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How to Deal with Side Hustle Stress
Revisiting this Acting Exercise Has Helped Me Navigate Through the Uncertainty
Everyone is hustling on the Internet now. While the gig economy is slowly recovering, we are seeing the big shift onto the Internet since the onset of the pandemic. I’m not gonna lie — it’s scary to me.
As an actor,, I’m so used to the pressure in the audition room. The heat, the important people on the other end of the table, the expectations, etc. So I learned to manage that — through lost parts and bad audition experiences.
I learn from doing, from showing up in person. As a highly sensitive, intuitive person, my antenna works best when I get instant feedback from people. But with everything moved online now, I feel stuck, overwhelmed, and stressed. My antenna seems to lose its superpower.
Without the instant feedback I used to get from in-person interactions, I found myself constantly checking my devices, making assumptions about how my audience would respond to my contents, overwhelmed by the expectations, and even went paralyzed.
This is not how I want to live my life. As I sat down to reflect on it, an acting exercise we used to do back in acting school suddenly popped up in my head.
Our teacher asked us to stand in a circle and come up with a gesture for each action…
