Anxiety Almost Ruined This

Theatre audition season is upon us! For me, this meant picking new audition pieces and signing up for a monologue audition workshop. A wonderful opportunity popped into my email for a workshop put on by Artists Rep with two of their actors, Sarah Lucht and Amy Newman. Having been a fan of Sarah’s past work and a regular attendee at Artists Rep shows, I knew I needed to jump on this one. 

There was some time between when I signed up and the actual class, maybe only a couple of weeks or so, but in that time I started to feel my anxiety bubbling. I had selected my new pieces already but I kept procrastinating on getting them memorized. I started setting reminders in my phone, but when the reminders would alert me, I’d have some justification for why that time wasn’t a good one. The class was about a week out when I finally buckled down and got the two pieces memorized.

In the three days leading up to class, my anxiety upgraded itself from bubbling to a rolling boil. Day of, I was nauseous, shaky and my brain was filled with unhelpful thoughts, “Do I really need this class?” “What if my pieces suck?” “How are we going to spend this much time on a two minute audition?” “I don’t have the energy for this.” “I’m tired, I don’t know that I want to put myself through this.” etc. 

I was filled with fear and dread walking up to the building. We spent the first part of class introducing ourselves and then doing an acting exercise. I kept steeling myself for the moment Sarah or Amy would announce that next we would do our pieces in front of each other. My insides were screaming, “No, please don’t say it, please don’t say it. Please say we can just sit here and talk to each other more.” 

But then the moment came. And being someone who gets more anxious the longer I wait, I jumped up to go first. The second I got a laugh in my first piece, I felt that tight knot of anxiety in my chest release. As I moved through the pieces I could feel the love and support coming off  everyone in the room, and when I finished, I felt a wonderful sense of lightness and accomplishment. When I left class that night, I was beaming, and motivated to flesh out the work we had done that day to show growth I’d made the next week we met. 

It’s one of the things I find most fascinating about this line of work. I’ve had experiences of coming to a performance or a rehearsal having had a really rough day or anxious about something and thinking that I’m just not up for what I’m about to do. Then I enter the building and have multiple people greet me with genuine fondness and huge smiles and I feel my whole mood shift. We build such authentic connections in such short amounts of time, and these connections fill me up in a way nothing else does. 

I had such a wonderful experience in this class. It was only four nights, but these 6 people have a special place in my heart and helped me grow in ways I never could have done alone. And, thankfully, I didn’t let my anxiety ruin what turned out to be the great opportunity I thought it would.