I chased my dreams of being an actor for 6 weeks and it was really fucking good.
An experiment in attention, spending time on things you really care about, and feeling lots of things
When I started writing on Substack, I thought I’d write regularly. My commitment was optimistic. I had bigger plans lying in wait and over the past 6 weeks, they took over.
My secret’s out. Or maybe it was never a secret. I’ve been taking acting classes for the last 6 weeks. Not my first time - I’ve been taking classes since I moved to New York 3 years ago, and I loved performing in high school. But this was different. This was 6 weeks of full-on, everyday immersion. They call it an “intensive”, and they really mean it. Five days a week. Five hours a day. Rehearsals. Warm-ups. People traveled across the world to be here. I crossed a borough. But maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s taken me a lifetime to get here.
There are days I don’t feel like I fit in. Days I feel timid and misunderstood. My classmates have BFAs and resumes that span the length of their childhoods. They name plays like I name basketball players, list playwrights the way one names streets in their neighborhoods. “I love Annie Baker! That’s so Chekhovian.”
There are other days where I feel so alive, so certain, like there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. When the craft seems to crack me open and the space it opens feels like an expanse where life can seep in and feel possible.
It’s mysterious.
In one of our first weeks of class, we did this exercise where we got in pairs and simply looked at each other. One person sits in a chair. The other sits in another facing them. They look at you, you look at them.
And for a couple of minutes you just take each other in.
Then you rotate and sit with someone else and repeat until you’ve gone around the class. When you’re disobligated from needing to do anything - you don’t need to smile or entertain or reassure - who’s the you that comes through?
Afterwards, I wrote in my journal that it felt like falling in love with everyone. That it was overwhelming, my heart overspilling with raw feeling that I didn’t know what to do with, and the realization that maybe there was nothing to be done, but to feel. To let go, I’ve realized, does not mean to let out. It just means to not hold back.
I couldn’t focus in class after that. I left my hand on my heart and let it settle. Maybe to remind myself that it would stay intact. It was learning to trust its own capacity to be. And I’m not sure yet how to articulate the profundity of that moment but the nudity of it feels imprinted on me, in the way that a weight being lifted off your chest leaves an indentation. And the imprint it leaves - that small ache - is both the reminder of the weight you were carrying and the proof that it’s been lifted. Something can simultaneously exist and be gone.
It’s mysterious.
I’m living my best life. And to my surprise, that’s a life where I’m still so confused. When I was burnt out in my corporate job, I had this feeling of life passing me by, especially when I was I was sitting alone in the office and working by myself. I was in stasis, and life, like a caravan of happier times, seemed to parade by outside my window. I’d quit and then travel the world, I told myself. I’d live in Asia. I’d do more acting. I’d be so free. Quitting would be my salvation and the beginning of the perfect next chapter.
It’s hyperbolic to say I was a different person 6 weeks ago. I was a different person yesterday. But transformations don’t always feel transformative. Sometime it strikes like epiphany, lightning on a bright day. And other times it creeps in like walking through a fog and emerging to find yourself wet. I’m still in the fog. I’m not sure what comes next. But I do know this.
Life - that old adventurer that I used to watch outside my window - doesn’t feel like it’s passing me by anymore.
I’m flirting with life, and life, it seems, is flirting back.