Jealousy and Anxiety: Can't Make Art Without 'Em!
Last week, my anxiety flared up unexpectedly for the first time in five years. So fun!
Hi! Thank you for reading You’re Invited to Laugh: a weekly look at work as an American stand-up comedian based in Berlin, Germany. I’m Steph DePrez, and moved to Europe as an opera singer in 2019. You can read the full story here. This Monday publication is free!
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Opera is notoriously cutthroat. The ratio of roles to singers feels like the ratio of athletes to spots on an Olympic team. One of the biggest programs for artistic development in the United States is at Wolf Trap Opera in Washington DC. They hire 34 singers for the summer season. They had 1,400 applicants this year, amd 99% of those applicants have completed one degree and are in the process of getting a masters or doctorate in singing, and they all have a decade of training behind them.* 2% of those who auditioned got the gig. There is a 98% fail rate. So, that’s the waters I was swimming in when I studied opera in the US.
Let’s look locally: The Deutsche Oper Berlin recently put out a call to fill a Soprano 2 position in the chorus. It’s a great gig – nice pay, great colleagues, and you get to sing at one of the top opera houses in the world. I had a bunch of friends submit applications to be heard for an audition. From their experience, we can guess that there were at least 35 singers brought in to sing over multiple days. Probably more than twice that submitted to sing for it. We calculated that everyone who submitted had a 1.5% chance of getting the job.
The scarcity of opera isn’t a mindset; it’s the reality. You must, must, must be prepared to survive in other ways. My age group was walloped with the pandemic and a two-year theater shutdown.
I turned to comedy, and recently turned down a week-long opera gig to do three stand-up shows I’d already scheduled. Focusing on comedy instead of opera has been one of the most emotionally stabilizing things I’ve done in a long time.
Comedy offers a much wider playing field, more opportunities for financial gain, and more paths to “success.” You can be a touring comic, traveling around and surviving on ticket sales. You can be a corporate comic, doing professional hosting gigs and clean comedy at phenomenal rates. You can be a TV “game show” comic, which is, I gather, what often happens in the UK, and offers stability and longevity (and often a book deal). Or you can start a podcast, which is the final evolution for most American comedians, living off of ad sales, gated content, and live shows.
Comedy is a “low art,” which means there are fewer gatekeepers and rules. Sure, if you want to write for SNL, there are certain things you need to do to get the call to come in. But for those of us in the wild west of comedy in Europe, it’s pretty much choose your own adventure.
This is why it felt so amazing to shift my focus to comedy. The first thing I did was kick off this newsletter, because I’ve had a parallel career as a marketing writer for a decade and I want writing to be a part of my comedy footprint. I didn’t have to ask anyone, I just did it! Here it is, my blog about comedy!
Opera singers are basket cases by design. The career path doesn’t allow for comfort or abundance. I uncoupled myself from approval in the opera world when it became clear that, for me, the juice was no longer worth the squeeze, and I’d fallen into another performance form that felt infinitely juicier. I can sing and tell jokes? Sign me up!
But that doesn’t mean comedy isn’t a struggle, or that you don’t get burned by every artist’s inevitable bedfellows: jealousy and anxiety.
The secret weapon of my life is that I am very good at identifying my emotions and finding solutions. I can be furious or full of despair and still be able to acknowledge that’s what I’m feeling, give myself credit for the authenticity of the emotion, and come up with a solution.
The way this works is that when I find myself feeling uncomfortable, I ask, “If I could be anywhere, doing anything in the world, what would it be?” If it’s lying on a bed in a cool hotel room with the window open to the sounds of the ocean, I know I’m tired. If it’s a comfy chair with a good book in a cozy, plant-filled room, I know I need some alone time. If it’s on stage or singing, I know I need to get my ass up and do something active.
When I’m upset, I can usually name a situation I’d prefer, and from that situation, work backwards to determine how I should deal with current distress. One therapist told me I’m good at “self-parenting.” I can, in general, objectively see what’s going on and make decisions based on reality as opposed to being overwhelmed and spiraling. I believe this allows me to be more even-keeled than a lot of people I meet, which leads to a general sense of wellbeing, which leads to success.
However, I am not perfect at this. Even though I’m no longer in the world of the 2% success rate, I have faced waves of jealousy, bouts of anxiety, and fear that I’m wasting my life this past year. Maybe it’s the summer slump. Maybe it’s the heat. But last week, I bottomed out.
