Truly, Deeply

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

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.