Sloppy Firsts

"I don't know anything."
-November 5, 2010

I wrote this, first semester of my junior year. This was the time when acting became "serious". Unitards, crying jags, Checkovian  pause serious. I was in class, steeped in the sorrow that only can come from foolishly expecting that I was supposed to be a finished product so early on. I was convinced that if I was to ever be anybody in this industry that I needed all the answers, right then and there, that I had been in training for this long I should have solidified my brand and known exactly what the "right" choices that a black actress of my type should make. With the undue stress that this put on me, I started to crack, question the validity of all my choices, if I even had a place in the theatre, if I was really an artist at all or just the weird girl who had a lotta feelings.

When I penned those words, I saw it as the rueful admission that I was somehow lacking the stuff to make me an actress. Now, nearing the icy precipice of Get A Real Job Land, I'm thinking of that phrase as a bit of liberation. 

Somedays I wake up and think, honestly, what the fuck are you doing? May is coming faster than a fat kid down a water slide, and the collegiate cocoon is about to break wide open. And while I know I have more questions than answers about the world I'm trying to break into, I'm welcoming the mess and the confusion on a day by day basis.  I'm a work in process, my work is messy, sloppy, incomplete, sometimes God-awful, but I got something that's been growing  as a result of classical training and faith. Its growth is inconsistent, but I get glimpses of it just when I need it. It's the belief that I'm on the path that I need to be on, that somewhere in the margins of scripts near the smudged pencil marks and torn corners is where I belong.

I don't have a clue as to what's ahead, but I'm blessed to be where I am. I got no interest in making my art something neat and polished, but I'm devoted to making my art honest and beholden to who I am. 

Til next.