Not for the Life of Me [YouTube Video]

Manhattan, I prepared for you…

More than seven years ago, I took my last bow on the Steel Valley High School stage, ready and willing to do whatever it would take to make it to New York City.

At the time, I had an end goal without a plan: just a far-off glimmer in the distance that was calling me in every decision I made.

I didn’t know the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie yet, but Millie and I would become good friends on that stage I was leaving behind, soon after my own New York Story reached its conclusion.

Though I had moved on of my own accord, that dreamlike image of 1920s Manhattan set to the music of the Jazz Age called to me, making me nostalgic for a place I had only been too eager to leave behind.

How could I not be nostalgic? Was I not almost entirely an identical counterpart to Millie? A girl so set on making it to that platinum version of the Emerald City that she’d let nothing stand in her way?

For a time, I was her. Ticket home in my pocket be damned. Of course, our stories diverged in important ways – rather than looking for a rich suitor to marry, my modern dreams manifested in a more 21st Century style: making a name for myself in the so-called “high stakes” world of corporate public relations.

I think about that ambitious twenty-two-year-old who made it to Manhattan, and am torn in half by my conflicting feelings toward her.

On the one hand, she was foolish, knowing right from the start that something was amiss about the life she was determined to make fit. Stubborn and ruthless, she was willing to do anything to force that life into working.

But on the other hand, was she not the bravest version of myself that I have ever been? Leaving everything behind to pursue the one thing she’d always known she’d wanted?

Anyone can be born here, but to travel here on nothing but nerve and imagination –

Like a Millie Dillmount?

Like a Katie Bennett

Well, yes and no. It takes a great deal of bravery to go after what you want. But it takes a great deal more to step back and admit it’s not the life you want anymore.

I am trying to not be hard on myself for leaving Manhattan behind (which is particularly difficult on warm April Sundays that would have started with breakfast at Pret and ended with hours spent among the stacks at The Strand). I am trying to remember that the ending of something does not negate that for a brief yet ecstatic period, it was the fact of my life:

Granny dear, Mother mine – old and gray at 29…

Calloused hands, broken heart – dreams that die before you start…

The simple truth is, I had to want something that much and be so devastatingly let down by it to realize that wanting something is only half of it. That life has to want you back in return.

Through my own personal coming of age (if we want to call it that), and watching Millie’s story every day for four months as the assistant director of my high school’s musical, I’ve learned that a career is essentially just a relationship with your work. For quite some time, I was certain that it didn’t matter how you felt about your job – what mattered was something tactical and practical, like how good you were at it, or how much money you made.

But that’s not true. Though Millie and I led different stories, the conclusion is still the same. Whether it’s a marriage you have in mind, or a career, love has everything to do with it.

It’s not romantic or idealistic to want a job you’re excited about. I think about Sunday evening dread – a phenomenon I experienced so frequently as I anxiously awaited a new week to begin. Enjoying only one day out of a week because you don’t feel passionate about your work – that’s not a life. Not for me.

I think about the things I’ve given up – the potential six figure salary, theater whenever I wanted, skyscrapers that seem as though they lead you straight to the heavens – I don’t think there’s a day that will go by where I won’t miss some part of that glimmering spectacle. But to go back to it, to turn away from this yet unrealized purpose I’ve found simply because it was a dream come true?

Not for the life of me.