to finish my training and then come back to the idea of teaching. So I did. I packed it all away in a corner of my brain reserved for such grand plans and ideas and finished my training.
When I graduated in May of 2000 I attempted to get into grad school but I confess screwed the whole thing up. I wasn’t properly prepared, I didn’t do my research and I paid the price. Of the three schools I applied to I was waitlisted at two and not accepted by the third (or was it the other way around).
So here I am again. I’ll be ready this time. We’ll see what happens.
This is the first time I’ve put all of this down in writing, and it’s taken me a lot longer than I thought it would to get all this into words. I beg your indulgence if it rambles on a bit.
As a side note– I think the reason I decided to study acting in the first place was that somewhere in my high school brain circa about December of 1995 I decided that I needed a career path. I had found that I had some natural talent for acting in high school and it was something that I enjoyed and in a casual and almost arbitrary way I decided that this was going to be my life’s path. There really wasn’t anything more than that. There was no impassioned burning of my soul or anything even close. It was a snap decision coming from some kind of peer pressure to make up my mind how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It’s pretty amazing the impact such a small decision can make on your life isn’t it?
