Dear Reader, it is with great ignominy that I ask your forgiveness for my long absence. I am without a proper excuse as to why I have been neglecting my writing, but I do hope you will indulge me on account that I am, after all, a student who does not sleep nearly enough, is rarely in her most efficient form, and is nearly always at least a little overwhelmed. I do promise to try and be more consistent in the new year.
And yet, consistency has never been a strength of mine. If you will recall, this past year I have enjoyed the habit of selecting and pursuing an intention every week – a word or phrase by which to live in an effort to further myself down the never-ending path of self-improvement. Rarely do I feel I was consistent enough in my endeavours to have fully absorbed the power of these intentions, but I was at times regular in what I wanted to achieve. One of the last and most desperately-sought intentions I set for myself before taking that rather long hiatus from writing was the idea of balance.
Balance. I believe what I truly wanted was control – a healthy sense of control that left me feeling peaceful and content. Last year, my first year of college, I relinquished all control over virtually every aspect of my life in numerous ways and for numerous reasons. It was a year-long battle to survive, and in the end I was left exhausted, crushed, and as wounded as I ever had been.
It is a good story, I admit, when told the right way. But I am loath to dwell upon tragedies. The past is not a photograph which can be brought to light and examined at will, and returned to a leather-bound album for safekeeping when it best suits us. The past is something that lives within and travels beyond us, and I have found I am never served by allowing it more space in my head and heart than it deserves. Instead, I would like to recount to you, darling Reader, one of the foremost lessons I believe I am learning, perhaps a bit too early in life, from these past few years.
Remember, Reader, I knew beyond any doubt in the eighth grade I wanted to be an actor. Privately, I believe my parents hoped – or perhaps thought – that I would be swayed from my vocation and go to school for something equally obscure, though perhaps more conventional, such as English. This expectation I declined to observe. My senior year of high school I embarked upon the journey of auditioning for college acting programs. I now ask you to please think of the most intelligent student from your years of high school, and how they agonized over their college applications. Now multiply that struggle by the greatest number conceivable by your imagination, and you will understand the journey of an arts student.
Hours upon hours were spent on physical applications, rehearsals and classes, studying each school and program, organizing headshots and travel, writing tens of letters by hand… each step carefully repeated for the more than two-dozen schools to which I applied. All done so that when the time came for me to travel to Chicago – the city in which university performing arts programs congregate annually for a week of exhausting auditioning -, step into the room, and perform my pieces, I would be prepared.
Alas, Reader, I might have mentioned that consistency has never been my strong suit. My first audition in Chicago was a veritable disaster, a performance so horrendous it can not even be deemed laughable in my well-removed eye. From that point, I did my best to master my sense of self and persevere, and I believe I gave both the best and worst performances of my career that week, as well as every varying shade of ability in between. The lessons I wish I had known when walking into those auditions were things I learned in the room, things I needed to experience to understand… as it was meant to be.
In the end, I was fortunate enough to have an excellent array of choices as to which university I would call home in the coming fall. I narrowed my list down to two schools – let us call them the School of Longing and the School of Truth.
Dear Reader, I tortured myself over this decision. I cried on my kitchen floor as the world went into lockdown and I watched as if from an ivory tower as my senior year slip from my grasp – people who I had known since the age of learning to cut and paste were blotted from my life like an old, folded photograph with a crease so worn the damage distorts the memory. I cried because the world was prying my palms open and forcing me to let go of the legends I had been told since I was child – stories of diplomas, final memories, hugs goodbye, parties and events celebrating a life’s worth of work. I was letting that go, and I could not choose for the life of me in which direction to step next.
I will be generous with myself, and attribute part of my indecisiveness to the reality that I could not process the future when the present was akin to purgatory. However, I know that in truth I was torn between my head and heart.
