I have not been writing to you, but I have been writing.
Every morning for the past couple of months, I open a medium-sized journal bound in yellow faux-leather. I write with a dull pencil most days, because that’s what’s tucked into the elastic band that holds the journal closed. The writing sometimes happens before my feet have touched the carpet, so the writing implement closest at hand is what gets used. The path of least resistance.
It’s not a play or a short story or even an essay. It’s just a valve that I open to help me start the day. Put the pencil in your hand and see what comes out. I write for a page or two, sometimes three. It’s therapeutic, but it doesn’t help ease my hum of anxiety about not making enough progress on my next “work.” I want to be making progress. I want to write, and I want to have written. But for now, these morning pages are what I am able to find the time and energy for.
Did you know that I never actually wanted to be a writer? I wanted to be an actor. Even as a bright child who loved school, who enjoyed reading and math and history, acting was my only professional ambition. I must have known that this ambition had the potential to seem silly, because I didn’t voice it often. I kept it where I keep all my greatest ambitions: tucked deep in my chest, next to my heart, leaching into my bloodstream. And while much of my teen years blends together into a vague portrait of a place and time (the bright green shag carpeting of my attic bedroom; the faint must of the music wing at the old high school), I have vivid memories of the two pieces of advice I got during those years on pursuing an acting career on those rare occasions I revealed my aim.
One came from Betty Ann, an acting instructor and gifted performer who may have been the only actual theater professional I knew in Indiana.1 We were sitting around the dinner table at her home in Valparaiso. “Only become an actor if you can’t do anything else,” Betty Ann told me. I understood her guideline to have two valid interpretations: “Only do it if you have no other marketable skills,” was one. The other, “Only do it if you can’t NOT do it, if living any other path will break your spirit,” felt more like it applied to me. At the time.
The second memory is tinged a different color. In this one, I’m closer to graduating high school and starting college. My grandmother, Carol — one of the most important figures in my life, and even more so in the years after my mother died — stands across from me at a holiday gathering at my aunt and uncle’s house in Albuquerque. Perhaps it is Christmas Day; maybe it’s Easter. But I remember her asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I remember telling her. She was such an essentially free spirit, quick to break into song, eager to pursue a whim2. So it might surprise you, as it surprised me, that she told me I should find a different aspiration. “You’re too smart for that,” she warned. “You need to do something that uses your brain.” It was a compliment, you see. You’re so smart, Marissa. One of those crushing compliments.
It’s not my grandmother’s fault that I’m not a professional actor. I had a plan when I started college, and that plan was contingent on me getting in with the theater scene there, the way I had in high school. When that didn’t happen, I decided that my fragile teen heart couldn’t take the prospect of repeated rejection that is part and parcel of one’s early acting career. Since I’m being so honest, I will share with you that I also decided I was too fat to be cast by anyone but my friends. (This neurosis I am more willing to blame on the family matriarchy. But also, it was 2002.) So I had managed to make both the current rejection and the projected future rejection extra personal, and thus that much more withering.
In fact, that idea — that the rejection would be of my person, not of my work — must really be the crux of something. If I’d wanted to avoid rejection altogether, choosing to write would have been a boneheaded course of action indeed. But I didn’t “choose” to write, in the same way I didn’t “want to be” a writer. I just do it. I have always done it. It took me a long time to learn that this was a skill that might take me someplace I wanted to go.
And take me it did. Eventually. To California, to Los Angeles, to Beverly Hills, to Las Vegas…and to so much of the trappings of my adult life. While I’m still not really a “professional writer” in the sense of “this is how I make my living,” I am a media professional, doing a job that I couldn’t have dreamed of as a kid because it didn’t exist. And it led me to this newsletter. And one of the reasons it’s been so very long since I’ve written to you is that, in October, I spent my limited creative writing time working on a lengthy Metaforia-esque essay that was never meant for Metaforia. It was a sermon.
Have you noticed how most every Metaforia is structured like a sermon, but without the Bible verses? Canon Andrea McMillin, the priest in charge at All Saints’ Beverly Hills, noticed. She’d been hoping to start empowering the laity to share the pulpit on occasion, and asked me if I was game. In fact, the request was a reply to one of my newsletters. “Have you ever thought about preaching?” she texted me. (“Preaching is the main part of a priest’s job that appeals to me” was my response.) In assuming I’d be willing and able, she’d picked up on something I’ve only now realized: though I switched creative dreams, moving from acting to writing, I never really stopped performing. The writing is itself a performance.
