I’ve only ever worked in a restaurant once. I was right out of college, living in Berkeley, California. I had a newly minted business degree I had no intention of using, and was trying to break into the Bay Area theater scene. While I waited for a break, I worked as a barista at Peet’s Coffee & Tea and as a restaurant host at a popular breakfast joint called Rick & Ann’s. These gigs were alright in the short term, but working as a barista hurt my wrists and Ann (co-owner of Rick & Ann’s with her ex-husband) disliked me and made it clear that I would never be promoted to a server position.
Realizing these jobs wouldn’t be long term solutions to the question of how I would support my acting career, I thought about my other options. At that point, the criteria was basically just, “what else could I do that I wouldn’t hate?” If I might need to have a side job for the rest of my life, I better find something that I like doing.
So that’s when I became a yoga teacher. And there was a lot to like about it. Yoga studios can have great communities. Being a yoga teacher is a lot like performing. Often as a teacher you get to create your own sequencing which is creative, and gives you autonomy as at teacher to express your own style. Also, as someone whose life has been greatly benefited by yoga, as a teacher I could feel like I was helping people with what I did for money.
So, I became a yoga teacher. I didn’t really consider the logistics of a yoga teacher’s life, I didn’t investigate what an annual income might be. It really was as simple as, “that’s a job, and if it’s a job I want to do it because it looks like more fun than what I’m doing now”.
Also, in my heart of hearts, I only gave so much thought to my job because I assumed that it would be short term. At some point I would definitely get to the point of making my living off acting alone, and I just needed something I enjoyed to get by on in the meantime.
I’ve been an acting teacher for over ten years now. It has been a fun ride. I’ve met good people – both students, and other teachers. I’ve taught at cool places (like when I led a meditation workshop for the NBA). And it’s even given me a sweet way to stay at resorts cheaply by trading my time as a teacher for a discounted room rate. So, it hasn’t been without it’s upsides but I would also say that the majority of yoga teachers are ‘getting by’.
You don’t make a lot of money. You can spend a lot of time commuting between studios. It isn’t very friendly to performers leaving town for a gig, coming back, and picking up where they left off. It’s a hustle. Inconsistent, low paying, rewarding, and creative, but not generally a good side career if you want to live alone, save for retirement, or do better than ‘getting by’. It’s good for a hopeful, twenty something who is thinking of the side gig as something short term. But once your standards of living go up, or you start planning for the long haul, the practicalities eat up the romance really quickly.
Which is all to say, I’m transitioning to a new job.
I’m in my thirties; my fiance and I will be starting a family in not too long. Getting by isn’t going to cut it.
So, this is the criteria that I’m working with: 1. It still has to allow me to be an actor. To me, that means that the new job needs to allow for flexible scheduling so that I can go to auditions. Preferably, I can make my own hours. It should be remote, so that I can do it from home when I’m home, or from the road when I’m on tour with CHALK, or from a greenroom if I were understudying a Broadway show or doing a play out of town. Also, if it’s a job that I can do anywhere, I won’t lose any time to unpaid commute hours. If I’m working, I’m getting paid. I like the sound of that. 2. It has to make enough money to support me and to contribute to my family. Honestly, this was the requirement that really made yoga untenable anymore. I could scrape by myself as a full-ish time yoga instructor, while supplementing with other odd jobs, but there is no way to provide stability or support for a family. Basically, I need to get paid well. Whether as a salary or a really good hourly rate, now I’m not just thinking about whether or not I like what I’m doing, but what I’m doing needs to PAY. And ideally, my hourly rate is good enough I don’t have to work full time…
So, at this point I’m looking for something to do with computers. Either a Fullstack Developer or a User Experience Designer or some combination of both. There are other benefits of this too. I hear that programming can be pretty creative as you create new applications and solve new problems. I also hear that it can be social. It’s also self-directed where you can write a program your way as long as it’s fast and works. And as a User Experience (UX) Designer, you do creative work as basically the interior designer of websites and applications.
So, if I return to the criteria I had fresh out of college, “If I have to have a side job, what else could I do that I wouldn’t hate?”, there are reasons to believe that I won’t hate this.
It’s missing some of the things I loved about yoga. (There isn’t anything in coding that feels like being onstage or leading a group, for example.) But what I hope to gain in terms of financial stability, and flexibility in scheduling and geography while protecting the time I need to be an artist (and soon, a parent too!) feels more than worth it. AND, if I’m really checking all of these boxes, this will be a solution that works long term. Whether I start getting regular acting work or not, whether that work pays well or it doesn’t, I will have the resources to have a rewarding life. I’ll have the time and money to hone my craft. I’ll have the time and money to be an attentive parent. I’ll have the time and money to take vacations. I’ll have time and money.
I’ll have a foundation, to build something that lasts. Not something that works, until I get discovered. I’m building something that is solid and will work regardless. While still holding out hope that I will make it, I’m making a plan to have a good life regardless.