The Nightmare is the Way

Warning this is a raw unedited Journal Entry. It shows my mind at a point of darkness when I wrote to release the pain and hopefully find some hope. I don't feel this way everyday, but these are the thoughts I have sometimes as a person who struggles with clinical depression and ADHD. This is my mind's journey on a dark day. 

What are you supposed to do when you too terrified to go after your biggest dreams in life? The answers most self-help gurus or well meaning friends and mentors give are obvious and I've heard them all before, but they don't actually solve my problem. I am terrified to go after what I really want in life so I self-sabotage every step of the way. All I've ever wanted to do was be an actress. I remember being 10 years old and begging my parents to take me to an audition with an acting agency that was passing out fliers at the mall. They said my brother and I were photogenic and even at age 10 I knew they were lying, at least about me.  I was born with a left eyelid slightly lower than my right and I knew my lack of symmetry made me less attractive. I didn't exactly think of myself as ugly, but not on par with any actors or even the cool girls at school. The cool girls at school made me quite aware of that by talking behind my back about how weird I was. At least the boys would say it to my face "what's wrong with your eye?" It didn't help that my well intentioned mother was trying to find ways to help me get my eye "fixed". On one level I wanted my eye fixed and to be normal, but on the other hand it did seem like the surgery wasn't necessary for my sight, just necessary to make me normal looking. I will say the surgery did help my self-esteem for a while as my eye did finally look normal, but as an adult it has lowered my self-esteem in large part to the fact that now on my aging face the eyelid is starting to droop again and since they pulled the eye up when I was a kid I now have two eyebrows that are uneven. I wear glasses now too and the fact that they are straight makes my uneven eyebrows look crooked. Most people I meet say they have no idea my eyelid is lower than the other or that one eyebrow is higher than the other. But I see it in the mirror and every photo. Again, I don't feel ugly, but I also don't feel that pretty. I also feel like there's little point in makeup since it never goes on my eyes evenly. The two eyelids are vastly different shapes and require different styles of eyeliner, eyelash curling and even different contacts, when I wear contacts. In short I did not feel pretty enough at 10 to be an actress, and I don't feel that much better now. 

However, consciously now as an adult I have the awareness that you don't have to be pretty to be an actress. It definitely doesn't hurt, and may be required for 99% of leading lady roles, but there is an increasing need for real looking humans in the acting world now. However, I still can't help but think that it would at least be preferable for even the ugly actors and actresses to have symmetrical faces so at the very least the makeup artists have an easier time with them. Even Steve Buscemi has a symmetrical face albeit a weird one. Speaking of Steve apparently he was randomly punched by some stranger on the streets of Manhattan just for no reason yesterday. I wouldn't have known that if I didn't stop to google to make sure his face was indeed more symmetrical than mine. Turns out it definitely is, even after being punched. So I guess my conscious mind doesn't really get a say in the reality of my life. If Steven Buscemi seems to be more symmetrical than me, then my subconscious decides I am a monster and that's the end of that. 

Back to age 10, it turns out that agent wasn't legit anyway. They wanted to charge us $1000 to join the agency, which is a huge red flag. However, once my parents said no its not like we then worked together as a family to find out what the correct way to get into acting was. We lived 2 hours away from LA, but my parents both worked and the internet was barely a thing. We didn't know how and we didn't put that much effort into finding out how. Honestly, as a kid I just thought that was my only chance and since my parents didn't want to pay the $1000 that was it for me.

So I couldn't get an agent, but I could at least be in the school plays right? I did one play in 5th grade and in some ways I loved it, but ultimately my low self-esteem got the best of me. I wanted to be cool and liked by the other older girls in the play and I just couldn't shake the feeling that they found me annoying. Truth is they probably thought I was both cute and annoying because they were like 2-3 years older than me. That's pretty normal, but I internalize things so to me, it wasn't about the typical age difference dynamic, it was about me, I was broken and nobody could like me unless I did something nice for them like all the time, and even then I'd still be annoying. 

