Picking Up the Pace (Johanna)

Classes are over, and there is nothing that I have to think about anymore. It’s strange – one day after handing in my last assignment, I was laying on the couch thinking, “How am I going to handle moments like this where there is nothing pressing, nothing to be done?”. I suppose I’m used to being under pressure, and when it’s taken off, I feel like there is little of me left. This year has been ridiculously hard, many times I have felt like my personality or whatever it was that made me who I am was just wasting away. I was becoming work, stress, melancholy, escapism, etc. Things like laughing, or dancing, or spontaneous creativity didn’t seem to exist anymore in me.
I still feel a bit lost in myself, like I’m wearing clothes that are several sizes too big. But the summer beckons, and hopefully it will be sufficient self-recovery time.

Summer is a strange loaded concept… it’s stretching out in front of us until the end of February. For my friend Glenn, it’s an opportunity to party as much as possible before he has to start his first real job as a graduate in the real world. For Matthew, it’s a chance to have the first time he’s had in years where he has no uni, no shows, no projects, no ANYTHING. For my housemate David, it’s something he wished for until it got here, and now it bores him. I suppose I have to find my own purpose for Summer.

There has been a lot of goal setting in the last week or so – regarding future career aspirations. Instead of wasting money on Krispy Kreme or random shoes I will wear once, I now have important things to buy – like headshots, or screentest intensive workshops. Oh, and the part-time course I want to do at VCA next year. That’s right kids, I want to be an actor. Lots of parents would be devastated if their children said, “I want to be an actor”. Suddenly the future they planned for their child as a doctor or whatever would be shot with visions of them struggling to survive in near poverty as a waitress for the rest of their life, just waiting and waiting and waiting for that big break.
Funnily enough, my parents were actually relieved when I told them. For my entire life, wanting to act and perform has been the one continuous thing I have consistently wanted. People would tell me to be realistic and I’d push it out of my head, with other more temporary career options to appease them. But I’m sick of it – if I am not an actor, I have no idea what I want to do.

Our university probably has career advisors somewhere, but I’m not sure I want to find them. I’ve been thinking about going back to my high school and having a chat with my drama teachers. They know me and what I can do.
At high school, before our first big school production (in which I played the lead), our careers advisor kept telling me that acting was too hard to break into and I should focus on something else. She saw me perform, and then she changed her mind. Mmmmmm..

Sorry that I’m inflicting these mental processes on everybody else.
Knowing what I want to do is difficult enough, but figuring out how to do it is even harder.