Sunday, August 10, 2014

Just Happy to Be Here

    Hello world! Hope all is lovely and wonderful in your beautiful lives. So a few days ago I got home from one of the most amazing experiences in my life. Over the past two weeks I have grown so much not only as an actress but also as a person. The opportunity to spend eight hours every day with passionate and dedicated people learning from some of the most knowledgable professors in the country was more than I could ever ask for.
    I don't want to bore any of you with the details of the Shakespeare scenes and monologues that I did or the acting notes that I received, but there is one moment in particular that I learned a lot from.  Funny enough, it wasn't an insightful moment in one of my classes, but a moment shared with a company member of mine.
    Once the program was over, we sat down and reflected on what we had learned, what inspired us, and how we saw our company members grow over the course of the two weeks. During this time, someone described me in a way that I had never thought of myself before. I was described as "up for anything, go-with-the-flow, and just generally happy to be there"…to me these were never phrases I would have used to explain my personality. As a child, and even into my later teen years, I struggled with anxiety and was always overworked and stressed about it. As a kid, I always wanted to know what we were doing for dinner by the time lunch came around.
    My initial reaction to hearing these phrases to describe me was to immediately think they were talking about someone else and had just confused the names. And yet, as I looked around the circle of my company members I saw people looking at me and nodding in agreement. Not only was I being described in a way I had never heard before, but it contradicted the elements of my personality that I had previously thought to be the most prominent.
    Looking back over the past year of my life, with this new description in mind, I realized how much I have actually changed from living in a new city with new people on my own.  For some reason, the everyday anxieties and stresses that I had while I lived under my parents' roof and dealt with the drama of high school had slowly melted away.  Which, in my opinion makes an awful lot of sense. Even though the added responsibilities of being on my own have been stressful in their own ways, the freedom and independence that comes with them allows for a much more flexible control over my own life. It truly is incredible to see what you can learn by looking at yourself through another's eyes.
    Go ahead and ask someone you have been working with to describe you, you may hear some surprising answers.
Stay awesome guys,
Kodi
   

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