Two Bottles of Sangria Later...

Yes.  You read that correctly.  I said two BOTTLES of Sangria later.  And I don't mean shared bottles.  oh no.  Those were all me.  Aaron had two bottles of assorted red, I had tha sangria.  Jeff had a goddamn BOTTLE of sherry (gross) and most of a bottle of white, and we all shared a cheap bobbly moscatos chambagne thing.

So I'm having a rough day, lol, but had a very fun last night welcoming my friend home to the north, where he belongs.    When my husband loudly exclaimed, over a photo of some hot movie actor or other:  "Why is his penis not in my mouth?!?!"  My friend Jeff stopped what he was doing, washed over all sentimental and declared:  "OH, it so so good to be back in the north!  When a grown, staight, married man says something like that, it is CLEAR i'm not in florida anymore!!"

It will be so good to have Jeff back!  Gardening, gossiping, grand planning.  He is one of my dearest kindred spirits, and I am eager to start dreaming big again and feeling inspired... and then subsequently fucking off and shirking responsibility for the sake of 'nourishing our souls' or 'living our lives'.  This is our usual pattern.

Last night was a great fucking start.  "Just a warning:"  He prefaced, having a good gulp of the putresence they demurely call 'sherry', "I get wicked sentimental when I drink this stuff."  And boy did he. 

While Aaron was being horribly ill in the bathroom around 3:30 in the AM  (at which point I had officially been up for 24 hours, thanks to my giddy excitement over the royal nuptials!), Jeff and I comitted to having a 'truth session'.  He was very good at this; I, apparently, am a novice and was 'wayy too fucking nice.'

So now I have some complimentary things about myself on my mind, balanced by some 'i'm gunna level with you...' things, and some very strong opinions about who I am, what I am, and what I should be doing.

This is one person in my life who is completely disinterested in my claims of being a writer.  "No you're not."  He told me frankly.  But he's biased.  He wants me to be an actor, and he is a self confessed 'Not a reader'.  Nevertheless, he has known me forever and ever, he made some solid, some very perceptive and illuminating points, and one must consider all points of view.

However, as I mull things over, I can tell you this about me:  I am a fantastic fucking actress.  Honestly.  I am really fucking good.  I have the potential to be one of the finest actresses in generations.I am confident in this, and I am (despite the way it sounds) quite humble in this and humbled by it.

I would never have the confidence or the courage to speak the same way about my writing.  I am an infinitely better actress than I am a writer.  Not even in the same league, really. 

But I am not acting.  I am writing.  These are facts. 

I enjoy acting, I enjoy delving into a play and rehearsing and performing and bringing a story to life. 

But i LOVE writing.  I LOVE creating a story, crafting it, and sharing it.  I love it.

Hmphf.  Now what?

Because here are the two biggest roadblocks, as far as I can tell: I loathe auditioning and am pretty awful at it, which stands as a huge impediment to the acting.  And!  No one (with one blessed, cherished, appreciated exception) reads my writing, so that's a pretty sizeable obstacle to being a writer.  I mean if a writer writes in a vacuum and no one's around to read it...  right?  I can be a writer, but it's only a pretty meaningless self-inflicted label, right?  Kinda the way I call myself an actor, though I am not doing any acting (because writing can exist with no readers, but an actor is just a person playing pretend and talking to themselves unless they're doing it for an audience, you know?).

So I'm stuck in this limbo where I'm writing but no one cares, and could be a great actor but can't get cast.

And then there's the elephant in the room:  The teaching.  and the directing.

I am a good teacher.  I am a serviceable director.

I am proud of how far I've come and am still growing as both.

But LOVE is not a word I'd apply here.  Nor is the confidence and the fantastic.  I neither feel passionately about these things, nor do I feel like i could ever be the best or even exceptional in these fields.

So.

What to do?

jeff would have me lose some weight and get back on the audition circuit.  Aaron believes it's pretty hard to deny that I'm a writer when I write every single day and clearly have a passion for it (even though no one reads it and the quality is not really spectacular).  My advanced degree and all my money is sunk into the teaching\directing.  So tell me, where does this woman go with all that?  With her compass spinning frantically and her clock ticking down and the ground shaking beneath her feet?

Yeah.

She has another glass of fruit-juice wine and she says goodnight, and she decides she'll make decisions when they need to be made and trust in the universe to reveal it's plan for her in some obvious fucking way.  if it's too subtle, universe, I might miss it, because I'm tangled up to my eyeballs with possibilities and responsibilities, so if we could make it a Times-Square sized blinking, flashing, multi-media style sign, that'd be much appreciated.  Cannon fire and sturm and drang, please, if you could manage.  Thanks.