"Dare to Suck"

It's mid-June and graduation season is finally coming to a close. This year was a big year for my family. I received my second degree--an AA in Performing Arts from AADA on the exact day that I had received my BA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania five years prior. Before you give me a hard time about how divergent those two disciplines are, I must make the argument that Politicians are actors themselves, and a trip to the Capitol building will show you that D.C. is a lot like Hollywood, except people dress all the same and they don't get to play different characters---unless you're someone like John Edwards who managed to play golden boy and villain within the span of 10 years. If you need more of an argument, watch the 8 Part Miniseries, "The Kennedys."

My brother graduated the following week from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Industrial Design. He says that he was an Art student, not a Smart student, but he was smart enough to know that since he was a kid, he loved drawing and building things, and so he figured that he'd keep doing that.

I was not blessed with such a clear path. To make a long story short: I chose my college pretty much at random. My mom had a crush on the admissions officer and it had a number 4 ranking in U.S. News. I declared Communications to be my major upon entering college, switched to Psychology when that seemed too fluffy, switched to International Relations when there was far to much of a focus on monkeys and rats than people, switched to History when I got a C+ in Micro Economics because I spent the class doing crossword puzzles, and switched to Political Science when my history T.A. heard us talking about current events in the Middle East and said that if what we were talking about didn't happen 50 or more years ago, he didn't want to hear it. And even with Political Science, I had to persuade my advisor to override a few requirements so I could graduate in four years.

Even after all of that, I still managed to graduate cum laude. Yet I felt like a failure. After 4 years, I was even more confused about who I was and where I was going than when I had started.

When they announced our commencement speaker, the vast majority of my school was livid. It was Jodie Foster. To them, she was just some actress. How did being the star of the original Freaky Friday qualify her to speak at our school?

For me, this was a triumph. This woman was a successful actress, director, and producer. A movie is the ultimate storytelling machine, and she has worn every hat. In my heart, I knew that was what I wanted to be when I grew up--all of those things. I had always known, but I was just too scared to tell anyone that for fear of sounding crazy and because the odds seemed impossible.

What struck me most about her speech, and come to think of it, every commencement speech I've heard since, is the overwhelming theme of the importance of failure. Jodie said that she spent the first six months after graduation in bed, eating cheese doodles, and watching re-runs. Even though she had had success as an actress for years, she felt paralyzed by the responsibility of choosing the next step.

In J.K. Rowling's speech to the Harvard graduating class of 2008, she shared that what she feared above all when she entered the world was failure. She made a joke about how, as Harvard grads, they probably were not very familiar with failure, but that it may have been the fear of failure even more than the desire for success that had motivated them to spend their lives avoiding--well, failure. She said that what kids like that thought of as failure, most people might call success!

J.K. said that after she graduated from school, she said she felt like exactly the very thing she had feared the most: the definition of failure. She was poor and had no idea of what ladder she was supposed to be climbing, and she spent all of her free time writing stories in coffee bars. Despite feeling like she had failed at life by not having a great job, she said, that if she had truly succeeded at anything else, the world may never have known Harry Potter and his magical world of witchcraft and wizardry. She said that her failure was actually just the stripping away of the unnecessary, so she could direct all of her energy toward the thing that she felt truly called to.

As I reflect on the time since Summer of 2006, I see miles of failure behind me. Two unsuccessful applications to a government intelligence agency, a mental breakdown followed by a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, almost a dozen dead-end jobs, 12 different addresses in 5 years, my first time being fired, failed romances.

However, without all of that failure, I wouldn't be where I am right now. If it weren't for my mental breakdown, I probably never would have given my inner artist permission to be sensitive and creative and loud and moody. It took a healthcare professional to tell me that I was a performer and I needed to harness that and that it was OK to put energy into that aspect of my life, not be ashamed of it. Left to my own devices, I would have trapped that performer in a box and buckled down to work in a cubicle or go to law school. I probably would have been pretty good at that job too, but I wouldn't have been happy and, eventually, that breakdown would be inevitable because I was hiding my true self. As Julia Cameron, author of the Artist's Way, I would have remained a shadow artist, desperately wanting to create and contribute my art, but being afraid and not knowing how.

Winnie Holzman, the co-creator of the musical "Wicked" was one of the commencement speakers at my AADA graduation ceremony. After being introduced, she said it was wonderful to hear all those successes, but that there were A LOT of mistakes in her life, and those aren't on her resume. She told us the story about how she was preparing to speak to a room full of wealthy and important people, and just as she got up to speak, she fell on her ass. She said that in that moment, she made the choice not to be mortified and humiliated, but to laugh it off. To her surprise, she felt such warmth from the people in the room and such empathy, that she was no longer nervous. In fact, it was in that moment, she realized that she had created "Wicked" and done so many other amazing things in life by being willing to fall on her ass, pick herself back up again, and laugh it off, always moving forward.

I've fallen on my ass a lot. In some cases, I've fallen all the way back across the country to my childhood home. But all roads have led me back here to Hollywood. I found a school that understood me and gave me the room and the support to test the extent of imagination and the depths of my emotion. I am here with millions of other creative people, fueled by the same undeniable need to express themselves and tell stories. Now, along with all the life-lessons I've learned through my own "failures," I also have the tools and self-awareness to know who I am and where I stand in that community. I'm gonna chalk that one up in the success column.

Michael Conti, the student representative from the RIT school of Imaging Arts and Sciences, my brother's alma mater, summed it up nicely when he passed on the best advice he had received in his undergraduate education,

"My fellow graduates: Dare to Suck!"