Student Blog: Growing on My Own Timeline
Learning that becoming the artist I want to be doesn’t have a deadline.
I am a person with many interests and hobbies, within my musical theatre major and outside of it. Of course, I love dancing and singing, but I also spend a lot of my time working towards my journalism minor, crocheting, or reading a book. But I have definitely had a bit of a mental struggle recently when figuring out how to allocate my time between all of those things.
I am watching all of my friends who just graduated finish their senior showcase, and some are starting to post about signing with agencies. For a while, that felt very far away, but now I am thinking that this time last year doesn't seem so far, and so that only means that this time next year is coming barreling towards me.
I mean, in one year, I will be a senior, which is beyond insane to think about. Especially when it feels like that is some kind of deadline to have perfected yourself. Perfected your craft and perfected how you are going to market yourself. What kind of actor are you? What will you show the agents at the showcase that is perfectly you but also unique, and also shows off enough but not too much?
Halfway through my BFA, there are absolutely goals I have accomplished and things I thought I could never have done. But there is still so much improvement I need to make before feeling ready to jump into the real world of theatre and auditioning once I graduate.
So with all of that in the back of my mind, in the last couple of months, I had started to think about all the things I need to “perfect” before then. But there is only so much time in one day. Especially during the school year when I have classes from 8-4 and rehearsal from 6-11. There's no time to just go to the dance studio and work on things we learned in class, or go to a practice room and work on pushing my voice out of my comfort zone.
I felt burnt out already from just classes and rehearsal, so the idea of even more things I needed to work on made me feel like I needed to stop pursuing my other hobbies in order to focus only on theatre and working towards being “ready.” I forgot that being well-rounded is important too, and that the things I love outside of theatre still help shape me as a person and as an artist.
I started to worry that I didn’t have enough time to become the artist I wanted to be before it was too late. But then I realized it’s never too late. Graduating is not the end of education. Everyone continues to take dance classes and voice lessons. I even saw a comment on TikTok the other day from someone saying that when they go to open dance calls and feel like they did not put their best work forward for an audition, it was just a free dance class.
I realized that there are so many ways of looking at things like that, and now, after feeling like I was on some sort of deadline, I know that I have so much time. I am going to make the progress I need to make on my own timeline, even if it doesn’t happen all at once, and I am always evolving as an artist and as a person, and that will never change.
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