Friday 2 October 2015

A Little bit of Honesty

I have been having some singing lessons. They are long overdue and my first step towards getting Daniella and her mojo back together.

I have written in the past about how important it is to keep honing your skills when you are a performer; singing lessons, dance class and theatre trips. In my silly world, I haven’t lived up to my own advice. I’d let my passion and drive dwindle so no wonder I’ve been a rudderless, miserable shadow of myself.

Well, I’ve had a good telling off/rude awakening whatever cliché you want to use here and I’m on the path to finding my own Act 2.

When you’ve been teaching for a while yourself, it’s really strange to be the student again. It’s like starting from scratch, realising that old habits were wrong and perhaps that’s why I hit a wall professionally. But how liberating to start again and learn new ways to do the thing that I love best. 

Yes, it’s hard but I have a great teacher and it feels invigorating to have a goal. Only today I saw an article in The Stage about actors needing to constantly re-train and re-hone theirskills. Becoming stagnant is the danger, not only as an actor but in life to. My wise old Dad says life is about always working towards a goal, if he was on that Jeremy Vine Radio 2 segment “What makes us human,” I suspect that this would be Dad’s definition. It seems a good one to live by.

Who knows if it will lead to auditions and being a working actress again, but I do know it is a step towards being the best that I can be again.

Why am I telling you all this? Is this over-sharing with the inter-web world? Well, yes, it is very personal to me but I feel like it might be relevant. A lovely tweeter contacted me this week saying that she enjoyed the honesty of my blogs – so what’s the point of only writing about the good stuff? That doesn’t always help and is the blog equivalent of all of those “nom nom my gorgeous meal, look at me and my perfect relationship and baby scan picture” facebook folk. Life is a yin and yang of good and bad and if this little bit of honesty can help someone, then great. There may be actors out there who are losing their confidence like I did, people who are unsure what to do and it may help to know that we all feel a bit crap from time to time. Just don’t let it go too far, don’t lose your mojo entirely – trust me, it’s scary. So go and try to do something positive, something small. Just re-address the balance of creativity in your life in whatever form that may take for you. What’s that phrase? Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves? Little steps folks, little steps!



I wish you all a happy day.

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