Honesty

I have loved theater as long as I can remember, wholeheartedly. I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. No matter where I ended up, I wanted to be behind the curtain, on the stage, anywhere I needed to be. I wanted to give people the feeling that theater gave to me. And that feeling never went away, even when depressed and done with life, ready to go, all I found myself doing was trying to take of the people around me.

My freshman year of high school, I got my chance to finally take theater classes. I did not realize how truly shy and self-conscious I was until I tried to play the improv games and good god I stood there looking like a deer in the headlights with no clue of what I should have been doing. I remember struggling for the entire year, trying to figure out how to break that habit, I watched the plays, I constantly went to my teacher for guidance, I reached out to the students in the production and made friends to do whatever I could. Those friends turned into mentors and some of the most important relationships in my life.

When it came time for my sophomore year of high school, I took a readers theater course thinking, “Maybe focusing on the top half of my body would let me cancel out the world around me.” I wasn’t entirely wrong. I remember the exact moment that I realized that the only thing that mattered up on a stage was following through. We were performing a version of ‘Chicken Little’ when my teacher stopped us and went through one by one asking all of us to act as our assigned animals. Of course, as Chicken Little, she made me strut my stuff around the little black box squawking and flapping like it was nobody's business. And when the fire alarm went off she made me keep it up until everyone was out of the room but the two of us. I wasn’t one bit embarrassed to do anything after that.

When I wasn’t writing a new script for an assignment or rehearsing, I’d volunteered to clean the theater head to toe, repaint sets, reorganize a costume closet, put the dressing room back together, mop the floor that was impossible to keep clean, picking up backstage the day after a show. I did anything asked of me, while managing to audition for every show, and maintain my grades (badly), in hopes that maybe it would get me somewhere. Then came the day where the running show needed extra hands to run the spotlights during the shows. Needless to say, I volunteered and was lucky enough to have the support from the friends I’d gone out of my way to make. Like everything else I did for the teacher, I went out of my way to make her job and the crew’s as easy as possible. From there on out, she knew I was willing to help in any way possible, even happily doing the grunt work, if I’d manage to get on her good side.

Then it was junior year, and after two long and difficult years, I’d finally finally gotten into the performance class. At that moment I thought my entire life was changing for the better. I now realize that anything would’ve been better. Because nothing ever really changed. Junior year was, at that point the worst year of my life. I worked so hard, and I was so proud of the work that I only did because no one else wanted to. And it didn’t get me anywhere. I did more and more, and became the bad guy when I tried to get things done but I never got any more responsibility. The roles always went to someone else, assistant director, stage manager, lighting, stage design, no matter how I helped it always went to someone else. And as a high school junior, this bothered me so much. It bothered all of us in different ways, and most of us were very rarely happy. Even when a few of us were enjoying it, the rest were miserable. From all this disappointment, people became mean and cruel and spiteful. There was a large feeling of loathing that grew among us and before long this hate that came from all the hurt spread like a wildfire taking us all out. People who were supposed to be friends became toxic and we constantly lied to each other over the stupidest situations that I look at now and am left perplexed at.

I thought everything would get better with senior year, but by the end of the first semester I was so broken and done, I don’t know how I made it out. I took on about 3x as much that year, trying to balance acting in two theater productions, while trying to teach a beginning drama class and direct them in a workshop for an adaption, while trying to graduate high school and manage being in student government. Needless to say, I lost my shit. That year, our production class tried to put on a show while running a month behind. We were all running high on stress. Our tempers were, very very reactive. In an attempt to give herself more opportunity to do her work as a teacher, we as the cast were given the responsibility of managing ourselves (mind you were were a group of high school theater students, who were all on some type of egotistical high horse.) We were all struggling, personally, I was having the worst time of my life because nothing was working for me. I spent weeks trying to find my character and nothing was making the teacher happy and the suggestions I was getting were going in one ear and out the other. I desperately wanted to keep everyone happy, but it just wasn’t happening. I remember every single moment of the day things really started falling apart.

