From Casting to Coding
March 16, 2020, was the day that our world shifted. It was the day lockdown officially started in Toronto and everything changed in what felt like an instant. Before this day and before my reality was thrown for a loop, I had become incredibly adept at pretending I was happy.
Ever since I was a kid, I had always thought I was going to be an actor. There wasn’t much room for any other future as far as I was concerned. Being an actor is one thing, but having it be a full-time career that can fully support you is a rare thing indeed. In order to put acting first, I took a job in casting in the film industry. Our company mostly did commercials and boy could it be a grind. We sometimes auditioned upwards of 400 actors a day, cycling them in and out of the audition room, documenting their information, and trying to not fall too far behind. If we fell behind, the room would fill and those previously friendly faces became not-so-friendly. Here I was juggling actors out front, agency contacts in the boardroom, directors in the audition room while praying desperately that Ubereats wouldn’t mess up the lunch order that day. For four years I would work like crazy, spend all my money on acting classes, and go to auditions that never went anywhere. It became clear that I was working a lot more than I was acting, in a dead-end job that gave me more heart palpitations than feelings of content. Instead of facing this reality head-on, I kept on trucking. By the time March 16 2021 rolled around, I was burned out.
The lockdown forced me to cut the distractions and focus inwards. After a lot of self-analyzing and a lot of research, I knew I wanted to go back to school. It was hard for me to consider programs that were 2+ years. The truth was I barely had any savings, definitely not enough to support myself in full-time school for multiple years. Ideally, I could find a program that was short enough, affordable enough, that I actually wanted to do. After years of working a job that I wasn’t truly passionate about, I needed to find something that I loved. Not just liked. I also realized that I like working from home and having flexibility. All of these things were pointing me to web development, but I didn’t know it quite yet.
There had been so many options I had considered for school. Some were long and ambitious (midwifery), others were artsy (graphic design, woodworking), some were corporate (PR, HR) but after doing further research into all of them I always found too many reasons not to go through with them. A friend of mine who had recently made a career change advised me to make lists of things I liked and things I didn’t like, to help manifest my dream career. It worked.
When chatting with an actor friend of mine who was in the same boat, she mentioned Juno College. Her fiancé had taken classes there and loved it. She recommended I check it out. The truth was, coding had been on my mind for years but I thought it required another four-year degree in computer science. So I called Juno, talked to an advisor and after taking an introductory course to HTML and CSS I was smitten with the world of web development. Now, of course, there are always hurdles (Javascript for one and I’m sure React will be too) but nothing is more satisfying than successfully debugging your own code.
I think there’s a number of reasons why I’ve taken to the world of coding. I’ve always loved building things, DIY is kind of my middle name. If something needs to be fixed, you better believe I’m going to at least attempt to do it myself first. I am also patient and don’t get discouraged too easily even when things get hard. There’s a big part of me that is extremely creative but I also love to follow instructions (if you need any Ikea furniture built let me know). All of these attributes can directly translate into being a web developer.
Long story short, there are a million reasons why I’m here but if you asked me where I thought I would be ten years ago, I never would have guessed. When you make plans God laughs, as they say. So here I am, an actor and former casting assistant on a journey to become a front-end web developer. Life sure is funny but I’m here for the ride!
