Hello!
Hello my audience of curiosity,
I had a stroke on January 24th, 2023. Since then, writing is the therapy I found to cope with it. So, every week you can read about the New York Life style, my stroke, uplifting women and sharing their stories, and of course the life as a struggling actress… but for now, I’ll start at the beginning.
I Am No Writer
I will tell you before reading this that I am no writer. It was never something I craved to do, never my strongest subject in high school even. That being said, nothing was ever my strongest subject in school. I grew up in the small town of Greenfield, Iowa with a population of about 1,700. I slid past with A’s and B’s and of course C’s in math. If you ask me to use a semicolon in a sentence, I’d stare at you with a blank face.
Sports Dropout
I did, however, want to be good at one thing: sports. In high school, I went out many weekends with dad to shoot hoops or dig up ground balls. One day sophomore year, a person told me something that would stick with me forever:
“Keeley, there are two kinds of people in this world. People who don’t have to work very hard but are ultimately the best, and people who will work harder than everybody else but will never get there. You’re the second one.”
That phrase has stuck with me since… I mean who tells a 16 year old they’re fucked for life? But it was true throughout high school. I was average. I worked and worked but still came up average. My best basketball game in high school, I ended up shooting a basket for the other team. It was a beautiful shot, but it was for the other team. Thank god my teammates could make free throws because we would have been totally and utterly screwed. I would have lost the whole game for us. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life still to this day. And then I tore my ACL twice in two years and the rest of high school was overwhelmed with devastating recovery.
Being Funny is My Super Power
But enough talking myself down. I always knew I was good at one thing: Entertaining. Leslie’s Dance Emporium in Creston, Iowa was where I started dancing at age 2. That was my second home, my palace, my sanctuary. Every single one of my dance teachers are still the most inspirational people to me to this day.
Though I was always the last one to class and the first one to leave, I more often than not got the good end of the stick with our competition dances. It was known that I wasn’t the best dancer, but always got one of the leading roles. This made people mad. Heck, it would make me mad if I wasn’t the one doing cartwheels at the front of the stage or starting the dance off with funny faces. Man, I loved it. I couldn’t do a right split but could make a crowd laugh. I was a total and complete attention whore. Mary Catherine Gallagher, to a pig, to Alice from Alice in Wonderland, to Sally Brown, to Fiona from Shrek– There was nothing I couldn’t play, but I never would have thought about “dress up” as a career choice. All I wanted to do was sports! To make my dad proud!
Ugh College !!
It was hard for me when the time came to think about college. I ended up getting accepted to the University of Iowa and DePaul for Communications. One day, my mom sat me down and asked the simple question that wasn’t all so simple, “What can you do with a Communication Degree?”
I. Was. Stunned. I had absolutely no idea what to do with a Communication Degree. Communicate?
I was in a full blown panic for two weeks until getting a piece of mail from New York. It was a standard letter from The American Musical and Dramatic Academy that you knew went out to every person ever. But it said “Make Your Dreams A Reality,” and that’s when I knew. New York was my place. I’m going to become a STAR.
A Chicken Or A Star Or Both?
From that point forward I decided being a famous actress was my whole personality. I even dressed up as a chicken for my high school graduation speech. It. Was. Awesome. I talked about how you can’t be a chicken in life and to get out there and just DO IT. Moral of the story, it will go on as one of the best graduation speeches in Nodaway Valley history and I thrive off that. Or that’s what I tell myself. I moved to New York two weeks after that speech.
Things Aren’t Always How They Are Planned To Be
Fast forward 7 years, a world pandemic, another ACL tear, three strokes, heart surgery, hundreds of auditions and hundreds of no’s later, I am no star.
When people ask me “oh, what have you been in that I might’ve seen?” That question always makes me want to throw up. UNLESS YOU’VE SEARCHED THE DARK TRENCHES OF YOUTUBE THEN NOTHING KAREN. I’ve been in exactly 91 projects since graduating AMDA in 2019. This includes background work, web series, unpaid feature and short films, voiceovers, and underpaid modeling gigs. This doesn’t include all the classes and workshops and panels I’ve done to try to be seen. My mom once asked me “Why can’t you just email Netflix and ask to be in a show?” I wish it were that easy Jane. I wish.
Now I’m thinking about that sentence said to me sophomore year. I thought that if it wasn’t going to be sports, I could be the best at entertaining. But now it’s not panning out how I thought. Every day I feel like I’ve failed. Is it true? Some people have it and other people just don’t?
I’m always told that if you work hard enough it’ll pay off, but it’s everybody else’s story. I think I work hard but am currently feeling like success is still so far away. Seven years ago doing my chicken speech, I thought I’d have it together by now. Perhaps acting beside Brad Pitt and being a menace in a Tarantino movie?
Let’s Get To It
If you’re reading this, I vow that this will be the most hard working year I’ll have. I need to know the truth: do some people have it and some people just don’t? If I do everything in my power to get there and still can’t seem to make things happen, maybe that person is right, maybe I just don’t have it. I don’t know, but this year will tell me whether it’s true or not. It’s been seven years since that 18 year old was so full of life. The hard work that I thought would pay off by now is drifting away like a feather in the wind unable to find its way. I don’t want it to but I feel it coming. The burnout. The heartbreak.
Until it’s fully lost its way though, this is to a year of ambitious, true, and honest work. I’ve had a pretty crazy life and it’s time people hear about it. For myself to re-hear how amazing it is. Follow me or not but this is me.
If you want to read about my story and what gave me the confidence to start a blog here it is:
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