When I was eight, I won a competition for reading out loud. The passage I chose was from The Dare Game, the second Tracy Beaker book. I remember standing in front of my whole school, the purple book in my hands, pigtails bobbing in my peripheral vision. When I was done and I sat down, my body ringing with the applause, my dream was born. Clearly, I was destined for stardom on the stage.
I nursed this dream for another 14 years. I acted in school plays. I was, for my sins, a prolific sketch comedian at university. I performed in the upstairs rooms of pubs and in student theatres all over the country. I remember being backstage in Durham and wondering whether I had time to throw up from nerves in a bucket I’d spotted in the wings, still thinking: this is the life. I am sorry to say that there are, somewhere, a handful of short films that I starred in during my early 20s: kissing people and crying and, God help me, pretending to smoke a joint.
After university, I auditioned for master’s programmes at all the big drama schools. I committed myself to the idea of taking out an additional student loan to do so, I worked in a pub in the evenings and practised my monologues in front of the mirror during the day. I failed to get into any of them.
Still, I was determined to pursue my dream. There’s some famous advice in acting circles: if you can imagine yourself doing anything else with your life, you won’t make it as an actor. I took it to heart: I had to persevere. So I did it all again the following year, and once again, I did not get in anywhere. I remember getting the last rejection email I was waiting for, standing in the musty cellar of the pub where I was working. I blushed right up to my hairline and burst into tears. The fact that a self-conscious, physically awkward, depressed girl didn’t nail her drama school auditions does not come as a surprise to me now, but at the time I was blindsided. A dream is supposed to come true.
I kept going for a while. I got an agent, went to a few miserable auditions. But six months later, my self-esteem at rock bottom, I felt that I had reached a fork in the road. I could keep going, keep trying. Or I could admit to myself that this dream was over. What I ended up being more afraid of wasn’t the embarrassment (in front of whom?) of not achieving what I had wanted to achieve, but sinking more and more time and emotional energy into trudging down a path that was throwing obstacles in my way at every turn. And so, I gave up my dream. There was grief in it, but mostly I felt relieved.
I learned a phrase recently from a book called When I Grow Up by Moya Sarner. Talking about her insecurity around the fact that many of her friends were getting married or having children in their early 30s, she came to realise that this envy was “not a real kind of wanting”. Giving up on a dream can also mean discovering that a want you had was not a real kind of wanting: in other words, that the desire came from an unexamined place.
Why did I even want to be an actor? It was a question I hadn’t thought to ask myself; the dream had calcified in my bones too long ago. Childish reasons, in my case. Excitement, praise – hunger for fame, even. I know now that the life of an actor would suit me very badly. I would hate the enforced downtime, the unsociable hours, having to worry about my weight and appearance, the relentless rejection, the financial uncertainty. Some of these things are part of my life as a writer but, at the very least, when people read my work, I am somewhere else.
I’m a big advocate of giving up on dreams. Taking away a fundamental lens through which you see yourself – in my case, embarrassingly, believing I was some kind of star waiting to be born – makes you have to reconsider who you actually are. And a dream is by its nature a static, stubborn thing that is ill-suited to the ruthless way things have of changing. Life forces us to give up on dreams all the time. People die, jobs are lost, relationships end, the things that brought you joy go on to bring you sorrow. Being able to let things go is a skill that not everybody is born with, and I certainly was not. But I think it’s a good muscle to train.
There’s a fine line, obviously. To succeed in any career you need tenacity, self-belief and drive. But there is a point beyond which putting that energy in no longer serves you. Failure and its merits have been in vogue for a little while; Elizabeth Day’s hit podcast How to Fail has had hundreds of guests on it by now. I think even more important than failing, though, is the ability to start failing and say: I could continue to try this, but I could also not. And having the confidence to do the latter.
Do I miss acting? Sometimes. The adrenaline was fun. But there are better ways to get that fix. I have new dreams now. I daresay many of them will also need to be laid to rest, or will die of natural causes. And when they do, I’ll grieve them, and then get on with other things.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist based in London
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