Stuck...

I am 38 years old and I have absolutely no idea what to do with my life from here on out.  Call it a midlife crisis.  Call it nearing the big four zero.  Call it what you will but it’s starting to get to me.

Let’s backtrack:

High School and prior for me were a drug filled, screw the government, I don’t need anyone telling me what to do with my life, killing it in sports until I tore my meniscus, killing it onstage when I thought I found my calling, killing it on the yearbook staff when I thought I wanted to be a writer and a photographer, skating by with excellent grades because I took things like Livestock (raised a goat) for a science credit and brought my ceramics teacher McDonalds so she would let us make our bongs and pipes, and pretty much stuck my middle finger up and any sort of authority.  Boom.  Graduated with a 3.8 and snatched my diploma wearing my John Lennon purple sunglasses, Birkenstocks and I believe I was stoned.

Pretty much my life

Yup.  My life.

Enter a community college.  Yes community because I didn’t want to go to a 4 year college or a university and I didn’t need to take my SAT’s and I shot my chances at that Tennis scholarship when my knee ripped apart and I didn’t give two shits about school to actually apply myself.  So OCC it was.  I filled my transcripts up with WD’s (Withdraw from class) because I got in a heated verbal argument with my Speech Teacher and I thought one of my history teachers was racist and the World Religion guy put me to sleep and I and loved and aced Mythology and Human Sexuality classes.  Then I took one Scenic Design class, met folks from the OCC Rep and my life changed.  I ended up throwing my life into theatre.  The OCC Rep was a place to learn every single thing you need to know about theatre and we did.  I met some incredible people, professors and made some life long friends.  Out of the Rep spawned three very well known theatre companies that made a stamp on the OC Theatre Scene and one of them still stands.  Academics again fell by the wayside.  I had found what I want.

Hoping adding funny pictures will break up the long ramble

After staying way too long at OCC I was gently booted as one of our professors did to those of us who out grew the Rep, just before that Rude Guerilla and Hunger Artists were born.  I did a few shows at RG but landed at Hunger Artists and that was my life for years.  I ended up running the joint for a while and the company saw one of it’s most profitable years then.  When the time came for me to step away I became active again at Rude Guerilla, joining the board, throwing my life again into a theatre company. 

I met my husband in there somewhere.  Thought I had found the man of my dreams.  We lasted almost 8 years, married for 5.  He turned out to be a lost little boy who never did learn how to get his shit together.  I was in denial for so long not understanding how one person could lie so much.  Oh and then there was the cocaine and oh of course the draining my nest egg and leaving me in drowning pool of debt I’m still trying to recover from.  May of 2004 that came to a bitter end.

In November of 2008 the company I worked at for 10 years went under, leaving us all with no severance, no retirement, no nothing.  In March of 2009 my beloved Rude Guerilla closed its doors.  Not long after that Hunger Artists shut its doors. 

When I moved home I tried to take that opportunity to try the successful acting thing once more.  (I had tried somewhere in the running theatre companies years).  I’d get new headshots, find an agent, now unemployed I had the time.  But I hated it.  I hate the scene.  The people are so soulless and the whole industry is so full of bullshit and corruption that I just couldn’t stomach it.  I have friends still fighting the good fight, and some are getting work which excites me to no end but I learned very quickly it wasn’t for me.

One of my headshots.

Those early years I had fallen in and out of depression, drinking, partying sometimes all night long.  I was sick all the time.  Negative.  Angry at the world.  Then in 2010 I had a bit of an epiphany.  I needed to get my shit together, change my way of thinking, get my life on track.  And I did.  I quit smoking, jumped back on the fitness train, started taking better care of myself, started seeing a therapist to work on changing my way of thinking, stopped having casual sex and wanted to start looking for the real thing.  I was doing it.  Slowly.  Very slow going but defiantly moving forward.  I got a new job.   I started feeling better.  I honestly think I was so busy focusing on trying to get my life on track I didn’t realize I had lost the passion.

Then the hemorrhage.  Everything changed.  My perception on life.  Everything.  A year after that was focusing on getting back to my normal health and being able to tackle life like I did before.  No hesitation.  But that anger was gone.  That fight.  Life was different.  There’s now a fear and a time limit it seems.  My feisty "fuck you authority" is still in there but it’s quelled.  I focus more on kindness now.  I cry at EVERYTHING.  I seem to be gravitating more towards stability which I’ve never had in my life and that’s something I’m finding difficult to do.

So here I am today.

 I jumped on the OCR (Obstacle Course Races) train back in 2011 and loved it.  But it’s turned into something different now.  There’s a culture and I’m realizing I’m not a part of it.  The competitive side in me wants to jump in with both feet and join the crazy extreme athletes (some my friends have actually succeeded at this) and start doing these hardcore.  But I’m starting to realize this isn’t an option.  1^st of all I can’t afford them.  Jesus have they got expensive!  But mainly my body can’t take it.  Oh yes, I know there are 70 year old gramma’s doing these, and folks with disabilities, and people who have had multiple surgeries, and on and on.  But I’m also learning to listen to my body.  She’s a little beat up.  When I’m in pain I’m a bitch.  Plain and simple.  I’d like to continue doing them once in a while, but I need to step back and realize I’m not a competitor.  I started doing them because they were fun.  I want to go back to that.  A race I was supposed to do yesterday was cancelled and they are offering a “Hurricane Heat” as a make up.  Well, I got really excited and was all about it, but then I realized – it’s for the hardcore folks.  The runners.  Not for me.  This is when I got a little sad, but do need to accept, I’ll never be one of them and that’s ok.  I’m not going to be a triathlete or 3rd place in my age group for Spartan because I just don’t have the time/money/passion to train like that.

Never gonna happen

Theatre has taken a back seat.  My Papa was very ill for over a year which put me on a self forced hiatus so I could be there.  Now that he’s gone I haven’t jumped back in.  I do have a project coming up that I’m super excited about but it’s not my entire life anymore.  There’s nothing out there that sparks that passionate flame in me that Rude Guerrilla used to do. 

I wanted to go back to school.  Was thinking of majoring in creative writing.  I have the option here at Chapman to do so, but the math.  I know I know I know I should just suck it up, but I also HATE wasting time and the amount of time and energy I would have to put into taking enough math to enroll here would not be worth it to me. 

I’ve dabbled in art, crafts, writing, photography and although I feel I’m decent at some of these things I certainly don’t excel at anything.  Nothing sparks that excitement or passion. 

I’m watching everyone around me at work move on and up and I stay.  Not sure where to go or what to do or how to apply myself.  I’m watching all of my friends – I swear all of them – having successful relationships, marriages, children.  I may want that?  I've seriously thought that having one kid would be really fucking awesome but I don’t know. 

Here is where this surprising longer than I expected blog came from – what am I doing?  I’m in a big ol fat giant rut.  I don’t know where to go from here.  I lack inspiration.  I lack passion.  I constantly battle now with the “I didn’t die so I should be grateful every second of every day” mantra.  Which I am – I really am – but I still feel like I’m sitting on a train that’s going in one big circle.  I have absolutely no idea where to start.  

I will continue exercising as much as I do because it keeps me healthy and feeling good. I will continue to do theatre when the right project comes around.  I will continue the battle of "should I do online dating because I'm getting that desperate" argument with myself.  I'll still do the random OCR that actually looks fun when it comes around.   But that's all I got.  It's not enough.  I need that drive I used to have.  That ambition.  It seemed it didn't have direction before which was ok back in the day but it's different now.  I feel like I'm older, more mature (I sound like my mother) so I need something.  I need to find out what the hell I want to do with my life.  Any ideas?