Insane in the Membrane

One of my close friends recently loaned me a book about auditioning. In the first few pages, I stumbled across this passage:

"I've always thought it's better to give up sanity. Settle down and admit you're crazy or you wouldn't want to act. When you find out what acting is like and what the odds are, and you still persist, the proof of your own insanity is inescapable. Accept it. Most actors make themselves unhappy by searching for sanity, by insisting on their normalcy; it's a grave mistake. The life of an actor is a bit easier to take if you admit you're bonkers."

-Audition by Michael Shurtleff

That's the best advice I've received all year! It's time to stop striving for piece of mind and start reveling in the ridiculous life I'm living. There's no denying: it's completely insane. You can go from your highest highs to your lowest lows all in the span of a few minutes. You think, "Oh, it's probably because I'm a 20-something and Buzzfeed seems to get it", but after talking to your non-performer friends, you realize that you're playing an entirely different ball game. There's no such thing as sanity in this league. 

I'm learning that 'life as an actor' is more like 'life as an auditioner'. It makes up 90% of your efforts in the field. There's only one role and there are about a million people who want it, so you hear "No" a LOT. But you have to keep hustling, and searching, and showing up to those castings. You can't book any of the roles you don't audition for.

Auditioning is one of the silliest, cruelest, nerve-wracking experiences I feel I have to go through as an actor. 

It entails showing up to Union auditions (or EPAs) as a Non-Union member, meaning you have to wake up at the crack of dawn to write your name on a list to maybe be seen-- if the creative team has time and piece of mind to do so. All the while, you're sitting in a tiny, windowless hallway with other crazy actor-folk all day, and passive-aggressively fighting over who gets to use the one outlet to charge their smartphone. 

It entails preparing four extremely long sides-- or, selected material from the actual production you're auditioning for (as opposed to coming in with your own monologues)-- in a British dialect, which is quite the feat since you have other auditions, survival job(s), and general life-things to attend to, and when you show up to your appointment, the auditors hand you a paper with poorly scanned text and ask you to cold-read for a completely different character. Oh, and you need to sing the first half of it. Just make it up! Action!

It entails sitting in a studio lobby while another company is holding auditions for a baby formula commercial. New moms and their infants are crying and breastfeeding all around you, and all you want is to remember the words to that Chekhov piece you just memorized (last night). But you can't, because you're trying to figure out what the select newborns will have to prepare for their callback on Monday.

It entails lining up for open calls and having the guy at the front desk yell at you and 200 of your new closest friends through a megaphone, even though he's five feet away.

It entails bugging your roommates to read with you so that you can submit a video audition for a short film (which you pray to God you won't have to be naked in, but you'll cross that bridge when you come to it because you need a JOB, amiright?).

It's completely bonkers. But at the same time, it's kind of exciting. You feel the community of it all when you're in that tiny, windowless hallway or in line being shouted at at 5:30am. You can nail the audition if you just go for it, even though you have no idea what you're doing. You walk away with horrifically funny stories to tell you parents. You get great outtakes from that video shoot with your ADD roommate.

Sometimes what's happening off-screen is better than what's on it.

Some days it doesn't feel worth it. And some days it does. But no audition has ever made me wonder, "Should I just go back to school for Speech Pathology?" Ever. 

Plus, I really get off on the times that the breast-feeding stage-moms grill me about commercial casting, then finish up their questions with, "... I figured you would know, since you're a model".

Yes. Yes I am. 

Are you there, blog? It's me, Callie

It's been about 9 months since I updated this blog, and, while I haven't been tending to a bun in the oven, I like to think that I've been growing a new ME (and definitely eating enough for two, regardless). Since the middle of last year, I've been harboring some pretty serious demons in terms of my self confidence and general outlook on the world and my place in it. I needed this time to fall on my face, writhe around in the mud, and eventually dust myself off and try again (try again). 

While I've been silent, I haven't been doing anything productive, like pursuing the self-improvement challenges I gave myself when I first moved to the city. This is because, well... the challenge becomes getting yourself out of bed every morning. The bright lights are no longer mesmerizing, they're headache inducing. And you can't kick the headache because you're too broke for the caffeinated relief of a $5 cup of coffee.  Still, you somehow manage to afford that $20 grade B maple syrup at Whole Foods for a juice cleanse (that you're not going to finish). Also, this might be partially responsible for the aforementioned headache. Literally and figuratively. 

"So Callie", you say, "you haven't been challenging yourself, you haven't been spending your money wisely... what exactly have you been doing for the past 9 months??" 

I've been busy holding myself back, that's what I've been doing. And, like most things I attempt, I'm great at it!

Last May, I started catering to make some extra money. The first thing I can remember about the whole process is, at my waiter training, the captain repeating over and over: 

"Bring your own food to work so that you don't get fat".

