The Pink Paper

15 April 2015. Three days before I graduate with my Associate of Arts degree.

I'm walking to my program director's office for the second time in ten minutes. In my hand is a single pink sheet of paper. Across the top of it are the words Program Declaration/Transfer Form. Beneath those words, in my handwriting, are my name and the date -- my sister's birthday. Below that are the words Current Program and New Program. In those fields, in my handwriting, are the words AA Music and BA Music, respectively.

And I am taking this sheet of paper, which may or may not determine the next two years of my life, to my program director for his signature, which I know he will give... he's the one who's been pressing me to take this step for the past month and a half and who, five minutes before, directed me to get this piece of paper from the academic office.

I knock, and enter.

"I'm back." I hold out the paper.

He bids me wait a moment and finishes with the computer. I stand back from the screen -- he's doing grades; he told me this when I was here five minutes ago. Then he rolls his chair closer, takes the paper and signs it. Twice -- once as the director of the AA Music and once as the director of the BA Music. He hands it back.

"There you go. Take it back up. They'll open registration for you and they'll fill in a program sheet for you and email it to you and me."

I'm aware that my face is pale. My heart is racing. What am I doing? But I manage a nod. He's already made it clear that I'm not actually committing to anything yet and can still decide not to come back. But perhaps he sees my terror at my own volition for he says it again.

"You can always decide not to come back if things don't work out. But I want you to come back. Keep me posted through the summer. Shoot me an email."

"Okay."

I thank him, leave, and take the paper back up to the academic office.

***

One full year passed -- summer, fall, winter, spring. A second summer hurtled by. By mid-August it was clear that the money would not be there to return for this degree, this program on the pink paper, and so I began packing my schedule to the brim with dance classes in Alberta. I was pulling from three different schools, working around theatre rehearsals and the few auditions I could scrounge up online, practicing on my own, working my actual job every second I could in between.

***

29 August 2016. Three days before registration day at the college -- a day I know I cannot attend. I have come to peace (at least a bit) with the fact that I am about to forfeit my Bachelor's degree and two years of musical theatre training due to lack of funds.

I go to visit a friend of mine from church. We talk about what's new and the college comes up.

"About that..." she says. "I contacted a few people I know. They have collectively contributed two thousand dollars and there is one person who is willing to loan you the difference."

Never before have I experienced the feeling that I'm dreaming when I'm not. But I am now. I sit, studying her face, utterly lost for words. So thoroughly had I despaired of ever going back again that to have it sitting in front of me, within my grasp, seems incongruent.

This just does not happen. Not to me.

Years in the church, hearing the stories of missionaries and laypeople and pastors having miraculous answers to prayer, financially, have still not prepared me for the idea that that could happen to me. I have always been the punching bag on the outside looking into grace. Miracles don't happen to me.

Every thought I had had all day disappeared from my head. She was asking me about my week and I could barely string together a sentence. I had literally forty-eight hours to notify everyone, pack, and move out-of-province. But we did. My family rallied around me and saw me out the door on my first solo flight to the middle of nowhere on the second.


And that's (the condensed version of) how I ended up back in Saskatchewan this semester.

The Musical From Afar and Chronic Indecisiveness

28 November 2015, 11.04pm.

Christmas musical weekend at my college. And I'm not there.

I see the pictures from my friends who are still there. I can almost smell the makeup and hairspray and plywood from the set, I can see the spotlights cutting through the artificial fog on the state-of-the-art set, I can still hear the voices of the school's best singers and performers, I can feel the angel robe draping over me, and I can still taste the apples we were provided with backstage.

How many times since I graduated have I dreamed about this place? Literally dreamed -- at least once a week I find myself back in the dorm hallway, overjoyed to be back. Invariably I find a friend or two and am disoriented when I find a freshman in a room that once held someone else. And then I wake up. Suddenly the nine-hour drive I thought was behind me is undone, and I'm still here in Alberta.

It wasn't school itself that I liked. I didn't exactly enjoy finishing out a ridiculously hectic semester by writing four papers in 36 hours. Oh sure, I loved some of the classes (all the performing ones, anyway -- musical theatre workshop and choir and dance and voice lessons), but mostly what I liked was performing. And in prairie Canada, that school was probably the best place to go to cut one's theatrical teeth. If I could go to that college without having to actually take history classes, that would almost be a dream come true -- something so good I might commit to never leaving.

So why am I not there this year? And why am I not sure if I'm going back next year?

First answer: money. College is not cheap. Especially when your $1800-a-semester meal plan is basically unusable to due the horrendous schedule and you end up spending even more money to buy food because you're not actually eating in the cafeteria.

Second answer: dance. Longtime readers know how much I love dance. I thought I could give it up -- and I committed to giving it up for two years when I went to college. Long story short, I didn't have to give it up entirely, but I did have to go from training at Advanced One to taking classes at Grade Three. And I lost a lot of stamina, a lot of technique, and a lot of the joy in my life. I've spent my year in Alberta so far overdosing on dance classes -- I'm currently taking the heaviest dance schedule I've ever attempted and I still feel so far behind my peers who kept training at the advanced level during my two-year absence. The stamina and technique and definitely the joy is back in my life, but the thing is, to return to college, to return to theatre, I have to give this up. Yes, there are some dance classes at the school, but the reality is that for all intents and purposes, I have to give up dance. I have to pick one or the other. I have to either go back to college, back to theatre and the life it infused into me after years of just being a shell and turn my back on dancing or I have to stay here, keep training at my actual skill level in dance and dying inside every time I see backstage pictures from the many performances that the school puts on every year.

I've been agonising over this decision ever since I realised this past semester how much I loved acting. And the pressure only got higher when the people around me, the people in my program and the people in my dorm started telling me that I should stay, that I should continue on for a Bachelor's degree in performing. I didn't know what to do with that. I'd never received such validation -- ever, in anything. Most of the time, people never notice me as a person, let alone any strengths I have.

And I'm going to end up hating myself, no matter what decision I make. It probably won't matter if I pick theatre or if I pick dance. I'm always going to be thinking, what if I had done the other thing...?