I wake up this morning heavy-hearted with the loss of an incredible show looming in the immediate future. My second production of RENT ends today, and the experience invites everyone involved to experience the full spectrum of emotions required to tell this incredible story. At a time in my life that has been more challenging than any other time before, there is a certain cathartic quality to living and breathing on stage in a production that is all about saying goodbye to something you love.
Theater is a unique choice of profession, because it is a business of beginnings and ends, and it happens over and over. You walk into so many situations where you absolutely must give 110 percent and expect no guarantees on the outcome. In many ways, participating in theater truly teaches you how to live, cope, and find joy and opportunity in the uncertain.
Over the course of the last few weeks, my relationship has been quietly unraveling behind closed doors. Through an awful series of “Vaguebooking” posts (which are off-scoffed at, in my book), I have alluded to the issues I have been dealing with, without directly referencing them. But it seems appropriate that, on the day of this closing performance, that I make my peace with the situation and begin my journey moving forward.
After much effort and endless conversations, Charlie and I have ended our three-year relationship. It is a delicate time in both of our lives – my moving to NYC to follow my dream, his graduating from SFSU and being thrust into the real adult world – and we are simply unable to continue our individual journeys through life while meeting the other person’s needs simultaneously. It has been a difficult, painful process that lead us to this
point, and there will obviously be many emotional hurtles to jump during this healing process. I am not angry or upset that we have found ourselves at this point, but I am sad and wounded to lose three years worth of love, bonding, hard work, good times, fights, challenges, and successes with the man that I have loved so intensely for so long.
Everything we have experienced as a couple has lead us to this point. Despite the mutual daydreams we often shared about the song we would walk down the aisle to at our wedding, raising a family, buying a home with a shed in the backyard full of power tools so Charlie could build…stuff…our dreams for the immediate future are not the same. Perhaps we were blinding ourselves by looking too far ahead to recognize that we still had individual paths to walk. Before Charlie, I had scoured all of my surroundings in search of the perfect relationship with the perfect partner – when I found it in him, my priority of finding love was fulfilled, and it gave me permission to pursue my other passion in my life, building a career in the theater.
RENT was the first show Charlie saw me in after we had found one another, and it is the last show he saw before we let each other go. Although closing a show is always a bittersweet experience, today’s final performance will be absolutely electrifying. As I let go of yet another incredible experience onstage and in my own personal spectrum, I am reminded that my life will be full of these goodbyes, and that pain and tears and sadness will reap knowledge and wisdom that I haven’t yet obtained. I am honored to have shared this experience with such a phenomenal cast of gifted actors, and forever blessed to have shared my love and my life with someone as incredible as Charlie. I will forever love him in a way I will never love another, and I am excited to see what incredible adventures await him on his own journey. As I release him and myself back to the open sky, I stare the unknown in the face and seize the opportunity to live life for no one but myself. It is terrifying, exhilarating, and downright intimidating, but I accept my life for what it has become, and intend on making the absolute most of what awaits me in the next phase of my journey.
Love one another, speak clearly, and always stay true to yourself.
Twerking Actor 