My first real Trueing challenge was when I graduated from college.

Up to and through college I had a game plan. And the game plan was basically to study hard and get good grades. And it wasn’t really my game plan, it was my father’s game plan.

And like the good student I was, I followed the game plan reasonably well. I was a year ahead in high school. I went to an Ivy League school. Columbia, if not Harvard or Yale. I graduated from an honors program (though not with honors).

The problem was I had never given much thought to what I would do AFTER college. I was too busy trying to be the good student to give much thought to what my life would look like when I was done with school.

As I kid, I had sometimes fantasized about being in some kind of business. Of wearing a suit, and having a fancy office. But that fantasy never translated into an actual career path that I wanted to pursue.

I liked my major, psychology, well enough. But some part of me hesitated to become a therapist (one logical progression) or go on to grad school and more research.

I could go to law school but I wasn’t interested in law, even if I was good at arguing.

The problem was that the things I really loved weren’t about school.

I loved dance. I’d gotten good. Been a bit of a star in high school. Choreographed and performed. Onstage had felt like home.

I loved singing too, but didn’t have much musical talent. Just enough to be in Glee Club my last three years of college.

I was mesmerized by my friends who were actors. How bright they shined on stage. How full of life they were.

In high school, I’d found myself as a performer. That I could be that bright light too.

My gap year in Paris, I took 7-10 dance classes a week. But my father disapproved mightily. He’d sent me a letter on my 18^th birthday saying “God didn’t give you the body to be a dancer. But he gave you a brain and I hope you’ll use it.”

My freshman year in New York, I took classes at the Alvin Ailey dance school.

My sophomore year at Columbia, I joined a dance program at Barnard, across the street. The program included five technique classes a week, and on Fridays a kind of symposium where we analyzed elements of dance and played with choreography. Graduates of the program often went on to internships at New York City dance companies. Second semester, my teacher pulled me aside and said she thought that I had what it takes to be a professional modern dancer.

But then I pulled a muscle in my back, and had to stop dancing for six weeks.

I didn’t go to the doctor. I didn’t know if I would get past the injury.

I felt vulnerable pursuing something that demanded so much from my body. I felt foolish trying to do something that had such a limited lifespan.

And I didn’t know if I wanted to spend all day every day in class and rehearsal.

Even if I did get into a dance company, then what? How much could my body take? How long would that last? And then what would I do?

So I quit dance completely.

Acting was something I wanted to be able to do but didn’t know if my talent for dance translated into a talent for acting. I’d started to dabble in acting, so when I gave up dance, I shifted my creative dreams to being an actor.

I took my first acting class in Paris, at 18. But at the time I was there, Columbia had no theater department. The only options for acting were two classes in the school of General Studies (I took one my freshman year and one my junior year) and student club productions.

I did Guys and Dolls freshman year, in the chorus with a dance solo, and HMS Pinafore my sophomore year, in the chorus again, which didn’t really feed my soul.

I don’t think I was cast in anything I auditioned for my junior year, though in acting class we were creating and rehearsing an original piece melding Shakespeare, poetry, and The Three Sisters (Chekov).

My senior year I had two small parts in Play It Again, Sam, and a small part in an original one act based on the story of Noah called If You Can’t Swim.

The director of Play It Again, Sam told me he thought I had the most talent of anyone in the cast. But that’s all the proof I had of having some potential.

So when graduation loomed my senior year, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Or who I wanted to be.

I didn’t know if I would stay in New York, or return home to my parent’s house in California to figure out my next steps.

All around me my friends were applying for jobs – entry level stuff at arts organizations. A secretary at the Philharmonic. An associate editor at a publishing company. An assistant at New York City Opera.

I couldn’t do it.

I literally couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t imagine agreeing to show up in an office every day to put in my hours doing something that wasn’t meaningful. I couldn’t imagine a job that would make me want to wake up and spend eight hours a day doing it.

I couldn’t open a paper and look for a job much less apply for one. I wouldn’t have known what to look for. It felt like some part of my soul would die if I signed up for a nine to five job.

It’s not that I didn’t need money. My parents had informed me they expected me to be fully financially self-sufficient within six months.

I just knew that there was something important about this moment.

Something I needed to see or recognize. Something I needed to seize.

I met a boy I liked and I had a new group of friends who were all sticking around, and that felt like reason enough to stay in New York.

This felt like my last chance.

My last chance to find out who I could be as a performing artist. To feed that part of myself that was well fed in high school, and barely kept going in college.