I was sitting on my stool, running through the same two-page scene over and over and over, trying to get it together. Trying to get it right. I kept getting so frustrated and mad at myself, trying not to cry, looking like a drama queen (not to say I’m not one but in that moment it was about me screwing up) and I got up as quick as I could to run to the bathroom and cry. I stayed there for 10 minutes just hyperventilating, not even able to cry. The second I opened the door of the theater back up, my teacher was already waiting with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she nodded her head motioning in for me to follow and close the door of her office behind me. She stopped and looked at the floor before she said it, “You can’t act like that, so what’s up?” That was it, I was gone and the tears wouldn’t stop. All the air in my lungs was gone and replaced with sobs. I didn’t know what I could’ve said. I would never want to step back from a show in a million years, but I could tell that I needed to. And so could my teacher, without having to say a word, she just hugged me. After that, things kept just falling. My relationships, my grades, I couldn’t do anything but watch.

My cast was supposed to be my family, and we were all just horrid to each other. I got constant reminders that I’d abandoned them and I’d betrayed them when they couldn’t have cared less while I struggled to actually try to pull it together. The show closes, and weeks go by, while we wait for our next show to be announced. I debated back and forth on reasons to not audition and the choices I should’ve made for the benefit of my own mental health. And everything went out the window in an instant. It became one of those shows that if I didn’t do now, I’d never get another chance to. So I audition and was cast and was still miserable. Because now I was a deserter, but also a kiss ass who didn’t deserve to be where I was. I took it all to heart, people who were supposed to be my friends had flipped a switch. Time went on and I began putting my trust in the wrong people. I chose to keep my head low and continue doing what was asked of me no matter how I was treated or how much I was hurting. I kept turning around and complaining to someone I thought I could trust, someone I called my brother and of course, within time it came back to bite me in the ass. The last thing I wanted was to get our show shut down on opening night, when we’d worked so hard for months on the sets and songs and costumes, I would never have wished for this type of colossal mess. Yet there we were, our options either canceling the show or putting in the work to put the hour and a half of script that’d been cut out. We were all heartbroken. And I’m sitting there knowing why this is happening, in shock because I don’t know how. It was all my fault, and I took it to heart. I didn’t keep it to myself for long, I’d hurt my family and I needed them to know I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because I was hurting. And more alone than I’d ever been. The moment I opened my mouth, it became nothing but mumbling to them, people who were supposed to be my family became cruel monsters who were telling me to hurt myself, telling each other I deserved to be hurt, and my teacher couldn’t even look at me. We made the decision to put in the work and try to finish the show, regardless of the hours of added rehearsals. I was completely frozen out, isolated. Stuck listening to people who knew my deepest darkest secrets plotting against me and actively hating me, with no sympathy for the fact that we all complained to outside theater. I was just the one unlucky enough to have my confidant use it against me. So I walked away, completely.

I worked my butt off for 3 years to get myself onto that stage. I loved it, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work for it. From the moment I watched Oysterboy, to the moment I walked away from Into the Woods, I called that theater my home. Four years and I was left with nothing and no one within the span of a week. No one in this world deserves to feel a thousand stones being cast at them for crying out for help. No one deserves to be driven to try and take their own life. I’ve spent the last two years of my life with this hole in my heart where the Betty Miller Theater sat because I walked away from the place I’d called home in the worst way I could’ve.

I still feel the hole growing as the gap being out of the theater grows. Two years of auditions and callbacks and they never go anywhere. And not one week goes by that I don’t cry thinking of what I could’ve done differently. How I could have changed anything to give a different outcome. I think about my dear friend who probably died thinking I did it to hurt my family because she never heard my side of the story. I think about the people I could’ve had better relationships with. I think about the person I wish I could’ve been.

I wish I had been better, I wish we’d all been better. Not one of the people in that theater had clean hands but I know that most of us just acted the way we knew how. I wish we’d had the opportunity to grow in an environment that wasn’t cold and callous. We deserved better than that. I am truly sorry for the way I got to that point, but I stand behind the decisions I made.