My Acting Journey
Getting to where I am today as an actress has been anything but simple. The short story of how I ended up here is that I’ve wanted to be an actor for as long as I can remember. As ordinary as that sounds, it took a while for it to become real for me.
I fell in love with performing when I was a child. I remember being about seven and my dad brought home a video camera from a friend. He was testing it out and I followed him around desperately trying to get his attention so he could film me. This is one of my first memories of wanting to perform and being in front of a camera was normal and comfortable. It’s always been that way and it’s hard to explain but the front of a camera is my favorite place because I feel more myself looking down a lens than at any other time.
Growing up, I realized my love for performing and I was the kid that dreamed of being on Disney Channel. I sang with a hairbrush at the top of my lungs and found every opportunity to perform. I started getting into theatre in middle school and fell in love with the stage and the energy of an audience. In high school, I did musical after musical trying to satiate my love of performance. I’ll never forget the feeling of 700 people standing and cheering after my first performance in a leading role. I was the last to come out from behind the curtain for bows and walking out on the stage, hearing the crowd cheer was an experience like no other.
All of my acting coaches and teachers at that time used to ask me if I had ever considered film acting? They used to tell me that I had a way of being subtle when acting that created an incredibly believable performance. I took their advice and my senior year in high school was cast for a student film project called Variance. It was during this production where I came to realize I preferred the camera to the stage. I loved it so much in fact that my new dream was to move to LA and become an actress.
But, I gave into fear and never went.
That’s the thing about fear – it has a crippling way of stopping you from pursuing your dreams, and that fear kept me from following my love of performing. Listening to reason, I did what any smart eighteen year old would do. I went to college to get a degree in something that was practical. So I went to school to become a teacher.
For a while, becoming a teacher felt like enough and I talked myself into believing that teaching was really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was pretty convincing, so much so that people were often surprised when I would act in student film projects on the side at school. I continued to tell myself that teaching was the right path for me, but all the while I would long to be on film sets, watch every musical production at my school, and fight this nagging feeling that I was somehow missing out.
It turns out, I was missing out.
However, it took me four years of school and failed expectations to finally realize that. I did finish my degree in education and have my teaching license, but before graduating I took a long hard look and myself and was finally honest – I didn’t want to be a teacher for the rest of my life. I want something so much more, something that makes me come alive, and that something is acting.
So here I am, about to move to Atlanta to become an actress! I have no idea if my dreams are going to come true, but I’m willing to try! I’m willing to fight, grind, and repeat and fail until I don’t. (thank you Bobby Bones). I’m taking a crazy leap not knowing how any of this is going to turn out because not taking that chance today would be the biggest regret of my life.
So here’s to insane dreams and refusing to let fear take those dreams away.