Student Blog: Learning to Love the Weather Roulette

I grew up with the seasons of San Francisco, which means the only “snow days” I had were either smoke days because of forest fires or the one rain storm in my 19 years that killed our power. Everyone jokes that San Francisco has no seasons, just lots of fog and 60° all year round (cue the phrase, “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”) and everyone is kind of right. In reality, there are some warm weeks but they are few and far between and yes, summer in San Francisco is a lot of foggy days. I have always loved the foggy cozinesss of San Francisco because it was consistent. We have our random 85° weather here and there but I could usually rely on my city to give me my sweater weather most of the year. I never thought twice about this consistency until I moved to Boston for school and suddenly I had to be prepared for anything. I would wake to sunny skies and end the day with heavy rain and wind that would nearly blow me over, all without any warning from my weather app. My East Coast roommates were unfazed but I was shocked. How was I supposed to prepare accordingly—umbrella, coat, layers—without a weather app or a consistency factor on which I could rely? 

Looking back, I can say I overreacted because who cares if I am a little cold on the 4 minute walk between Acting I and Intro to Literary Studies. Yes, I overreacted to the weather roulette of Boston, but I also knew it wasn’t about the weather. I grew up with consistency most of my life. I have been at the same school since kindergarten. My divorced parents have had the same schedule for house switches since I can remember. I have always loved school and have always been pretty good at it. San Francisco weather is just fog and 60° all year round. All very consistent stuff.

I am thankful for the consistency of my pre-college years but looking back at my transition to college, I realize I had wrapped myself in all that consistency like a protective blanket. My subconscious knowledge of that blanket was part of the underlying reason why I went so far away for college. Boy, did the changes hit me like a ton of bricks. Everyone talks about the first semester of college being the one of big change and transformation, but I think it’s the second semester that really gets you. When I returned, for what should be called the winter semester (again, Boston weather roulette), everything became real. It hit me that this wasn’t just a long vacation or some funky high school semester abroad: I was going to spend the next 4-5 years at this college studying theater in this city with these people. Safe to say that didn’t go over well with my consistency-loving brain. 

During this rough semester, I had a damaging experience in a theater production which, joined with the other factors, led me to question my choice of major, which I hadn’t done before then. For brevity's sake, I will let you imagine the downward spiral that provoked. It was a tough semester, to say the least, and it made a total mental reset necessary in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I came back this year with the understanding that change is not only unpreventable but necessary and a beautiful place for growth. This is not to say that every bad experience that changes you is helpful or even good but I try to have the mindset that it happened. That there’s nothing I can do to change that and I need to acknowledge the hurt, and grow from what it could teach me. After my downward spiral and subsequent mental reset over the summer, I learned that I can’t just make giant changes quickly, my mind and heart don't like that. I need to make small changes with the proper support. I need to do the scariest thing: ask for help.

Ahh! Scary! In all seriousness, if you are an independent (and maybe stubborn?) person like me, the idea of admitting weakness or vulnerability through asking for help makes you just a little queasy. Through the queasiness, I recognized that the cycle would repeat if I didn’t find the support I needed. The first step was to repair my relationship with theater. Theater is one of the strongest support systems I have and I needed to make sure to not let my past negative experience damage something for which I care so deeply. Again, small steps. Instead of doing a full mainstage show, I joined a club production with less of a time commitment and more community focused goals (see my new favorite reaction photo). Next was my friends. I went through what I call

“friend pruning” which for me meant being more selective with whom I invested the majority of my time and effort. I chose to focus on those who support me and are kind to the world around them. The final step I took is that I made sure to talk and process the changes in my life in the moment, with those close friends and family, not months later or with those who could hurt me. This wasn’t just limited to the bad. I would call my mom every time a funny thing happened in rehearsal or texted my high school Best Friend when the first real rain storm hit Boston. 

So much to say when talking about changes but my main takeaway is, change has happened, is happening, and will happen again so we need to find ways to embrace it. Theater is a constantly changing profession and art with consistency being, maybe, the last word I would use to describe it. I am still not great with change and I’m not sure that will “change” any time soon, but the way I react to it will. It’s a slow process that I know I have to take bit by bit, step by step.

~ Natalie