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When I was a kid, I knew I was going into theater.

I say knew, as opposed to dreamed about, because I was given a vision showing me exactly what was coming.

It happened when I was seven years old. I was standing in my parent’s bedroom. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw myself on stage. I was outside with a large audience in front of me. There was a feeling of anticipation. The audience was waiting for me to speak. I had the sense that others were onstage with me, but I couldn’t see them.

At the time, in my seven-year-old mind, I interpreted this vision in a seven-year-old fashion:

I’m going to be on stage. And I’m going to be famous.

After the vision, every opportunity that came for me to be on stage, I took.

Not surprisingly, I loved the theater. I loved acting. It came easily and effortlessly to me.

In seventh and eighth grades, I was the star of the school play. After one of those performances, the parent of one of my classmates came up to me and said, quite emphatically, that I should go into theater. That it was my life’s work.

I can’t remember how I reacted. I probably just nodded.

But it confirmed the vision I’d been given several years prior.

And then came the obstacles.

It started when I auditioned for a play in high school.

Not only did I not get the lead, as I was accustomed to, I didn’t even get cast.

Almost everyone who auditioned got some part in the play, even just as a non-speaking walk-on.

Not me.

To this day, I’m not sure what happened there. My only theory, in hindsight, is that I suspect the theater director was a trans woman who was not out as a trans woman. Maybe she saw a kindred spirit in me and was scared I’d out her? Or my presence posed some other kind of threat or annoyance? Or maybe it had nothing to do with that at all.

Bottom line, I have no idea what happened there. But it was enough to discourage me from trying out for that director again.

I did do some theater in summer camp during my high school years, but something had shifted.

In college, I signed up for an acting class, but I didn’t go. I can still remember the first day of that class, standing in the parking lot outside the classroom building, deciding whether or not to go in.

Something was telling me not to go. Something was blocking the path forward.

So I dropped the class.

Over the years, I would think of the vision given to me at age seven and wonder what it was about. As time went on, I thought about it less and less.

The path back to the vision started during a skit at a spiritual retreat.

A bunch of my friends and I were lip-syncing to the song “I Kissed a Girl.” In this case, all my friends were “girls” and I was the “boy.” Something ignited in me when I got in front of the audience. I danced. I played. I clowned around.

After the skit, a friend who had been in the audience said, “I had no idea you were such a ham.

Yup. That’s me.

A gender-rich ham.

After that skit, other opportunities to be on stage came my way. Little by little, I found myself back in alignment with that early vision.

For so long, I hadn’t been able to make sense of why the vision hadn’t manifested. But now it started to make sense.

I was blocked from pursuing theater in my teens and early twenties because that wasn’t the way I was supposed to go about it.

In my early twenties, I discovered the spiritual path. That became my passion. My focus.

By the time I came back to the stage, it was in the context of spirituality.

Now everything makes sense. It all fits together. But for the longest time, it felt as though something had gone wrong.

Sometimes disruption of the plan is the plan.

It’s hard to see this when you’re in the middle of it. Or if the disruption involves rejection, as it did for me.

But trusting the way forward, and trusting that Spirit will guide you, is the best way to make it through.

You may not end up on stage, as I did, but you’ll end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.

And nothing feels better than that.

 

When has disruption of your plan been the plan? Share your comments below!

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