Where am I in life?
This year has definitely has it's up's and down's as i'm sure it has for a lot of people. I've seen friends become married, engaged and separated, babies have been born, I've travelled a little bit more of the world and goals have been reached in both my personal and professional life. I'm such a softy for Christmas and New Year (on NY especially, there's always a tear) as it really is a time where I reflect on how grateful I am to have had another year of good health, love and support from the incredible friends and family around me. For a long time I believed that as performers, we measure our successes in the jobs we secure which consequently make us feel worthy and defined as individuals. This year I've measured my successes in realising there's more to life than work! You can be the most passionate, driven, pro-active, loyal, responsible, hard working person in the world but it could all be over in a flash and for that reason i've learned to allow myself the freedom to book the holiday away, take that random day off work and not be in fear of living my life at the possibility of the dream job coming in for which I need to be available. I know I work hard and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I think it's important to have ambition and aspirations but I have learned that I can enjoy being me without having to prove my worth to anyone anymore. I've stopped dreading the meet ups where the same rhetorical questions surface and i'd feel like I was reciting an Oscar worthy monologue, "I'm still auditioning but I'm really positive and i'm loving life, bla, bla, bla, when actually i'm not positive and i'm not loving life and I don't have it all together. I'm rife with anxiety and powering through with everything I know I can control and it's consuming my life. Admitting this opened up a full new realisation to me, that in fact performers aren't the only people who analise their lives, feeling like we've not got it all together and the things we desire most will never happen, we're all victim to it! And some of my closest friends, with no association to the performing industry have the same anxieties of "where they should be in life". With the wonderful tool that is social media, we can't help but compare our lives to others and asses if our lives are at the point where society deems we should be by a certain age in our lives. I'm in my late 20's so society deems I should be married, own my home, have a thriving career and have at least one child. Whilst some of this is accurate for where I am at present, there's lots of unanswered questions that I, myself still can't answer about when these things will happen. It also poses the question, how boring is it that we have to live our lives in accordance to a time schedule that we don't get to set for ourselves. Maybe 20 - 30 years ago this was ok but now with new technology and the opportunity to get on a plane to anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat, isn't it more exciting to discover what the world has to offer us before we settle for what everyone else is doing? I think we all need to do less assesing of what society says we should have and more of what we've already got. Let's start 2018 by being proud of who we are regardless of what is expected of us, after all your life is only yours and no one else's. Happy New Year! X