Skip ahead to the next time I tried for a play in 8th grade. I was terrified to sing out loud for the audition. I felt like I was a terrible singer compared to everyone else. I never had a single singing lesson, but I didn't even know that was a thing. I thought you were either born a good singer like my best friend Loni, or you weren't. I felt I was somewhere in between, sometimes in the right lighting and acoustics I sounded decent, but other times I couldn't reach certain notes. It never occurred to me that practicing singing would make me better. When I didn't get the role I wanted in the play I was mortified and thought everyone heard how horrible I am and they just gave me a role in the choir out of pity. Both my two friends in the play got speaking roles because they had multiple experiences being in musical theater situations. I had none. None of this logic ever entered my mind. My parents didn't even drive me to these play rehearsals because they had work. I walked to them after school and caught rides with my friends home. I say this because I think typically someone with confidence, like Taylor Swift for example, would have had a mom or a dad there to say something like "you're just starting out, you gotta start from the bottom, its ok to mess up, you can get better." I think my friends who got actual roles in the play had parents that did that for them. That might have been just my perception, but that's what it seemed to me. My parents didn't discourage me, and they weren't totally absent. They would have come to the play and been proud and told me so. The problem is that neither of my parents had self-esteem either. My mom especially has one of the lowest self-esteems I've ever seen. So it didn't really matter if my parents had said "you can do it, you're amazing" because its hard to believe in encourage from someone who doesn't even believe in themselves. That said, they also didn't really say that to me as much as I might have needed because like I said they both were working pretty normal 9-5 or sometimes 9-6 type jobs and were not always aware of everything I was up to after school. So maybe it was this lack of encouragement, or the feeling mortified for having a loser role compared to my friends, but after a couple weeks of going to the play rehearsals I quit. The reason I gave for quitting, which honestly is valid, was that the director was mean. Although in 8th grade I would have use a more colorful word. The truth is the director was unnecessarily strict and direct with her direction. That's a lot of direct words, I mean she was a direct so I guess that's her job, but when you are working with kids who might be acting for the first time, some warmth, empathy and encouragement goes a long way. Maybe she was nicer than I thought, but with already having low self-esteem and someone being short with you, I took it personally. If I had gone in with high hopes and high self-esteem maybe her methods and style would have worked for me, but instead it just made me feel worse until everyday I wanted to cry and so I quit going. I did go see my friends in the play though. They were great. 

One, two skip a few, the next time I touched acting was in High School. We had a theater elective and I was actually allowed to join it, unlike my elitist middle school theater elective that for some reason I could never get in on. The teacher was warm, caring, funny and he boosted my confidence alot. I think his name was Mr. Chapman. That guy was cool. I even entered a talent competition of sorts where we performed an opening dancing act to the Cell Block Tango. It was so fun! However, I still didn't have the most confidence. When it came time for the school play auditions I was too afraid. I still thought I can't sing and I was scare to audition for that reason primarily. Maybe I could learn to dance a choreo, maybe I could learn to act, but I couldn't sing, and that you can't learn. You are born a good singer or a mediocre one, obviously, or so I thought. I remember seeing my friends and other theater kids audition and being so jealous. I wanted to audition, I just was so scared. What did fear feel like then? Did it feel like shaking in my boots as I walked by the theater door? Nope. It felt like me saying "ha ha look at those theater nerds, I am too cool for that. After school I get to makeout with my boyfriend instead of having to go to some rehearsal." And that is basically how fear shows up for a lot of us before we are aware of it for what it truly is, a farce. Our primitive brain and body are so good at protecting us from dangerous emotions like fear that we will tell ourselves anything to avoid those feelings and the things that cause them. If you notice in my entire story so far, I have a narrative of being a victim. I am afraid of my dream because of the kids that were mean to me, the unlucky birth with unsymmetrically face parts, the parents who didn't set a good example for me, the director who was unkind. And objectively in a lot of ways I was a victim as a child. I couldn't escape the hand I was dealt from birth. I was depressed before I even knew what the word "sad" meant, before I could even talk. I went through trauma and bullying and comparison, which was the worst torture of all. My parents blessed me by raising me in a nice fairly prosperous small town, but it was also a curse because compared to everyone in our town we were a broken family in poverty. If we had grown up in an actual poor part of town I would have comparatively felt rich. So even the things that were blessings added to my low self-esteem and broken self-concept. In a lot of ways I was a victim as a child. Not many things in my life felt good to me and I had very little control over bringing or keeping the good. I had loss at an early age. Loss of my childhood home due to income, loss of my family dynamic due to divorce,  loss of two of my best friends who moved away and I never heard from again, and even the loss of my treasured Ernie doll who was my security blanket in the hard times of age 2. I know people have gone through much worse than me, but very few that I meet seem to be as stuck as me by what they've been through. Maybe I am just not aware of how stuck they are, maybe they aren't either, but I know I am a ridiculously sensitive being and going through so many emotional things from such a young age as really broken me in a lot of ways. It's like turning a fire hose on a delicate flower. I would have been a sensitive child if I was raised in a super positive and peaceful home with healthy relationships and very little trauma. But being a sensitive child in the opposite, was pretty damn near unbearable. The worst part is the coping mechanisms I had to develop to handle being ultra sensitive in these situations were to become like the crab, put on a protective shell and clam up. I became so numb to things around me and I also reacted so stubbornly at times. I acted out and disobeyed authority just because I needed someone to see me. But the more I acted out the more they misjudged me. Othertimes, I would be silent and they would just assume I am feeling nothing, when on the inside I felt like I was drowning in pain. Sometimes I would stand up to others on the behalf of others. I couldn't protect myself, but I could stand up for my brother when someone made him cry or standup to my parents when they were fighting and scaring my brother. No one really saw what I was actually feeling or going through and I had no idea how to express that or even be aware of it myself. I often felt like I just wanted to die. As an adult who once was a teacher, it's really quite unbearable to think of a child as young as 7 feeling so alone and afraid that they wanted to die. So, maybe its fair to say as a child I was a victim.

