I am Retiring from Auditioning
This is a story I feel truly shy to tell. I am embarrassed, ashamed, and, in facing this and sharing it with you, also liberated.
For as long as I can remember, I have been auditioning. Trying out for all the roles. My dad told me when I was young that I should run for all the offices at school. “If you don’t run, you can’t win. If you run, one day you’ll win.” I have auditioned for so many jobs. I have auditioned for so many gigs. Auditioning has become so engrained in me that I lost track at some point of when I was doing it.
Most of my auditions have gone well. I’ve had so much practice, I’m pretty good at it. The audition mindset has helped me start businesses, change careers, sell a book to a publisher, try out new ideas with others.
But this is a story about an actress who auditioned one time too many.
I’ve come to realize that for my entire post-middle school life, I’ve been auditioning for love. Through decades of serial monogamy, I’ve dated heaps of great men, and in almost any instance where I “wanted to win,” I auditioned…hard. My recently released book, Never Ask for the Sale, speaks directly to the (I should say “my”) auditioning context for online dating!
In the context of romance, I realize now that I had believed for eons that I would only “win” (a partner, a romantic outcome) if I set aside meaningful aspects of myself (including my very belief in myself as someone decent) and tried to pull off the role of “someone worthy of love.”
If you read my blogs, you know that I exited a marriage late last year. Now that the intense grief has blown through my atmosphere, I am facing my auditioning habit directly. I’m staring it down and demanding that, for the days I have left in this life, I am taking the already well-earned role of “myself” and letting that be enough.
In that last relationship, I started the audition in the first chatter on Bumble. I swiped right on someone who lived a 2.5-hour flight from my cherished home mostly because that man had gone to Brown University. I mean, yes, it’s a great school chosen by many brilliant people who have a little something extra (that’s you, Leah Pearlman). Hell, I may have swiped right on that guy because of my love for Leah Pearlman! Whatever the reason, my auditioning was on full tilt early on.
And I can see it in the background or foreground of every step in the process. I see myself trying to lock things down. I see me turning a blind eye to VERY early red flags because this person looked so good on paper (and, frankly, not bad in person!). I was trying. I wasn’t always succeeding. I was working my tail off in conflicts to bring us closer in repair. I was letting go so easily of priorities that made my life meaningful. Not because of him. Because I put myself on an imagined stage with an extremely harsh spotlight, and I did all the dancing. You don’t need the details on the steps. Just know, they were often uncomfortable to me, intended to accommodate. But I performed the moves nonetheless, uncertain about whether they were in service of positive relationship compromise or negative self-denial. In the haze, I found that boundary unbearably confounding.
In the end, the answer was so obvious.
And today is Sunday. I have spent time with one of my oldest friends. She became obsessed with Wicked recently, particularly the Oscar performance of “Defying Gravity.” She was so obsessed that she insisted we do home karaoke of this song. So obsessed with this scene from the Oscars that she “made us” film this video of part of the song. You can see my resistance was, well, overcome by boundless joy.
I cooked for my friend and me after years of disliking cooking. I’m cooking for everyone now, making too much for one person and delivering single meals to friends. I love being in the kitchen, a former conflict ground zero in my marriage. I sit around and read books. I sometimes watch TV in the daytime. I’m taking an improv class, because after eight years of dating men who lived in different cities, I’m home every Monday for eight weeks. I’m looking after a two-month-old baby of close friends because, although this is really the first baby with whom I’ve ever deeply interacted, she feels like family. I go to movies, plays, and dance performances alone because I still buy two tickets for everything.
I am available. No makeup, no dialed-in outfit. No song and dance. No management of or attention to the reactions of others to the thing I just said or did. Or, let’s be honest here, much less management. I’m slowing everything down, especially relationships. I’m “dating” like a 5th grader who went to her first concert with Marc Fishman (Air Supply). I’m applying my bar for friendship to the romantic universe. Does that sound obvious? To me, too. (Now, finally.) After all, I have extraordinary friends.
Although I’ve worked hard to make and secure friendships and work in my life, those contexts have been wholly different. The bar has always been high. I have always been authentically me. So, really, I’m just endeavoring to bring the context of romance “up” to the standard of authenticity and “me-ness” that has served me well in every other area of my life. That, in fact, is what passionate ambivalence was always about.
Almost every day, at the end of the day, I ask the best audition-detection question I have found: “How much did I feel like myself today/just then/with that person?”
I am home.
And a special reminder for you little people out there of all ages: You…being home…whatever home is to you…is perfect.
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Speaking of owning your power: I recently sat down with Jane Miller on her podcast, Jane’s Place, for a conversation that felt like a natural companion to this post. We talked about confidence, self-doubt, and what it means to step into your potential — including an exercise I love for identifying the one thing you’re truly exceptional at, even when saying it out loud feels uncomfortable. You can listen here.