Hungry for Help

Tonight I tripped into the most horrifically devastating, pitiful and yet self-empowering conclusion: the complimentary encouragement of others, while incredibly wonderful and, in my case, needed like breath and water, is deviously disguised inside a coating of doubtlessness, as if compliments were laws and facts that could somehow mold my future.   


Searching for gold with an ax and six dwarf brothers and later for the affections of Snow White in the creased curve of her red lips, Dopey and I are self-consciously the same. For so long, I see I, consciously as well as unconsciously, have wiggled my words into situations and conversations with the secret desperate hope that compliments would cover me in return. Mostly, I have clung to a twisted optimism that those I know and respect in the theater world would somehow steer me like a gang of tug boats, pulling my fat barge of an ass to the right dock. I'd send emails looking for advice, hoping compliments would be sprinkled into their returning messages like salt in a pot of spinach soup. Waiting for someone to outright say that my present employment bagging the groceries of strangers in a big scary city would one day be rewarded with something redeeming or at least something resembling promise. 


I should have listened to my mother. "We are born alone and we die alone."  She's said. Within the thin skin walls of our different bodies, we humans are all working toward our own self-pride and worth in this world. ...This entirely obvious realization has thrown me into a hole that literally feels six feet deep. Like I'm buried and layers of heavy sorrow stand on my skin, flattening the bones of my chest cavity, pushing my heart so deeply down that I feel it between the steps of my spine, and like maggots are crawling through the cracks beneath my fingernails, into my nostrils and over my earlobes to infest and ingest my intestines. I am lifeless, too stuck inside this stillness to move or scream. 


An actress, a writer, a person, I've grown dependent on the glances, castings, compliments and general commentary of others when it pertains to me, most particularly when it is by those I admire. And now, just now, I understand how unpredictable and even trivial it can all be later, or in this instance, now. This is the most vomit inducing life lesson I have ever attempted to swallow. We all want to be good at something. Most of us want to be damn near the best at our something and when our stars do not align, but spread into messy supernovas, we become discouraged and compliments become as necessary as practice. 


"If you can't remember if you wore that outfit two days ago, what makes you think anyone else will remember?"  My mother's way of telling me that the world does not revolve around me and my button down cardigans. Those whom I respect and wait for compliments from are not thinking about me. They have their own lives and careers to think about. Their own outfits to contemplate and coordinate. They are busy compiling the thoughts they think others have of them, others they respect, to wonder what little old me, a former student from years ago, is up to. And if they happened to be wondering about the progress of my life, their thoughts probably would not stray far from whether I am still hopelessly infatuated with their solidified confidences. 



Many people have heroes, but we all cannot expect to be saved in a dramatically cinematic flying sequence where we are plucked from a tumultuous train on a dead end career track, carried into the sky past swaying city skyscrapers and confused flocks of fat pigeons to a studio where we are starring in our own sitcoms where Diane Keaton is playing our aforementioned mothers.  Teachers and theater directors wear the tights and capes in my vocation fantasies where my inexhaustible imagination plays me weeping, thanking them all for their email responses full of flatteries and job offers in a Best-Actress Oscar speech. But tonight, I write this to remember how many of me there are. That these teachers have their own heroes to chase, children to support, tenure to obtain, their own careers to plan. They have hundreds of papers to grade, shows to direct, syllabi to type. They have their own imagined award speeches to write. 


This is like a hunk of steak that is too big and tough for me to chew through, but because it is already wedged between my teeth and cheeks, I must now spit it all out onto this white cloth napkin page. The celebrities of my life will not, can not and should not pave me a path to success. They have already given me the water, the shovel and the stones. The rest is up to me. It is time to be confident. There is no more room for awkward apologies and creepy shifting eyes. I must grab my whimsical life by its ear cartilage and pull myself to where I want to be. "Help is not on the way" my yoga teacher told my class last night while in a pose that stretched my hamstrings like gummy bacon. Compliments will not pay my wages. Sure they seem more valuable than my little sister's engagement ring, but they are mostly as intangible and as worthless as sympathy. Graciously receive them all, compliments, and store them for the days of hail storms and snake bites, but do not rely on them to hold your head up. The strength of your neck comes not from others but from the good nourishment you feed it. Do not wait for compliments and helping hands like scheduled buses and teeth cleaning appointments. They are as delicious as lemon frosting and my aunt's peanut butter balls, but compliments are not medicine. They are vitamins and they have brought me far enough. They have kept me writing, sincerely they have kept the keyboard under my fingertips. They have kept me auditioning when rejections for roles seem more plentiful than fruit flies on a bowl of peaches and blackened bananas in summertime. But now it is time to break from this self-induced confinement of uncertainty. It's time for me to stand tall and alone like a single birch tree in a field. 










I fear these previous pages are all just further attempts of my mind to manipulate my fingers into pressing for the compliments I still dreadfully crave. I would tell you that this was all unintentional, but I just don't know if it is.