I spent my entire high school career working towards getting into college, specifically a theatre conservatory, and focusing on my family, which was in distress. I didn’t date. I didn’t really hang out with friends. The only extra circular activity I did was theatre. I never really had a life and never thought twice about it because ultimately, it paid off. I had a G.P.A. of 3.5 from one of the most prestigious prep schools in Tennessee. I applied to four of the most prestigious theatre conservatories (as well as a slew of other colleges) and was accepted to three conservatories and the other colleges I applied to. I thought, “This is IT! I am going to The University of North Carolina School of the Arts! I will major in Stage Management! I will move to NYC and be a Stage Manager on Broadway!” I was convinced that was exactly how my life would turn out. Life lesson #1 of this blog: Just because you plan for your life to go a certain way, that doesn’t mean the universe (or whatever higher power you believe in) will allow it to be so. The first two years of college, I was working toward the goal of being a high-powered Stage Manager on Broadway and thought I was in paradise. I thought I’d maybe be an opera Stage Manager instead but I was going to be working on big productions. About half way through my junior year, I started to have a crisis of identity. First off – a little background on my college experience. UNCSA is a stand-alone conservatory and the entire campus’s curriculum is based around the physical productions on campus and the hours need to make those shows happen. This means that for my main course “Production”, which is a six-credit lab class that is time solely devoted to working on the physical productions that were happening on campus. All productions on the UNCSA campus, whether it’s a play, an opera, a dance concert, or a film shoot, are entirely student run. This class is a minimum of four hours every day but for stage managers it is usually six hours a day. The reason for this small tangent is that if you are going to understand where I am coming from, you need to have a basic understanding of how UNCSA works. Now back to my crisis. The way it worked out, I didn’t have a production assignment for five months. I managed to find some local, off campus jobs and some small opportunities on campus but those gigs were not guaranteed and I had to find them. Had I not found them, I would have been sitting at home watching Netflix for a six-credit class. This is was the catalyst for my identity crisis, which has yet to finish. Because I was given time off by my professors and because of my background (which will be discussed at length – just you wait), I naturally thought it was because they didn’t want me working on anything because I wasn’t good enough. This was furthered by the fact that every time I asked my professors why I had time off, their response was either “That’s just how it worked out”, “It’ll work out, trust me”, or “You just need to get over it and move on”. Now having the time and the motivation to really analyze myself, my love for stage management and theatre, and what my skills actually are, I started to question whether I should be a stage manager and if I wanted to. To add fodder to my crisis, I was in the middle of a friend break-up with my best friend who was also my roommate. We had been super close since the first week of college and he didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. To be fair, I had become a pretty miserable person because of the feeling terrible about myself and thinking I had no value as a stage manager. That’s the thing about making one part of your person the majority of your identity – it will come back to nip you in the bud. I was a really good stage manager and I had invested so much of my life into becoming one that when it started to crumble away I just broke down. When I started to retreat into myself and get lost in a dark place, my friend didn’t know how to deal with it or with me. I don’t blame him for bowing out. He did what he needed to do to take care of himself. I respect him for knowing when something was out of his wheelhouse and knowing when to walk away. Removing himself from my life was the best thing he could have done for himself – he finished his college experience strong and with the experience he wanted. The third leg of the trifecta was that on April 28, 2016 my grandmother died. Fortunately, I was able to be with her when she passed but her death hit me harder than I thought it would. She was ninety-one years old and lived a very full life. It was her time to go and my whole family was ready to let go. But nevertheless, it was one of the hardest moments of my life. Because my junior year was so hard emotionally, I decided to take the summer off and not do an internship. It’s the expectation at UNCSA that students do a summer internship in their area of study. That summer was one of the greatest summers of my life. I got to relax and hang out at the pool every day and for the first time in a long time I was completely stress free. When I was able to get some distance from everyone at school, teachers and students alike, I realized that I still love theatre. And so, I thought that meant I still loved stage management. I went into my senior year of ready and excited to be a stage manager and hopeful for the new and final year. The year started off well enough. I was working on a production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot directed by one of my favorite directors and the design and production team was comprised of wonderful people. That production was one of the best experiences I had in school and if every project I do could be as amazing an experience, being a stage manager would be a great career to have. But not every production is like that, unfortunately. My next project was the one that broke the camel’s back. I was stage managing the biggest production of the year – an opera entitled Florencia en el Amazonas. I was so excited to be given such a huge opportunity. I had never worked on a show that big before but thought surely I can handle it. The director and design and production team had already been working on the project for seven months by the time I was assigned, so already I was behind. Not so unusual for stage managers to be brought onto a production after the rest of the team so I figured that wouldn’t be a huge issue. Turns out it was a bigger issue than I anticipated. There was so much information to be learned and so little time to learn it that I just started drowning in it all. Because I’m a pro (not really but let’s pretend), I was able to keep it all together enough so the production kept chugging along. But I was miserable. Everyone on the team was constantly frustrated with me because I couldn’t live up to their standards. They expected me to be perfect and mediocre was a stretch for me. In that, I realized that if doing the job were enough, I would have been happy. I was doing the best anyone in my circumstance could do and if the joy of the job were enough, I would have been ok with people being mad at me for not being perfect. I would have still been happy. But I was miserable. That made me realize the job wasn’t enough for me anymore. I was working almost 24 hours a day and a continual punching bag for every person who had an issue. I wasn’t mad at anyone for treating me that way – that’s a part of the job of a stage manager. But what it all taught me is that the job wasn’t enough for me. I needed more in my life than the job, which was never something I knew I needed. The job had always been enough. Even if I had needed a break away from the work occasionally, ultimately it was enough for me. This realization happened in February 2017. With graduation in May, I started trying to figure out what I was going to do. I learned that I wanted a career that would allow me to have a life outside of work. So what kind of career in the arts allows for a life? Something with a 9-5 schedule, which mostly means office and administration work would allow for a life outside of work? Sounds perfect, right? These jobs use the skills that I love from being a stage manager but don’t require me to be in a rehearsal studio or theatre and work 24/7. Now don’t get me wrong – there are stage managers that are able to find a balance and have a full life. And it’s not a contractual obligation of the job that you are available 24/7 but being available when anyone needs you or has a question is an expectation. And knowing myself I would never be able to find that balance and I would work all the time because that’s how I was for my entire time at school. And when I loved every aspect of the job, I didn’t need a life outside of it. But when I stopped loving the job or didn’t have the work to fall back on, I was empty and lost. So I decided to pursue a career in administration for the arts. The only problem is I don’t have a degree in administration and I have no experience in administration work. I have the skills to do almost any of these jobs – maybe I’m lacking in a few specific computer programs but I’m millennial I can teach myself any computer program. I have a degree from a very well respected and connected institution, my professors think highly of me, I think highly of myself (not in an egotistical or narcissistic way, just in a confidence way), and I am an ambitious, talented self-starter. Surely I can get an entry-level job for some theatre company or a job as an administrative assistant – The Devil Wears Prada style. Turns out that entry-level jobs require experience – the one thing chutzpah can’t get you. So here I am: 22-years old, unemployed, no skills to get a job I’m interested in, uninterested in jobs that my degree qualifies me for, living at home, hopelessly single, and totally lost both emotionally and sometimes very literally because I’m terrible at navigating. I am in the midst of a quarter life crisis. Where to now?
A Millennial’s Real Time Step-by-Step Guide for Learning to be a Grown-Up.