...Or am I just restless?

For a few months I've caught myself actually being bored.  I have things that do occupy some of my downtime:  Making pies for a local restaurant, and peddling vintage objects for the home at a local vendor mall.  An hour and a half a day for baking and then sourcing vintage products when things pop up don't really take a full day.  Auditions come in sometimes one a week and sometimes five a week but those are pretty straightforward and don't take much time to knock out.  I've not worked in two months on an acting gig so I've had a lot of free time on my hands which makes me restless and before I know it I'm bored but I haven't started climbing the walls yet.

I feel like I need to do something more structured to occupy my time but I'm unsure what to do and even that makes me a little frayed around the edges.  I don't really want to dive back into the mortgage world and working retail at my age wouldn't be a good idea for the customers.  For 7 years, aside from a year I spend managing a showroom in the design district a year ago, I've only focused on my acting career and was also able to because I had a partner that afforded me the luxury of not having to shell out rent for nine years but that's all different now.  Life changes and we move along with it.  I may just be restless because I don't have a set structure and an exact steady income and I do miss that.  Maybe being sensitive to not knowing what's next keeps me going but lately it's been slightly debilitating. 

I did read a great blurb in The NY Times this morning and here's the quote from Annette Bening; 

"To someone just starting out, I’d suggest finding a good teacher or institution where you can go and study acting as an art. Though when you’re actually doing it, it’s not an intellectual process — you want to be free to experience the moment. So much of what you learn in training is how to listen, to allow your focus to be off you and on the other actors, which is the great relief that acting can bring. If you respond intuitively, that’s gold. In the moments you feel like a phony, that’s when you go back to the basics, which is what [the Russian theater director Konstantin] Stanislavski taught: “What do I want? What do I do to get it? And what’s in my way?” The more that’s in the way, the better off you are because you need to have a hole inside of you that you’re trying to fill. Sometimes, of course, you just need a job, and if you get a gig that isn’t satisfying those higher artistic ideals, that can be OK. Work is work. If you can be selective and follow the work you love, that’s a privilege.

I regularly took time off because I had four kids, so I was stopping and starting a lot, which ended up being a good thing. Some people don’t want to have children, and they’re able to dedicate themselves in a different way. I’ve found, though, that when you have responsibilities that are outside of yourself, it makes your work better. And your desire to continue to excavate and express the inexpressible doesn’t leave you. It might wane, but then it comes back."