Creative Direction, Styling, and Painting by: Grace Copeland Painting Titled: "The Old Me"
Photography: Rickie Poole
I eagerly visited my high school theater teacher last week. But this wasn’t so much a homecoming moment as it was an introduction. Many theatermakers proudly wear the title of “theater kid” into adulthood. Though I have become a “theater kid” in my adult years, I was not one in high school. I was the school photographer, an IB student (if you don’t know what that is, count yourself lucky), a gymnast, and I ran the video production at my church. I didn’t even become aware that “working in theater” was a real thing that adults did until I’d already lived in New York for two years. Meeting with my high school’s theater teacher felt like meeting someone for the first time and leaving feeling as if you’ve always known them. As he told me about his experience in theater education, I found myself observing the signed show posters on the walls. As I looked at the titles of Sweeney Todd and My Fair Lady, I realized had someone said those names to me in high school I wouldn’t have known what they were talking about, but they are now part of my everyday work conversations. Both art and faith have been like this in my life - always there, but I didn’t notice until later.
I found myself within the world of theater when the industry reopened in the fall of 2021. I went through a messy breakup right before COVID and a friend took me to The Hang, a community of theater artists of faith. Though I felt deeply out of place, I continued to go because I felt so welcomed. As people started to trickle back into the city, people from The Hang started to become my closest friends, though I was still not doing anything artistic. One of these friends was producing The Hang’s Christmas production that year and she asked me to film some of the dance numbers. I look back at those first dance films and see the faces of people who are now my closest friends and most trusted collaborators. These people’s belief in me empowered me to try something new - photo and video within the theater and dance space. They told me that I could before I believed that I could.
I decided to become a Christian when I was 16. I use that specific language not to diminish the fact that, more accurately, God found me, but because it was a drawn out process to come to finally deciding that I didn’t think Christianity was as stupid as I once did. I did not grow up in a Christian household, but we did go to church on Easter (not even Christmas Eve - oh, how quickly life can do a 180). Once a year, I heard the resurrection story preached. Every year I had the same thought: “This doesn’t matter. They never explain why this is supposed to matter today if it happened 2,000 years ago. If there was a clear answer for why this is as important as they act like it is, someone would’ve said it already.” At 16, I thought that Christians were spineless people who just believed what their parents told them to believe and never thought for themselves.
I went to a Younglife weekend in the mountains of North Carolina purely out of FOMO. As any 16 year old would think, “Well, it’s dumb that it’s a Christian thing, but if everyone else is going to the mountains, I can’t be the only one who stays home.” I heard the gospel preached for the first time, including a very direct explanation of why it should matter for me, a 16 year old living in Raleigh, North Carolina in the twenty-first century. It was another 6 months of hanging out with my Younglife leader (who I decided maybe wasn’t so bad after that weekend) before I decided that I wanted to be a Christian.
When I think about my life before faith, I remember having conscious thoughts that there was something about life that I hadn’t found yet. And I don’t want to be overly dramatic - I was 16, I was absolutely not an adult with hard pressing problems. But I was old enough to have autonomous thoughts and to make decisions that would impact the trajectory of the rest of my life. I had tried other things on this search for whatever “it” was - I had friends that I didn’t like (and who didn’t like me), I dated boys I didn’t really like (but who were popular), and was just starting to party (three cheers for the public high school experience). When I was first told the complete gospel, I thought, “Well, I’ll try this, and if this isn’t it I’ll just try something else.” When I sometimes find myself mourning the “lost time” before I found God, I remind myself that getting to choose faith for yourself later in life is just as much of a privilege as it is to have been taught the truth from the moment you were born. They are different experiences, each with its own set of pros and cons, but equally honoring to God.
When I think about my life before art, I feel like I am just looking at a person deeply in denial about who she really is. Mentors had told me that I should be a professional artist from the very start of me taking pictures at age 15. I have paintings and drawings lying around my childhood home (they’re not good, but they show follow through and a desire to make things). I LOVED Wicked. I mean, really, who doesn’t. But I could’ve been off-book for Wicked my senior year. It was the one piece of musical theater that found me. It was the one and only cast album I listened to, but I treated it as a guilty pleasure. I was deeply embarrassed to be listening to showtunes. I decided that musical theater didn’t fit into the image I had curated of myself, so I kept it like a dirty secret.
Today, I am currently trying to take down the thin veil of my old self that I spent my teenage and first couple years of my twenties desperately trying to keep up. Even though I believe that the veil to the holy of holies has been torn down, I have subconsciously been putting up my own thin veil in its place to keep the true me from the presence of others. I deeply feared being seen. This is not a journey I am writing to from the other side - I’m still very much in the middle of it, but feeling proud of myself to see how far I’ve come. I now realize that all that time that I had marked as “lost” has created a beautiful story, one I didn’t have to pen myself. Sure, I may have been a late bloomer as both an artist and person of faith, but I have a different perspective on these things because of the time I spent observing them from the outside and refusing to join.
My story is singular and I think that is why God has continued to put me in positions to share it. I spent so much time trying to be normal, conventional. I’ve always wanted to do things the way they’re “supposed” to be done. But this has meant me living a life within boxes of my own creation and expressing myself in grayscale. Visiting my high school theater teacher brought up a memory of a teacher I did have a personal affection for in high school. He was the civics teacher and basketball coach, so I photographed his games often. In the last few weeks of my senior year, I stopped by his classroom after school one day to film something basketball related. I had already enrolled at UNC Chapel Hill, but had deferred for one year to take a “gap year” in New York City working for a church called the Dream Center (that “gap year” is now in its sixth year and that is still my church home). He said to me something I haven’t forgotten: “Every year there are students who I know are going to be successful. But it’s only every once in a while that there is a student who I think might change the world. I think you might be one of those students.” Strangely, his choice of the word “might” felt freeing. It’s like he was empowering the potential that he saw, but not putting undue pressure on me. It’s unlikely I’ll ever change the world, but if I can use art as a means to the end of connecting with God and others, that will be more than enough for me.
It’s never too late to admit that you long for something more than yourself. It’s never too late to make things just because you want to. It’s never too late to take dance classes. It’s never too late to go to your first audition. It’s never too late to take a 9-5 job because you prefer stability. It’s never too late to try a new artistic medium. It’s never too late to change your own inner world. It’s never too late to live loud and in color.
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