Thank You New York?

The older I get the more I am experiencing things I never wanted to experience. And I’m not talking about that time I was drunk and fell on my forehead while trying to pick up my already broken cell phone. I’m talking about those fears that have haunted my future reality from the time I was a teenager. Granted they are not the worst things that could happen to a person. I don’t want to scare anyone, they have nothing to do with death or paralysis, they are more along the lines of humiliation, rejection and disappointment.

When I was seventeen years old I was accepted into a theater school that had a cut system. One of my biggest hesitations about enrolling was the idea that I may get cut. How would I live with myself after that? How would I face people, the people I went to school with, the people I grew up with, my family? I was so terrified of it that I pushed it to the back of my mind where I forgot it existed. It was like death. If you thought about it all the time you would never live. So I threw a black sheet over the possibility of being cut and went on my way.

I went to school and I worked hard. I thought I did some really good stuff, I knew some things weren’t clicking but I was dedicated. I wanted it. I made a family of my class mates. I fell in love with Chicago, even after losing the skin of my face to her chilled winters. I made it past the first year but when the second year passed I was not accepted for a third.

I was in Chicago when the letter was sent to my house in Iowa. My mother called me to tell me that she got the letter, “Open it!”. I could hear the sound of my mom’s voice on the other end telling me before she had to tell me. I had been cut. It had happened I would not be going back to my college for a third year. I would not be going back to finish with my friends. I could not go back to Chicago to live. I didn’t know where I would be going, until two months later.

I had been informed about the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC. That was my next destination. It was there that I learned to love acting again and realize my own talents on a deeper level. It was also there that I would experience my first kiss and my first broken heart. I would begin to learn about loss and how it is a part of winning. New York City gave me my womanhood. It has also taken a lot of my security and confidence; sometimes it will throw a little back.

It’s been eight years since I moved to this city. Sometimes I am done, sometimes I feel like I’m just beginning. But no matter what happens I’m learning that I have to make losing situations into winning ones.