I was always going to be an actress. It was simple. I started doing it when I was eleven. There was never any other job I would have even considered myself qualified to do.
Or, at least, that's what I thought.
I got very lucky with the start of my career. I was literally discovered; my manager found me at a summer camp and introduced me to agents. I learned very quickly after graduating college that it is very difficult to get anywhere in the business without an agent. Equity open calls are pretty much only held because they have to be by union laws. Casting agents send assistants of assistants of assistants, and most of the time they already have people who auditioned through agents lined up for callbacks. So, in order to be able to afford the train tickets and the time to go on these mostly hopeless auditions, I am currently working two part time jobs at odd hours of the day. And even though I'm working 7 days a week at one of them, I'm still not making anywhere near enough to live off of. I have been putting so much financial strain on AJ and it's not fair. We can barely afford to pay our bills, and are living paycheck to paycheck. I don't want us to continue like this.
Even if I were to begin booking professional acting jobs, I would need to keep the part time jobs. In a business like acting, one success doesn't guarantee anything in the future. I worked professionally for 7 years, and I added one small role on an episode of a tv show, one professional show, one workshop, three staged readings, and one commercial to my resume, along with some other work like commercials that never aired and commercial samples for focus groups.
In addition, my priorities have changed since I was a teenager. I always knew that I wanted to get married and have a family, but I figured that the family part wouldn't come until well in the future. Now, AJ and I have lived together for almost a year, and we know that we are going to be getting married, hopefully within the next few years. Our age difference has been brought up several times in the discussion of having children. Both of our fathers had our sisters late in life and will be in their seventies when the girls graduate college. My grandfather died when my sister was only three. I want our kids to know their grandfathers, and I don't want AJ to have to deal with being an "old dad". And as more people around me become pregnant / have kids, the more I want to too.
But probably the biggest reason I'm considering making a change is that I don't like what I've become. I am jealous of my friends who work regular 9-5 jobs Monday through Friday and have the weekends to spend with friends and family. I'm jealous of women who get to wake up and shower and make themselves look presentable before work. I'm jealous of my friends who do community theater show after community theater show, while I'm stuck sitting in the audience dying to be on stage with them. I'm jealous of people who can afford to stay up and wait for their significant others to get home from a late night, and don't have to be in bed by 9:00 in order to get up the next morning.
So, I've decided that acting professionally no longer fits into the life that I want. It is kind of an overwhelming decision, seeing as for the past 12 years it's the only career I've known. Right now I'm going to focus on finding a full time job to just get out into the workforce and get money coming in and saved up. I submitted my resume to three jobs today, so we'll see what happens.
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