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90's Sitcom

So no one told you life was gonna...


Depictions of your twenties in small apartments, mismatched furniture, and the constant barrage of friends coming through the door. I’ve always seen myself in the trendy clothes and the feeling that one is always on the precipice of something life changing. The existential dread, the comments on how much a character hates their job, glossed over as they shut the front door and spend the next thirty minutes on the shenanigans of the episode. Where’s my laugh track?

I can’t tell if it’s a generational thing or the result of 2.5 decades of life, but what seemed like a comfortable set feels cagey now. A writer hands me my next line, I’m gripped with indecision on what’s right or wrong and whether that even matters. And then I hate that I have the capacity to feel these things, resentful of the audience, smiling like an actor while my thoughts wander to my next free hour, vacation, escape. It’s no singular experience, I’ve commiserated over it many times with different casts of friends as the same sitcom episodes play in the background, a familiar soundtrack to what feels like the not-so-roaring twenties. And perhaps I carry too many pollyanna hopes, maybe realism isn’t my strength, but I can’t help but know there must be something better.

There’s no laugh track or writers and I have to pick out my own mismatched furniture, but there are joys I don’t feel I can compromise on anymore. I can’t walk through doors and make flippant remarks on bosses and paperwork, I don’t want to sit and count coins as the bigger plot unravels itself for the true story. I want the story, even if my disastrous dates are the funny preamble, a mere montage to the guest-star-turned-regular. I don’t think it’s any little kid’s dream to be an extra.

And maybe part of me is scared because there really is an invisible audience, and if I pull down the fourth wall and announce I’m leaving, I’m not sure if they’ll follow. The applause and chatter and guffaws have become a familiar soundtrack and I’m afraid of what happens in the silence of a single camera.

But I have to.

I’ve always been a little scared of comfort, of feeling so much like I belonged that I wouldn’t leave. But I’ve never walked away from a good thing for the hell of it. Bright lights and marks and multiple takes can cause some actors’ souls to burn, but they’ve turned stale in mine. Something in the adventure is gone. And everyone deserves to be in love with their life.

If I’ve been miscast, I owe it to myself to turn down the part. To write the script that lets me star in the show. Everyone deserves to be the lead of their own story.

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