metta for the room
may we all audition with ease
I walk into the waiting room for the audition. It’s packed full of people all hoping for their shot. I’ve been in more of these rooms than I care to think about, and in general I have other places I’d rather be, to put it mildly. Everyone has their own way of dealing with the audition process, the nerves, the vulnerability lurking beneath the surface. Years ago, before I had any conscious idea what an energy sponge I am, I would just get taken for a ride on everyone else’s angst, not to mention my own.
Plus, there was the self-loathing, the competition. If all these other people would just go away, I could get my due! I still remember the sting of the audition monitor looking 21 or 22-year-old me up and down before telling me they would not see non-union actors that day, as if I were dressed in rags. The countless ways this business has to tell you that you don’t measure up. And to make matters worse, deep down, I agreed with them. Constantly seeking approval outside myself and constantly being rejected, I spent years building myself up to try again and then fighting tears all the way to the subway.
Today, it’s different. The last few years have been an on-again, off-again affair between the theater and I. Covid, motherhood, life changes — I’ve been taking big breaks when I felt called to, and only getting “out there” when it really feels right. There have been strings of many months when I’ve wondered if I’ll ever set foot on a stage again. And while that thought had a lot of grief attached to it (a lot), there have also been plenty of times it’s brought a palpable sigh of relief.
My fear, in letting go of this lifelong identity, was essentially annihilation. Since being an actor has been intrisinc to nearly my entire life, would I still even exist if I ceased to be one? I feared I would just get smaller and smaller until one day I might disappear.
What I found, though, was the opposite. As I’ve released my white-knuckle death-grip attachment to BEING AN ACTOR, I’ve discovered I’m actually far vaster than just that. I already was anyway: daughter, sister, wife, mother, teacher, friend, dog mom, auntie, neighbor, gardener, New Yorker, American, democracy defender, book lover, forest bather… the list goes on. And beyond titles, just who this Katie-person is is fluid. My teacher pointed out to me that there could be plenty of ways to work through a transition like this, but I went decidedly, intuitively, to the Buddhist idea of non-self.
The idea of no self is not the nihilistic view that we don’t really exist, life is all an illusion blah blah blah, nothing matters. Rather, to put it briefly, if we examine our lives and what we see as our identities, we’ll see that “who we are” is comprised of various habits, actions, attributes that are all impermanent. Nothing about us, including our time in this body, lasts forever. And we did not spontaneously arise independently; we were born into a certain time and place, a certain family, a certain culture, from which we derived habits and patterns of being, and then we constructed an idea of a person with our name. But nothing about us is actually solid or self-contained. Where could I point to the part of me that “is” a singer?
Sure, “I” still love the theater. The days I sing are always ineffably better than the days I don’t. It’s one thing I do, it’s part of me and may well always be, but it’s not all of me. Rather than going all-in and beautifully devoting myself to this passion, clinging to that narrow identity was actually selling myself short and keeping me from living a full life.
Today, I walked into the audition waiting room and saw a friend. We hugged, a genuine connection. She introduced me to her other friends and the circle expanded. I looked around the room and saw dozens of potential friends, people just like me who all came here with a dream. I’ll never be friends with or even meet all of them. Having been around theater people for decades, I can say with a good degree of certainty that many would probably annoy me at the very least. But rather than competition, I felt instead my heart full of compassion.
And then, as I waited while 300 other names were read out before mine, I practiced metta for the room. May we be safe. May we be happy. May we be healthy. May we live with ease. I imagined every one of us beaming with joy. I imagined productions enough to give each of us our dream role. I imagined each of us, including myself, in the audition room, being truly heard and attended to by people who were deeply glad to witness and co-create a piece of art for the briefest of moments.
Anyone in the business knows these are aspirations at best, particularly that last one. It doesn’t matter.
I have no idea what the future holds. I still don’t know if I’ll ever set foot on a stage again. And trust me, I am not some enlightened being of endless compassion. Spend five minutes in the car with me if you want me to prove it. But the other thing I’ve been doing in all this time away is training my mind, and today I got to see that at least to some degree, it’s paying off.