Nyanda & the trip to Saint Croix

I'm still trying to figure out what I really want to do and who I really am. I know I want to act but sometimes I look at my daily tasks and they don't align with that. I feel I’m not doing anything to contribute towards that.

I’m trying to figure out, “What do I want to do?” I've been doing a lot of traveling and I want to have a lifestyle that supports traveling but I’m still trying to figure out what my other passions are. So just kind of wandering right now and hoping that the wind will blow me in the right direction.

Career

When I first started pursuing acting at 16 it was because I wanted to be famous. I realize now that I actually don't want to be famous at all.

I do think there's a difference between being famous and being recognized for your work. I would rather the latter being recognized for my talents as an actress and my skill set. I just want to live a peaceful, happy life while pursuing my heart's desire which is to act and produce art because I know it will give me the opportunity to change lives.

As I reflect more and more, I realize that I really do want to pursue acting but sometimes it can be a little intimidating knowing that everyone in California wants to be an actor.

Everyone is pursuing the same dream. I have to remind myself that, yes, we're all going after the same thing but what's for you is for you. If this is for me, no one else’s talent will get in my way because I'll have a lane cut out for myself. There's enough pie to go around in this career. The work I want may not start out on the scale that I desire but the work is there and will provide me with the experience to succeed. I have this desire for a reason and I don't want to be 70 years old saying, “Oh, I could have been. Oh, I should have been”. I don't want to die with those regrets.

If I try this and it fails, I will be okay with that. I can walk away with my chin up, chest out, knowing that I tried. I didn’t half ass it. I tried for years. I went to school for it. I put in the work for it. I got myself together. I presented myself to agents, I auditioned, I worked on projects and maybe I didn't get to that level but that's okay.

If it works, it works, if it doesn't, that's okay too. I can find something else that I'm interested in and dive into that. I promised myself that this is the one thing that I'm not going to shortcut. I'm gonna try it and I'm gonna bet on myself and if it does not work, I have other talents. But I have to see this one through for the little girl who wanted to be an actor. I don't want to let her down.

Challenges

The biggest opposing force I encountered on my creative journey was myself. When I was in college I completely lost myself and was trying to be all these other things instead of focusing on what I was there to do. Which was to get educated and to improve my craft.

I was missing classes, some of my favorite classes. When I was in those classes, I wasn't focused. I was half-assing it because I wasn't there mentally, and it took me until pretty recently to get out of that.

My life ebbed and flowed in terms of mental stability. I'm not going to sit here and say I was clinically depressed at all these points of time. But I was distracted and it wasn't until I was forced into isolation in 2020 that I was like, “We had our fun, it's time to focus now.” As COVID onset it was a perfect opportunity. I barely had school because it was digital. I didn’t have a job. So I had no reason to not pursue it with full force; so I did. I probably recorded over 150 self tapes.

Once I got the distractions out of the way and the main distraction being myself I was able to focus more on, “Who is Nyanda as an artist?” But then I realized that I'm getting older and I need a job and acting, at least at this stage, doesn't pay very well.

Turning points

In 2020 as we all know the world stopped and I had the time to focus on my craft and commit every single waking moment to acting and it worked out in a lot of ways. I got to meet a lot of people, I got to work on some great projects, and dedicate specific, intentional time to that.

Then slowly but surely the world started to open back up and I found myself searching for a 9-5. Almost instantaneously I went from committing every single day to something to not working on it at all. If I had continued what I was doing with acting, I think I would be in a very different position right now today; but because of circumstances in life, I couldn't maintain that. I found myself working two jobs at one time. I had no time, plus school on top of that and that continued for a while. And then I started working in corporate. Plus I started a business so I’m juggling all of that while trying to not spend every moment of my day working and giving other people pieces of myself. It's been months now that I haven’t even picked up a camera to do a self-tape. I had to make a choice to support myself and support my lifestyle.

I thought that 2020 was my big break and with the flick of the switch, I don't even recognize where I am right now. I'm not mad at it because I know that all of this is making me hungrier to go after it again. It’s a constant battle every day. If I don't make intentional time for it, it will never happen.

Work-life balance

If you ask me if I exercise, not really. If I eat healthy? I try. If I read? Not enough. I want to do all these things, but by the end of my day I want to lay down and do nothing. Doing nothing is not productive when you're trying to achieve other goals outside of your current circumstances.

On the day to day, I'm not doing a very good job and I know that. I need to carve out X amount of time for acting, I need to carve out X amount of time for personal achievement. Exercising, reading, I need to carve out X amount of time for decompressing and then I need to sleep. It sounds really great but it feels impossible most days. It sounds so nice. Oh yeah, four o'clock, I'm gonna read this script and do this self tape and then four o'clock comes and I just want to go to sleep. And I do. The energy is not there. They say that's what differentiates people who are successful or not because the discipline is doing it even when you don't feel like it. And I have not mastered that yet. I'm working on that part.

