The Artist's Way - Week Eight
As artists, we are expected to be emotional to the extent of being irrational. If you’re anything like me, you’ve rejected this stereotype to a dangerous degree. One that feels almost stifling to your emotions. In a rebellion against that stereotype and as a form of emotional protection, I have often shoved away any initial feelings of hurt or disappointment. I hide away, feel them privately, then attempt to move on.
Being an artist means facing rejection. We all know that going into it. It’s tenfold for actors, who get rejected six times before lunch. Because we all know this and because it is so common, we don’t allow ourselves to feel it, to mourn it. It would be grossly impractical and unhealthy to mourn every small loss or rejection, but we’ve come to be so accustomed to losing that we never mourn the big ones either.
The scripts that took hundreds of hours only to get ignored, the marketing/networking emails and follow-ups that were responded to with silence, the role you prepped for weeks to audition for, then ended up never even receiving a callback. These are hard, time-consuming, energy-intensive pursuits of your craft. We are told time and again that rejection isn’t personal. Nonetheless, we should be allowed to lament without being told or hearing a voice in our heads say, “Oh well, this is the industry you signed up for.”
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I went to an art school that wasn’t particularly kind to artists. The typical colligate path for an actor is to get conservatory training in a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree. I had planned to take that path initially. The pandemic had other plans. After my freshman year, I transferred to a highly regarded school to get a Bachelor of Arts degree (BA) in theater. The program marketed itself as being highly integrated with the BFA program, just more flexible. That was incredibly false advertising.
I found myself at a top-ranked theatre school, in a program that the school itself deemed as less than because of a single letter difference. There were no school-facilitated, faculty-led performance opportunities for us. We had a class dedicated to telling us to become theater admin as opposed to actors and directors. We were forced to spend full semesters doing laundry and sewing hems on the costumes for the actors in the “better” program. All of this because our tuition made the school slightly less money.
It was gross, elitist, and incredibly damaging to my artistic health as an actor. I was forced to go into other departments to find fulfillment. I spent more time in the film and English departments than I did in the theater department. I can count on one hand the professors who positively influenced me creatively, and only one of whom seemed to actually see the issues we were facing and wanted to champion for us.
It has been over a year since I left that program. I am only just now feeling the return of my love of theater. That was the love that made me want to go there in the first place. I fear that whatever skills I did learn were not at all sufficient tools for the reality of the industry, and if they were, they’ve been overshadowed by the near blows to my artistic ego.
These are the types of major artistic losses we should not only mourn, but quickly work to heal. I know I am not alone in the way that program made me feel. I have talked to former classmates who feel the same.
What a waste it is to have an institution built on the encouragement of artists turn into a place that does the exact opposite.
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So how do we heal? First and foremost, you must allow yourself to feel it. Feel it - don’t fester in it, don’t hold onto it - just feel it and move, then move forward.
Next, reframe it. What was the gain from this loss? In my particular case, I gained a very diverse scope of knowledge of my industry because of feeling forced to find fulfillment outside of theater. For myself and my fellow alumni, we have all gained resilience and resourcefulness that was born from being forced to make our own opportunities.
Overall, the key to survival - to healing - is action. Even in the immediate, when we feel bogged down. One tiny action to make ourselves feel supported, then we can go on to finding the next step in creating the path towards our artistic dreams.
