“I didn’t feel like I got enough from that.” Lars, my acting studio professor stands over me, his arms crossed. I’m sitting on the floor in the circle of students who’ve just delivered their final performances of the year. I just delivered a poem by AA Milne, ending a particularly emotional year on what I hoped to be a hopeful note. But yet again, I failed to give enough. I had failed to give all of myself to a few lines of text in a room full of wooden boxes and eight exhaughted twenty-somethings. I lost it. 

“There’s nothing more of me to give. I don’t want to give anymore. I can’t.” I wail. My classmates watch me break the cardinal rule of acting, which is not to bring your personal life into the space. But my personal life, my entire world, my twenty-four seven on-call job, is sitting in the room with me. He can’t even look me in the face. 

 

I entered my performing arts college program in the fall of 2013. I graduated from an idealic but isolated boarding school in southern Pennsylvannia. I went from a school with a cap of three hundred students to one of the biggest urban areas in the entire country. I was excited to have my college experience in such a huge city while also being surrounded by people who were interested in the same fields as myself. My freshman year I was blessed to work with one of the most celebrated actors in Philadelphia. As my studio teacher, he instilled in us a motto that he had carried through his every career. 

“It ain’t that deep.” He’d smile after every exercise. As a young woman wanting only to be told I was good, that I was doing “right”, this was something I struggled with. But I tried to take it with me into the next few years, which I was told would be difficult but ultimately prepare me for a lifelong career as a performer. 

This was all shot to shit when my university went through a sweeping “reform” that altered the structure of the theatre department forever. The classics were out. Devised theatre was in. Alternative methods and structure was the new, hip thing thrust on this controlling, type A sophmore. Between trying to cope through a Meisner course, a movement intensive, and the Greek classics, I spent a lot of nights overdressed at house parties not having fun. I left my first serious relationship to throw myself into creating a web series, a web series that was basically me writing most of the script and screaming at my friends/follow actors. To this day I can’t tell if I had one prolonged breakdown or several small breakdowns. Despite all of this, I was cast in my first college production, a commedia dell’arte piece directed by the man I came to know as my mentor. I’d known Carl since I was sixteen. I had known his since my days at the pre-college theatre program at the university I would one day attend. He was the only one at my university that seemed to genuinely believe in me. He believed in me as not only an actress, but as a human being. He encouraged me to slow down, to trust myself. He reminded me that I was kind, introspective, and most of all that I was young. I was young and I would make mistakes, but they would be good. The commedia show was the worst reviewed show of that year, but my performance as the villanous queen was met with rave reviews. I got a small part in a summer stock production of Much Ado About Nothing. I was riding high, finally.

The fall of my junior year, Carl was gone. There had been sweeping sexual harrassment alligations against him and several other professors. The other professors that were not accused were forced to give up their positions for a wave of trendy New Yorkers, shipped in by our trendy new dean. Carl had been my window to an outside world, a world that allowed for people like me to shine. Nobody tells you how to deal with someone close to you being accused and fired. You’re just expected to move on, to fall in line and forget all the moments they supported you. I never got a straight answer about what happened. Nobody swooped in explain anything or assure me I would be able to go on. I lost that one, solid person who told me every day I was good. So I went looking and found it that assurance in the swamp pit that was Preston Ketler. 

 

Preston and I were in the same acting studio. He told me he liked my green eyes, my freckles. I’d stare dreamily at him in that little blank room with the broken bed frame we’d have to use for our scenes. He looked like young Albert Finney, tall and flaxen. The fact that he was tragic only cemented my adoration. We spent hours in the coffee shop off of Rittenhouse after class. We poured out every toxic thing that had ever happened to either of us. Every horrible thing we had ever done or felt became this delicious brew. It fed me, kept me warm when the rest of the world seemed so cold, so distant, so above me and my abilites. All that year I prayed to the theatre gods that we’d be put in a scene together. There was something intoxicating about the thought of getting up in front of my class and showing everyone that not only was I capable of depths unknown, but there was someone else who could match me. There was someone else who had that old world passion that no modern, theatre class could begin to unpack. 

Lars, my studio coach, obviously knew putting us together would be like pouring gasoline on a fire in a match factory. He’d watch us giggle in class, steal glances, walking down the hall together. He knew better then to put “couples” together. But he gave us exactly what we wanted in the form of a scene from A Doll’s House. We had completed our section on Ibsen and Lars was eager to test our grasp of the material. I was Nora to Preston’s Torvald, as well as pulling double duty in another scene (our class had an uneven number of people, so Lars would assign someone two scenes randomly). I was floored. I was ready to prove to everyone, Lars included, I could give everything I had to two scenes, in-depth. I could play Nora. I could be a leading lady. I could, with total ease, be charming and innocent and everything to everyone in that room. 

I failed. I failed dramatically. 

