“If you’re curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don’t need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that’s exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets.” —Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink
“How have you been complicit in creating the conditions in your life that you say you don’t want?” —Jerry Colonna, Reboot
If all the world’s a stage, what role are you playing?
The nerd? The jock?
The victim?
A friend of mine recently dyed their hair blue and just offhandedly said, “I don’t know what that says about me.” My instinct was to say something like, “It doesn’t say anything about you!”
But as soon as that thought formed, it dissipated and was replaced with a more grounded truth: it says a lot about them.
Who has blue hair? The surgeon or the barista at the indie coffee shop?
And that’s not a criticism—it’s just a snap judgment. Appearances matter. We judge books by their covers all the time because we can’t read everything to know if it’s “for us.” These judgments are wildly error-prone, but still, we do it because we don’t have the time to investigate everything thoroughly. We can’t sit down and get to know every person we come into contact with over a three-hour coffee to determine if they could fill the role of “best friend.” We have to filter. And those filters come in the form of everything from our outfits (costumes?) to our hairstyle to our attitudes and how we carry ourselves in the world, to even the people we spend our time with. Each of these choices signals that we’re auditioning for a specific role.
Even if we aren’t making those connections consciously.
We pour our hearts and souls into our auditions each and every day with the choices we make and then, when we get the part, we’re like, “I can’t believe I got the part. Oh, what a fucking tragedy.”
“Ugh, I got the part of the miserable, down-in-the-dumps dude who can’t find true love in Los Angeles.”
Well. Yeah. Of course you did. You auditioned for this role by eating like shit, never going to the gym, and getting high each night while ripping through three hours of TikTok. The people you want to date don’t want to date you. Maybe audition for the emotionally available single guy by learning how to cook and going to therapy?
Your choices are your audition tape.
What roles are you going out for?
And remember, in this framework, the things you say don’t count. Just the things you actually do. Your actions. The moment-to-moment choices of your life. And yeah, it sucks because actions actually do speak louder than words. Talk actually is cheap. Really cheap. Like, they’re having an ALL WORDS MUST GO BLACK FRIDAY SALE kind of cheap.
If you want a different life, audition for a different role by changing the things you do each day.
Otherwise, you’ll get typecast by your friends, family, and the world at large and you just might think that you don’t have any say in the matter when you are, in fact, the only person who does have any say.
xjesse
P.S. If you like my no-nonsense style of writing, please “like and subscribe” to my CUT TO: Hollywood Substack, which is all about breaking into (and staying in) the entertainment industry. Or forward it to someone you know could use some insight on their Hollywood journey.