You Are Your Own Conductor

“I just wanted to say thank you for sharing this. I’ve been in this position so many times, or at least it feels that way, and now I’m back here again. I lost my job that I moved to a new city and state, away from family and friends for, my relationship is failing, and I’m slowly drowning in debt. Since getting fired I’ve had such a hard time not comparing myself to others, especially on the internet (despite knowing that we ALL only show what we want people to see so we can be perceived the way we want to be perceived), and my chronic depression is setting in to the point that I don’t even care enough to take my medication. If I didn’t have a dog to take care of I wouldn’t be getting out of bed. But this honestly helped me cry it out a little bit for the first time in a long time and I feel a little bit better in this moment. So thank you for being you, for being relatable, and for sharing. ♥️”

My Dearest Bad Biddie,

When I was in my twenties, I went to audition for a one-line role on a TV show. The casting director’s office was holding castings for several other projects and I ran into a girl I knew from high school auditioning for one of these projects. She had just come off a national a tour as a leading role in a Broadway musical, and was auditioning for much more than the one-line role I was vying for. I said hi to her and she looked at me, square in the face with a smile, and called me by the completely wrong name. I didn’t bother to correct her because, in a way, it just validated how I really felt – that I wasn’t supposed to be there and that everyone I had grown up with was so much farther in life than I was. It was like I had shown up to the party of life underdressed, two hours late, when everyone else was pairing off for the night and making plans for the after party. I’ve always believed that nobody can humiliate you unless you allow them to, and that day, I let this girl from high school call me by the wrong name because I didn’t feel like I deserved to occupy any space, much less the same space as the girl who had just come off the national tour of a Broadway musical.

It’s so hard to care, because caring about something, anything, usually means you have to do something about what you care for. Caring means sometimes the things we care for, don’t care for us back. But caring is living, otherwise, we’re not really living, we’re just existing, and I think, even in the depths of your depression right now, you know that you can care. You care enough to take care of your dog, you care enough to open your phone, scroll onto Instagram, and watch a ninety second video on how to keep going when all you want to do is stop. If you can care in these small ways, you can, one day, learn to care about the bigger things.

In the meantime, realize that no one’s life is as shiny as it seems. One of my girlfriends and her now ex-boyfriend celebrated their one-year anniversary with a splashy, picture-perfect carousel of all their best photo memories over the last year and a week later, they broke up. You wouldn’t have known this from looking at their social media, but then again, you wouldn’t know a lot of things just from looking at anybody’s social media. That no matter how confident, polished, and collected someone seems, we all have our gnawing insecurities that keep us awake at night when our inner demons are the only voices we hear in the deafening silence. Despite all my wins over the last ten months of this content creation career, I still often feel like I don’t deserve to be in certain spaces. That other people have been doing it for longer, doing it better, doing it with more grace and ease and here I am, flailing in the wind, hoping that the powers that be care enough to allow me to continue to earn a living from this career.

In this journey of life, neither success nor failure is guaranteed, but the ride to find our version of success, whatever it may be, is well worth the cost of admission if we just remember not to disembark the train before our time has come. One day, yours will. In the meantime, remember that you’re on your own track, conducting your own train, and if you look outside the window from time to time, you’ll realize that there’s a lot more life outside of the car than there is inside. Here’s to exploring all of it.

Love,
Your internet hype woman