I feel like I've kind of lived the upside down version of the American
dream. I saw this opportunity of doing something different and
thought, Well, why not just try this and see where it takes me?
I've been a performer now for actually ten years, which is crazy.
I'm Marissa Kelly.
I'm 28 years old.
I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
And I brought in around $130,000 last year
as a foot archer.
A foot archer.
I guess it didn't really exist until recently, but I basically
shoot flaming arrows with my feet in handstand and I
perform that for a living.
My act involves me doing a variety of acrobatic trick shots,
handstands and contortion, and I get to go around the world and
enjoy myself.
Last year I actually did over 130 flights
traveling across the US and the rest of the world.
I do events, I do halftime shows, I do TV
shows, stunts for films.
I definitely don't work in an office, but I take my job as
seriously as possible.
I just have a lot of fun whilst I'm doing it, and I hope that I can
show that there is a value in being a performer.
I'm originally from the UK and in 2020 I moved to the USA and
ended up in Nashville.
One day I was meant to get on my flight home to London and I
realized I see a really big opportunity for my career here.
So I just didn't get on that flight home immediately.
From that moment on, I decided, This is it.
I want to live in the US and my career has just blown up since.
It's cold today.
When it's cold, the bow doesn't want to bend a bit like me.
Maybe people think, Oh, she's just going on stage for 5 minutes or 10
minutes, but they don't see what goes on behind that.
The physical requirements to do what I do are obviously quite
demanding. My goal for what I do is to make it look easy.
You don't want to watch someone struggling on stage.
It's a real hunting bow.
It's very powerful.
Actually, it's 30 pounds, so that's tough.
I train up to six hours a day and I'm always doing admin, sending
emails, marketing myself.
Yeah, they are real mirrors.
Look how pointy. Like that one.
Like that in my butt.
It's really painful.
Another expense that I have very regularly is pedicures
and nails to as a foot archer.
Actually, pedicures could technically come under a business
expense. I like to use that as an excuse to get as many as possible.
I guess you could say maybe I'm a bit reckless with my spending, but
I see it as living in the moment just as much as living for the
future. I'm an athlete.
I like to spend money on food, okay?
I don't cook, so I just have no desire to sit at home and make
meals. I think that spending money on food is a big habit of
mine and it's probably not a great habit.
But you know, I have so many nice experiences, either meeting people
or hanging out with my friends that I don't regret it.
I always put in 20% of everything I make.
I don't even see that money.
It's gone straight into my savings.
One of the things I wish I knew when I moved to America was how
expensive healthcare is.
I will do anything I can to wait to go back to the UK to
resolve any medical issues, and in some cases it's actually
cheaper to buy a flight the next day to England to get this
resolved than it is to go through my insurance, which is just crazy.
I actually grew.
Up in a very poor area and my parents had no money.
So actually when I was 12 years old, my dad passed away very
suddenly. Then we went from being poor to really, really poor because
my mum was actually raising three kids on her own and all three kids
were under 18 and she had to get three different jobs just to pay
for us to be able to eat.
From then on, it was very clear that life is short and my mum,
instead of saying, Go get a solid job where you know how much
money you're going to make, you're going to be secure.
She was absolutely adamant, Do what you love because life is
short. I've been a gymnast since the age of three.
After about 15 years of that, I was like, I can't just stop.
I can't just do something that's not physical anymore.
And I decided, why be the best in the world when you could be the
only one be so different that no one else even compares to you.
So I came up with this crazy idea.
I bought a bow and arrow.
I went to a cricket field, which is like a baseball field, and I
just taught myself.
I trained six hours a day every single day for six months until I
hit my target. I went all the way in.
That actually pushed the wick back.
What people don't realize is that more than the physical training is
the mental training that I had to go through.
If you're nervous and you're shaking, that's going to transfer
along the bow, along the arrow, and I'm going to miss my target.
In the early days, that was a real problem.
How do you get over your nerves?
Well, you have to go on stage and work through that.
So for the first year, I struggled.
There was definitely some failures.
But when you fail so much publicly,
you become so focused and so strong and so
determined. I still get nervous when I go on stage.
And if I didn't, maybe I don't care enough.
So I'm glad I do.
But now I just know how to control my nerves and how to use them to
help me. And as soon as that music comes on, I'm on.
I'm ready to go.
Some of the biggest challenges of my job is the instability.
Being self-employed is not easy.
It takes a lot of courage.
We don't know when we're going to have gigs.
We might have a month of amazing work and then three months of
nothing. And that takes someone who's really brave to commit to
that. The way I found to tackle that is by really working on
creating content and boosting my social media.
So now that's become another form of revenue.
So when I don't perform as much, I'm pushing out content, I'm making
ebooks, I'm making courses and finding ways to provide another
income. I actually managed to build over a million followers just
on TikTok alone in one year, and that had a huge impact on the
amount that I was being booked.
And I had many requests for merchandise.
So the things that I settled on were signed arrows, a signed
calendar and signed prints.
You can pay an extra.
I think a couple of bucks to have them sealed with a kiss.
My income is unstable and that can be stressful,
but it feels like the gigs come much slower the more I worry about
it. So I try and be very relaxed and Yeah just trust my career that
people are going to book me.
I'm definitely not nervous or anxious that I'm not going to be
able to do this job forever.
It's a reality.
I don't want to be performing upside down, bending in half
forever. So as my archery career slows down, I
will be focusing on more online ways to make money.
And honestly, who knows where it's going to take me?
And I'm always open to new and exciting opportunities.
I don't know where I'll be in 5 or 10 years, but I do know that I'll
be doing what I love, and as long as I'm doing that, then I'm happy.