Letting Go Of Your Safety Net

It’s easy to proclaim, “I wanna be an actor!” when you’re five and your parents are supportive. Your first grade classmates choose similarly daring careers like “president!” and “astronaut!” and “dinosaur!” Life choices come so naturally when you’re too young to understand the danger of an artist’s life. When you’re killin’ it as Pollyanna at your community theater and people won’t stop talking about your potential. When boxed mac and cheese is a treat your mom makes when your friends come over to play, not a way to stretch your last bucks to eat something and still have the fare to get to work. (Not artwork. Work.)

When did things start getting tricky? Maybe it’s the first time you auditioned for a play and were completely ignored. Maybe you hit high school and discovered heavy metal, flannel and the innate coolness of angsty depression. Maybe you lost your safety net just when you figured it’d be there, and suddenly there wasn’t enough room for survival and your dream.

In my case, my dad died, after a battle with cancer that left my family emotionally and financially gutted. But I couldn’t stay home and mourn — my gut said if I stayed, I would stop. I’d fallen desperately in love with a guy, and after the funeral I moved in with him, alienating my family and cutting myself off from my childhood.

I was 18, with two suitcases, an empty wallet and a dream deferred.

I found a job waiting tables. I made just enough. I stayed up late writing and went through the day exhausted. I made a little more money. Life got routine. I found a new community theater and landed some roles, enjoyed them immensely, didn’t mind that I wasn’t getting paid. I started working at the box office. I was an actor, right? It was like a real-world version of what I always wanted. My true five-year-old manifesto was faded enough for me to interpret it into something convenient. But at night, when I picked up my pen, it showed up like I’d said it yesterday. I remember it taunting me, refusing to fade. But how was it even relevant when I was struggling to pay rent and still have a little fun? I was working hard — didn’t I at least deserve that?

Seriously, how easy is it to compromise years of your life?

But maybe, just when you’re about to settle on a sensible kind of living with an easy job and an okay relationship and not much to look forward to, your childhood dream seriously won’t leave you alone. You try to explain it away — too risky, too idealistic, something that requires more skill than you have, you don’t know the right people, to try is to fail. But you’re still the one who came up with that crazy idea, and you realize an easy life was never what you really wanted — to the point where the life you’ve compromised on has to change, STAT.

You know you have to do something, but dreams don’t come with a color-coordinated opportunity. You’re unsure. You wait another day and you lose that day. You’re scared.

And then this one day starts out basically like every other day, and you’re at your desk, and you lift your eyes, and the kid-dream in you unmistakably speaks (in your adult vocabulary):

“Fuck This Shit.”

So you Fuck That Shit. You look beyond your routine and you don’t look back. You make plans knowing they might not work, but you don’t care anymore — if you stay, you’ll stop. Instead of spending your money and time on shopping or hobbies or a night out with friends, you spend everything that’s not rent on your career — and just like that, it’s a career! Maybe the guy you’ve lived with for years suddenly objects to your new life, and you kick him to the curb. You go back to waiting tables so you can have extra time to audition and shmooze. You go to professional mixers and tip the bartender to put soda water and lime in a cocktail glass so it looks like you can afford a cocktail. Maybe you go back to school — the ultimate investment — and become savvy and meet people at the cost of your sanity and long-term financial freedom.

You make a lot of mac and cheese.

You graduate, save up and move to New York City, that mecca of theater, knowing you’re arriving along with thousands of starry-eyed artists who are most likely younger and richer than you. You go to open calls, but as you audition, the person who can give you the job doesn’t even look up. When you do get feedback, it’s discouraging. You’re not quite right, ever. You try not to get desperate. You’re alone and restless. You start to resent your five-year-old self for not proclaiming, “I want to be a comfortably well-off person who does something reasonable and stable!” But you threw away your safety net, and what’s the point of making another one?

So you hang on, not onto a net, but onto your dream. Past the point when reasonable people give up, after those kids who moved to New York with you moved back. You sell everything, and you live small as you think big. You keep honing your craft and you keep looking for opportunity. You have nothing more to lose than your dream, and it’s finally in focus. You attempt the terrifying process of creating your own work; it fails pretty horrifically; you do it again; it fails but maybe not as disastrously; you do it again. And when you do get the chance to do your stuff, it comes from a place that nothing else can touch: the source of you.

And who knows? Maybe after countless auditions and workshops, one casting director finally looks up at you and says, “Hmmm.” Maybe a couple years later, you land a job that puts you in a union. You find a company of artists that gets you, and you act out your dreams together, and you feel less alone. Maybe things get a little easier — just a little. And you know at any point you can lose all your progress, or your day job, or your apartment. But you know you’re making progress because that dream is in full 3D technicolor radiance, stronger than any safety net you ever thought you had. And when you think of what you wanted to be when you grow up, you can smile and relish that you’re here doing it.

I’m here doing it. Somewhere between the starry-eyed girl reading audition notices in her hometown paper and my current thrilling-slash-terrifying reality of working steady as an actor in NYC, I ditched my safety net — but I never lost my dreamcatcher.

Hang onto that dream, keep it safe, trust that you deserve it. And when the time is wrong, be it.