For years, I called myself an actor. If you asked me what I did, I would say acting. “Actor” was my identity. It had been for my entire adult life.
Then I started directing. Acting wasn’t bringing me the same happiness it once had, and directing was getting better at scratching that itch to create. At first, calling myself a director felt like a lie. I wasn’t acting anymore, but I had wanted to succeed as an actor for so long that is seemed like a betrayal of my younger self to call myself anything else. But directing satisfied me, and acting didn’t, and gradually I started calling myself a director and believing it. “Director” became my new identity.
For the past few years I’ve been working as a production manager. It’s more than a full time job, so I’ve had less and less time for directing as my work responsibilities have increased. My identity hasn’t changed – production managing is just my job. But if you ask me what I do nowadays, I’m more likely to say I’m a producer. (Nobody knows what a production manager does, but everyone thinks they know what a producer does, so I simplify.) Since I only direct about once or twice a year these days, I once again feel like a fraud if I introduce myself to someone as a director. I’ll leave that revelation for the deeper end of the conversation – if we reach the point where we’re telling each other what we are instead of what we do, I may tell you I’m a director.
Years ago, I was, to most of my friends, a writer first and foremost. I wrote plays and sketches for myself and my friends to perform, in high school and college and summer stock and eventually in New York. But while that was how other people viewed me, it was never how I viewed myself. I only wrote to give myself something to act in.
But now…something is changing again. I spent the past year pouring all of my frustrated creative energy into a book, and I surprised myself with how happy it made me. Happy enough that I turned down the opportunity to direct two plays this summer in order to focus on writing. I’m not quite ready to say I’m a writer, yet – it hasn’t become my identity. If you introduce yourself to me at a party and ask what I do, I will, after stammering incomprehensibly for a moment (I’m bad with new people), still tell you I’m a producer. But if we get past that, “And I wrote a book” will probably leave my lips before “And I’m a director” does.
But ask me again after my second book comes out. I’m dying to know what I’ll say then.
