Giving Up My Dream, and All That Followed

About a year ago now, I did something I never thought I would do. I gave up my dream of being on Broadway, packed up my New York apartment and moved back to my small home town.  Of course, this story is not unique to me, in fact, I've heard it more times than I can tell you.  I just never thought it'd be me. 

I've never had the bright, shiny, Kimmy Schmidt sort of optimism, especially about the things I cared deeply about.  I've always been more of a cautiously hopeful kind of girl when it comes to what I really want. But ever since I set foot on stage in my first musical I knew it's what I wanted to do with my life.  

My story follows a familiar narrative as I progressed through high school and onto college, with a notable summer at NYU when I was 17.  I was nervous, to say the least, going into that experience. My parents were absolutely crazy to let me live in New York City alone at 17, but they believed in my dream as much as I did, and I ended up having the time of my life!  I went on to college, graduated in three years, and after a summer of bartending and saving money I moved back to New York.  Because why try anywhere else when you can go after what you want with everything you've got!

To borrow some words from the prophet Jo March, "I came to New York on a dream. I knew it might take me a while, but all I've been hearing since I arrived is, 'Leave it right there on the pile.'"

My early years in New York were exactly what you'd expect them to be.  I worked a few truly horrible jobs, auditioned whenever I could, and lived in an apartment that was FAR too expensive. But I also lived with Rachael, spent countless hours in museums, gained my independence, and found a good degree of success in my career.  Enough to encourage me to keep going.

The thing about living in New York (in a nut shell) is that you face all the normal challenges of life, they're just amplified x10.

I first wrote about my struggles with New York and chasing my dreams in a post back in October of 2014.  I called it I Heart NY? At this point, I was just over three years into my journey there and the wear was starting to show.  From then on there were still ups and downs, but the downs were tougher, and the ups were fewer and farther between. 

My mom has this phrase, "Embrace the suck." And that's exactly what I did.  New York is dirty, smelly, crowded and full of tourists.  At first, you don't see any of this.  You're just thrilled to be stretching your legs in a new place, to be experiencing new things each and every day.  The adrenaline of confronting your greatest fears keeps you going.  But the longer you live there, the more habits and routines you establish, the city can start to drag you down.  To pull you into the dingy fabrics of its sidewalks heaped with garbage bags.  So, you begin lie to yourself.  You embrace the suck. You search for any glimmer of the joy and optimism, the dream, that drove you to the city in the first place.  And when you find it you weave and sew those lies into your heart, creating a narrative that allows you to stay, despite the abuses hurled at you every day by the city you claim to love.

It was here, in July of 2016 that fate intervened. I had come back to Missouri for a break from the city.  I needed space to breathe and reevaluate what I wanted. I started seeing something weird out of my right eye so I went to the doctor and found I had a Giant Retinal Tear.  That's the actual medical term for what I had.  This was my wake-up call. 

I had to let go of the hustle. To come to grips with the idea that the only worthy lifestyle was that of the paid artist. That my value as a person was directly connected to my success as an artist.  That New York and I just didn't fit. Top to bottom I needed to change the way I thought in order the change the way I was living my life.

Lucky for me, I had three months of retina recovery to work through my thoughts and begin to admit to myself that my dream was killing me. If not physically, then mentally.

I have always been a crier, in fact, I subscribe to the Kristin Bell school of emotion.  If I am between a 3-7 on the emotional scale I'm fine! But if I find myself between 1-3 or 7-10 I'm crying. And though I've always been emotional, I never truly owned it.  When I would get emotional and it made people feel uncomfortable, rather than stand in my feelings I would make a joke or change the subject.  I think a lot of people do this. I felt, in a way, that the frequency of my emotions made them less valuable, less impactful.  I saw vulnerability as a weakness.  But when I was sitting in my mom's living room, face down, for months at a time, there were moments when there was nothing left for me to do but cry. I cried out of frustration, despair, sometimes I didn't know why I was crying at all.  If I wasn't going to let the crying break me, if I was going to rise up out of it, I had to harness the strength that comes with true vulnerability and use it to my advantage. 

I see now that I gave up my dream because my ability to be vulnerable had been sucked out of me by the very efforts I went through to pursue it.  Who wants a dream that does that?  

Now, a year later, I find myself drawn to my inner world more than ever. My soul, my emotions, my thoughts, my inner well-being.  Only through attending to those pieces of myself first and foremost have I found balance elsewhere.  Yoga, meditation, exercise, essential oils, and inspirational podcasts have been the key to my success.  Have you heard Oprah's SuperSoul Conversations? I don't use the word inspiration in the capital I corporate way, but in the way that sets a fire blazing inside of me.  That turns my thoughts and emotions inside out and incites a revolution in my soul.  That makes my skin tingle and sends my insides jumping up and down!!

Right now, I'm here to show up for myself.  But I can feel myself opening up and being ready to show up for others again too. So, if you've felt my absence in our friendship, I am truly sorry.   To those of you who gave me the space I needed to heal, thank you.

My dream now is to be Whole and to let the definition of that change from day to day.  I strive to be vulnerable with myself and those around me and to tell the truth. Just like yoga, this is a practice not a perfect, and I choose to strive for it every day.

As I sit here writing this pouring my heart out to you, it occurs to me that I am so much more an artist, now than I ever was when I was pursuing it as my life's ambition.  I am more open, more receptive to the world around me, more likely to let it impact myself and my art than ever before.  And that moves me more than I can say.

If my time in New York gave me anything it's a more open mind. I went there from a small town with limited experiences of diversity and I left with friends of every color and creed. Which, in today's political climate I consider the best gift of all. I may not be on Broadway, but chasing after my dream equipped me with the skills I need to better navigate the world I'm living in. I no longer live in the most diverse city in the USA, but I'm a different, stronger, more loving and open person than I was when I left the most beautiful small town in America. -xo Sydney