by Tim Federle
Trust me on this one.
50 LIFE IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL
If you have spent any portion of your life waiting for permission, consider this sentence that permission. Go. Do the thing. You know what “the thing” is, or you wouldn’t have kept reading. Commit to living your real life, right now. Not tomorrow. Unless you know something I don’t know, you don’t get do-overs on earth.
I like to think of life as one very long show with no intermission, during which you’re constantly learning about yourself, your own performance, and the vast audience made up of everyone you’ll ever meet. And then one day, perhaps with little to no warning, your show is gonna close.
Midway through my high school years, I was on a downward spiral. I’d recast myself in the role of the school’s class clown, simultaneously flunking and charming my way through remedial math. Truth is, behind the facade was a lot of fear—about the future and what I might not ever add up to. I figured if I never applied myself at all, I could always look back and say to myself, Well I coulda been somebody, but I just never tried. Safer in the shadows, you know? I both wanted desperately to be discovered (as if teenage boys are regularly airlifted from Pennsylvania to Times Square) and also to go utterly unnoticed. I’d lurk in the corner at dance class and never raise my hand to volunteer for solos in choir. This odd timidity was fueled by the strange impression that I’d live forever—that someday, during my presumably long life, I’d wake up… ready. Ready to sing out. To step forward.
And then one day my drama club acquaintance, Ellie, was killed in a car accident outside our school. Childhood over—hers and mine. Intertwined with the horror of seeing a fellow teenager lying motionless in an open casket was the realization that my “someday” had arrived. Not the imagined someday, when I’d feel ready, but the day I had to make myself ready. I knew I needed to move myself to the front of dance class, and dare myself to be known. Not just that: to be brave enough to show how eager I was to stop waiting and to start living. Eager has no chill. Eager is vulnerable. Eager is the way forward.
Life is not a dress rehearsal. Until Ellie’s death, I had never known somebody during my short but privileged life who had died—not anyone under age eighty, anyway. When Ellie’s voice vanished, I somehow in turn found mine; I’d remain the class clown, sure, but I’d try harder, this time not just for me but for Ellie, too. And for anyone whose own experience on Earth was cut tragically short, or who never had the tenacity to try something scary—something she’d most certainly fail at, but had to try anyway. For anyone who never arrived at her someday.
I cannot promise any reader of this book a particular outcome about your own future. I can guarantee, however, that there will be no mythical day when you are suddenly handpicked to play the lead role in your own life. That day already occurred. It’s called your birthday, the first one—before cakes and candles, and disappointments. You were born whole and ready to take on the role of your only lifetime.
Start doing things that feel significant and meaningful to you, even if it means occasionally embarrassing yourself. Not just onstage, but everywhere. People tend to regret things they don’t do more than what they attempt and suck at. Sociological fact! Crack on a high note at karaoke. At least you’ll have an anecdote afterwards. But if you sit back and never get up, you’ll be self-diagnosing a terminal illness known as Wondering. The symptoms of Wondering include: stressing out about who you could have been, what you could have accomplished, where you could have lived out your happiest days.
Every breakup, makeup, and night spent sobbing over the hot boy in the cast—the one who always gets to play the lead and never seems to notice you in the background? It’s all part of the show—the good, the bad, and the hilarious. Start living your life as if the finale might be coming soon, because someday you’ll be right. You’ll want to look back knowing that you left your desires and attempts, full-hearted and half-accomplished, center stage for the world to witness, instead of locked up tight inside your head.
Wondering only has one cure. It’s called Doing.
So go do, and see. And live.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank his theater teachers, mentors, dance partners, collaborators, ex-boyfriends (nearly all of them), current boyfriend, and especially students he’s been lucky enough to be inspired by along the way. Also, thanks to his dad, for paying for private voice lessons, and his mom, for driving him. Grateful acknowledgement to everyone at Hachette and Running Press, particularly his editor, Jennifer Kasius. And special thanks to Brenda Bowen, agent and chief advisor.
