I played a Yale student, a girl from the Midwest, in a TV series popular in the early aughts. I had gone to Yale and I was from Minnesota, facts that had helped me land the role despite the modesty of my resumé and my talent.
     At twenty-six, I was cast to play a freshman, and over the years I spent back "in college," I suppose I thought about my college years more than most people my age. I remembered Yale as a place of Neo-Gothic turrets rising forebodingly into a reddish night sky, of fast lanes of traffic bifurcating a campus demarcated by large, locked gates, of maniacal construction: the pounding of the new library they were building behind my dorm room, clang, clang, clang, woke me painfully early each morning. It was where I discovered I was poor, though I had never felt so before, and where I discovered I was slow on the uptake, though I had thought of myself as a quick enough study until then.
     I had been so intellectually unprepared for the classes that they might as well have been in another language; professors and students alike used words (Tautology! Teleology! Ontology! Eschatology!) that I understood even less after I looked them up. Even Theater Studies—my major, what had drawn me to Yale in the first place–confounded me; "The Method" seemed messy whereas Meisner seemed methodical, and our experiments with Feldenkreis, flailing around on the floor, struck me as inapplicable if we were playing characters who weren't infants or bugs.
     When, as a freshman auditioning for a minor role in a play at the illustrious Dramat, I was stopped mid-monologue and asked what my objective was, I said, with utter earnestness, "To be in this play." The director, a sophomore with hyperthyroidal eyes and curly hair rising in two great seaswells from his middle part, tittered before explaining that the question was what my character wanted. And so I discovered not only how little I had learned performing children's theater off a truck bed in Bemidji, but also my ability to blush.
     I auditioned diligently for the dozens of plays that went up every semester, but I wasn't cast in anything until my junior year, and then earned only small roles in plays directed, and sometimes written, by underclassmen; these went up in the basement storage rooms of residential colleges. Despite this, and my great difficulty parsing Shakespeare, I was optimistic about my chances in the Dramat's production of Richard III. I was sure I had Lady Anne's vulnerability and lostness cornered, and that the way I strained to make sense of Shakespeare mirrored the way she strained to make sense of Richard and his sway over her. I even thought my audition was going uncustomarily well, that is, until the director—the same one as before, with the great camel-humps of hair—interrupted to say, "It is dust." I had no idea what he was talking about. "'Dust,' not 'dost': 'Dust grant me, hedgehog,'" he said. And with this correction to my pronunciation, embarrassment once again swallowed me whole, and the part crumbled and fell through my fingers.

Throughout college, I felt like I disappeared. My overwhelmed silence in seminars was such that professors insisted I'd been absent on days I'd been present, and fellow students I crossed paths with later were surprised to hear I'd been in their classes.
     My feeling of being unseen coexisted with the feeling that that there was an eye always on me. This disembodied eye disembodied me: I constantly saw myself, as if from an elevated distance, waking up, getting dressed, sitting on my bed to put on my shoes, grabbing my books, going down the stairs and out the door into a forbidding world of indecipherable signs and unreadable symbols.
    My feeling of being watched was perhaps wishful thinking; I wanted to be seen so badly I convinced myself I was.

I did go the play. I thought my jealousy would distract me, but in fact, I was ensorcelled watching the Lady Anne who wasn't me, who was the red-headed daughter of a famous director. No, her casting had nothing to do with her father, as I'd supposed and perhaps hoped; the role was fairly hers. When she spoke, her lines flashed with such unmistakable intent, and when she listened, expressions flickered across her face so intelligibly that I felt I understood not only everything she said but everything said to her, that, because of her performance, I understood Shakespeare for the first time and now could not un-understand him; from this moment on, his plays would be penetrable. I felt utterly outmatched by this actress, but I also marked that a curtain had been pulled aside, and so perhaps other curtains would be; perhaps all the words that were opaque to me would one day be clear; perhaps the worlds that were closed to me would one day be open.
     Afterward, I surmounted my intimidation and went up to Lady Anne in the receiving line, praising her with great sincerity. But her hand was limp in mine; she seemed to look right through me, as if I weren't there at all.

So the opportunity to play a college student again on the show was therapeutic for me. Not only did having regular work validate my dubious choice to be an actress, but I also felt a new and easy sense of belonging, aided by a cast hierarchy determined by the size of our roles and the assumption that we were all at least a little like the characters we played. My character, one of the leads, was infinitely more confident than I had ever been. She entered rooms without waiting for an answer to her knock; she plunked herself down amidst any group expecting to be welcomed; she spoke and assumed she would be listened to, and much of what she said was decisive and principled. A little of the role rubbed off on me, and I slowly managed to shed some of the self-doubt that had fastened onto me in college and clung to me ever since.
     The attention of the writers also bolstered my confidence. None of them had gone to Yale, and, though they had only the most desultory interest in research or accuracy, they peppered me with questions when they visited set. Not only was I the center of these conversations, but these conversations served to relocate me from the periphery to the center of my own past; describing the traditions of the Dramat, of a capella groups and secret societies, groups I'd been far outside, had the strange effect of making me feel like an insider.
     Occasionally, these conversations with the writers engendered scripts in which my own history was rewritten. My character, for instance, defeated the daughter of a famous actress to win the role of Miranda in The Tempest, and, on a stage grander than the Dramat's, I shouted my lines into a wind machine and bowed to a standing ovation. My defeated rival shook my hand after the play. One episode revolved around a secret society's "tap night," and my own experience—hoping for a knock on the door that never came—was given to a guest star, while my character was tapped for Skull and Bones. In the initiation ceremony scene, filmed in a wood-paneled room peopled by students (extras) in black robes, my character, invited to drink wine from a skull, ran away in horror. Sometimes, I believed that this was what had happened; the real director's daughter's hand grew firmer in my memories, apologetic, even conceding. And sometimes I caught myself thinking—without thinking—that I, instead of being rejected, had rejected a secret society, just as sometimes my character's aplomb was beginning to flash anachronistically in my college memories. Hadn't I, as a freshman, waltzed into an audition room and asked a director what he wanted, with such frankness that he blushed and stammered?
     My acted experiences were rapidly overtaking my actual experiences, like paintings on top of paintings: memories of Connecticut's cold, dark winters ceded their hold to California's lemony sun and prehistorically-large foliage; my dorm, which had, in actuality, been dungeon-like, transposed itself into the cheery former boarding school in Pasadena where we shot; my fellow actors began to appear in memories where my real roommates belonged. I had mentioned to the writers the young man who refused to wear shoes, the young woman who wore only white, the music graduate student who always dressed as a Victorian gentleman, and actors playing these roles made their way into the show and overlaid the originals, whose faces I could no longer remember.
     Another revision to memory: my longstanding feeling of being watched resolved into something premonitory. The eye I had once felt on me became the camera that would be: what I had sensed in those years turned into this future, one in which I would be watched, would be filmed rising from bed, putting on my shoes, walking out into a world of signs and symbols I had always known how to read.

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I did go to Yale, and I was an actress for a decade, and this short piece is a sort of dream-pastiche of terrible auditions I gave and actresses I have admired. Unlike this protagonist, I never had the chance to "relive" college—except by writing about it, which also warps the initial experience and casts my memories into uncertainty. This short piece is a fragment of a novella that I could never quite get to work.