Gird your loins

Some advice from someone who's made major mistakes so you don't have to.

Somehow, I’ve managed to write and re-write the title above three times as “gird your loans,” and man oh man is that a subconscious Freudian slip. If you don’t like advice, feel free to skip this one. Because I’m doling it out like Otter pops on a hot summer day.

If you’re a writer, thinking about pursuing writing as a career, already pursuing it or you’re going after another artistic career (filmmaker, visual artist, dancer, actor, theater director), you MUST, at all costs, do your best to avoid student loans (credit card debt is also a huge problem that you should avoid).

Unlike other Substackers, I’m not going to promise you a blueprint on how to win the game because I haven’t won it yet. Not close. Personally, I don’t really believe in making art this way. That’s why I started working on a manifesto on how to unfuck yourself from this way of thinking.

That said, I can tell you one of the number one ways to screw yourself up. I can tell you this because I personally derailed my career in my twenties and messed myself up when I attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for my masters degree in performance. You would think attending NYU would do the opposite and would open many doors. I mean, it could have if I hadn’t taken out a huge loan to attend. Two individuals I was friends with in the program have done amazing things since graduating. One of them just won a Tony award this year and was the showrunner for a major TV mini-series on Hulu, and the other was nominated for a Tony award last year. And I’m very proud and happy for both of them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have as easy a time after graduating. But I’m not the only person who struggled after my time at NYU. One person I attended the program with wound up loading palettes at a Walmart in Florida for years. Two others I knew who lived and breathed theater, wound up becoming corporate HR managers and I don’t know if they’re still active in the arts.

This is not because the academics were poor. They were interesting. I had the opportunity to audition for and work directly with Anna Deavere Smith and Richard Schechner and sit in on talks with Young Jean Lee, Anne Bogart and other amazing artists. I learned so much that I still use to this day. But…my experience there made me feel (at the time) less confident in myself, it made me hypercritical of my work (which is what the academy teaches you to do), and it left me deeply in debt.

Photo by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER AUTUMN

Before I begin this sob story, I do want to let you all know that I’m now in a very good place. I have a job in television that’s interesting, I’m writing regularly, and working on very large and ambitious projects that I feel good about. I have momentum. I’m no longer ashamed of the mistakes I made or the failures I experienced. The shit that happened to me in my twenties sucked. But that’s life.

ORIGINS

I grew up in Florida and came from a working class family. I enrolled and graduated from a brand new college in Florida, where I’d founded the campus theater company, ran it as its artistic director, taught myself how to direct and produce theater, stage manage, costume design, and I sometimes acted. We basically had no student life available and I didn’t have the money to buy a video camera to become the film director that I dreamed of becoming. If I had, I would have produced and directed bad amateur films in addition to theater. I had that much energy and love for life.

I tell you all of this because I look back fondly on that girl, the one who had big dreams of making it but had no real clue and no mentors guiding her who actually knew anything about the arts or entertainment. So I had no clue what I was getting into. But I’d been dreaming my entire life of moving to New York City and making it big. By entire life, I mean it. One afternoon while I was in grade school, I convinced my brother to pack up a backpack and hop on our bikes to head to New York. We didn’t get further than two blocks up the road because he crashed his bike into a parked car. But that’s how much of a drive I had to live in that damn place.

Straight out of college, I got into an MFA Directing program at Brooklyn College, but due to a change in the costs for out of state students, I couldn’t afford to attend (even with the full amount of student loans). Even then, I remember being frustrated that there seemed to be no funding for graduate level work in the arts. At the orientation dinner for the program, I sat next to Sarah Benson, who was a student in the program. She went on to become the artistic director of Soho Rep. So when I realized I couldn’t afford to attend, I pivoted and moved to London, where I met Rachel Tucker and Erinn Holmes, two other American expats with big dreams for their futures, and we wrote and performed original work together in Covent Garden. While there I also worked with a British theater company as a stage manager.

In Covent Garden just before the reading of the play we wrote together chronicling our experiences living in London.

TAKING A BITE OUT OF THE BIG APPLE

After that I decided to return to NYC. I got into NYU and attended it. After graduating, I wrote, directed and produced theater and performance art in NYC for several years while also working full time at jobs that had nothing to do with the field I wanted to work in because I couldn’t afford to work in arts organizations. Working at those jobs allows you to network in your field but they pay so little.

I spent all my free time watching interesting films, seeing cutting edge theater and performance art, dance and visual art. NYC as a site of learning was (is) amazing. I found my work being accepted at the finalist level of performance incubators from Mabou Mines and playwriting development organizations like the now defunct Lark. I was shocked that my work was getting recognized so quickly, but I sort of knew that it meant something.

Completely out of my depth, I wanted to absorb everything that pushed the limits of what I wanted to do with words by locating where the emotions behind words met the body’s need for expression. I lacked the confidence I needed to pull off what I really wanted to do at the time, but the real problem was that I had no money. New York City is not the city you want to attempt to scale while deeply in debt.

