"Your happiness is not predicated on your art," a friend once told me. It was a seismic shift in roles. Here, was a young man I once affectionately referred to as my "younger brother," now schooling me on the importance of living a life and not just a career.
It was a realization he'd stumbled upon after being fired from a job at a theater company. During the long plane ride home he had time to consider all the ways he'd said no to life for the sake of advancing his career. "People were always inviting me out to parties after shows and I always said, 'No.' I really regret that."
How many times had I too declined an engagement, cancelled an invitation, or sought solitude to rehearse the same monologues for hours on end? I wondered. It wasn't until I was physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted from the daily grind of being an actor that I was nudged, or rather, shook into remember there was more to life than deciding which blazer to wear for my headshots.
In time, I started to slowly engage with the world I'd neglected, choosing instead to participate in every way I could. Slowly, the world was once again three dimensional, my priorities re-calibrated, and acting somehow became a joy again.
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