When I was in high school, my friend Margie and I did everything together and managed to come out in the 1 and 2 spot more often than not – grades, musicals, AP exam results. We were best friends with big dreams, in a de-facto competition in every situation. At one point, we decided, expressly, that we would celebrate all of our wins, regardless of whose it was. We declared that there was no room for jealousy. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it helped me flex muscles I’ve used ever since – the muscles to take jealousy and turn it into community pride.
When people I like are successful doing something I want to do, I get jealous. I have a pang of WHY NOT ME??? I can feel frustrated that I didn’t think of something similar, or why didn’t I start working on this sooner? It happens in opera and it happens in comedy. Someone is going on tour. Someone is opening for a cool headliner. Someone did a well-paid gig I didn’t even know about. Someone had a viral moment. My first reaction is always jealousy, because I’m a human. But the second emotion, if I’m keeping up with my self-parenting, is to acknowledge that, if someone from Berlin’s scene is having success, it’s good for all of us. Rising tide, and all that. If someone from Berlin sells out a show here in town, crushes it opening for a massive name, wins a Gong Show in London, or moves to New York on an O1 visa, that’s fucking amazing for Berlin’s comedy scene. Comedy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in front of an audience, alongside colleagues. So everyone who wins in Berlin is winning, in some way, because of Berlin.
My ability to celebrate when my colleagues are successful is a cornerstone of my own success. I think it’s a much bigger contributor than you’d assume. This mindset helps me regulate emotionally, and it helps me keep my focus on my own work. No one can do the bits that I do. They are mine, and my journey is my own.
This leads us to anxiety, which is where I struggle. I’ve been on Sertraline since 2018. I began when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and my therapist at the time upped my dosage in 2019. I remember walking around for weeks in November that year, feeling like the world was ending, and once my dosage was doubled, I returned to feeling like myself with wonder and awe. Thank God for modern medicine and chemical intervention. A pandemic came, my mom died of cancer, I moved to a new city, I gained weight (after an unhealthy diet in grad school), and through it all, I generally liked myself and felt grounded in what I was doing.
But it is definitely up and down. I have a habit, usually after a breakup, of wondering if I am loveable or just a selfish ghoul leeching attention from everyone I know. I will move through (indulge ferociously) these thoughts for a bit and then self-parent: what do I actually need right now? How can I get it? The thoughts are allowed to exist, but then they must move on when other thoughts are ushered in. My favorite weapon against anxiety is to call someone and talk it out. When I say my brain’s feral thoughts out loud, they usually feel smaller.
But they exist, and return, and I know that keeping a holser of anxiety solutions is a part of my life.
Last week, Margie visited me from Vermont. I was sick at the beginning of her visit, but she managed to pull off a full dance card of activities and meetups regardless. She left on Tuesday, and Wednesday was the hottest day of the year so far. Berlin is famously terrified of AC, and my apartment faces west with floor to ceiling windows. I woke up sweating, exhausted, equally lonely while feeling the relief of a guest departing, with laundry to do. Now that Margie’d left, I couldn’t use her impending visit as an excuse to put off other looming events, namely, bringing a new solo show to Fringe.
This coincided with Congress passing a bill that will remove my medical coverage in the US. I am currently eligible for coverage because, since I pay taxes in Germany, the tax treaty between the US and Germany means my taxable income is below the poverty threshold in the US, allowing me to receive Medicaid through Colorado’s Medicaid Expansion. This means I’ve been able to keep seeing my doctor when I go home to do all of the big things one must do – pap smear, cholesterol tests – in my native language.
The new work requirements do not consider work abroad to be eligible (I’ve checked this), even if I would technically be required to pay US taxes once I hit the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. (Although double taxation doesn’t kick in until you make ~$120,000, so it would be outside of the bounds of Medicaid anyway.) All told, I will lose my coverage.
This means I now need to purchase medical coverage every time I go to the US, and I won’t be able to do my routine tests in the UC Health system anymore. I know this is small potatoes, especially since family members of my former high school students have been kidnapped and are being held without their Constitutional right to due process. I have a German doctor, as you’ll learn, and I will be fine. But it’s the most material harm that Trump’s administration has done to me, personally, since my taxes went up in 2017. (That tax bill was great for businesses and awful for freelancers with hefty business expenses.)
