Fears

Are you climbing up the mountain?

There’s this thing that my friends and I used to do in college while we were eating.

“Oh my God, I am so fucked right now. I have a biochem lab write up and a Theatre History paper AND I need to read three chapters for sociology.”

“Well let me tell you that I am so f-ed right now because I have to do the Theatre History paper, memorize two scenes, complete three comp sci projects that are all past due and I have an a capella rehearsal until 10.”

“And can I just say how totally and completely screwed I am because I have a poly sci exam tomorrow that I haven’t even started studying for, a 10 pager for linguistics, the Theatre History paper, the scene memorization, two rehearsals and I said I’d tutor my roommate in French for an hour.”

This can go on ad infinitum.

There was a perverse glee with which we detailed and enshrined our over committed-ness. It was pandemic across the student body. It was our mascot, this looming specter of the impossible tasked to us. We wore it with pride the way we might have worn out maroon and white had we been a school with more traditional means of displaying pride. (Perhaps it’s why something as lame as “The Garnet Tide” was allowed to continue into perpetuity. Really? The Garnet Tide? Though, for such an extremely liberal school, a vaguely menstrual symbol of our collegial devotion is also sort of fitting. But that’s a side note.)

Anyway, in thinking a little deeper about the writing that I did last time I was in this space, I was trying to suss out the exact difference for myself between useful frustration at one’s limitations – the kind that leads to progress and growth – and shame and anger that pulls one back and gets in the way. I started thinking about that habit, one that I took to so easily along the route of higher education. And I started to realize how this parasite of “I am so fucked” has found itself quite a number of comfortable hosts here in the artistic community.

How many times when you talk to people about their work do you hear them bemoan their over-full schedule with stuff it sounds like they aren’t really excited about? When was the last time you asked someone the dreaded “What are you working on?” and received a calm and happy, “Just this one amazing project that I love”? I notice in myself a weird feeling of not enough if I answer that I am simply doing one show for months (years!), rather than rehearsing one, finishing off the run of another, while prepping three for the next coming months in the span of a few weeks.

Why is that?

To be sure, there are financial pressures that force us to do more than we ought. But if it were money alone, why are there are an awful lot of projects that I see people take on for next to no pay or exposure? Projects they don’t even like. Projects that they seem to refer to with disdain.

“If you hate the work and you aren’t really getting any money, why are you doing this?” I often want to ask.

But I don’t. It doesn’t feel like my place to tell someone that they seem to be making some pretty artistically self-destructive choices. And who am I, with my measly one or two projects a year, to say anything at all?

What if we all took a step back? What if we all tried to cull the herd and take on things that really serve at least two of three purposes – artistic growth, making money, or real enjoyment.

I used to have a day job that was just a money job. I hated it and it felt like it was actually making me stupider. It was also really easy. And over time, I realized that even if this job paid me double, triple, ten times what I was making, I would still resent being there. And that’s when I quit.

I’ve also had artistic projects that felt like they were so fulfilling and so happiness inducing that I would find a way to make time to make them happen even if I had no cash. So I kept doing them, because they feed enough of the other parts of me at that moment to make the little money worth it.

Sometimes we start things because we love them and they make us happy, and we forget to check back in and see if that’s still happening. Like any relationship, the way that you are when you first start seeing someone/something has to change over time. A job that at one point in life was a real step forward, ten years later might feel like a step back. That only makes sense. But it’s tough in the moment to remember that, that sometimes we outgrow the things we once wanted.

Here’s the image that I have in my head. (PS credit where it’s due – I first started picturing this image for myself after hearing an amazing speech by Neil Gaiman from a commencement at UArts). Imagine the artist you want to be, the life you want to lead. That life is the top of a mountain. With each step you take, are you going up the mountain or down? Are you getting closer to the top, or walking away? Even if the thing you’re considering seems like a good idea, is it still getting you closer to the peak?

If it’s not, why are you doing it?

Coming back to the original thing for a moment: Taking on too much can be a way to distract ourselves.

If we are so busy that we don’t have time to stop and think, when we are so busy looking at the road just in front of us and hacking through the brush just to move ahead, it’s actually easier in some ways. We don’t have to evaluate choices. The work to get ahead is so strenuous, so effortful, that the prize is simply moving forward, having done it at all.

That forward motion may be exactly what you need. Or not. You have to look at the mountain to know.

When I was in school, I had a moment where I realized that by committing myself to a Chemistry thesis, a devised acting piece, an original directing work, a voice recital in four languages, not to mention the choice to shed dorm life and learn to pay bills and cook my own food all at once, I was giving myself an out.

The out was this: If I do all of these things, no one of them has to count.