I have always been the type of person to romanticise everything, to fall in love with an idea and break as did Gatsby when my mysterious green light turns out to be nothing more than a glowing internet router in the window of my neighbour’s home. I have always claimed passionately that if given the choice, I would follow my heart, and never allow my head to sway me.
But, dear Reader, if you remember, I love almost nothing so much as I love theatre. I would sacrifice a great deal of what I know to preserve and protect the art form, and I would sacrifice a great deal of what I have to continue living in the world of stages and film reels and magic. I was prepared to sacrifice my heart for what I thought in my head would be the better institution of learning.
The School of Longing is nationally recognized for its theatre program. Its faculty boast credentials beyond my wildest dreams, its campus is in a city I love. The School of Longing was the school I had idealised in my head, the school for which I hungered because I believed that if I only went there, all my artistic insecurities, all my fears about pursuing acting, all my anxieties and the hammer with which I had been driving myself for years would be cured – I would be confident, I would be unbeatable, I would be perfect if only I attended the School of Longing. I wanted that. I wanted to escape my fears, I wanted to escape my harsh thought processes – none of which were at all focused on cultivating balance – without having to work through or deal with them. I wanted to be fixed, and I wanted it to be clean and painless. I was convinced the School of Longing would tie me up in a pretty bow and send me into the industry to succeed.
Then there was the School of Truth, the school which I currently attend. Its faculty had many of the same credentials, though I turned a blind eye to this. It is not as widely recongized, though its sister program is internationally known. I did everything in my power to avoid attending this school. I asked for the input of countless friends; celebrating when they said to follow my head and feeling dashed when they said to follow my heart. I called every theatrical mentor I had known and begged for their guidance. I told myself if one – just one – of these respected adults told me I needed to attend the School of Longing, I would do it. But none of them did.
Oh, they assured me it was a fine institution. They told me of their colleagues who are now household names whose dusty attics guard framed diplomas with the school’s name emblazoned across the top. But not one told me plainly, “Lettie Anne, you must go to the School of Longing.” In fact, those who knew me best, those few who had been most influential in my life, encouraged me away from the School of Longing. I struggle with consistency, I struggle to believe in myself, I struggle not to brutalise myself whenever I make a mistake. And these people who had guided me so far in my life recognized that the School of Longing might very well take my spirit and exacerbate the things I was trying to escape.
I did not want to hear that. I wanted Daisy to run into my yellow car, grab the sleeve of my pink suit and drive with me to La La Land. But in my heart, the heart that mopped my kitchen floor with tears, I could not commit to the School of Longing. So little was in my power – the future, the pandemic, the reality of what is – all I could do was choose one school. (Though really, Reader, as I now reflect I ask this question: is not that the only power that matters – the power to decide for oneself, and surrender to Fate the reigns?)
The School of Truth was much more individual in its approach to actor training. Its emphasis was on placing the power in the hands of the student, and giving them the tools to create for themselves a process by which they would become an artist. For someone who so badly seeks control, this was not at all appealing to me. I wanted to be fixed, not shaped. Stitched, not molded. Packaged, not peeled apart. I fought and fought and begged and pleaded with myself not to resign myself to the imperfect, but in the end I did exactly that. I cried as I declined the School of Longing, but the monster in my chest stopped raging. An inkling of sadness trickled down my back, but the serenity I had not known for weeks flushed it away. The School of Truth was what I needed, and I believed I could control my experience to make it, and myself, perfect.
Oh, Reader. You know well what happened next. My freshman year was a disaster. For reasons both personal and relating to the cursed pandemic, I was living in hell even in my dreams. I was languishing there, in my little dorm room, only forty minutes from my family but too stubborn to admit how deeply unhappy I was. I was not moving towards perfection, in fact, I seemed to be fleeing in the opposite direction. I was a worse actor, my own brain was a nightmarish place in which to live. I felt betrayed in every sense of the word, and I did not want to confide in anyone. Within my small class, I refused to admit how badly I was struggling, and to my own family I shared just a little. That is, until the year imploded, and I, with it, and I went home to recover. I did not enjoy my winter break, I spent the entire month counting down the days until I had to go back. I did not enjoy my summer, I spent the entire time sobbing in fear over returning to the town just under an hour away.
