Millennial Agony Aunt: Week 20

Emily Watkins is a professional Millennial (read: precariously employed twenty-something). Each week, she will answer a generation-specific query from the depths of her on-brand existential crisis. Our Aunt returns once more to help a struggling actress.

Please send any quandaries, issues, troubles or thoughts to aunt@whynow.co.uk for a good dose of aunt-ing.

I’m an aspiring actress, juggling part time jobs and trying to squeeze auditions in wherever I can. The pandemic has obviously disrupted things, but now that we’re back I’m feeling the familiar competitiveness with my friends who are in the same career.

I want to be uncomplicatedly happy when someone I love gets a call back or lands a great role, but if I’ve had a tough few weeks then it can be really hard not to feel like ‘why not me?’ How can I make peace with my friends’ success and stop comparing myself?

You might be an actress, but this letter could have been written by almost anyone — the feeling of why not me is universal, isn’t it? There’s a fine line between envy and competitiveness, and arguably it’s by comparing ourselves to others that we define what we want and keep pushing forwards. Equally, that dog-eat-dog mentality is exhausting and can easily become counterproductive. But fear not: as ever, it’s all a question of perspective. 

Other people doing well would be something to fret about if success was a pie and they were carving out larger and larger slices before you’d even taken a seat at the table — luckily, that’s complete nonsense. The trick, as far as I can tell, is to frame your friends’ wins as things that expand your own sphere of possibilities rather than detracting from it — after all, there will always be another audition. All things being equal, if they can do it, why can’t you?

If the gig your peer just landed feels like a level up, take it as proof that people-like-you can catch a break every now and then. Remember too that (unless you believe in an interventionist god, in which case take it up with Him) there’s no cosmic force meting out wins and losses according to who most deserves them. 

When it comes to success, hard work and talent enter the picture less than we’d like to think; cold hard luck, unaccountable human weirdness and a bit of bluffing go a long way, especially in something as alchemical as acting. If, even in the midst of all that chaos, you keep turning up, I would like to give you a medal for Being a Fucking Trooper along with a contract to certify that one does indeed have to Be In It To Win It. You’re doing everything you can by doing anything at all.

I hope that’s at least as liberating a thought as it is a frightening one; it applies to your friends as much as to you, and to the most famous people you can name as well as the most talented ones you’ve never heard of because they never tumbled into the configuration of events (the casting director and the agent and the studio and the introduction and the chance encounter and and and) that pushed them to the top. I can’t make your career take off, but — to a certain extent — neither can you. Hope that helps! Sleep tight  🙂