There is an acute grief going on in Americans right now, being communicated to the world through ironic doom videos and outraged think pieces. It’s a creator economy full of rage and resignation. But at the end of the day, we’re all just sort of numb. For most Americans my age, and for nearly all Americans living abroad, what we believe about our country and what our country is revealing itself to be are wildly different. I’m losing a mother all over again.
It was 101 degrees Fahrenheit with three fans blasting and no AC. I was calculating the cost of travelers insurance in between taping pieces of paper with jokes on them to my glass cabinet. I was convinced I have nothing new to say, I’m a hack act with an opera element that isn’t actually funny, not one Republican member of Congress has a goddamn backbone, and wouldn’t be able to afford to raise a family in the US even if I wanted to. I’m a failure, I need to move home, I can’t move home because it’s not a safe place to be since I would absolutely get in a masked man’s face and get arrested, but why aren’t we making citizen arrests of those people in masks and tactical gear anyway, I have no future, I’m a waste of a human.
Round and round went these thoughts. Dread pooled in my stomach and stayed. Nothing I did, no tea or yoga or shower, could shake it. It was too hot to go on a run. I dreaded leaving the apartment for groceries. I tried calling my dad twice, but he was teaching his drone course. (If you’ve seen my set recently, you know my dad was a Navy pilot. He now teaches drone license certification courses which is very cool. Except when I’m having an anxiety attack and he can’t pick up.) Why didn’t I call anyone else? Because logic was not involved.
I have not had a day of anxiety like that since my mom died. Something about the combination of loneliness and heat and despair put me into a place I couldn’t get out of. I lay in bed, wondering if I would ever feel normal again.
I had a show that night, after things had cooled down. It was at an outdoor venue. Dave Adams played guitar during his set and did a guitar solo in the middle of a song which was him putting the guitar up against the stool and walking off stage. It was stupid and wonderful. I laughed so hard. I had a great set. I went home full of joy.
In the midst of my anxiety paralysis I had the foresight to book a doctor’s appointment. My Hausartz saw me on Friday. We talked about meds and therapy. We made a plan.
No artist lives without jealousy and anxiety, the twin reactions to any colleague’s work that come in variable doses no matter how good you are. I believe the best artists are those who learn to wield them properly. Notice them, navigate them, tend to the garden of blooming jealousy and creeping anxiety as needed. Pack thick sheers. Weed often.
My full time job right now is preparing for Edinburgh Fringe. I finished the press release last week. Tickets are selling well, since the only race is against myself and my previous two years. I’m bringing a children’s show in addition to my solo and now I’ve been introduced to the world of kids theater in Scotland. What I mean is, I’ll be doing things like leading a session at Mix Up Theatre Camp on July 30th and doing various paid spots at childrens compilation shows throughout the month. I didn’t even know that was a thing!
If you’re in Berlin, I’m doing a long set on Saturday this week in preparation for Fringe with some new (not-normal-Berlin-set) material in a split bill with my friend Patrick in Schöneberg. I would love to see some friendly faces in the crowd! If you want to come but can’t afford it, please reach out.
Today’s newsletter was many things, but I wish to end on one note: catharsis. Comedy pops the bubble of things we spend our lives dancing around. On Friday night, I jumped in to host a show for my friend Sepideh, who is from Iran. Her opener was Nir, who is from Israel. And there I was, American, hosting it. Nir immediately leaned into politics and did a set about the war, nuclear weapons, and uranium. Let me tell you, the audience loved it. “Raise your hand if your country is currently being led by a criminal.” The catharsis was palpable.
What’s on this week!
Monday, August 7th
Bad 4 Business | art.city.people
Friday, August 11th
Friday Showcase | Cosmic Comedy
Saturday, August 12th
Top Shelf Comedy | Mein Freund Harvey
*Thank you to Maureen Brabec, Queen of Facts, for helping me find these numbers <3
Was this forwarded from a friend? Thanks for reading! About Me: I’m Steph DePrez an award-winning singer, writer, and performer. You can read my full bio at www.stephaniedeprez.com and also follow me on Instagram and YouTube.
I love this so much. Thank you for writing it. 🫂
Stephanie…I love you! Anytime you need a momma…call me ❤️❤️❤️