FACT: I brought bobby pins and character shoes to my first day of senior year and seriously considered leaving the first day of school early to make my call time for the performance that night.

FACT: I missed my last two actual days of high school to go on location for a film.

FACT: Like my fellow college applicants, I brought resumes to my college "interviews" (read: auditions), but I also brought head shots, sheet music, and three or four pairs of dance shoes.

What these facts of my life, and many others, add up to is the industry in which I chose to pursue a career, defined my high school experience. Alongside reading "Moby Dick" (I had a hardcore AP Composition teacher) and formulating debate arguments in Spanish, I was writing music and lyrics with an iPhone virtual piano backstage at a production of "Fame." I was spending days off from school at auditions, after eventually getting my guidance counselor to sign off on my child performer work permit. There were days when this was the life. Even now, I wouldn't change the choices I made. But there were also other days: the days when I was reminded that just because I'm a performer, it doesn't mean that juggling is automatically one of my special skills.

CONS

1. You become kind of resigned to not getting much sleep.

I always tried to get homework done while I was sitting backstage in my dressing room, or when I had a spare moment on set or during rehearsal. And sometimes I was successful in those efforts! But in the end, I often spent hours doing the work late at night, after I'd gotten home. However, I can try to turn a con into a pro -- I learned how to function on not a lot of sleep, a skill I think will serve me well and even become necessary as a college student and as an adult.

2. You miss some events because you're choosing to be a part of others.

The rest of my senior class planned a "senior scream" on the last day of classes, in which they went outside after ninth period and chanted something all together (I'm not sure what the final decision was on the exact words of the chant). Meanwhile, I was traveling back from working as an actor in upstate New York and making up the assignments I still had to turn in. Am I sorry I was somewhere else? No. Do I regret my decision? Not really. But do I wish I could have been there somehow? Yes.

3. Not everyone is going to understand the choices you make.

(I happen to have a very supportivefamily, but not everyone does, so I won't even go into that.)

I have had some friends and teachers who don't like theatre or the performing arts. (And I've heard worse stories than my own of teachers giving detentions or of students having other negative ramifications from their theatre involvement.) I will never be able to comprehend how they can make a gigantic generalized statement like that, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be friends with them, and it doesn't mean I can't enjoy those teachers' classes. It just means that certain moments were a little difficult because of that divide in interests. And there's always a bright side -- I went through high school knowing exactly what I wanted to do, and I did it. Not everyone understood how I was able to do that, to know it at my core that way, and not everyone got to do it. I feel really lucky that I did.

4. Show friendships have a totally different dynamic than school friendships, which can be hard to explain.

Sometimes, show friends only last as long as the show does, which can be really painful. It's hard to pick up the pieces and say, "At least I still have my school friends," because it's just not the same. It's not better or worse by default, just very different. And for all you know, school friends might only last as long as the school year. But, making a positive out of a negative again, even if some of my friendships in both places have gone downhill or disappeared entirely, I think I've also made some of my lifelong best friends at school and working on shows.

PROS

1. There's almost always someone to help you with your homework.

Most of my "Our Town" cast couldn't translate words for me, but they definitely helped me brainstorm topics to write about in my journal for Spanish class. And when you're sharing a dressing room with a bunch of other high school students, someone's bound to have a graphing calculator handy even if you don't.

2. You have a serious advantage with any theatrical school projects.

Even as someone who can be an introvert offstage, I can vouch for the truth of this. I definitely walked into my sophomore year drama class a few times with a monologue I'd memorized independently for an audition. I got free feedback that was even helpful sometimes, and I got the grades without too much extra work. And when I've had to explain how I would stage a scene from a Shakespeare play that my English class was discussing, my perspective as a director was enormously helpful.

3. You get an excuse to read a lot of great plays.

Between the plays I've read with my English classes ("Twelve Angry Men," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Antigone" were some of my favorites) and the one I chose for myself because my Creative Writing teacher wanted us to do independent reading this year ("A Streetcar Named Desire," "Killers and Other Family," "The Sisters Rosensweig,"...), I've read so many more key pieces of theatre as a result of high school than I would have otherwise. I made time for these extraordinary works of art and literature that I know I would have put off without the excuse of "It's for school." And I really do feel that the experiences of reading them as a high school student were more meaningful because I was simultaneously immersing myself in the theatre.

4. You find an accepting and affectionate family almost anywhere you go.

My grandfather died during the week that I was performing in a production of 9 to 5. I will never forget or stop appreciating how much the hugs and joyful laughter of my cast meant to me while I was going through a difficult time. Somewhat similarly, despite my mixed feelings about missing out on spending my last two days of high school with my friends from back home, the new family I found on the film set where I was working was so warm and loving that I didn't need to worry about what I was missing; all I had to focus on was how much fun I was having exactly where I was, and how happy being there made me.

The life of a theatre kid isn't one for every high school student, for sure, but it worked for me and made my life that much richer and fuller, so even if I could go back now and decide it all differently, I know I wouldn't.