My Ever-Evolving "Dream Career"

I decided to become an actress after watching the first-ever episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997. I was in seventh grade. I’d played the head rose in our fifth grade production of Alice in Wonderland and I knew I liked attention and learning lines.

Sarah Michelle Gellar made me realize that acting could be a job. I was hooked and would spend the next 23 years pursuing what I thought was my dream career.

I never fantasized about my wedding day, I only dreamt of my “big break.” I wanted to be on set. Win an Oscar. Become rich and famous and respected and admired for my devotion to my craft.

I got a bachelor’s degree in Drama from The University of Georgia, attended the Williamstown Theatre Festival, moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles. In 2007 I got a 4 line part in 30 Rock annnnnd that was it.

After 10+ years of chasing, it felt like my dream kept getting farther and farther away. I couldn’t land an agent or a manager or an audition. While I adored my acting class and had a blast making a few short films, I always felt frantic, behind and like I had no idea what to do. My passion was drowned by my desperation to figure it out.

Where my acting career stalled, my serving career thrived. I spent fifteen years in restaurants and even though I was a brat about it because it wasn’t what I wanted to do, it’s the trade that’s paid my rent and given me peace that a job exists in whichever city I’ve lived.

Restaurants stretched my world and exposed me to culture, good food, wine, taught me the assertiveness I bring to all my work and introduced me to every person who has helped me move into a new chapter. Truly baffling that I’ve met 90% of the MVP humans in my life while serving or working at a farmers market booth. I even had the opportunity to be interviewed for the BBC’s World Service podcast, The Food Chain, to chat about restaurants from a server’s perspective (that episode should air next week!).

It’s easy now in retrospect to appreciate and feel nothing but gratitude for my first career.

Throughout a decade and a half of waiting (both literally and figuratively) I envied friends who allowed themselves to explore their interests. Who willingly walked through open doors to see where they led. Most of them are thriving at careers that unfolded organically and led to work they’d never considered, usually something even better than they’d imagined.

I got tired of waiting.

I started fantasizing about returning home. There’s so much stigma around the story of ‘giving up’ that I never allowed myself the option. But my exhaustion was heavier than my pride and so in February of 2020 I drove myself and my Scraps from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

I spent a few months (in lockdown) coming to terms with what felt like a lifetime of arrested development… had I wasted my 20s and 30s naively pursuing a dream with no hopes of achieving it? Could everyone see that? Did everyone think that? Could I have an actual “career”, no debt and a 401k if I’d grown up and gotten real with myself sooner?

I came to the conclusion that I could only be where I am and after a year in my childhood bedroom, I moved into my own place, got a(nother) restaurant job, met the love of my life, realized my career as a server had to end to make room for something new, leaned into Human Design, began to understand my alignment and watched with awe as new roads revealed themselves.

This isn’t a sales pitch for Human Design although it could be. I mention it to say that paying attention to what felt precisely true for me: exploring my many passions, allowing myself time to make big decisions, understanding my depth and that I have all that I need already and that that is enough, is what began to illuminate all that could be possible.

It was magic.

Within a few months, I won a scholarship to learn Human Design and became a reader.

I stopped complaining about wanting to quit serving, found a “bridge job” so I actually could and then did.

I worked the front desk of a Pilates studio with full awareness of and gratitude for the job’s purpose - to get me out of restaurants and into my next chapter.

During that time I was also meeting and expanding my network of event planner friends, falling in love with freelancing for them and strengthening my confidence that I can do new and hard things.

Currently, I’m writing to you from a porch in Block Island, RI overlooking rolling hills dotted by cedar-sided cottages and stretching to the ocean. I’m assisting a planner friend (hi, Kathleen!) for a wedding this weekend and I feel like Anne of Green Gables.

Over the past two years, I’ve traveled all over the East Coast for work. Something I only thought I’d say if I was telling you about a movie I was shooting. I left my front desk job after a year and have been supporting myself through a mashup of event assisting, Human Design reading, retreat cooking and errand running.

Everything I’ve been working towards now feels not as much like a future hope or dream but instead like a memory of what I always knew deep-down was possible.

This weekend, as I stood in the wedding tent, overlooking the most beautiful sailboat sprinkled water, working on a team full of incredible women, knowing I’d get to go home to a wonderful man, a wave of appreciation and awe swept over me.

I get to do what I love and am good at.

I finally get to say I love my job and my ever-evolving ‘dream career’.

Look at this precious laptop case I found on Etsy!! It arrived while I was away and I’ve never been more excited to open anything….

I finished Season 2 of Yellowstone. I only watch it on flights since Delta now has seat back sign in that let’s you pick up where you left off. It borders on too much to watch while airborne (so violent and Shakespearean) but I do love measuring how much I’ve flown in a year by TV season and Beth Dutton is such a babe.

I’m finished with travel for the next three months and looking forward to some personal projects and more random work opportunities.

I updated my website, brittanyfelton.com which is what inspired me to write this week’s essay so take a look.

I hope you are enjoying your summer so far. I’ll talk to you again next week.

xoxo, Brittany

If you’d like a Human Design reading, you can book here ♡

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