Life is good

(repost from my LJ, 6/22/05)

It truly is. I love my hubby and my family and my friends and my home.

That said, however, every once in a while you have to let the insecurities out to play, or they're gonna wreck the carpet.

I love all those things above. I hate the nagging sense that crops up now and again, that I've played it too safe.

I watch college classmates play Buffy baddies or log seventeen zillion performances as Christine Daaé. I watch the college and just-out-of-college kids in J&H throwing themselves all-or-nothing into building their careers. And I can't help wondering what would have happened if I'd done things differently.

Maybe I'd be an actual working actor.

Maybe I'd be living in a cardboard box (as my floormates voted me most likely to do).

Maybe I'd still be cranking out legal gobbledygook 40 hours a week, leaving the house at 7:15 and getting home after 11 in order to do what I love and still pay the mortgage.

I know there's no way to know, and it didn't happen, so there's no point in dwelling on it. And I don't dwell. But every now and then, it bugs me. Every now and then, I kick myself for wasting those few years circumstances gifted me with, when I could have taken so many more risks and didn't. I wonder why the heck I didn't come to Chicago sooner.

I know I'm either what they want or I'm not. And in all honesty, I've always been mostly not, the girl nobody knows what to do with. (Just in case anyone's still wondering why I've latched onto Elphaba so hard as THE dream role these days...) As the butt gets bigger and the joints get stiffer, that's only going to get truer. But I should have gotten myself in front of way more of "them" by this time, to increase the chances of finding the ones for whom I am what they want.

I let the brick wall I hit in New York paralyze me for way too long. Now I'm scrambling to catch up. It's certainly not impossible that I still can. But it gets less likely every day.

Sometimes I envy my many friends whose hearts are in writing. Not that getting published is any easier than getting paid to perform. But the actual writing can be done anywhere, any time (assuming there is time, of course). Actors are the most insecure creatures on the planet -- even the healthiest of us! -- because we constantly have to beg others to let us do what we love, let alone get paid for it.