As someone who has always, always, always been worried about being FAT, I took this to heart. Heck, as your regular top-tier over-achiever, I took it to head, too, and I let it make me crazy. On the job, I would sit alone and eat my pre-made salads etc., while everyone else would go down the line for left overs at dinner break. It was all fine, for a while, until the stress and the misery of working as a cater waiter got to me. I would use all my willpower to stay away from dinner, but by the end of the night, I would go crazy eating desserts as we broke down the event. They felt like a reward for toughing it out and damn it, I deserved them. But, by the time I made it home each evening, the gravity of what I'd done would hit and the panic set in. I was going to get FAT. 

To compensate for my out-of-control dessert shoveling, I decided to make my already restricted vegetarian diet more extreme: I'd go gluten free and vegan. Take that, weight problem. 

Except, that's not really how it works, is it? 

Whether or not I was actually gaining weight, in my head I was on my way to obesity. I'm not exaggerating. I was tormented day in and day out about the way my body looked and I felt so, so helpless to do anything about it. I couldn't control my self-loathing and I couldn't control my eating-- the restrict and binge cycle was too much to handle. I started being really dumb. Really, really dumb. 

I can't even bring myself to write just exactly how stupid I began to act, because, after witnessing the damage food issues can do via the struggle of a close childhood friend, I should have known better. I do know better. But I didn't act like it.

I went away for the summer. The issues with my body image and my demented relationship with food spiraled out of control. I finally had to take a serious look at myself (a good 10 lbs+ heavier despite all of my "best" efforts) and cut the crap. I needed to try something else. I stopped the vegan and gluten free nonsense, which I wasn't really doing anyway, because those restrictions just messed with my head. I got a personal trainer and, for the next 6 months I explored my hate-hate relationship with exercise. 

While enlisting the help of a trainer was a valiant effort on my part, it wasn't the solution I was ready for. My issues ran much too deep for there to be any success with our workouts. My trainer was young, cute, and probably too nice to me, which made me completely mortified every time we charted my weight and body fat. I felt the same way I did when I went through my chubby/awkward phase as a kid: like everyone stared at me as I exercised, because watching fat people struggling to perform physical tasks is like a car wreck-- you can't look away from the uncomfortable horror. Needless to say, I was relieved when the membership was up this month. I feel guilty for admitting that because I really did have some great workouts, and I felt empowered when I was able to do one half-assed tricep dip on my own (yeah I said it, you scared, bro?). But the reality is that I felt hopeless and worthless because I didn't make any changes to my body. And I was unable to make any changes on the surface level because my problems weren't living on the surface level. They started deep in my head, where they were rotting and festering, doing their best to kill off all the things I actually liked about myself. 

After a pretty traumatic break-in to my apartment, I completely lost it. The way I began treating myself hit an all-time-low and I knew that I needed to go and deal with my baggage once and for all. So, about a month ago, I started to talk to a therapist about everything that has been keeping me down. 

I have a lot of seemingly silly things to deal with, although they feel very serious to me. Once you let an irrational and unimportant thought take hold of you, the idea magically becomes the most rational and important tenet you've ever held dear, and it feels impossible to live and think any other way. No matter what anyone else tells you. And the thoughts breed and mutate until you're all kinds of crazy. 

In our last session, my therapist said to me: 

"I'm not sure if this is the right thing to say as your therapist, but you are very pretty".

And I was so uncomfortable with that assertion that I began to cry. 

How stupid is that? 

The phrase "The truth? You can't handle the truth!" is spot-on. I tell myself that I can't handle the truth because, what if it's a lie? But what I really can't handle, even more than that, is the fact that this matters so much to me. So much that I pour my blood, sweat, and tears into silly vanity rather than applying all that hard work and energy into chasing my dreams. When I take a step back and observe from the perspectives of my loved ones, it all looks pretty damn absurd. Doesn't it? 

While, clearly, I still have a long way to go, I feel like I have some of my sanity back. I catch myself being satisfied with who I am again. Sometimes I even like the curve from my waist to my hips when I glance in the mirror after a shower. 

This preoccupation with the way that I look has kept me from going on auditions ("why bother, you're too fat to cast anyway") and has poisoned other areas of my life ("don't waste your time learning a new song on the guitar, you can't sing anyway"), essentially whittling me down to nothing more than a depressed narcissistic nightmare. 

WELL...

Ain't nobody got time for that. We only get one chance at this, right? Is it really worth it to put your life, your dreams, your goals, your happiness on hold for something so meaningless and lame? 

Just in case you paused there and pondered the question, I will remind you of the answer: NO, IT IS NOT WORTH IT. 

I am lucky to have an amazing network of friends who have encouraged me, and fought with me and for me throughout this mire that I've been dragging myself through. It is because of them I've found the strength to own up to my weaknesses and to admit to them, despite being terrified how they'll reflect on me in the eyes of others. I made the choice to be mean to myself, now I'm making the choice to be nice. 

So this is my admission that I have fallen. And this is my assertion that I am starting anew. Joyful Callie is coming back with a vengeance. Get excited.