Be who I am and say what I feel.你對生活愈有興趣 你的世界就有愈多喜樂與成功

I'd worked in a financial institution for years and had done very well when I got the opportunity to retire. I could sleep in and watch daytime TV everyday, which I really didn't want to do, or I could get another financial job, or I could try something completely different. What I really wanted to do was act in commercials.

Acting was really outside of my comfort zone. I'm not in a suit standing in front of business people. I was comfortable in that role. Acting is something completely different. I thought: "I'm too old. I have no experience in this. This is silly. I don't need to do this. At this point in my life I can relax [about money] so why torture myself?" It's because learning is fun and the sense of accomplishment of doing something that I didn't think I could do is so rewarding.

At first, I told myself I would just do voiceover, that way I wouldn't have to go on camera. Then I realized I needed to test myself so I took an acting class. I had to do scenes, and I had to do scenes with other people. I had to learn lines. I had to do rehearsals. It was horrible and it was very scary, but I wasn't going to embarrass myself by walking out. Every time I took a class, I would walk in and there would be all these 18, 19, 20 year olds and I would think: "What am I doing here? I'm, you know, not young." I wanted to quit! Then I would hem and haw and wait to quit until the next class and then the next class would be a little easier, and I would think, "Maybe I can do this."

I thought insecurity about [my appearance] would bother me the most. With women, we think we're too fat or too thin or we think we are too this or too that. We are what we are. No one knows where you were yesterday or where you want to be tomorrow, they just see you for what you are in the moment. People aren't hiring me to act. They're hiring me because they want personality and that's a big thing. They don't want me to be someone else, they want me to be me. They want to see the honesty. I can only give that if I am being myself. I can't wear those skimpy clothes and those wonderful new fashions, but a lot of people can't. And, maybe more people will relate to me. I mean, baby boomers are just coming into it now and they want to see faces that they can relate to. I'm hoping I'm one of those faces.

I read this Dear Abby story years ago. Someone was afraid to go to law school because they were 45 years old and they decided they would be far too old when they finished five years later at 51. And she wrote back and said, "How old will you be in five years if you don't go to law school?" Fear is not a good reason to avoid doing something. Just do it, it doesn't matter if you're 60 or 40 or 20 or 12, you do what you can do when you can do it. It's always going to be scary. You have to go ahead and try it.

There are plenty of wonderful stories about women who decide to become a lawyer or a doctor in their 50s. A friend of mine was a schoolteacher. Her parents had always wanted her to be a schoolteacher. She was in her 30s and she hated school teaching. She wanted to be a doctor. One day she up and sold her house, went to medical school and she is now one of the foremost doctors on AIDS research for women in the world--not just in the country, in the entire world. Me? I'm not hurting myself by trying, but I am hurting myself by not trying. If I don't try I automatically fail.