the beauty of the side quest

I recently started playing Hogwarts Legacy on my boyfriend’s PlayStation. A year in, he’s somehow managed to turn me into a cat person and a gamer.

At this point, I’ve put more hours into the immersive, open world role-playing game than he has, but I haven’t gotten nearly as far in the main story. For reference, his difficulty level is set to “hard” and mine is set to “story” (a level below “easy”). 

I’d be a lot further along in the main quest, but I keep doing the side quests instead—exploring every jaunty hamlet, searching endlessly in spider-infested caves and long-abandoned ruins for loot and field guide pages, pressing revelio to reveal anything interactable approximately every ten seconds.

I am the side quest queen, I whisper to no one in particular, another two hours in, the main quest untouched for the night. 

And I really am. At least, I am now. 

I thought I was a main quest girlie growing up, for sure. Music, acting, writing—these were the side quests I’d touch because they’d give me a boost in +XP for the main quest. Everything I could justify doing was in service of extraordinarily narrow goals.

Go to the best college you get into, and learn exactly what you need to for your career. Get a stable job, and climb the ladder. Marry someone nice, and stay with them forever. 

Except… I didn’t really do any of that. 

I went to an in-state school and changed my major five times. I got a job outside of my undergraduate degree and promptly quit a grand total of one year later. I got married at 23 and was divorced by the time I turned 26. 

And just like that, my singular main quest became a series of side quests instead: temporary adventures that passed the time (however pleasantly or unpleasantly), with no direct bearing on my present or future. 

A former colleague asked me if I regretted spending the time going to college, since I was “just an actor” now. 

I said no. 

Besides the life-long friends I’d made, college had led me to a teaching job in Tennessee.

Which led me to a panicked job search less than a year later.  

Which led me to a great but passionless job in real estate. 

Where I realized watching Blake Gibson (to this day, still the best boss I’ve ever had) that it wasn’t the field that was passionless–just me in it. 

Where I realized my passion lay in the arts, as it always had, even when I had looked down on it as a side quest.

Which led me to a slow on-ramp to a journey into the acting world. 

Which led me to a full-time career as an actor, which still feels like the most side-quest-y thing I could have possibly pursued. 

Every day, I am trying something different, traveling somewhere else, meeting someone new. 

My life consists of auditioning for jobs I (mostly) don’t get. 

The jobs I do get are no guarantee I'll get another.

I spend my time flying and driving all over the Southeast, rarely in the same state for more than a couple weeks at a time. 

Even the longest of film jobs usually don’t last more than a couple of months. 

My entire life now is side quest after side quest. 

There is still no main quest in sight. There is no one goal that, once achieved, will denote the end of my searching, or exploring, or doing. I will continue to visit hamlet after hamlet, investigate tangent after tangent, and collect horklump after horklump–and I will take my time.

That is, in my mind, the beauty of viewing our endeavors as side quests.

You can wander. 

You can fail. 

You can take a break. 

You can learn. 

You can grow. 

You can return. 

You can level up. 

You can take your time. 

You can be present.

You can enjoy the things that make you happy, right where you are, without necessitating permanent relevance for current appreciation and joy. 

Will I get any further side-questing than I would’ve main-questing? I have absolutely no clue. I am aware that at any point, this fickle and ever-changing industry may decide it no longer wants or needs me, and that I may very well look back on my 20s as the time I was an actor for a while.

And even so, I have all the trust in the world that I’ll be able to look back on the many side quests I embarked on during this time and say, 

Well, wasn’t that fun? 

On to the next,

SH