Identity is a Real Bitch but I’m going to Texas
Well I was planning to thank you for the lovely wok you bought me, but I hadn’t even finished unboxing it when a huge miracle occurred, right here smack dab in the middle of Modern Times. Just when all of the scholarships had been handed out for the upcoming One Voice USA 2025 in Dallas, voila! Café au lait! Yves Montand! Our good friends at the National Association of Voice Actors, who have been instrumental in helping me survive this leap of faith I took, are footing a rather hefty pass to one of the finest professional voiceover conferences going. Which means, in light of my recent flight from an abusive marriage (with a Beagle and a 16-year-old car, $300, and no destination or blood kin), that my industry and my community is making it possible for me to:
1. Attend at all!,
2. Network and rebuild relationships
3. Enjoy many free educational offerings
And here comes the biggie...
4. Collect and distribute multiple hugs with the greatest group of colleagues one could ask for.
(It's really nice and it was really affordable and now I feel centered and whole. Not even kidding.)
So essentially, this scholarship means more than just a professional grant. It means that the voiceover community is real. We extend, and receive, one another's support. This -- unemployed, without a home to call my own, and in the early stages of what promises to be an epically ugly divorce -- is my definition of success. See also, George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” when he opens his Christmas gift from Clarence.
No man is a failure who has friends.
Between your support here, and the generosity of NAVA, I have never felt so supported and friended (friended?) in my life as I have come to feel since I ran away from home. We’ll tear into the dynamics of abuse over time and how that can come to create feelings of friendlessness and unworthiness, but this isn’t that post.
This is a post about how very grateful I am. To you. To NAVA. To a man named J. Michael Collins. To my friends Shannon and Phillip and Jane, all of whom put a roof over my head now and again. But mostly to myself. Hubris? Ego? Nope, it’s just that I got to thinking. I never would have received this abundance if I hadn’t trusted myself sufficiently to have the hysterics, feel the mortal fear, and pack up the car and the dog anyway. Well done me.
That said, identity is the focus right now, in both the literal and figurative senses. I have to get my Enhanced New York Drivers License asap, as I have to fly to Dallas! And in the process of getting that little item, I have to scrape up all my name changes since birth, because I am a woman and I am breaking up my third marriage. The husbands never have to do this. But three times, with stars in my eyes and love in my heart, I’ve changed my name to “his” and back again.
So yesterday I found myself searching out how to find and order the documents from my second marriage, in New Mexico. And in the end I wound up spending in excess of $60 for overnight postage to and from and let’s not dwell on that part because $60 would have been a pretty decent Happy Hour in Manhattan.
And of course, sometime in the coming months, I will have to do it all over again, because I will be divorced, and changing my name one last time.
I’m just gonna be Diana Wilde. 😉😸🦄
#HattitudeOfGratitude🎩