Truly, Deeply
Muse Magazine|July 2017

After deeming herself incapable of true intimacy, psychologist Debra Campbell learned to stop looking for love in all the wrong places and in turn forge deeper connections.

Paulo Coelho
Truly, Deeply

In my twenties I was looking for love above all else. I stumbled and fell into potholes and even chasms along the way as I felt very lost. I left drama school to take a dream acting job with one of the two biggest professional theatre companies in town, as a lead in the Harvey Fierstein play Spookhouse.

It was a rare achievement to get such a great start and I thought I’d made it big with all the attention. I was lucky and on track in my career, I thought. But I didn’t know about the industry, the necessary networking, bitching, fighting and schmoozing. I lacked contacts, street smarts and strategy in the dog-eat-dog insular world in which I found myself.

Mostly, I had difficulty discerning friends from ‘frenemies’ – people who want to be around you when it seems you’re doing well but run when you fail. I was usually unable to identify them until I found myself feeling used or dumped. When Spookhouse ended and I flopped in a few auditions, I was unemployed. Life between jobs was unstructured and I felt vacuous and unmoored.

I’d thought being an actor was my path to self-esteem, but it quickly became a nightmare of rejection and self-doubt. It got to the point that even if I had an acting job I didn’t feel excited by it after the initial thrill of ‘winning’ the role. I gradually lost touch with love for the art because it wasn’t feeding me the self acceptance I was trying to milk it for. I was hit hard by bouts of anxiety and a new, creeping self-loathing because I would sabotage my efforts without understanding why I was doing it.

I ‘acted out’ my rage at myself by failing auditions through lack of preparation or by running late.

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