I’m attempting to believe in my dreams. The dream has always been to make a career out of making stuff up. The dream right now is my production company: A.L.P (Alexandra Lean Productions). A production company wherein which I bring all the stories, characters and songs I’ve written to life. Fringe was my first real step. It was the first experience bringing something I wrote to life. It was good and I learned a lot. Two years later I am ready for my next fulfilling creative experience. Why the two year hiatus, you might ask? To which I would respond: what hiatus? I’ve been writing and working on music for the majority of the time. Then, I got depressed and stressed because nothing was coming of any of my efforts. I admit it I truly gave up on creativity. The things I loved the most writing, improvising and music, I tried to pretend that those weren’t all that important to me and I could live without them. Big mistake – not only was I miserable but I got physically sick. My hair started falling out and I was dizzy all the time. It got bad. The annoying part of it all was that every medical test came back ‘normal’. During my weird illness I binged watched everything on Netflix including the show ‘House, MD’. In case you are unfamiliar with the show it is the story of the most brilliant doctors in the world – genius’ if you will – who don’t know anything about what’s wrong with their patients. The show is a series of wild guesses and life ruining organ transplants that at least won’t kill the patient but will leave them paralyzed or whatever. For any person who is going through any kind of medical anything the show is actually kind of a horror movie. I would literally watch the show with my eyes covered. It would also keep me up at night. The big take away from watching that show is that doctors don’t know anything. The point of this anecdote is that it made me think about what changed in my life from when I was feeling fine to when I started feeling sick. The change was my elimination of like all things fun i.e. improv and music and creating. The thing of course was and always is I personally don’t make much money. So cutting out all those fun improv classes and music lessons on paper seems like it would be a logical thing to do. I started taking the cheapest classes I could find. Well, in the last year I’ve taken: piano, guitar, voice and then piano/voice together (because I want to feel like a secondhand Lady Gaga). Anyway, my health issues have subsided and I am ready to fully embrace the creative person I am. I hope for the necessary funds and people to appear. Even if they don’t, I know that I will never give up on myself again.
The song “I Believe” from the Book of Mormon exemplifies how I feel. Except take away all the hilarious jokes about being a Mormon and think about believing wholeheartedly in your wildest dreams coming true. That’s the way this song makes me feel:
Waking Dreams Up 