Actually, I don't watch "Grey's Anatomy" but a large proportion of my friends do so it seemed the obvious choice for the tilte. However, I digress (already). I feel like I may have been a bit moany (not a real word, I know) recently so I decided it was time for a good old slab of optimism. Life is good at the moment for a variety of reasons (still not financially, unfortunately). However things have only felt really great over the past couple of days.
Since writing the last diary entry (To be or not to be?...What?...To be or not to be what?) I realised that I had been, perhaps, looking for an easy way out. I like to know where my next pay packet is coming from, it makes me feel safe and cosy and, for the first time in my life I don't have that particular security in my life. Therefore, I thought if I just built up my list of singing students and concentrated on helping other people do the thing I have always wanted to do I would be happy, content and, ultimately, financially secure. But a performer's life does not work like that. This insecurity is what we signed up for. We knew it would not be easy and there would be fallow periods. It is important, however, to make those times between jobs count. By this point in my life you would think I would be used to the insecurity that comes from going from job to job. Finishing one job and not having the prospect of another on the horizon is, for me and others like me, normal.
The thing to do is embrace your free time (I covered this, sort of, in Up and at 'em Platt!.....Let's have a coffee first though)What I have had a tendency to do over the past couple of weeks is stress about having no auditions to go to or not enough teaching work to pay the rent that I ended up doing absolutely nothing but think about doing nothing. I can spend hours, nay, days doing this and achieving precisely nowt! So what has changed, I hear you yell? Well, for one, I have joined a gym. Those of you who are familiar with my physical being will attest, I am never going to be a thin woman (I have no desire to be so either. I embraced my curves a long time ago) but I could easily rein in those curves a little with a modicum of work. There is more to going to the gym than just getting skinny. I find if I do nothing then I want to do exactly that, nothing. However, if I get out of the house and do a bit of exercise I then find I want to do other things with the rest of my day other than sit around stressing about having nothing to do.
The second thing I have done recently is to join a kind of meditation programme. My brain is full of thoughts. So many thoughts that I can not hold on to one thought for more than a couple of seconds before another thought invades the space and shoves the first thought out of the way. I have always had too much going on in my head. I have a ridiculous imagination that runs away with itself at the drop of a hat (this was part of the reason I started doing this Diary so you can blame my imagination for the bombardment of drivel). Unfortunately my imagination is not the sort of useful imagination that allows me to write stories and stuff (I wish it was), it just gets in the way to be quite frank. Anyway, the meditation idea (I know, it sounds a bit spiritual for a girl like me) is a way of quieting all these thoughts so that they can form an orderly queue. That way I can get to each one in turn instead them feeling like a tangled ball of wool that I can never untangle (ooh metaphor - that's new).
In addition to these two potential improvements I have made I have also been inspired by two other things. The first being a friend who has started blogging. Her first offering (probably without meaning to be) has been quite inspirational. A great advocate of the "don't sweat the small stuff" camp (visit her blog via this handy link: http://paperlantern55.wordpress.com/). She was also the instigator of the meditation thing so blame her if I turn into a zoned-out hippy. The other inspiration was an online magazine article, shared by a friend on Facebook, about actors who have made their own work. Some of the people mentioned are women who have had trouble getting the sorts of roles they wanted so created their own characters, wrote their own screenplays and put themselves out there. It is so easy to sit around and wait for work to drop into your lap, Lord knows I am guilty of that, but I vow not to do this anymore. I had an idea for a one-woman-show-type-thing and, by the power of Grayskull, I am going to make it happen. (See the article here: http://www.frostmagazine.com/2013/09/actors-who-make-their-own-work/)
So there you have it. I promise from now on to be more productive, more upbeat, more vivacious, slightly less voluptuous and a lot less desperate (in all aspects of life). If I had ever been a Brownie or a Guide I would pledge allegiance to the Queen or summat like that. Unfortunately I wasn't so I pledge to serve Doris Day and work my ass off for the foreseeable future.
No comments:
Post a Comment