Does Confidence Ever Return? Asking for a Friend

I would like to get back into acting this year. I was never technically OUT of acting; I wasn’t actively pursuing it. I auditioned several times when we lived in Vermont and performed with my improv team but in terms of auditioning back here in the city, I haven’t been on one.

This has been a choice I made and I have no regrets about it. I have several business reasons for deciding to wait to jump back into the fold. I need new headshots ($$), I haven’t auditioned at the new (not so new) Equity audition center and the whole online signup and new space brings on my ‘new things’ anxiety, and I need to tweak my reel, update my resume, little things to be set up and ready to go. These are all easy and achievable. I could probably do them all in a week.

It’s my confidence that is stopping me from doing any of it.

I’ve tried to gain it back over the past year. After turning 30 and gaining weight to no longer be a 95lb waif, I started to hate my body and everything about my appearance. It didn’t feel like MY body. I didn’t know how to move or dress or walk down the street without feeling like this fake version of myself. This version that wasn’t the real me. It was some skin I was wearing that didn’t feel familiar, like I had been body snatched.

I thought I had gotten better with accepting my body. I’ve toned it, lost weight, taken better care of it instead of giving up and sitting in sweatpants, not moving. But the very thought of auditioning, of paying money for headshots when I still hate most photos of me, the thought of walking into an audition space makes me stop cold. It puts up a wall that I hide behind and tell myself I’ll put it off another week, another month, another year.

Another five years.

I miss acting. I wasn’t sure I would but I do. I miss it terribly. It’s like regrowing an arm, painful but exciting. I worry I suck. I haven’t flexed the muscle and it is a muscle. I need a class which is another business hesitation. I need to take the first step and audition and get one out of the way. I need to make one at Equity with the online system and walk in and do it. If I get lost or fuck it up, will I die? Will my career be over? Of course not. I once walked into an audition room while someone was auditioning, thinking it was holding. This scarred me and actually still creates a pit in my stomach when I think about it. On second thought, this may be the root of some of my fear in a new audition area with more doors to walk into by mistake. But I still went in a little while later and auditioned and I don’t think the casting director even knew I was the girl who busted in.

Does confidence ever return? I don’t know how to get it back. I don’t know how to look in the mirror and love myself as I used to. Sure, I was insecure AF as we all are. I hated being as skinny as I was and I got what I wished for and the grass is not as green as it appeared to be. Yet I always was able to walk into a space and own it. I felt pretty, I was funny, I was confident. Shit, I received compliments and I don’t remember the last time someone I didn’t know gave me one. I feel old, bags under my eyes, a literal Crypt Keeper. I’ve never lost my love of drama at least.

When I broke down my goals for 2020, one was to go to an audition. Any audition. Pick one I am not even interested in and go to break the ice. To see what happens. To maybe tempt the confidence to come back. Am I a good actor anymore? I don’t know. Sometimes I really don’t think I am. In a few readings with friends that I have done, I was entirely in my head, thinking about everything I was doing and saying. I felt like a freshman in college again, learning it all over and being told to get out of my head. I couldn’t. I sat there and judged every inch of my performance. I deprived myself of the joy.

It’s a low moment for me. I try to remember the magic I know that still lives inside me when I have these moments. It can be insanely difficult and practically impossible to bring it up from underneath the piles of dirt and anger and insecurity and resentment that are burying it. I used to model in very little clothing on the rooftops of buildings, including the one across the street from the office I work in now. Every day I walk by it and look for the fearless girl posing on the edge near the water tower. I want to find that girl again. I miss her. I hope she comes back.