I remember in college listening to a young composer who was visiting our school from NYC tell us about his experience in the city. He was at our school to workshop a musical he had written. I clearly remember him telling us that the highs and lows in the city are extreme. The city can bring you quite high very quickly and send you low just as fast. For some reason that stuck in my brain. How mysterious this roller coaster city seemed. Now after living here- I wouldn’t disagree with this statement. But it is all in how we respond to our circumstances- right? I think the roller coaster effect is quite hard to steady sometimes, and I think it is a result of the massive amounts of opportunity we have here. When an exciting opportunity arises, we rise with it. Getting an appointment for a show. Getting a callback. Getting another callback! You feel on top of the world- and like you’re just riding the wave. Life isn’t so hard here! Being an artist- it’s great! Easy peasy. Here doing the thing. Then the roller coaster slowly reaches the top, the wave is about to crash. But it doesn’t happen suddenly at first. At first, it’s just silence. No one calls you to tell you didn’t get the role- you just don’t hear anything. Silence. Then there’s always that moment, no matter how much you’ve tried to “let go” and not care about the result, when you realize- ‘Oh- they are probably done casting that now’. And there’s the crash. One version of it. It happens in many ways but that is one of them. Also showing up to a callback, and totally biffing it. It happens. It happens to all at one point or another. But showing up to this thing that could potentially be a big win- and then nope. It’s just not. That brings you down. The same thing happens when you get up early, sign up for three different auditions, three auditions you have mentally prepared for, read up on, planned your outfit for, and none of them end up seeing EMC/non-union members. There are big ups and downs in the city because there are big opportunities, and you open your heart up to the big opportunities. Then if they don’t work out- it’s a bigger drop to the low. The mystery of the city that drags you high and low makes sense to me now. And how do you not get dragged up and down with it? Try to ride the wave. You can’t close your heart. You can’t stop yourself from opening your heart to the big exciting things. Because then how do the big things get in? I think the thing to do is to get better at the recovery. Get better at “letting go”. You can’t help but have the down swings if your heart is truly in it. It is a real loss. But you can get better at letting it go and moving on to the next one. …Check out my photo below from my new coloring book from my Dad. It is the best thing to color while waiting for an audition. Thanks, Dad.
So moving on! Sitting in an early morning audition line with some joyful and kind people. It is a good line because in this particular building we can wait INSIDE. Miracle. One girl returns to the line and offers to share bits of her blueberry muffin or her vegetable patty with us, the other twelve people in line at the moment. I laugh. People are good. And we’re all the same. Any person in this line might have had a different childhood than me. But we are the same. We are in this line together. And we are all pursuing this thing. “Dunkin Doughnuts is my favorite store,” the girl tells us. We are all weird. And we are all the same. Anyone of these people in this line is likely living a very similar life to me.
I got to listen to the actress Wendy Braun speak a couple of weeks ago. She has put out a lot of material on the mental game of being an actor and I am verrrrrry into it. During her talk, we did one of her meditations that created. It was incredible. I cannot talk you through the whole thing, but the central mantra was “Everything always works out for me”. And if I look back through my life through that lens- it is true. Everything does always work out for me. And going into an audition with that mindset is a game-changer. Literally a game-changer for your mental game. Then your happiness, your up-and-down-ness- maybe isn’t so dependent on external factors. Your mental game is solid. Then your life is solid. Your happiness is internal. And that is magnetic.
Share with me about some of the up swings and down swings you’ve had lately!
