Another Delayed Brunch (or I Wish I Had More Accomplishments)

I’ve been doing my meeting with my WIF mentoring group for a few years now. At the beginning we were really good about meeting every other month as a group (when we started, the alternate months were meetings with our mentors). When we were on our own, we still were pretty good about maintaining our every other month meetings and they seemed to be much easier to schedule. But lately, we’ve been having some issues with scheduling which is fine. The reasons have been because everyone is getting very busy with some awesome career stuff, but we are still trying to make an effort. So after a few reschedules recently, we finally had our 2nd brunch of the year this past weekend.

I’ve struggled a bit lately in our brunch meetings with what I have to share with the group. I always feel like I’ve had a lack of progress compared to everyone else, but I also know that it’s not good for me to compare myself to the others. We all are on our own paths and are at different stages in our careers. So there’s really no way I can look at what someone else is doing and compare my accomplishments to theirs. Even so, it was a bit frustrating that I didn’t have really anything related to acting to share with the group this time. I know that the point of our meetings isn’t just for me to share what’s happening in my life but for me to support the others in the group, but there is almost a sense of feeling left out when I don’t have good things to share.

I did share about some craziness that’s been happening with my day jobs and how I’m doing social media management as a side job right now. I know that sometimes I think that there isn’t much happening in my life until I look back at various blog posts, but I think this time there really wasn’t much related to my acting career since the group met back in January. I’ve started to wonder if I haven’t been focusing on it enough, but I know that I’m staying involved in the union and other actor related things with various groups and meetings I’m attending. That counts for something even if I’m not auditioning a lot. I would like to get back into class eventually, but until I’m in a better place financially I can’t afford to do that. But maybe this feeling of left out will help kick my butt into gear into figuring out what else I can do that is not dependent on me having auditions.

Even with my negative feelings about my personal accomplishments, I was so happy to be at our brunch so I could hear about the accomplishments that everyone else had! Because we’ve been meeting for so long, when someone has a big breakthrough it sometimes feels like I’ve had the breakthrough too because we’ve been going on the journey with them. I love getting to hear that someone had an amazing meeting with a producer, is getting financial backing for their project, or that they just had fun on set. I’m not feeling jealous of any of them at all. My feelings of being left out are more to do with my lack of accomplishments and not at all about their successes. I guess if I must have any negative thoughts, I’m glad that they are just a me issue and it’s not about anyone in the group.

The other thing that made me so happy with this past brunch was that we had almost everyone in the group there. We were only missing one person and it felt amazing to have all of us who could make it at brunch. Of course, we all would love it if we all could make it but we know how tough that is with our schedules. But getting to see everyone I did see and seeing how excited they all were to see each other really made me so happy and grateful for the group that we have.

We really are striving to have another meeting in 2 months, but we are also aware that we may need an extra month or two to get everything scheduled. At least we all understand the situation and nobody was upset that we missed having our brunch last month (they are all just grateful that I am willing to schedule and organize our brunches so they continue). And while I can’t control if I have any auditions or bookings before our next meeting, hopefully I can figure out something else to move my career forward that I can share next time.

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