We were lucky to catch up with DeEnna Holohan recently and have shared our conversation below.

DeEnna , appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I don’t think I would have wanted to start my creative career any sooner than I did. When I was young, I was in musicals, and that’s really where the spark began. I loved performing, it felt natural, like home. But, life had other plans for a while. I had to grow up fast, work my way through college, raise two daughters, and build a life that taught me what resilience, love, and loss actually feel like.

When I turned 50, something shifted. I realized all those experiences weren’t detours, they were preparation. I had lived through enough transformation, heartbreak, and healing to finally bring truth to the work. That’s when I decided to return to acting and writing, not from a place of trying to “make it,” but from a place of having something to say.

I think the depth I bring now wouldn’t have been possible in my twenties. Back then, I could have played the role, but now I am the story. I understand what it means to rise again, to forgive, to love without fear, to create from a place of soul instead of striving. So, while the spark started early, the timing of this chapter feels perfect. Everything I lived through made me the artist I was meant to become.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

For me, acting and writing both came from this deep need to tell the truth, to explore what it means to be human in all its layers. I’ve always been drawn to connection and authenticity, and those two mediums allow me to express that in different but equally powerful ways. Acting gives me a chance to embody emotion, to live inside other peoples experiences and find myself in them. Writing gives me the space to. reflect, to translate those same truths into something that can hep others see themselves more clearly.

My book, Act As If: Live Your Truth, Heal Your Life, Change the World, grew out of that. It’s almost finished now, and it feels like the most honest work I’ve ever done. It’s part memoir, part soul guide; a conversation about how we can live with more awareness, compassion, and courage. I wanted it to read like you’re sitting across from me at a cafe, talking about how to come home to yourself after life has stretched or broken you open.

What sets me apart, I think, is the lens I see the world through. I’ve done a lot of inner work; spiritual, emotional, creative and it shows up in everything I do. My goal isn’t just to entertain or inspire, but to create something that moves people, something that shifts energy. I’m not afraid of the dark places. I believe that is where the light is born. When I write or perform, I go there first, so others feel safe to go there too.

I’m proud of the courage it’s taken to stay true to that. To not water it down. To create from intuition instead of ego. Every time someone tells me that something I have written or performed helped them feel seen or hopeful, that’s what fills me up. That is the real reward.

At the heart of my work is a belief that storytelling can heal. Whether it’s through a role that reveals a quiet truth or a chapter that helps someone shift their perspective, my mission is the same, to remind people that they are capable of transforming pain into purpose. Act As If is really a reflection of that idea: that we can step into who we want to become before everything around us catches up.

That’s what I hope people take away from my work, that. we all have the power to live as if we already are who we’re meant to be. And that when we do, the world changes a little, too.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to unlearn is that the stories I tell myself are always true. For a long time, I didn’t realize how much meaning I was assigning to situations, people, and even pain; how quickly I’d turn a single moment into a whole narrative about who I was or what something meant. Most of us do that without thinking. We get hurt, and instead of letting the experience move through us, we start building a story around it: I’m not enough. I’m always left. Things never work out for me.

Unlearning that changed everything. I started to see that the mind loves to protect us by creating stories, but those stories can become cages. Once I started questioning them, I found a new kind of freedom. I could look at what was actually happening, not what I decided it meant.

That realization is woven through my book. I won’t give all the insights in there away but basically, I explore how to rewrite the inner narrative, to shift from old patterns and step into new truth. It’s not about ignoring pain; it’s about changing the lens you see it through.

When you stop believing every story your mind tells you, you start living from your heart instead. And that’s where real transformation begins. That’s the lesson I’m most grateful for, and the one I hope readers will feel deeply when the read the book.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The biggest pivot in my life came when I finally admitted that I wasn’t living authentically. I had done all the right things, built a stable life, and carried the weight of everyone else’s needs, but somewhere along the way I lost my connection to myself. That realization brought me into what I now see as a dark night of the soul. Everything that wasn’t true started to fall away.

In that space of unraveling, something beautiful began to take shape. I rediscovered my creative voice, the one I had buried for years, and that’s when acting and writing came back into my life. Acting became the way I could express emotion honestly, to live truth through story. Writing became how I made sense of it all, translating that same truth into words that could help others heal.

It wasn’t an easy shift. It required me to let go of identities I’d outgrown and face fears that had kept me small. But once I stepped back into my creative self, everything began to realign. I felt more alive, more grounded, and more connected than ever before.

Now whether I am on set or working on my book, I see both as part of the same mission; to tell the truth, to heal through story, and to live fully awake. That pivot at midlife didn’t end a chapter, it began the one I was always meant to write.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @deenna_holohan
• Other: TikTok: @collectivewisdomcc and IMDb: DeEnna Holohan

Image Credits

Dana Patrick Photography (all photos)