I want to pause for a second to say that as I am writing this my lower back feels so sore and heavy. Its like all the emotions of this story of mine are stored in my lower back. I wish I understood more about Somatic therapy to know what that means and what to do with it. I really need to finish that book "The Body Keeps the Score." Everyone tells me that I should read it and I have tried, but I think people don't realize how super sensitive empathetic people who've gone through trauma sometimes just need to learn the techniques without having to listen to 13 hours of stories of other peoples trauma. I mean I feel traumatized just hearing about what these people went through. There was one tragic story in the book where a mom bent over to put her daughters seatbelt on while driving because it somehow hadn't been on. She did so to protect her daughter from any possibility of getting hurt in the chance of an accident. However, in doing so she looked away from the road and missed a red light and got in the accident she was trying to prevent, instantly killing her daughter. Like what the actual eff? Hearing that freakin wrecked me. I am sorry if I am now second handedly wrecking you as well. I mean I can't get that story out of my head and its been a year since I listened to that book. I can't stop thinking how horribly insanely unfairly tragic that is to lose someone because of something you did stupidly while trying to save them. I mean the guilt that mom must have felt. Being that she was in the book about therapy I assume that mom has had some help moving past that tragic event, but I don't know if I ever will. So yeah, I guess sidenote to say I can't read that book because it traumatizes me more than my actual trauma. 

Back to the story of why I am terrified to actually do my dream of acting or be happy in any real way.  By High School I was not a victim any longer. Yes I couldn't control my home life 100%, but I did have a car and my parents were very open to letting me have freedom of choice so I could do whatever I really wanted. I just lacked the self-esteem. I did have a good run in High School though. I did a lot of cool stuff like try out for the tennis team despite never playing tennis until lessons I had taken that summer by my moms forcing me to, I was on the Lions club, I even entered a terrifying speech contest.I tried really hard to do super well in school and get a 4.0 gpa, which I achieved. I was almost perfectionistic in my schoolwork I put so much effort into it, and I tried a bunch of different things to get a well rounded resume for college. But the one thing I would not do is try out for any plays. It wasn't until I went to a play with my boyfriend at the time that I realized how important acting was to me. I had this weird uncomfortable feeling watching the play. I was both delighted by the play and immensely sorrowful that I wasn't in the play myself. There was a lot of conflicting emotions because I really wanted to be up there on that stage, but I also strongly felt that my friends in the play were 1000% more talented than I could ever be. I thought I really don't deserve to be up there, but I really want to. It was hard to enjoy the play fully with such a painful longing to be part of it. That play was The Little Shop of Horrors. My best friend's sister played Audrey and my first boyfriend from 5th grade played Seymour. They were perfect and it was amazing. I wanted to be in that play one day so bad. I wanted to be Audrey, but I had no idea how that would ever be.