I so badly did not want to find myself at the School of Truth for a second round of torture, and I believe my family thought I was a deeply distressed masochist when I vowed to return for another year. My mother often asked me if I regretted not accepting the School of Longing, and I answered her no. This was the truth – I harbored no misgivings about my choice. Something had brought me to the School of Truth, and as much as I fought against it, that small sense from deep within was still whispering to me that there was something to be learned there.
I put in transfer applications to other universities, and my family reassured me that if I absolutely needed to I could return home and reevaluate my collegiate plan. With these safeguards in mind, I moved into an apartment with my two lovely friends and waited (after a week of sorority events) with great anxiety for classes to commence.
Reader, that first week was hard. I cried and cried and cried. But when the grief subsided, I woke up in the morning with the familiar feeling of a monster asleep in my chest – no longer did she roar, but she had settled down to give me rest from the pain and confusion she so often brought.
I do not remember when exactly everything fell into place, but I remember realising one morning while walking to class that I had no desire to finish a transfer application on which I had been working. I was tentative about the decision, I was so afraid of boxing myself in without any chance of escape in an environment I was destined to despise, but the rays of hope to which I had been clinging were enough to convince me to climb just a bit out of the pit in which I had been living.
Reader, the School of Truth is a beautiful place and I am eternally in its debt. In one semester I saw myself transformed. I am so far from perfect, I am still plagued by worries and fears, but I have never in my life come so far as a human being. I have never in my life understood so much and so little about everything. I have never in my life experienced the process of creating as meaningful art as I did. If this is the bumpy, uneven, devastatingly imperfect road down which I will prevail – reluctantly on occasion, of course, but most often as if on a valiant adventure – then I believe I have been blessed with the greatest of opportunities. My life is one to be envied, and it is all because whatever has happened has been meant to be.
Most darling Reader, the idea of meant to be is the one I can not impress enough. It is the “Hakuna Matata” of the philosophers. It is the line that ties us to the shore and pushes us out to sea.
My senior year of high school, I was rejected by the school I wanted to attend the most – the school for which I still believe I did some of my best work to this day. Had I been accepted there, I would have attended, and like the School of Longing, it would have destroyed me irreparably.
So I came to the School of Truth, the school I knew all along was meant to be my home. And I hated it, despite knowing consciously I was growing in my pain, despite feeling that inkling that I needed to persevere, I hated it. But all those failures, Reader, all those horrible memories and darkest hours paved a now-beautiful path down which I am running with so much love and joy.
I know so many people disagree that we must go through difficulties to experience joy, and I concede that it is a beastly business to look at the monster of life in the face and accept the road ahead will not be a pleasant one. But I believe that only through trial can we better appreciate the life around us, only through failure can we grow, and without these processes we will live a stagnant life, a life devoid of true joy because we have nothing to work for and nothing to fear, nothing to love and nowhere to go.
Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is meant to be. I am fortunate enough that I see the phenomenon coming true in my own life, but a year ago I was severely disinclined to believe it. I believe in the seeds planted long ago coming to fruition, whether they were watered by tears or a flowing spring. I believe that life happens in a way we can never predict, and though whether there is a greater force pulling the strings I can not answer with certainty, but I believe nonetheless there is a great plan. I would like to trust that plan, more than I would in balance, even more than in control, because if I do, all the intentions and aspirations I hold for myself will come along the way, if they are meant to. And if not, I will discover what else is in store along the great path I pursue.
Reader, I hope for you – whether you are waiting on your own college admission decisions or lumbering down the walkway of life – that you trust in your meant to be. It is no easy journey, but rest assured it is one we traverse together.
Love,
Lettie Anne