Being a working actress is no easy feat. Unfortunately, there is no yellow brick road to take and no “Good Witches” with magic wands to tell you exactly what to do. In that regard, navigating your acting career is a lot like navigating through your life in general! We can plan and plan and think that our lives will be going in one direction, but at the drop of a hat a new opportunity can present itself and everything can change! I’ve learned that the best thing I can do as an actress is find my own feet and own and enjoy my journey!
As a perfectionist, trying to navigate through my journey to being an important actress has been no easy feat. There is no set structure or career path like there are for other professions. When I was a hairdresser back in Ireland I started as a trainee where I did very basic things like sweeping and cleaning the color bowls until I got to the next stage where I got to wash hair – and boy was I the best hair washer! From there, I learned how to do perms and then over a span of time I passed all of my color courses and I became a colorist. After that, I took years of classes of cutting hair to eventually graduate as a professional stylist. In acting, however, there is no set ladder to climb and no pre-requisites to fill before reaching a next level. It is actually just the opposite. For me, someone who appreciates structure, I find this part of the job very daunting. Until you’re an A-List celebrity, you never know when you’re going to land your next gig and you don’t know when you’ll finally get your big break. It happens differently for everyone, just like life!
I have learned in this business that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. You can’t sit around and wait for things to happen or opportunities to come knocking on your door. You have to go out and make the opportunities happen yourself! While there is no set path or right way to do most things to land your next role, it’s a game of trial and error – and yes, it can be very frustrating. There have been instances where I will dedicate weeks on end to pursuing something that I think will lead to a breakthrough of some sort. I work and work and climb and climb this imaginary mountain expecting to find something valuable at the top, only to realize that I didn’t go up the right mountain. At the time it may feel like the biggest let down in the world and you may feel like you’ve wasted your time for nothing. I know the feeling and it sucks! Sure, working hard for anything and not having it materialize is disappointing, but it’s also a lesson learned. Pick yourself up with these newfound fish for your pond and keep moving forward. Now you know that this wasn’t the right mountain and you can try mountain number two (or twelve!). Either way, there is value in everything that you experience, whether or not you get the results that you had hoped for! Like I have mentioned in previous blogs, everything happens for a reason!
I have always known that I loved expressing myself artistically. From a young age, I have been a dancer. I knew that I was at my happiest when I was performing and thought that my calling in life was to be a dancer. Even after finding great success as a Master Stylist, I still didn’t feel the sense of thrill and excitement in this form of expression that I had felt as a dancer. Quite frankly, I felt like I had flat-lined artistically and I was searching for something like a needle in a haystack, still not really sure what I was looking for or what I expected to find. When you’re an artistic person and your artistic light is no longer shining, you feel as though a major chunk of you is lost. What is the most confusing part about this is that others may think that there is nothing wrong with you, even though you’re feeling as though a piece of you has disappeared. Following this misery, I was drawn back to what I knew made me happiest in life, which was dancing. I have learned that each mountain we come across and climb has a purpose. I climbed my dancing mountain, thinking that this was my destination, only to find that the bright light that lived inside of me was actually acting. It was like I was I had found a missing piece of me that I had always been searching for my whole life and boy, when it FINALLY HIT ME, it sure was worth the wait!!!! Like I said, everyone’s path to finding their calling and path is going to be different, so embrace each step of your journey! I have truly come to realize that our journeys are just as important as the destination we are venturing towards!
As someone with no direct ties to one of the most competitive industries in the entire world, I have had to fight tooth and nail and work my butt off nonstop for every single thing I accomplish. I am by no means complaining about this, but it is not easy. At all. I think that building your acting career is like getting a college education of sorts. You have so much homework to do in terms of research and digging and practicing and learning. Your hope is that you’ll ace your tests which come in the forms of auditions and interviews and that you will be able to see your hard work pay off right before your eyes when you finally get that call back! That being said, there is still no yellow brick road and no set amount of hours that you need to bank before you’ll get your big break!
One of our biggest resources and also our biggest enemies is the Internet. I have done countless hours of research trying to learn the best practices and the best people to get on my team and best people to work with, and you really just never know what you’re going to get. You want to sign with an agent? You’ll find thousands of articles online telling you “QUICK! RUN OUT AND GET ONE IMMEDATELY OR YOU’LL NEVER SUCCEED AS AN ACTOR” and you’ll find another thousand telling you that you “NO! NOT YET! YOU’RE NOT READY!” And the worst of it is that you’re forced to make up your own mind as to how you want to move forward, only to find that whatever route you decide take has its own hurdles – TRUST ME ON THIS ONE! I can’t love acting without loving this business, no matter how confusing it is, so I have learned to try my best to embrace every crazy and wild turn I am faced with on this journey as just another part of my education.
When we work hard and get to see our efforts pay off, whether it’s getting the right person to join your team or getting a wonderful compliment about your work, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. Knowing that you have earned something that is so important to you is one of the most fulfilling feelings in the world and is one of my greatest motivations to keep working as hard as I am! Just as there are lessons to be learned from our efforts that don’t materialize as we may hope, there are also lessons to be learned from each of our accomplishments!
I have come to notice a lot of similarities on my journey to that of Dorothy’s on the yellow brick road. I’ve come in contact with people who don’t have hearts, I have found myself lacking courage at some points and I have certainly stumbled upon my fair share of people without brains ;) Sure, I could also click my heels three times and be done with the whole thing, but I won’t. I won’t because the passion I have in my heart and running through my veins drives every single effort I make to be an important actress. I won’t because even at my lowest points, I am able to muster up the courage and fight to push on towards making my dream my reality. I won’t because every thought that I have in my brain, around the clock, day after day, is about new ways that I can further myself along through this journey to getting my big break. I know there is no wizard at the end of my travels who will grant me a wish or anything of the sort. I know that all that I need for my journey already lives inside of me and I know that I will own and enjoy each step of this beautiful, unique journey of mine. I hope that you, too, can come to this realization that you already have everything you need right inside of you! Stop looking for a magic wand and make your personal yellow brick road everything you want it to be!