Question from my Sister
I’m writing on my new blog every day for thirty days straight. This is the eighth one.I asked my family and friends for questions about my career that I could answer during these thirty days. Today I’m answering a second one.
When I lived in Texas, my nephews and nieces (and mostly their parents) would call me crazy Uncle Andrew. I love playing with those kids, and I love being their uncle. And recently, as the time that I’ve been away from Texas has grown longer, I’ve been worried. I have this nagging fear that one day I’ll be a washed-up actor, driven insane by rejection and penniless by my own foolishness. That my nephews and nieces will still call me crazy Uncle Andrew – but instead of “crazy” meaning “fun” it will now mean “manic depressive.” Ol’ manic-depressive Uncle Andrew!Eight days in, I’ve realized something about this blog. One of my motivations to write is to keep my family up to date. Since I’ve moved to LA, I haven’t touched base often enough. So since I’m afraid I’ll end up clinically insane, and I don’t touch base often, I want to prove to them that I’m still sane. All the smog hasn’t clouded my brain yet. Yet.It’s funny because I just saw the following quote this morning: “If you find yourself constantly trying to prove your worth to someone, you have already forgotten your value.” So maybe I should stop writing to prove my worth to my family. Maybe I’ve forgotten my value. Maybe I don’t give myself enough credit. I don’t have an answer.
Today’s question is from my sister Sarah. She lives in Houston, TX with her husband Joey. She works at NASA, and Joey works at an oil refinery. Sarah and I are the two youngest kids in our family, but she’s nine years older than I am. We're the only two kids with curly hair. She’s the only sibling I remember living with; the rest of our siblings were already gone to college. As a kid, I tried very hard to annoy her. To me, annoyance was an art form, and I was painting masterpiece after masterpiece. And when Mom and I dropped her off in Milwuakee for her freshman year of college, I vividly remember crying.From the sis:I remember you saying at one point that you wanted a job in which you made a lot of money - explain how you changed from that kid to an adult that loves a career that doesn’t always pay a lot.Our oldest brother Bobby (who’s twenty years older than me) worked at a major consulting firm after college. After a long time at that company, after he was making over triple digits, he gave it all away and decided to become a Catholic priest. It was an amazing decision, but Bobby’s an amazing guy and it didn’t really surprise me.I was only a kid when he decided, but years later when I was in college, I remember having long discussions with him about what I wanted to do for a living. I remember asking him point blank what he could see me doing, but he didn’t tell me anything specific. But something else he told me stood out.
“If I could do college all over again, I would have studied what I loved instead of what I thought was responsible.”
I didn’t take his advice. I continued to pursue Electrical and Computer Engineering, but I think his advice subconsciously worked on me for the next several years. I remember working in the computer lab and overhearing graduating seniors comparing their double-digit signing bonuses for their multiple job offers. Job security was a given in that field, but after I realized that I didn’t enjoy the work - the job security never appealed to me.
There’s a billboard for a church near my current house in Los Angeles that reads a rephrasing of Matthew 16:26: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” I’m not going to lie and say that I’m wise enough to have been thinking this, or that I even knew where that quote was from in the Bible before I googled it just now. But I think at some point, I realized I’d rather be a failure as an actor than a success as an engineer.