Rachel Tucker visiting Erinn Holmes and me in NYC while I was at NYU.

THE APPLE BITES BACK

Graduation day from NYU, just as I was about to enter a Sisyphean struggle with student loan debt.

Unfortunately, after NYU, I was living in NYC with a gigantic student loan that was forcing me to live in bad living situations. By gigantic, I mean it was equivalent to the sticker price of a brand new luxury car. By bad living situations I mean places with ten cats required to keep the rats at bay. Horrorshow apartments where thousands of German cockroaches would skitter away into drains when the lights were flicked on. Autobody garages turned artists lofts that sounded cool but had only one tiny space heater to keep the entire place from becoming subzero in winter. Old apartments where the room’s floor was sinking in a slanted angle (not one, but two of these apartments). Yes, I realize there are countless bad apartments in NYC and many people have had shitty living situations but have done well. That’s not the point though.

I could never afford to enter into my own leases because of the brokers fees, so I lived in shitty sublets. Eventually I found myself suddenly homeless in a late January winter where the highs were in the teens (Fahrenheit). My then roommate, who I’d met off Craigslist because I clearly didn’t care if I got murdered in my sleep, had suddenly decided she wanted to move someone else in who would pay double for the room I was renting after she discovered I wasn’t interested in dating or having sex with her. It was such a terrible situation.

At the same time, I’d lost my permanent day job due to the Lehman Brothers bank collapse and was sporadically temping. And I still owed $400 a month on loans, even without a home or a job. You can’t write or make good art under these circumstances for too long. I know because I tried.

It took many years for me to recover from that experience. I blamed myself, even though I wasn’t really to blame. I left NYC, went home to Tampa, Florida, which was being ravaged by the Great Recession, and took a very bad content writing job that was located at a former Nokia call center in order to make ends meet. I wasn’t the only overqualified writer at this terrible job either. I was working alongside seasoned journalists who had lost their jobs and had families to feed. It was super depressing for all of us. I told myself that I deserved this. That I had flown too high and too close to the sun. That I wasn’t talented and didn’t really have what it took to make it.

In reality, I was part of the detritus of a wasteful higher education system that preys on people’s dreams, destroys our society’s talent, and limits its future.

NO EXIT

Student loans were the yoke that made me feel like I didn’t have a future anymore. I couldn’t get my feet on the ground to stay on the path I wanted to. It was a constant struggle against quicksand. I had grown up without much money and I suddenly felt like I would never get a chance to have any agency over my life.

Bad shit happens. The twenties can be particularly hard. Especially in cities and in industries where you’re likely to meet people who are highly competitive and self-absorbed. I know that if I’d been debt free, I would have bounced back much quicker from the other stuff.

TLDR

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

I really just want to advise against getting a bachelors or masters degree at a shiny, fancy school that doesn’t offer you full funding. If you’re reading this and you’ve dreamed of attending a prestigious BFA/MFA program but you have to pay for it, STOP RIGHT NOW. DO NOT PASS GO. UNLESS YOUR FAMILY HAS THE MONEY TO SUPPORT THIS, IT IS NOT WORTH IT.

You will forever be in debt if you do. You will not only owe increasing amounts of money every month but it will become a psychological burden that will make it very difficult to feel free enough to work on your craft.

Yes, some people can navigate their debt burden better than I did. I had some bad luck, especially in NYC. I met the wrong people there. Most of them were selfish and dumb. But I met those wrong people because of the financial dire straits I was in. I was hitting redlights instead of greenlights because I had to say no to opportunities due to not being able to pay my bills if I said yes. Of course, there is always the chance things will work out for you, but you’re stacking your odds against you if you are shackled financially, especially if you do not come from means.

Our society (and the world) needs more artists and writers who feel free to create work that moves humanity forward and brings us closer to each other. We are in grave danger without this work. It’s very hard to create brilliant work when feeling under the weight of such a burden.

HOUSEKEEPING

I have decided to divide up this newsletter to separate out the grief work/writing I’ve been doing from the posts about writing and creativity. I don’t see them as separate from each other, but I also feel as the audience here expands, some may be joining to read one thing while others are here for other things. Ultimately, this Substack is where I make sense of myself, my life, connect with others and form a community on here, and to offer something beautiful or terrible, which (hopefully) fills you with a sense of wonder.

This particular article might not be filled with wonder or beauty. It’s more of a horror story, but it is filled with the hope that it might help someone, somewhere from making the same terrible mistake I made when I was young.

-

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this essay, please tap the heart, share and recommend this Substack. If you love what I am doing here, consider recommending my Substack or becoming a paid subscriber to have access to all my archives, poems and the upcoming chapters of my serial novelette, 21st Century Leviathan.

- Autumn