Success.

Tomorrow is the last day to submit for the Canadian Film Centre’s Actors Conservatory. Soon, we 2022-23 CFC Actors will have our showcase, and the 2023-24 actors will be chosen and this whole experience will be pretty much over for me, leaving my life irrevocably changed in its wake.

Back in September, someone asked me what my idea of success was. I’d said I just wanted to be able to make a living doing acting. I didn’t need fame or fortune; that was the dream, to be able to just act and nothing else. Now here I am, less than a year later, thinking maybe I’d been naïve. Acting is not a constant. It ebbs and flows, and no matter how good you are, sometimes there are writer’s strikes, and actor lockouts, and there is so much that is out of your hands.

In the past I’ve booked roles that paid enough to cover my living expenses for a few months. Maybe I’ve already lived the dream, then. Maybe I’ve accidentally chosen to define success as a thing that ebbs and flows, or perhaps—more accurately to me—a thing that bursts out of nowhere, dazzling and bright like a firework or shooting star, but then fizzles out. But even if my idea of success is something that burns out, could it not still be true that this life I’m now living is, in itself, success? I got out of Calgary and moved to Toronto like I’d always wanted. I’m alumni of the foremost acting program in the country. I’m regularly submitting auditions I once only dreamed of getting. I never even thought of getting the role—I only fantasized as far as the audition. And now I’m there.

I once got to film a big project that you might never see, and it was amazing. I had a decent role so I got the biggest trailer I’ve ever had, with a full bathroom and full-sized refrigerator, and a fireplace and a three-seater sofa and a TV and a vanity with lights all around the mirror. After filming I went home and walked my dog and picked up her poop and went inside and cleaned my bathroom and scrubbed my toilet—all in the same day.

So maybe this is it, and it crept up on me while I was busy surviving. Maybe success looks like not even getting a callback for two years while working a full-time job and taking acting classes, then suddenly having it all pay off in one summer. And maybe it’s also living in an attic and hardly ever seeing friends because you’re too busy working in a restaurant and cramming auditions into late nights and days off, while being proud of every audition you submit.

Success is a hard thing to define because it’s so easy to redefine. We so often think of success as an achievement, but in reality it comes upon us as a state of being. Maybe success is as much here and now as it was then and there and it will be somewhere someday. It’s like that quote from The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

Anyway, I wrote this because I couldn’t sleep and now it’s 6am so if this post made no sense, at least you know why.