Closing of a chapter...

It’s Tuesday night, and I’m sitting on my patio at 8:30. There’s a tall dewy glass of Prosecco on the table to my right and an intermittent rush of breeze blowing on the back of my neck. The atmosphere has been beckoning a storm all day, but I’m not complaining. I love when it’s like this.

I’m going to be graduating this Saturday…Summa Cum Laude. I’ll be receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Writing, with my major having been English/Professional Communications and my minor in French . After I give my final presentation for a class tomorrow around 3 p.m., I’ll walk away from the Armstrong campus of Georgia Southern University after four and a half years of being a student. The first time I’ve been a student since…well, I’m just old enough to not really want to say, if that gives you a clue.

It would sound cliche to say “time has flown by” since I first registered in August of 2014, and the truth is, it’s hard to know if it’s flown by or not. I think I feel like it’s flown by due to the fact that I can so quickly recall the moment that I first decided to enroll in college when it wasn’t that much of a priority for me before. If you want me to be honest, I kind of decided to enroll on a whim. 

The 18-year old daughter of someone I was close to had already taken a semester of college courses while she was in high school, and she wanted to come to Savannah and go to Armstrong. That put things in perspective for me. 

I was an obscure actress at the time, known and respected mainly in the towns I lived and worked in, which included Jackson, New Orleans and Savannah, with a few independent projects in my repertoire but no solid hits; a lot of potential and some connections but no guarantees.

Well…only the guarantee that I was getting older. That was about it. What was going to be my Act 2? Or 3? Time marches on and slows down for no one. I didn’t want to abandon my dreams, but maybe it was time to reshape them.

I enrolled in college first with the idea that I would just get something going…just move forward with something, and I’ll figure out the rest later. I wasn’t even sure about a major. Mostly because I had too many conflicting interests. I already had invested a lot in the world of theater and film, but I also had an avid appreciation for aviation. (How’s that for alliteration?) And I wasn’t too terrible at mathematics. It crossed my mind to try becoming an actuary or even an aerospace engineer. I knew a good bit about the science of aerodynamics from years of pilot training.

Before I enrolled, I already was doing intellectual exercises on a daily basis. That only got me so far. I was still bartending late nights on the weekend. I needed something else.

For the first two semesters, I went to school part-time since I felt like I needed to pay cash for my tuition. At my age, I didn’t think I had a chance at scholarships or whatever else kids get right out of school so they can go to college for free. I took a basic required algebra course and a composition course each of those semesters just to get things going and start checking off boxes to see how feasible this all could be.

The prospect of four more years of school stretched dauntingly ahead of me, but it was also exciting and kind of a fresh new direction. There are more certainties when it comes to achieving academic excellence, especially in mathematics and other scientific courses, at least more so than I could expect when I was going for theater and film roles. With that, it didn’t always matter how much I prepared with the script and how well I prepared my look…I either got the part or I didn’t. I got a few, but there were many more that I didn’t.

In college, if you go to class, do the studying, the homework, and at least some of the readings, you’ll probably get pretty good grades. I wasn’t sure about the writing, because I figured that would be more subjective on the part of the professor.

The funny thing is, I got pretty high marks for my analytical essays. It’s not that I hadn’t been praised for my writing before, but it usually came from friends and people who knew me. This was the first time I had gotten this kind of validation. I discovered that I may have an ability as a writer and communications specialist after all. Now just where it will lead me, I’m not sure.

I know that I have probably felt more comfortable and confident these past 4 years than I have maybe felt in my entire life. I’m sure it has to do with multiple aspects of my circumstance. The kind of circumstance that has allowed me to accomplish many things in nearly half a decade. 

I’ve had two study abroad trips–to France for a few weeks and then Italy for several months–which opened up in me a passion for ancient history that I never knew I had. I got to complete a creative internship at a production studio in Los Angeles, at the end of which I was offered a job to work closely with a screenwriter and producer for a television show. I also finally achieved my long sought after pilot’s license at the end of that summer.

And then my brother got into a catastrophic aviation accident while piloting a plane. He lost his leg and nearly lost his life. 

That changed everything.

A vital part of me wanted to make my dreams of becoming a successful film industry professional a reality more than ever, if for no other reason than to help my brother and my family after this ordeal. I’d already come so far. I had people at big studios telling me to move out to Los Angeles as soon as possible.

But then I sat with my brother for lunch at a bar in my hometown over a year ago, and he said that if he “had a billion dollars,” it wouldn’t give him back what he had. That stuck with me for a long time. Even if I could somehow make a billion dollars–which I most likely wouldn’t–the best I could hope to do is just make him a little more comfortable with this new circumstance of life that he found himself in. I’d never be able to give him back what he had. Not even with the best that money could buy.

The same went for everyone I deeply cared about. I wouldn’t be able to give them back what they once had: their youth, a working body part, someone they lost in death. All I could do is live with them and for them now and try to give them the best I could give in my own circumstance. My brother’s reality has touched my entire family and even beyond family. Everyone who knew him, and the vibrant, athletic, independent, adventurous person he used to be, was likely hit with the reality that tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. And even if you do get a tomorrow, there’s no guarantee that it will be the same as today.

One decision, one incident, one moment can change the direction of our entire lives and also the direction of anyone close to us. The decisions we make have outcomes that cause ripple effects on others in ways we might not even fully realize.

There was just no longer a place in this new reality for me to be chasing dreams in the wilderness of Los Angeles and elsewhere, even if I had every tangible reason to believe that some aspect of them could’ve finally been achieved.

There's an irony in the photo that I've chosen to put at the top of this blog. It's a photo of Jenkins Hall, the place where theater majors and performance art students spend the majority of their time. It's the only hall I've never gone inside during the years I've been a student at Armstrong. I spent nearly 10 years of my life actively pursuing a career in theater and film, even studying at a prestigious theater academy in London for a period of time.

It might seem like I’ve given up those dreams, but as I said in the earlier part of this piece, I realized when I started college that I might have to reshape my dreams. And in actuality, I’m reaching out for much bigger ones, with a much more tangible reality to grasp in the end.

Someday I’d like to tell you more about it, if you’re interested.