Jennifer Carroll is a 21 year old actor and writer. She first began writing for the Uxbridge Cosmos in 2007 when she had the opportunity to share her experiences as a Canadian ambassador for an international conference for women in Dubai. At the beginning of 2008, she moved to Ireland to pursue a career in theatre and film. Far From Home is her monthly account on living and working in Dublin.
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What am I really doing here?
?There is an ivy tree in my back garden. A massive, imposing hunk of tree, the beast is an impressive mountain of dense greenery. I like it because even in the winter, my back garden flourishes with an intense forest green instead of an icy white, a treat I still marvel at in the middle of February. I'm not sure why, but there is a comfort in that. However, the beast cuts two to three hours off the sunshine in the afternoon in our garden, so we decided to pull it down and get rid of it.
Upon roping, sawing and fighting the beast to the ground, I marveled at the guts that spilled onto my back yard. It was at least twice as big and dense as we'd figured. I inspected the broken tree in mild horror; the ivy was interlaced with evil holly, the centre of the tree had long since died leaving sawdust for a skeleton, and it had eaten several horrifying items including chicken wire, saw blades, broom poles. I even found a bird that had been trapped and died in the struggle to escape the beast's clutches.
I wondered: how could the beautiful leafy exterior hide so much death and decay? And we just let the decomposition fester. The beast ate itself from the inside out, hiding its gangrene from the world, fooling outsiders into thinking it was lush and healthy. It made me think about the nature of people. So many of them are trapped in the glossy role of happiness. We constantly mask honest emotions, refusing to project them onto our faces in order to maintain a comfortable façade of contentment. Emotions are for the privacy of your room, tears are for the bedroom pillow, anger is for the delicate section of drywall next to the mirror. There is no room in the outside world for those dangerous, unpredictable emotions. We walk around with leafy exteriors, disguising our rotting guts.
I don't want my insides, my morals to turn to sawdust. So, in the spirit of emotional bravery, I have something to tell you: I'm afraid. These last few weeks the fear and doubt in my mind have snuck closer to the surface, and I find them hiding behind my eyes and under the tip of my tongue. I know I have strength, but where do I find endurance? Those secret questions are becoming harder to ignore: what am I really doing here? Am I being foolish? Why aren't I home? I very seldom wonder why I'm here, partly because I'm afraid that if I truly examine the evidence, I'll find I have little reason to stay. I have nerves of steel, ones that can take nearly anything, but when my own determination begins to falter… well, it's hard to hold an outfit together when the seams start to disintegrate.
It's hard to express what I feel, because I don't want to appear shaky and defeated. That's not what I feel. I have a wonderful life here, one that I built alone and on my own terms. I'm in a country I love. But I owe it to myself to write honestly. These bumps in the road are important ones to document. I write about living here because the struggle, the fight, the journey is interesting. But it's also difficult. I just don't want to gloss over the hard bits. The contrast is what makes the joy and success all the sweeter.
I'll tell you one more thing, one more wonderful discovery: I'm not afraid of being afraid. I'm not scared by the doubt. I just breathe through it and wait for the morning, because I'm always alright by then. The fear means I have something to lose, something worth fighting for. I'd rather be terrified than feel nothing at all.
And so in the spirit of my new emotional bravery, I'm shaking things up. I want something new, something exciting and creative and my own. My fight needs a new approach. So new headshots, new classes, new projects are all on the books. Enough waiting, enough backstage, enough quiet plodding. Time to be bold and eccentric! Fear and desperation are only useful if you use them to fuel your ambition. They'll vault me forward, because I'll be damned if I let them defeat me.
