A little over a week ago, I graduated with my Master’s Degree from the esteemed Manhattan School of Music. The weeks leading up to my graduation featured many congratulations from my loved ones, emotional Zoom classes saying goodbye to my friends, and a full blown quarter-life crisis. Up until this point of my life, all I have ever known was school, structure, and a safety net. I spent my entire life working up to this moment. I dreamed of the day that I received a Master’s Degree and was finally able to go into the world with a solid six figure job waiting for me and a group of important people praising me for finishing school. It was a very cute dream. The reality was that I finished school and had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life.
What do I do with my degree? How do I write a cover letter? How do I find a job during a Quarantine? Will I be successful? Will I be able to pay my loans back? What am I doing? Does my life have any direction?
These were all questions that I had floating in my head. Now that I had all the time in the world, I had no guidance or plan for what I wanted to do for the great “after”. I was supposed to be “most likely to succeed” and I had nothing going for me. I lost all of my fun, cozy theater jobs because of COVID-19 and I lost my motivation to do literally anything other than my online Krav Maga classes. I felt so hopeless that I spent hours writing in my journal that I needed to be “more”. I started comparing myself to people on social media who were thriving in Quarantine. I was in a bad spot for days until one day I realized that the one thing I was doing was writing. I caught myself writing plays, journal entries, and many Instagram posts. If writing was what made me feel productive than why not turn it into something? Why not use my writing to tell the stories of my life that people always ask about? I get so many questions about my ACL injury and reconstructive surgery, my weight loss journey, and what it’s like to be a performer. Also, in that moment, I realized that if I write billions of plays, it might never be seen to the light of day unless I decided to make it public myself. We get rejected so much in the world that there are people with brilliant ideas who have given up simply because they were never given the chance to be public about their work. Therefore, I decided to create a blog to discuss my journey and eventually, promote the work that I am head-over-heels passionate about. Though it is such a cliché, life really is too short to not put yourself out there.
