On Easter Sunday at 11:59 at night my mother and father welcomed their first child into the world. I arrived seven weeks premature; my mother tells me I was in a hurry to meet the Easter Bunny. Being a preemie, I was placed on a respirator and several other monitors. After only a few hours the doctors took me off of the respirator and detached the other machines. I was doing fine on my own. My father claims that from my first breath without the respirator I became a fighter.
I grew up the daughter of two professors of history at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. For the most part, growing up in Utah was an ideal childhood. Logan is the type of place where the whole town goes to the high school football game on a Friday night and then goes to the local malt shop. The major difficulty of my childhood was growing up a non-Mormon in a Mormon world. For me, rebelling from the Mormon world was as simple as bringing a mug of coffee with me to school.
My sophomore year in high school my parents took a sabbatical in Seattle, Washington. For the first time in my life I was not labeled an outsider based on the church I attended. I loved the open-minded nature of Seattleites and admired that people questioned what they were taught. After my time in Seattle I knew that I would leave Utah for college and never look back.
My freshman year in college took me to Greensboro, North Carolina were I attended Guilford College as a Music and Theatre double major. Although I loved the liberal Quaker atmosphere at Guilford, I could not find peace within the music and theatre departments. After realizing that the required music theory classes would prevent me from taking fundamentals of acting until my junior year, I decided to audition at conservatories.
In June 2001 my mother helped me move into a dorm room the size of my bedroom closet, literally. The exchange of a small room for the Big Apple was well worth it. The Upper Westside of Manhattan quickly became home. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged. Although conservatory training in musical theatre was emotionally and physically draining, I had never been happier. I woke up every morning excited to go to school and learn more about my chosen craft.
I graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) the fall of 2002 after taking all four semesters back to back. I was terrified to be out in the “real world” and auditioning with the big dogs. Luckily, I had fallen into a job as a personal trainer. I say fallen because I had no experience in the fitness world. Sure, as a dancer I went jogging, did my daily sit-ups, and glanced over Shape magazine in the check out line, but how did that qualify me to be a personal trainer?
My first day on the job, my boss, Paul, gave me a book and a stack of articles to read before my next shift. Being the perpetual student that I am, I went straight home from my shift to start my homework. It had never occurred to me that the human body was so complicated and interesting. At first I found the anatomy and physiology difficult to memorize, the words were so long and foreign. At the beginning of each work shift Paul would come out of his office to quiz me. For every wrong answer I would have to do fifty sit-ups, push-ups military jumping jacks, or squats. The first month of quizzing I found myself getting into extremely good shape, and although I didn’t mind the physical exertion, I hated not knowing the right answer. By the end of my second month, all my hard work had paid off. I could almost always come up with the correct answer and if I couldn’t, the fifty push-ups were nothing. (If only fifty push-ups were still that easy.)
Seven months later, I sat on the six am cross town bus on my way to work. I wasn’t scheduled until that afternoon, but I had a training client that could only meet in the morning. I planned to be done with Simon’s workout by eight, which would give me plenty of time to finish the final paper I was working on for a class I was taking a New School University. New School had accepted all of my transfer credits from AMDA and Guilford, which made me only one year away from graduating with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. That morning, I looked out the window and thought about my Broadway dream for the first time in months. I’d been so busy with school and work that I hadn’t accepted an audition since the beginning of the semester in January and now April was almost over. I realized that morning that I no longer longed for the bright lights of the stage. My passion for theatre had been replaced with a love for human exercise physiology.
That night, while waiting outside the classroom door, I called my mother and told her about my bus ride. My mother asked me, “What do you think that means?” It took a minute for me to gather my words, “Mommy, I want to go back to Guilford to study exercise physiology. I want to work in health care.” My mother said that would be fine when my lease ended in June, and Dad would be happy to move me back to Greensboro. By the end of the week I had officially re-enrolled at Guilford.
For the past three years I have attended Guilford and now I find myself less than a month away from graduation. Returning to Guilford was the smartest move I ever made. I have learned so much and made so many good friends. Although I am excited to start the next chapter of my life, which hopefully includes getting into medical school, I close this chapter reluctantly.