Confession

I’ve got a confession to make: I’m a failure. All my life I’ve been failing at one thing, quitting another. All my life I can’t make a decision on my own that I really trust. I can’t work hard at anything, not enough, because I always know in the end I’ll fail, or my family will just laugh as I fall on my ass. They all expect me to fail. They know I’ll fuck up at some point and need money or help or something. So I never try stuff I really want to do; I never go all the way because there’s no point. I stay in school studying acting so I can avoid really going out and getting an acting job. I’m too scared. Because failing out in the real world of acting is really failing big time and I can’t handle that. I say I don’t want to be on TV or in films, but that’s all I ever wanted since I was a little kid. Falling in love with theatre was a fluke; I went to college for acting and theatre is what they taught and I fell in love with it. But I got to the top and then I graduated and I had no idea where to go next. So I got a stupid job in an office and I sometimes would take some acting classes or go to an audition not knowing what the hell I was doing. Then I got to New York; I got into this school and this one teacher noticed something in me immediately; something most people overlook. And because he saw it I got more confidence to let other people see it, and before I knew it I was at the top and I felt great. I was succeeding and my family was far away so they couldn’t shit all over it and remind me that I’m really nothing… and then I got cancer. I thought, ‘shit, I failed again.’ It was like cancer was my punishment for being happy and working hard for the first time in my life. But because I had created this strength in me and worked so hard, and because of that confidence I gained, I weighed it all out and the old me would have given up, but the new me didn’t. I got up and fought and I beat cancer. I yelled at every damn person at the doctor’s offices and I cried a lot, but I got through it. The thing is it’s not the cancer that made me better than I was before it’s the acting. The confidence I gained from acting and the fact that people at school saw me as a winner gave me the drive to keep succeeding. But… the cancer… it’s what’s made me feel weak again. I am so scared I will go back to who I was before I got to New York, before I got a taste of success and a taste of what it feels like for someone to support me. I keep thinking about this teacher who pushed me and inspired me to work so hard at what I love, and, on one hand, I am so glad that he did, because without him I would never have had the confidence that I could succeed against cancer. But on the other hand I am so terrified that he will discover that I’m really a failure and a fuck up. It’s one thing for my family to see me that way; I’m used to it, but for someone I admire so much to see who I really am and that it’s nothing good is just… too scary. I mean, I guess the cancer and the chemo and everything I’ve been through is something that reminds me daily to keep trying to work harder and be better; it’s not all because of my teacher. But all this stuff happened at the same time, or, like, one on top of the other, and I mean, I get scared about going into the real world at the back of the line behind all those other actors already out there, and even though I have talent, I still get really scared because what if no one else sees it like he did; what if I don’t stand out? Because I never really have, not for anything good. But, then, even with that fear, I remember how scared I was when I found the lump in my breast, and I think: ‘Shit, I got through that, what’s a fucking audition gonna do to me?’ It sure won’t kill me. And maybe it’s not up to some random person at an audition taking notice of thing I have that’s special; maybe now that my teacher showed me it’s inside me I can start showing it other people without being so scared. It’s the success inside me, and I guess I should learn how to share it with everyone. Maybe now I am all tapped out of failure. Maybe.