By Helene "Michael Finnegan" Gresser
I recently had a
dear friend talk to me honestly about some of my bad habits. I love this woman
like my sister, and have known her since I was in first grade. She is the
reason I decided to get my real estate license. She is successful, smart, disciplined,
empathetic, funny, sexy, and incredibly generous. I have always looked up to
her. And I have disappointed her. The honest talk she had with me came from
such a loving place I could no longer pretend that I was getting away with my worst
traits.
I have always
been disorganized. I am often late. I do not prioritize well. And my focus –
well, let’s just say that I am all over the place. The bad habits started
around the time I reached middle school. Maybe the habits were always there,
but it started to affect my schoolwork when I became involved not only with
several extra-curricular activities (Student Council President! Drama class!
Voice lessons! Ballet! Track! Cheerleading! Basketball!) but also when I became
highly interested in pursuing the opposite sex - such fun distractions from
boring old research papers with first drafts and notecards and such. I had
always been an excellent student, and I was suddenly “not achieving my
potential.”
Apparently I tested well in all those weird IQ-like Scantron tests
(number 2 pencils only!) and I was supposed to be excelling at everything,
except maybe math, which flummoxed me since we started fractions in fourth
grade. But I was not excelling. I was all over the place.
It got worse in
high school, though I hid my failures well by being a class president multiple
times, joining every activity I could, and speaking easily in the classroom
discussions during Literary Criticism and Anthropology. I could always
improvise like a motherfucker. I was confident speaking publicly. I was in
every play and musical I could get into. But I was getting Cs and Ds and
failing Algebra. By the time I was a senior, as my close friends were
contemplating which ivy league schools they would attend, I was left with two
choices for college, the University of Wisconsin because I was in-state and it
would be fairly inexpensive, and Bowling Green State University, where my dad
was a professor and I could get tuition waived. I wanted to go to Brown, or
Amherst, or Dartmouth and study literature and psychology and theater alongside
my peers. But we were not rich, and my grade point average was C+. I was not
getting a scholarship anywhere. I went to BGSU.
I got into the
Honors program because I tested well and was able to skip Freshman English. I
had some terrific professors. I auditioned and got leads in plays. And I was
forever late with my homework, last to memorize my lines for a show, failing
Biology twice (it was an 8 a.m. class!) and getting so many Incompletes that by
my second semester Sophomore year I had a zero GPA. ZERO. I had been stupidly
signing up for 18 credits worth of classes a semester, being in every play and
musical, and working three jobs since my grades were poor and my dad said I’d
have to pay for my dorm and board and books myself until I proved that I was
serious about school. I was all over the place.
I took a year
off of school, worked as a nanny in Chappaqua, New York, and then quit that job
so I could be in Manhattan and see if I could pursue acting, my passion. But I
had to work so hard at waitressing and babysitting that I had neither the
energy nor money to take classes or audition. I naively interviewed with the
famed Sanford Meisner to see if I could attend his Master Class in the Virgin
Islands. Lord, what was I THINKING? Meisner looked at me, at my silly headshot
and college theater resume and said into his voice box machine (he’d had a
tracheotomy due to throat cancer) “Go back to school.”
I went back to BGSU
after a year in NYC, buckled down and got better grades and then blew up my
world around graduation by breaking off with my loving fiancé and moving to
Athens, Ohio to live with a guy I thought I loved and who wrote me nice poems.
He was a grad student at Ohio University. I worked as a waitress and had a near
nervous breakdown when I realized that my new relationship was doomed the
minute we moved in together, and I could not go back to my fiancé because he
got married very suddenly, six months after our break-up. I was a mess. In this
flailing state, I decided to audition for the MFA program in Acting at OU. I
was an alternate choice, but I got in.
Grad school was
three years. Three looong years. I was
psychologically torn apart by all my fuck-ups, and grad school did not help. I
did not memorize my monologues, was never chosen for mainstage plays, and was
criticized for my lack of discipline and focus. My acting teacher told me “You
have a fear of success.” I feared everything. I did not want to get up in front
of my studio and show my audition pieces, I was so afraid of being judged. I
skipped a rehearsal for a small play I was in to drive to Cleveland and say goodbye
to a man I had fallen for (and who was not in love with me,) and I was put on
academic probation. Until my final year, an internship at Cleveland PlayHouse,
I was sure everyone thought me a real fuck-up. A New York actress playing Anne
Frank (I was playing the thankless role of Margot, her sister,) took me aside
and said “You deserve to be on this stage. You could be playing Anne. Don’t
think you don’t have what it takes. You do. Believe in yourself.” I did not.
Somehow, I
graduated with my MFA. I moved to NYC. I had no idea where to start, how to get
an acting job, and had no money. But I endured, got a well-paid job at a
financial firm, kept getting raises, and happily left that security for a
touring children’s show. My audition had apparently been good enough to have me
called back for nine of their shows. I had validation at last. I had my Equity
card. I toured eight times. I made little money, saved none, but I was working
as an actress.
September 11th
happened. I was in NYC rehearsing what would be my final tour of Charlotte’s
Web and one of our cast members lost his father in the towers. I was grateful
to be out of the city a couple of weeks after the disaster, but my being was
shaken to the core. I was afraid of everything again. Afraid of noises and orange
alerts and planes flying low. And after the tour was over, there was no
part-time work in the city. Since that time I have had several jobs, few of
them paid acting gigs. I started doing stand-up to have an outlet, but I had no
plan. I once went on a date with a man who asked me what my “five-year plan”
was, like a damn job interview. But I’ve
never had a five-year plan. I was stumped. And I felt like a child.
People who make
a success of themselves have plans, focus, drive, discipline, and usually
talent.
I think I have
talent. But that doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have a fucking road map and gas
in the car. My beloved friend from grade school was telling me this: Get your
shit together, girl. Stop with the excuses, the fumfering around and drive the
damn car in the direction you need to go to get to your destination. Quit
waiting for a magic carpet to sweep you up and away because that ain’t how it
works in this world. Decide what you want to do, to be, and work hard at it,
every day. And if your heart isn’t in
it, don’t do it. Do something else that will give you what you need. Find your
purpose. Look at the horizon instead of the ground as you go.
Time to grow the
fuck up, even if that means I decide to pursue something completely new. Or if I
decide to take my creative pursuits seriously, then just DO IT. Do something
resembling ANYTHING.
Oy.
Begin again.
-hmg
...the horizon instead of the ground. i like that a lot. much of what you go through is not foreign to me at all. oy. i say that a lot too.
Breathless reading this. Yes. Yes indeed. Hard to believe its worth saving yourself when others are so good at asking, that's my thing. Barb Gensler told me yesterday, when I posted online that the answer to happiness is lowering the bar. She said "No! To be successful, the first thing to do is to fall in love with your work!"
Beautifully expressed. And I see so many parallels to my own life it's a bit daunting. Personally, I've come to believe that the key is finding the difference between the level of success that you think will make you happy, and the level that will actually make you happy. The former is usually much higher than the latter.
Or at least that's what I think today. Tomorrow, who knows? My philosophy changes more often than an incontinent toddler. Que sera sera.
Thank you all for reading my blentry, and for your comments expressing kinship. It helps me to know many of us struggle with fuzzy focus and ADD and general fucking up. We just keep on keepin' on.
Fumfering. Love it. And I think we could be tied in the organization category.
xo~Samantha