I (23M) am scared of life
Hi just a heads up before diving into this, I’m going to spit out a lot of info here and I’m just looking for general advice/ guidance from random strangers on the internet because I have no support group in my personal life that I can just openly talk about the things I’m burdening myself with.
Here’s a bit of context about my life before I dive into the meat of my issues at hand. I’ve grown up in several different countries in my life because of my dad’s old job as a traveling salesman growing up. However, about 12 years ago now, we have been planted in Canada with the exception of travelling from city to city for odd jobs my dad would take to make ends meet. Fast forward a bit, we’ve now settled in a small in town and the whole family is working now but living under one roof. As my parents are slowly settling into life here, I can’t help but feel the dread in their eyes and I feel the need to just see them happy again. A huge part of our depressed state is because money is tight. I help out my parents financially with our car, groceries, internet and other bills in general, so that I’m not just leaching of their generosity to still live with them. However, my dad has picked up a pretty ugly alcohol addiction from the stresses of life before here.
Growing up I always said I had wanted to make money being creative and my parents and I aligned that with a vision to become an architect. I aligned high school courses to get me into the best schools and always kept my grades up. In spirit to be the perfect student, I also took on extra curriculars to boost my “resume”. Most of which was actually musical theatre and acting. I graduated with honours and even got a $10,000 scholarship for university. Life was looking fantastic, I was in a position where it seemed like I was only going to go up and yet I felt strange about it all.
2 years into the program (I’m 20 by this point) I was so severely depressed because I started to hate the concept of “designing.” It all felt so unnatural to me, I constantly forcing ideas and reaching walls where I literally couldn’t design a simple threshold. Trying to fit pieces of several different puzzles together, I was losing my fucking mind. On top of all of that, my younger brother had told me that my parents were going into financial ruin to support the other aspects of my studies (books, art equipment, supplies, subscriptions, food, rent, etc). I couldn’t pick up a job during school because I wanted to keep my grades up. I talked to my parents about it, and they actually told me to just keep going and that everything was going to be fine. Seeing how much damage it was doing to me and my family, I made the decision to drop out. My parents asked me what’s next and I said let me try acting.
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During highschool, I built an unexpected love for the performance arts. My English teacher who was also in charge of dramatic arts at school introduced me to this new world and it help me forget about the stresses of school. I used to be very much a bookworm and introverted so I never felt that comfortable around people. Ironically, when I was on stage I was the most comfortable and at home I had ever felt in my life. It’s a feeling that I can’t quite put into words.
Ever since I’ve left school, I have been spending time working on personal issues (ie. recovering from a state of depression, health issues, family matters, etc) and picking up passion projects around town. Even got so far as to getting some lead roles in local theatres. I spent the last year trying to transition into professional acting as I have only done local community theatre gigs (that have been pretty successful) though no luck on booking paying gigs. :(
However, I look around at friends that are now graduating school or starting careers and can’t help but think. Am I behind? Am I in a place where a 23 year old should be? And as an actor, am I running out of time before I can be where I want to be?