This isn’t the post I wrote last month.
Last month while feeling completely and utterly burnt out I sat down and wrote out a post that I didn’t get around to publishing. I let it sit in my draft folder as Noises Off! took over my entire life. A few weeks later I took another look at it and realized my attitudes and feelings have evolved and change. So that post becomes the second lost post on the blog.
I still feel absolutely burnt out right now. I’m trying to balance a demanding day job and a demanding theatre job at the same time. I can see myself being stretched thin across both gigs, I really and truly want to do my best in everything I do but I sometimes I feel like I can’t please anybody.
I questioned if I was being a good stage manager. I took every mistake I made on the stage to heart and I was beginning to feel like a failure. I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for professional theatre.
Then as the run went on I stopped treating every note I got as a personal attack and just concentrated on doing a good job. Now I’m a little over halfway done with the run and I’ve regained the confidence I used to have working on my past productions. While things sometimes go wrong I have come to terms that nothing is every perfect and I work around problems under pretty tight conditions.
Last weekend one of our props broke in between acts and right before it would be used for a critical part of the show. Did I fret? Nope I just fixed it with the magic of gaff tape and informed the actors of some changes.
Sometimes you are going to make some rookie mistakes- especially when you are a rookie. The big thing is to learn from them and you’ll become a better player in the long run.
It took me awhile to work through my hyper-sensitive, stress induced moments but now I’m cool as a cucumber again and like most periods of burn out I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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