Sarah Wessendorf

For many people, life’s biggest struggle is determining their role — what kind of person will they be? What work should they pursue? What religion should they follow? How do they define themselves?

But for some people, such as Sarah Wessendorf, the answer is simple: “First and foremost, I don’t define myself.” Refusing to be defined acts as a boon for Sarah, granting her a sense of freedom and exploration that elevates her work as an actress and her personal life to a higher level.

Sarah began acting as a child, essentially growing up in the theaters of her hometown of Hamburg, Germany. It was a charmed childhood, but like so many people who begin working early, she reached a point of reckoning in her late teens, wondering whether she was truly on the right path. Fortunately, the universe gave her an obvious sign that she was, indeed, on the right path.

It came while she was in Tel Aviv, working on the award-winning movie CPH. “I was cast in a really small role at first,” Sarah explained, “but for some reason the director called me over and sat me down with the main actor…we talked, and then he gave me a way bigger role. Then he told me that ‘[acting] is what you need to do. And you need to do it as soon as you can.’”

With such encouragement, it’s probably not surprising that Sarah would go on to create a successful career as an actress, working in numerous productions all over the globe. Thanks to her commitment to avoiding definitions, she finds it easy to slip into a wide variety of roles, giving her a varied prowess rarely seen in modern actors.

It also helps that Sarah considers much of her day-to-day life to be a kind of acting. For example, when researching for a role, she may go get a cup of coffee, and while ordering, she’ll try to think and speak as much like the character as possible. Importantly, she’s not merely portraying the character as a subject, but as an extension of herself. “I act in movies, but I also act in real life. I think we all go way beyond the roles that we play.”

As an actress, Sarah knows firsthand that once you understand someone’s history and motivations, it’s not difficult to understand who they are — a concept that applies off the stage just as much as it does onstage. We all play roles everyday. We might play a role that we’ve held for years, that we’re so comfortable with that it seems difficult or impossible to change. But it’s a role nonetheless, which means its malleable and understandable. It also means we have the freedom to change and improve on that role.

One of Sarah’s most recent projects is Hecate House, a play that deals both with the struggles of overcoming pain from the past and with the fluidity of sexual identity. It’s the perfect role for her, who spends a great deal of time pondering sexual fluidity. “That’s actually one of my main focuses in life, sexual fluidity,” Sarah says. “But it actually goes beyond that. It’s about not being defined.”

This undefinable mentality also explains a recent stir she created in the Buddhist community. Though Sarah prefers to investigate her spirituality with non-religious teachers, she’s spent the last few years exploring Buddhism.

“I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, but I use Buddhism to deepen and widen my understanding of who I am and what’s going on.”

As she probed the subject further, she began to grow frustrated with the separation between women’s and men’s groups in her local Buddhist community. After all, she doesn’t want to define herself as strictly a woman or a man, and doesn’t understand the need to pick one or the other when it comes to religious or spiritual beliefs. To address this issue, she’s spearheaded a new, polarizing movement of non-binary Buddhists in Berlin.

To some, such an intense dedication to fluidity might seem like a frightening way to live. In a world that’s more chaotic than ever, committing yourself to fluidity leaves you with nothing to anchor to. Fortunately, Sarah knows herself well. After a false cancer diagnosis, Sarah set off a spiritual quest that helped her to build a fundamental understanding of who she is and how she reacts to the world. This knowledge creates the foundation on which her fluidity sits — the floor beneath the ocean wave.

And besides, she knows she’ll be alright, no matter what life brings her way. In one defining life moment, a friend’s father took her face into his hands, looked kindly into her eyes, and told her so. “You’re always going to be alright,” he said, “because you have a human face.”

It’s a beautiful statement, and perhaps the purest definition of acting: creating a human face. But it’s more than that. A human face is more than a profession, or a nationality, or a gender, or a sexual identity, or any kind of definition at all.

It’s being human, and in the end, that’s everything.

— Written by Jackson Rockwell