Sunday, May 10, 2015

Up, up, and AWAY

Every so often I will have a day or two where it's none stop and I am driving hundreds of miles in a day for auditions, photo shoots, filming, and then to an occasional family dinner. But lately, it's felt like all week has been much busier. I'm not saying I'm ungrateful, I'm just unsure how to fit everything I need to do in one day. I work a full time job, that I thankfully will be getting better hours at soon, am going to school online, plus acting classes and auditions, and working out, as well as trying to start a business and prepare for the next step in my life....

For the last year I have been getting the little feeling that I needed to move to California. I will be the first to admit that I don't like the idea of moving to the City of Angels. I went once when I was 15 to try to get into modeling (didn't go very well, I was too naïve to go anywhere in that industry at the time), and promptly decided I hated it. There was lots of cigarette smoke, seemingly self-absorbed people, too much city, and a distinct lack of mountains. I started modeling about 7 years later when I asked a friend to do some photos of me since my mother hadn't used a camera in years, and I felt I wanted something pretty to show future generations. She saw me a couple months later and said they needed a model for her photography class, I decided I enjoyed the fun, novelty, and art of it and searched opportunities to do more. After 4 years of modeling off and on, I had a friend who went to UCLA and graduated in film, I told him I thought it would be fun to act, we made a fun competition piece commercial and the rest is history!

I don't know why I'm supposed to move to LA. Truly, if it were up to me, I would give it another year, year and a half, at least. I don't feel even remotely ready. I feel confident that I'm passable in most of my acting so that people wont laugh when I'm on the screen (Unless its comedy, of course. Hardy-har-har), but I'm nowhere near the capabilities of some of my friends who are struggling to work as an actor there already. But I know I should go..

Part of me is excited at the possibilities of what that means, the other part of me is freaking out like a prom queen that just spilled grape juice on her dress as her hot date knocks at the door. Freak! What am I supposed to do? I don't want to work a full-time job out there 'cause I feel like that will kill opportunities, but I don't know exactly how I'm going to make ends meet. I don't know hardly anyone (active Mormons, especially) out there, and I have no idea where I'm going to live. So on top of trying to be a full-time student and worker, keeping a fit body, and striving to be an actor, I'm also trying to prepare for that. This includes finding an agency in LA, hopefully for modeling and acting, building a website, gathering all my reel and portfolio work, and learning how to use more Social Media... Yes, seriously. I just did my first Instagram post in almost 2 years and discovered I'd been tagged in more things than I had ever even posted.

But guess what? This is all doable. If God wants it done, its doable. So I have just tried to take every possible opportunity he throws my way (including going to a Model Search I knew I had no chance of winning in hopes they'd remember me when I lose that next 10 lbs. :) That's right... Wahoo!), and pray that I will be able to follow the guidance he gives as well as be led in my preparations for this.

So here is to fully embracing the absolutely terrifying roller coaster God seats us in and pulls the lever. Here's to meeting many more people I could come to love and possibly find love with. And here's to trusting God knows best. Even if I get kicked in the pants, if I can remember to keep the best perspective, like my mother, I know I can turn out a better person for it. So here's to LA. In July.

(Deep breaths...........) 


Ps. I have lost 10 lbs and to be at my goal weight I need to lose 10 more, which I hope to be at by the end of May.
Pps. I am back on that dumb medical diet. One of these days I'll be able to eat more than rabbit food and chicken. Embrace the rabbit food.. Embrace it.. :)