I blew off my other scene parter to hang out with Preston, but we never did any actual rehearsing. We were those dumb, Bohemian babies that thought we had so much chemistry we didn’t need to worry about inflecting or motivation. We’d just “be” and it would all come together. That was what Preston assured me of the night before we were due to perform. The next day we filed in to the studio in our period clothes, boys in suit jackets and girls in floor length skirts or dresses with shawls. I had a long, black dress with my hair in a chingon tied with a black ribbon. We’d gotten there early to do a few last minutes run throughs. All but Preston. I cruelly ignored my other scene partner to text and call him to no avail. Lars came in and started reading off the list of scenes as they were to be performed. Preston and I were third. I took my seat after we had all warmed up, eyes glued to the clock. Fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes. An hour. The second scene gets their critiques and takes their seats. Lars asks if I would like to skip ahead to my second scene so Preston has more time to arrive. I stand up shaking. I deliver a piss poor performance, all that I can managed in my current state. I’m dangerouly close to passing out. I have to finish the scene sitting down because my legs are shaking so strongly. I’m a hair’s width away from a panic attack, alone in a room full of nine people. Everyone is staring at me, not because of my acting. Because they all wonder what kind of fuck-up I must be, to be standing here blubbering, unable to keep track of both scene partners, especially the one I’m sleeping with. Lars lets us all go and have a ten minute break. I sit on the toilet with the lid down in the women’s bathroom, legs tucked up under me so no one sees my long skirt. I shake so hard my eyes vibrate in my head. I cry so hard no sound comes out. I rock myself like a crazy person, trying to down out the sounds of the others in the bathroom. They talk about other classes, assignments, plans for the weekend. They go on living their lives as I fall apart in secret.

Preston arrives with one hour to spare, two hours after class has begun. I’m on the verge of passing out as I stumble over my lines. I’m full of rage, and little else. I didn’t eat that morning, and the night before Preston and I split two bottles of wine in my apartment. Lars sits on the edge of his chair as we wade through the scene. He looks like he’s being tortured. A kid I’ve never been friends with looks ready to spring up and catch me, my green complextion reflected in his eyes. The others look on with pity. My torment ends as I run out of the room, using whats left of my strength to get to the elevator. Preston mistakenly got in with me, trying to apologize. I smacked him as the doors closed on the theatre department floor. By the fourth floor, everyone else had evacuated the elevator car, driven away by my banshee-like sobbing. 

Of course I forgave him. 

I spent the next months trying to make it up to Lars, to my classmates, to Preston. I threw all my emotions into my classwork, saving nothing for my personal life. Preston continued to misuse my affection, I felt nothing. My grandmother passed away. I was a block of ice. Other students snubbed me, ignored me, refused to have anything to do with me. I rushed through the halls, ignoring them. I went through the motions of familial love with my parents so they didn’t worry, or sense a change in my mood I developed heartburn. My hair became brittle. I’d wake up in the dead of night gasping for air. Tears would run from my eyes even though I was hollowed out, like a festive gourd.

 Then spring came. 

A final assignment. 

To deliver a poem of our choosing in front of the rest of the acting studio.

 

I sat on that floor, the last time I would, having failed for the last time. I’d spent that whole year trying to be enough for everyone. In every class, every relationship, every scene, I was not enough. I had been accepted to study at LAMDA, a school in London I had fantisized about for years. But I had fooled them, and that fall they would realize I had fooled them in to thinking I was enough. I’d sacrificed everything, drowned out any personal needs that would impact my performances. Now Lars was asking me to explain to everyone why I was subpar in every way imaginable. The gig was up. I cried my first real tears in months, not just the ones that came out from pure exhaustion. 

“I have nothing else. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! I can’t give anymore. I barely have anything left and it’s mine. I don’t want to give anymore away. I have nothing!” I cover my face so I don’t have to look at the other students. I know they are long tired of my bullshit, my blubbering. Preston looks away from me, obsolving himself of any responsibilty. Lars suggests a ten minute break. I spend the rest of class in silence, sitting, stewing in my own failure. I fade in to the wall, shrinking away so nobody has to deal with me. 

 

I spent hours wondering why I chose that poem. If I chose a diffrent poem, would I have faired better? Would I have been able to give more? I chose the poem because I loved it. It meant something to me. A.A Milne was from a time in my life where things were easier, when people were together. When going on a walk was the most exciting thing in the day, full of possibilites. It was also a love poem. I picked it hoping Preston would have looked at me in that room, full of people the way he looked at me when we were alone. 

 

“If you were a bird, and lived on high, 

You’d lean on the wind when the wind came by,

You’d say to the wind when it took you away,

“That’s where I wanted to go today!” 

-Spring Morning. A.A Milne

 

 

He was my wind. In the saddest, most teenage sense of love, he was my wind. He carried me, and I was at mercy to his gusts and tropics. I didn’t realize at that point I was in the eye of a hurricane and was being tossed like a paper boat. I thought all that followed was my fault, that I brought too much into the room. I thought I wasn’t giving enough to get back the love I so desperately wanted. I wasn’t listening to the wind. That’s why nobody got enough from me.                 

 

There’s a danger in the emotional openess we face as actors. There’s a danger in giving, over and over while remaining detached from the scene. Don’t get involved. Don’t bring it into the space. Don’t let the outside impact the inside. But give. Give to your fellow actors and your directors. Give emotionally. Give time to reading countless monologues and studying scenes. Give mentally. Give hours in the gym, in yoga, in stage combat classes, physically theatre retreats. Give physically. Keep giving. If you aren’t where you want to be in your career, you didn’t give enough. You didn’t sacrifice enough. You didn’t open your chest cavity and hand over your heart to the role. But, you know, don’t get too involved. Don’t get involved, because if you’re not involved then nothing can affect you. It can’t crawl inside of you convincing you to care for it, to nurse it while it slowly eats you from the inside out. I wished that in the midst of auditions, and showcases someone had asked me if I was ok. I wished there had been more like Carl, who had patted my shoulder and gave me those words we all want to hear. 

“That’s enough. You did good. You are good. You are both the wind and the bird.”