Follow the Opportunities: How Expectations Can Hold You Back
What was the career you pictured when you decided to become an actor? For some, it’s the dazzling images of Broadway and Hollywood. Others dream of Shakespeare, or forging their own way in indie film. But in reality, it’s unlikely that the bulk of our careers reflects those initial dreams.
A career as an actor lacks the stability and predictability of many jobs. It requires constant evolution and reinvention. When you’re rolling with the punches, never knowing what your next gig might be, it’s easy to wonder, am I doing it wrong?
I fight this line of thinking all the time. I was one of those kids that decided early on what I wanted to be, and never looked back. But that means my expectations of what the “right” kind of actor is were formed before I had any life experience, and well before my brain stopped developing. So why do I find myself holding myself against standards I made up when I was still a lump of raw cookie dough? While that’s mostly a problem for my therapist (thanks, Kelli!) to sort out, I can take a crack at it.
We as actors don’t have a real measuring stick. The only actors whose careers we observe consistently are celebrities. And very very few acting careers look like those. Even A-listers likely didn’t imagine their path to success exactly as it happened. And while our panicked human brains try to create stability by forming expectations of the “right” and “wrong” way to do it, those expectations can be very limiting. We don’t know what we don’t know.
When I decided to pursue an acting career, I assumed I would only be an actor. I had no real ambitions to direct, I certainly never thought I would be a producer, and intimacy coordinators didn’t even exist yet. But this is all work that I have done, and found exciting and fulfilling because when the opportunity arose, I thought why not give it a try? Actors change. Opportunities change. Years ago when I came to Atlanta for an acting apprenticeship, I thought I would stay eight months. But I met some incredible artists to work with, and acting opportunities kept coming, so I stayed. Now Atlanta is a thriving hub of film and theatre, and I’m glad I took a chance on it.
Freeing yourself from the confines of your own expectations might be challenging, but it can do wonders for your career. When you stop telling yourself what you should be doing, you open your eyes to what you could be doing. By all means, make goals and pursue them. But in the meantime, keep that voice in the back of your head that says What if I said yes?
Work breeds work. And you never know what kinds of work might surprise you until you try. Follow the opportunities. At the very least, you’ll learn what kind of actor you really want to be.
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You may also like:
- What to Do When You Don’t Feel Your Work is Good Enough
- How to Become an Actor in Atlanta
- Life Lessons for Actors from Casting Director Kim Marie Swanson