Enter college. My self-esteem was actually growing now because I was learning so many wonderful things from self-help books, from encouraging teachers from positive tv shows from all the messages kids got in the 90s and early 2000s about how you could be anything and do anything. Our culture was really starting to open up to the idea that people could get better at things and were not just stuck with one talent from birth. But even if they were stuck with one talent from birth, mine still would be the arts, as every adult in my life always said something about how creative I was. That didn't matter though I didn't believe them. What did matter is I was building my self-esteem with performance, but not in the arts, in literally life performance, mainly through the two P's Productivity and Perfectionism. As long as I could stay productive and do a really amazing job on my school work and other tasks assigned to me, then I had confidence and I was valuable. That is what got me through High School and its what I continued to rely on in college. However, it didn't work as well in college because the work got more complex and I couldn't be as perfect. I had to learn to let some things go and cut some corners. Like not reading every single book assigned by every professor because 5 hours of reading a day is impossible when you have essays to write and school events to go to. I had to actually be willing to not do everything the teacher said now. It was a hard lesson. I even got brave enough to try out for the woman's chorus. I was thrilled that I got in and lo and behold it turned out you can learn to sing! Being in the choir helped me become a much better singer. I still wanted to be in plays though, but at my school there were only two types: plays put on by students that were part of this honor scholar thing you had to apply for, I did not get in and plays put on by the music department. Most of the roles were reserved for the music majors, but I did decide to audition for one. I didn't feel good enough so I paid an older student who was a voice major to give me vocal lessons. After a few months of working on my audition song with her I auditioned for "Into the Woods". I worked so hard practicing my songs and was so brave to audition for the first time since that middle school play. What's more is the casting director was some famous director from LA and so there was a lot of pressure. Plus, plus did I mention you had to sing with a live piano accompaniment, not like a recording of your song, so I had to know when to come in based on a piano version of my song played by this amazing pianist who I had never heard play that song before. I am not good at musical timing or knowing my entries and exits. I was so nervous. I will never know what went wrong, but I always blame myself to auditioning with two songs. They said you could do one or two and I prepared two and after doing the one I blurted out I have a second one and did that as well. I felt like it wasn't as strong and I got confused with the entry point. I don't know if they noticed that or if that was why, but I never got a call back or even a choir role in that play. It felt very anti-climatic since I was the only one for sure that had paid for a vocal coach to practice their audition with. Maybe I was just that bad?

And then I moved on with my life and became an elementary school teacher. There was even a moment in school where I took a few different career tests and they always listed actor as a possible career choice, but then I think, even if I could do that I wouldn't make any money and its way too hard. But truly, I just didn't believe in myself. Teacher was also always on those lists and I knew I could be a teacher if I just worked hard enough. That is the thing. I don't like my dreams because I don't know if I can achieve them, so I go after things that are not dreams, or are lesser dreams that feel more achievable. Things that are easier and things that I have more control over. The crock of it all is that you actually can't really control much of anything. Even lesser dreams can end in failure and that's exactly what happened with my teaching career. I have a whole other blog post about that, but it was a career that if I had to say why it failed, it was because I cared too much and I tried too hard. 

So as you can imagine that doesn't bode well for my dream career of acting either does it? If caring too much and trying too hard leads to failure in a simple, anyone can do it, teaching job, then how can I have a hope of success in the world of acting where they chew you up and spit you out just for looking funny, which we already established, I definitely do, funnier than Steve Buscemi. 