But instead of finding myself as an artist in the smaller pond of a college program, I would be finding out in the wilds of New York.

So that was it.

I would stay in New York and pursue a career as an actress.

I had very little training. I knew nothing about the industry.

I had very little proof that I had talent or could get professional work.

But I had a dream of living a wildly creative life around other creative people.

My father always said the greatest blessing in life was to love what I do for a living.

And this seemed like a living I could love.

It wasn’t easy or straightforward. It wasn’t a fairytale or a Hollywood discovery story.

I made my money at first temping as a receptionist because I could never get my typing speed up high enough. Some of those early months, I made $600 a month, and $450 went to rent on the shared apartment I had found around the corner from my friends.

I lived on pasta and saved money to go to bars and clubs to hear the bands our friends played in until the wee hours.

Slowly a few pieces came together.

I got hired to teach standardized prep for nearly triple what I made working as a receptionist. And then I got hired to write and develop course materials for the test prep company. My coworkers were fellow actors and writers and musicians so work there was both freelance and fun.

One of my test prep materials development coworkers told me about an organization that trained actors to think like business owners. I joined and started to learn how to map out where in the industry I wanted to work and who I needed to know.

A group of us at that organization decided to put on an industry showcase based on a retelling of Grimm’s Fairytales and I ended up writing some of the original pieces as well as performing my own monologue in it. Rapunzel dreaming of cutting off her long hair. Snow White complaining about the dwarves.

Another coworker at the test prep company cast me as a 13-year old in a one-act he was directing at a prestigious theater. No money but great on my resume.

I mostly didn’t make money acting. And I mostly didn’t make even $20,000 a year.

And I had all the angst most 20 year olds have to work through. But there were ways I was happy. I was always doing something interesting.

I got a makeover and learned how to do my make up and dress with more style. I started leading evenings at the organization for actors to meet industry professionals. I knocked on agents’ doors with my headshot and resume.

At the Actor’s Information Project. I joined a class called RISK where we were asked to take on an “impossible” project and pursue it for six weeks. I raised money to try to buy the rights to my favorite book (Wet Paint by Gwynn Popovac) as a film project I could star in. I reached out to well-known film directors. I handed my packet to actors I’d want to be in the production with me at the stage door of the Broadway theater where they were performing. I drove to the Yosemite area to meet the author Gwynn Popovac and discuss the project with her.

I didn’t succeed. ABC was reaching out to option the book at the same time, and the author wisely chose to go with them. But getting so close, actually being considered alongside ABC, felt like an affirmation.

I found a funky little acting school where I could get classical theatre training for a fraction of the cost of a big acting school. I did scenes for showcases. One of my teachers dubbed me a major talent.

I got my first paid job at a little theater outside of Pittsburgh, playing a hippie dippy sister in a play called Belles.

I got cast in an independent film with the promise of money (deferred pay contingent on the producers making a profit). I got strangled on screen under a overpass in Queens. I lay in a body bag in a real morgue.

I got a four and a half month gig at a Renaissance Faire as a mud beggar, spoofing Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy three times a day in a mud pit, and wandering the Faire grounds improvising with the other actors.

Despite getting paid work, I started to feel the most I would ever do was get small roles or understudy roles at regional theaters. I was tired of moving in and out of New York as my acting work was nearly always out of town.

I was finally starting to want more stability in my housing and in my income. I turned down the chance to go back to the Renaissance Faire.

The Actor’s Information Project had career coaches, and those coaches became very early adopters in the coaching industry, and I followed them, echoes of my psychology major, thinking that coaching would be a better support job for my acting career.

And then I blew a deadline for a group audition for summer theater (and therefore my chance to work that summer).

I decided to backburner acting to focus on coaching, and before long I realized that I was done. That I was a better coach than I was an actor, and that coaching had more potential for fulfillment and good income than acting did.

I wasn’t sad or discouraged when I quit.

I felt done. Complete.

Pursuing acting led me all kinds of amazing places. I learned how to feel my feelings. I learned how to dress and present myself to look my best. I learned to think like a business owner, to map my goals, and figure out my finances and market myself. I took risks and knocked on doors to try to get where I was going. I was part of beautiful, creative projects. I studied things I loved, like Shakespearean Verse Technique. I got to do scenes and showcases and plays I was proud of. I gave good performances.

I don’t regret a minute.

Until I graduated from college, I was following someone else’s plan. This was the first time I listened and chose something for me. Chose knowing that it would upset or disappoint my father. Knowing there was no guarantee I would succeed.

But knowing it was the right ride for me.