Five years

I used to live in the future and then I realized as the future started to present itself I was really off. It would cause me to feel like I'm not where I need to be. That started to cause me to start looking at other people's lives and what they were doing and comparing myself. They're doing all these things meanwhile I'm flipping burgers at The Habit. What am I doing wrong?

I have ideas of what I would want it to look like. I know I want to have way more money. I know that I wanted to have traveled to at least 20 more countries. I know that I want to have my own home and all these tangible things and [have] more experiences.

But I don't know. I'm not going to hold myself to that because I don't want to be disappointed in five years. I would much rather be embracing of the unknown. And just be grateful for whatever it is that I have in five years.

Values

The first thing that comes to mind is family. I've realized that family doesn't have to just be restricted to people that you share blood with. Sometimes blood isn’t all that thick. I have a chosen family of close friends who I know no matter what will be there for me.

I think integrity is a second thing that's coming to mind right now. Someone told me this one time I've never forgotten it. “It's easy to do the right thing when it's easy, but it's hard when it's hard.” That's why it's called integrity because if it was easy all the time we would all be A list people. If you can make the right choice or the choice that doesn't just serve you, but can serve someone else and be considerate of other people, that's integrity.

I don't know if this is a core value, but staying true to myself. Whatever that means depending on the day. Sometimes it doesn't make people very happy and I know that and I've made quite a lot of people very upset in my life. I've had to learn how to live with that.

What do you find yourself holding on to?

Everything. Sometimes I think it's good. Sometimes I know it's bad and it's probably one of my biggest weaknesses is not knowing when. Someone told me this one time, I never forgot it, “If it costs you your peace. It's too expensive.” Let it go. Sometimes, I don't do that.

Sometimes I don't trust myself like I think I do. I talk a good one. If someone calls me for advice I’m like, “Oh yeah, you should do this. I'm confident that you should do this.” But when I have to make that same choice, I don’t know. I start questioning myself and I don't know what to do.

Treasured memory

In 2011, my mom and I went on a vacation to Saint Croix. It was supposed to be this amazing luxurious vacation and a hurricane hit the day we got out there. We didn't have electricity the entire week. We struggled to get a plane out of there because there was rain and winds every single day and we tried finding another hotel but couldn’t because they were booked to capacity because everyone on the island went to that hotel because they had this huge generator, and etc, etc.

And so we found ourselves stuck in this two bedroom villa and had the best time. There was no electricity and no running water. We filled up the bathtub with pipe water when we heard the hurricane was gonna hit and we survived off that and the ocean water and pool water. We were reading, she was telling me stories from her childhood. It was probably the best bonding experience we've ever had. Even up to this point, and we've had some pretty amazing experiences.

No Facetime, no video chatting. It was just phone calls and we couldn’t even really do that. You have sincere fun. You're forced to do it. I would say that’s one of my favorite memories. I have so many and I'm not trying to betray any of them. That was the first thing that came to my mind was the Saint Croix trip in 2011 with my mom.

If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly. Would you change anything about the way you are living now?

Hell yes because I wouldn’t have any time to waste. I'd only have 364 more days. When you think about it, time is flying now. I would change a lot of things. I would stop saying I will and just do. My first choice would be to amend anything that I haven't. Leave no stone unturned.

Any conversations I know I need to have and I haven't had them. I would make sure that before I leave, everyone who needs to know, knows how I feel about them. We can work through whatever we need to work through. I'd also probably cut a lot of people out of my life. I’d start plucking the threads. Then I would just start doing. I'm talking about opening every credit card that I can. Rack up all this debt and uncle Sam will be left with it. I hope my mom doesn't get left with it. I think there's over 200 countries in this world. I would try to see at least 90 of them. And I don’t know how to do it but I would do it if I needed to.

Hope

I've seen people come out of some really shitty situations and turn their lives around when no one thought they could. No one was in their corner and they white knuckled it and made something of themselves or just did what they needed to do to get on the other side of it.

And that gives me hope. I too have had to white knuckle a lot of situations. I was just going through life and fighting my way through. I made a lot of bad choices. Luckily, I'm not making those choices today. I probably told myself, “This is it.” so many times.

I talk about 2018 and 2019 because that was probably the turning point in my life. I thought it was over so many times. I thought, “Oh, I could never come back from this. I will never be able to recover. I would never be able to wake up and be pleased with myself.” I made all of these ending statements. Here I am two years later. I don't let anything get me to that point anymore because I just know one day it's not gonna matter. This thing that I'm so stressed about today? Give me 60 days.

You’ll have forgotten about it.

I might not have forgotten about it, but it's not gonna have the weight that it has today. There's a lot of things that I will never forget. I'll probably be 90 years old like, “Damn I shouldn't have done that.” I don't feel the same feelings that I felt at that moment. I don't feel the same shame or guilt or resentment towards myself that I was feeling in that moment. They don't exist anymore. That gives me hope.

I'm not the same person that I was. I do try to learn from mistakes. I don't go through the same exact situation twice. I don’t think I could take the same pain twice. This one thing might have broken me really really bad but let that situation present itself again and I promise you I'm gonna make the right choice.

Nyanda Callinder | June 18, 2022