Returning, and thoughts on perfection

I'm back in the 'burbs in my Shiny Town and as usual it's comforting and disorienting at the same time.

I want to ensure while I'm back here I don't fall back into old habits.  Over the past year I have made such amazing developments.  I really don't want to ruin all those positive changes, so I will have to remind myself on a constant basis that I don't have to be the way I used to. This is a constant task for me, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

On the way to the airport yesterday morning, the taxi driver asked me if I had to be perfect to be an actress.  This really bothers me, the expectation that if one is an actor one must want to be a 'star' and therefore 'perfect.'  Being in the business of telling stories visually, of course one has to fulfil certain expectations, for example, you have to be the girl that the character and the audience falls in love with, or the evil guy that shoots out the bank.  You have to be able to convince the audience that you are entirely that character, otherwise it pulls them out of the story.  But the problem is that people think, oh, actor, you must be skinny and pretty (and stupid), and if not, then theatrical and weird.  Even my dad has weird expectations about what being an actor is.  People don't seem to understand that it's about craft and and that finding a happy medium between commercialism and art is the challenge for us all.

Another reason I suppose that the comment bothered me is that I haven't been very good at being 'perfect' lately.  Part of me wants to be desperately, and the other part knows that the whole reason I went down a hole a few years ago is because of this desire to be 'perfect'.  And the past couple of years I have been nowhere near it at all.  When he said it I really wanted to be perfect for him but at the same time I knew I couldn't.  The other thing is, I can't spend my life stuck down a hole either.  At some point in my life, (and let's face it, the earlier the better), I'm going to have to get out there and face the world.  The rest of the world has been doing it for ages, it's just me and my addiction to hiding by studying that has kept me away from it.  From now on, the best I can, I have got to find a way of being true to myself and to my art, while at the same time meeting these expectations of being 'perfect.'  Hell yeah!

Now to start...