With graduation right around the corner my absolute favorite thing to do is to sit and think about how much more successful everyone else’s college career was than mine. (Side Note: That is complete sarcasm). It is hard to believe that four years of college has gone by already. It seems that it was just yesterday that I was eating a sandwich drunk on a bus stop bench after attending my first party, and now here I am drinking a glass of wine wondering why my neighbors are being so loud at 8:30 at night. While sipping on this cheap drug store wine I think back on my four years and this thing we call “self-doubt” starts to take over.
I transferred to school in New York my sophomore year so thats the main reason it doesn’t feel like four years, because technically it was only three, but I digress. I look around at all my senior friends and they have all accomplished so much. As a senior I can say I have been in a total of 0 school shows, have done 0 internships, and ultimately sat in the commons eating onion rings that were 95% batter for most of my time there. It’s hard to be excited about graduating when I feel that I never fully experienced the same things a lot of my friends did. They have cast parties to remember and they have stories of being an intern for my favorite tv show. But then I remind myself that everyone’s journey to their destination won’t always be the same.
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College is a place for self-discovery. You go in as one major and you come out having studied something completely different, or you studied the same thing but you changed programs. You picked up a minor in something you never thought you’d actually be interested in and you experiment with electives that you have curiously looked at in the course catalog since your first semester of freshman year. I think my biggest struggle was sitting in an acting class and realizing that everyone else around me seemed to be more passionate than me. Everyone knew all about the new Broadway musical. Everyone always knew every playwright or play that our professor threw out. I personally, most of the time had no clue. While everyone was reading new plays I was studying up on my favorite tv show. While everyone else was rehearsing their monologues I was paying to perform stand up to a room of 25 people. I’d show up feeling like shit because I didn’t feel that I deserved to be there. These people could sing and dance, and really knew their stuff. That’s when it hit me: my interests changed.
As I said earlier, college is a time for change. It’s a time to discover what you like and don’t like. I like hard liquor but I hate beer. I like guac but I hate paying extra for it. See…discoveries. But seriously, around my junior year, I realized that maybe I want something a little different than everyone else and you know what? That’s okay. No, I wasn't in any shows, but that’s fine because the role went to somebody who would embrace it so much more. No, I didn’t do any internships but honestly, mama was too busy working a full-time job to pay her own rent and those aforementioned cover charges for open mics. I wasn’t getting coffee for a tv show host but I was getting my face out there by performing. It’s easy to look to someone else and feel that you should be where they are. It’s easy to feel that you have completely fallen behind. I hate the saying “everything happens for a reason” because then I just spend my nights asking “well what the hell is the reason?!” I hate feeling like there is a secret that I’m not being let in on. Most of all, I hate it because I know it’s true. All these things do happen for a reason. Will that SNL intern have a resume that looks great? Hell yeah. Will I have a reel and a stand-up set that looks great when I audition for SNL? Hell yeah.
So to all my seniors, or just anyone out there who feels the ever so large presence of the real world creeping closer to us, just know that we got this. Whether you are the student who had an internship every semester since you stepped foot on campus, or you're the kid that was taking a nap in between the bookshelf in the library, we are all on our own path. We all have our own story that we will be able to tell when we look back on life. My favorite thing to do (no sarcasm this time) is to remember that some of my favorite people weren’t on their way to showbiz until their late 20’s. Tina Fey was 24 working at a YMCA for goodness sake. That technically means I am doing more than Tina Fey did at my age. Talk about a confidence boost. The point is, we all look around at everyone else wondering if we are ever doing enough. We all look to the person who sits right next to us and wonder “are they ahead of me in this game of life?” That is the absolute worst thing we can do to ourselves. We need to wake up every day and ask “what can I do to be one step closer to where I want to be?”, and then be satisfied that we took just one step. Let’s stop being hard on ourselves for eating those onion rings when our friends are at their internship. Because now we are full and happy and our friends are tired and exhausted at a job that they most likely are not getting paid for! We can choose how we see our college experiences. Maybe you didn’t stay up late partying every night. Maybe you weren’t in five shows in one semester. Maybe your resume says you brought drinks to bar tables instead of drinks to office desks. No matter what, you have to believe that where you are right now is where you are supposed to be. So no matter where you are in life remember that it’s never too late to head for your dreams and you should always say yes to onion rings.