Despite that after failing my acting career I did eventually find myself going after my dream of acting for the first time ever. It was amazing. I was in an acting class, I learned a lot, I was a top student doing everything my teacher told me and I had rapid growth. But eventually I hit a wall. Again I cared too much and I tried too hard. What does that even mean? What it means is that I try really hard to achieve the level of skill I think I should have, I compare myself to others and their skill and if I deem them better than me I criticize myself and wonder why I can't be more like them? I beat myself up and try harder and harder. I push myself and when I don't perform the way I expect I get super discouraged and just lodge that as evidence against myself. I expect so much of myself and care so much about being the best I can be, that I make it impossible for me to improve. I basically kill the artist and turn her into a slave working at a masonry with a whip at her back. I really try to not do that. I try to implement a growth mindset. I can hear you saying, "don't do that mistakes are apart of learning," but bro just shut up right now I have heard all that crap before. I have read every self-help book there is and all the acting books too. I know the truth about learning, I was a teacher. You can't learn if you are being criticized and whipped by yourself or others. You can improve if you think you have to be perfect. I know, I know, I know. But I can't help it. When I care about something I am just so afraid of messing it up, up losing it, that I push myself to the edge to try to please it. It's like acting is my best friend from Childhood and she's going to move to Connecticut again never to be seen if I don't perform this scene right. Or she's my childhood enemy who says I can be her best friend if I just bring her hostess cakes, clean her room and drink my own pee. Why does that stupid little girl shit have to get in the way of my adult life? Eventually, the pain was too much. I kept failing again and again in my acting career. Did I audition for a ton of things and not get picked? No I would say I got about 50% of the roles I actually auditioned for, but it didn't matter. No matter how much my teachers said I was great or my husband believed in me or any external thing pointed the way, I could not get past myself. The self-doubt, the fear and the lack of self-esteem just made me feel miserable. Eventually my brain and body went numb and I got stuck. I am now stuck in this realm where if I see the word acting I feel this twinge of pain inside knowing that I am running from this world, but I also feel another stronger emotion of apathy that just says "eh that's a drag, I'm not really into that anymore." But the truth is I am so into it, but I just can't face it. I can't face it so much that I can't feel any hope or excitement or joy from acting related things anymore. I just feel terror, pain, or apathy. Maybe actually acting would be a solution, but to me that's like saying the way to get over your fear is to walk across a thin tightrope 5000 feet above the ground over a pit of sharp jagged rocks. Like you might be right, but am I willing to risk death to try that? Because actually going for my dream just feels like death to me right now. 

I am not currently sure where this story ends or how to get over this hurdle. That's why I started writing this because I was hoping you might know. You reader, or you inner self who discovers things as she writes. One of us might know. I am desperately hoping one of us might know. 

I will end this story on a slightly hopeful note. Before I put aside my acting career, I actually did something truly remarkable. Remember that play I saw in High School where I felt sad and delighted by my friends? The Little Shop of Horrors. Well one day I decided I was going to go for, it I was going to try to be in a musical and I wanted none other than to be in that amazing play. It's a common play, but its not like its done every single year, but as luck would have it I googled it and a nearby theater was going to be putting on that show in just 3 short months! I was probably one of the earliest people to plan to audition for that play. It was right after covid when things were opening up again. I waited for the day of the audition singing the songs from the play and my audition song every single day. Finally I went in an I did the audition. My first ever audition for a musical since that tragic middle school audition where I couldn't sing "Put on a Happy Face" for the life of me. Not only did I nail that audition friends, but I got the female lead role. I was Audrey. Now how that play turned out and the ups and downs of that amazing, psychotic and wonderful play is a story for another time, but I will never forget how I got to achieve my childhood dream of being in the Little Shop of Horrors and playing Audrey. It felt like truly a sign from the universe for my acting. 

I hope one day I can take that memory and let go of the negative memories I haven't mentioned around that memory as well. Maybe I can learn to overcome my fear again and actually pursue this thing I love, even in some small way. But the truth is I know I can't pursue acting in a small way without wanting to do it in a big way, and if I can't do it in a big way then I don't know if I can handle that pain. When your entire childhood is pain you grow up kind of more willing to let go of dreams sometimes to just live a life absent of pain. Even if that means boring security and the pain of letting a dream go, its at least a type of pain I control. Its at least a slow killer, rather than a hugely overwhelming insta-death. Still I know its just my brain trying to protect me and playing its little tricks to try to keep me "safe". I just have to find a way someday to escape the subconscious prison of my mind. For tonight I'm just staying in this cell singing "Somewhere That's Green."