The immense privilege of getting to preach at All Saints’ Beverly Hills was not lost on me, though I do tend to take the grandiosity of the place for granted since it has become my church home. As for the experience of preaching, it woke up in me the dormant gift of performance that had been so alive in my young self. I noticed this awakening, and I tucked it into my chest.
Less than a month later, I was back at the front of the sanctuary, only this time it was after hours on a weeknight. My friend Colleen Dodson Baker, herself both an actor and a writer, had written a part for me to read in her latest play, which would be debuted in a table reading as an event for the church’s flourishing LGBTQ group. Throughout the writing of the play, Colleen would tell me that she’d had my voice in her head all week. Nevermind that the character I’d be reading was an older British woman. Had Colleen ever heard me do an English accent? I don’t think so. But she assumed I had this skill. I never tired of hearing that Colleen was thinking of me. That she was thinking of me as an actor.
The yellow journal I’ve been writing in every morning came as part of an excellent birthday gift from my roommate, Megan. It was a special packaging of a romance novel (which, incidentally, was about a fat fashion designer finding love and stardom on reality TV) and several wrapped gifts that tied into the novel. But rather than opening everything all at once, you were to wait until a specific page to open each present. Each package was labeled with a page number, and the corresponding page of the novel was marked with a specially printed sticky note so that you didn’t forget it was time to claim your reward.
The gifts were straightforward: a Turkish bath towel, a leather key fob. The journal is simply meant to resemble one described in the book. When I opened it, I was thrilled to see it; I love a good journal. And I put the sticky note on the front cover to remember the fun present Megan had given me.
“Open Your Gift,” the note reads.
I glanced at this phrase every day for weeks before, one day, it said something different.
I mean, not literally. Literally, it was the same old pre-printed note. But like a cookie fortune or a tarot card, it had gained a new dimension. When you leave a gift unopened, it can get buried. It gets forgotten. All the potential inside for light and joy is never realized. And I’d done that with one of my most treasured gifts; what other, smaller ones might I be leaving unopened?
Whether it’s well-meant advice, deep-seated anxiety, or an overdose of “cold hard reality,” growing up has a way of shutting down many of our fondest pursuits. We blame a lack of time and energy (and sure, when is there ever enough of these?), but don’t turn to acknowledge the voice inside that says, No one really wants this from me. Or, someone like me isn’t supposed to do this. Maybe, someone else can do this better than I can, so why even try? Or even the darkly capitalist, If no one is paying me for this I must be bad at it.
I can already tell that I will be walking through 2024 whispering “open your gift” to myself. As much as I wish that you have gifts under your tree and (better yet) people to open them beside, I wish for you that you’ll search your chest for any old gifts you might have tucked away in there and forgotten to open. Look in that spot right next to your heart.
If you would like to watch me read my sermon from October, the whole thing can be found here starting at 22:22:
If you’re looking for a Christmas Eve service (or maybe just a bonus one), Sunday night’s choral candlelight service will be livestreamed from All Saints’ at that same YouTube page. This will be my first Christmas Eve sung there in nine seasons at the parish!
You can still watch The Mirror Game on Tubi, YouTube, or Amazon.
And if you want to give ME a gift, I’d love it if you shared this newsletter with someone you think might like it.
Merry Christmas! I’ll try not to keep you waiting so long.
…who wasn’t doing theater as an extra-curricular activity, I mean. I knew plenty of theatrical adults. I was once in a board meeting for the local community theater where a man in his 40s unironically shouted, “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! This whole meeting is out of order!” I was maybe 14.
“I don’t believe in pain” is something she said a lot in her later years, in a sense that would make any hedonist nod in agreement.
What a wonderful message, Marissa! Thank you for sharing it.
I have much in common with you... I also grew up wanting to be an actor, and I was pretty good at it! But I gave it up because I realized that a woman who looks the way I look wouldn't get far in the profession. I ended up a writer, too, which is probably a better fit for me.
I did get back into acting (via my local community theater) for the first time right before the pandemic hit, and I really enjoyed it. Now that the pandemic is as far behind us as it will ever be, I should open my gift and get back into it. Thanks for the reminder.