If my concert was under prepared, that was only understandable, as clearly I had no time to rehearse. If my thesis was a little sloppily slapped together, well that’s alright, because I was balancing so much else. If I wasn’t the actor I imagined, that was because I was too busy not because I didn’t really belong on stage. If I paid my bills late, who could blame me, no one else in my peer group was acting like such an adult.

All these things together meant that no one of them really reflected back on me. Their shortcomings were the limitations of my time. Their successes were the “real” me.

As a life long perfectionist, this has always been a struggle – finding ways to keep hold of this “real” me fantasy. But these days, when I have actually set up my life in such a way as to actually have that stuff, the time and money, I find myself strangely more bottled up than ever. As I found ways to have more control over my life, it was more difficult to keep pretending that given infinite time and resource I would someday make those amazing things that I kept promising myself about.

I think it’s because there’s finally no excuse. There’s not much left between “real” me and myself. And it’s hard look at the things you’ve done and say, “That is the best I could do.” Not because I was busy, not because I was under funded, because it was actually just the extent to which I was capable. This is why we (definitely me!) procrastinate. Not because we are bad. Because we are scared that we might be less capable than we wish we were. So we over book and over commit so we never get the chance to measure the “real” thing, and so we can keep the fantasy.

The times when I have most found myself climbing down the mountain are the times when I was afraid to come up short. They were the times when I let myself be measured by other people’s expectations (and hated them for it!) because I feared myself incapable of succeeding by my own. The times when I have most despised theater and myself in it are the very times when I’m carrying all this crap I didn’t want, when it feels like it’s holding me back, like some kind of gravitational inevitability. That time and energy were conspiring to keep me from my best self.

There is a real sadness in giving up the idea of the “real” self, and as Americans I think it’s especially difficult. We live in a culture that teaches one to dream, dream, dream. BE YOUR BEST SELF, we are admonished. And while I am all for dreaming, the flip side of that tendency is get so comfortable with the imagining of one’s best self, that we never actually bother to get it. You have to give up the ideal to make something real.

I think more likely, more often, the thing holding me back is me. Me struggling to be ok with being less than perfection.

Potential Energy

Can I admit something?

When I was in middle and high school I used to want to cry when I saw Country Time Lemonade commercials. Little Debbie sometimes also got to me.

There was a long time when I couldn’t really articulate why. But every time that farmhouse with the grandfather and little kid sitting on the porch staring off into the sunset came on, I’d start to well up. They’d stare out into the sunset drinking from that frosty yellow glass and I’d start to get this panicky feeling like I was losing something. This anxiety would rise from my stomach into the back of my throat until I could actually taste the lump like acid.

Those commercials are intended to elicit a false nostalgia to make one wistful. Ostensibly we could catch a glimpse of the former simpler time by buying some over-sweet juice mix. I saw that purpose behind the scene played out. I knew what they were doing with that lens fuzziness and sad music. Still, it just made me sad. Really really sad.

If you asked me why I was upset I would say, “It’s Sunday afternoon. That commercial just makes me think of Sunday afternoon.”

I don’t know that anyone in the commercials explicitly says that the long angle sunlight porch sitting is taking place on Sunday, but in my heart I knew it must be true. It just felt like a Sunday, knowing that this moment couldn’t last, that everything was about to change. And not simply any Sunday – end of the summer Sunday, Sunday just before school starts.

This is what Country Time was doing: Making me face the end of potentiality. To confront the idea of perfection with the reality of what actually is.

If you’re thinking, “What are you talking about?” let me put it this way:

Friday afternoon has always been a symbol of everything in life that is possible. On Friday afternoon in high school, one could feel the tangible finish of a long week’s work. One had earned the right for mystery and intrigue of the weekend. Friday night held the possibility of infinity potential energy. In those intervening days before Monday morning, I might create an amazing piece of artwork, I might get far ahead on my studies, I might go on an adventure with friends that I would never forget. I dreamed about Fridays because I loved the idea of standing at the precipice. It was the blank canvas about to be brushed with the very first stroke of paint.

On Friday evening ANYTHING was possible and in a strange way, imagining all that potential it almost seemed like ALL of them might be achievable. I didn’t really even need to do any thing, I just liked the idea that I could.

Sunday is the opposite of Friday. Friday is the promise of perfection. Sunday is always a let down. Sunday is the time when you look back at the weekend and compare what has happened to what might have been. It’s a bit of an impossible demand on Sunday to live up to all those Friday maybes, but I did it nonetheless. It was a rare Sunday afternoon that I took stock of the rehearsal, family outing, or friend hang out that I’d taken part in and found it to be as big and full as the mirage that Friday had dangled in front of me.

Sunday afternoon is especially desperate. Unlike the evening when one has finally acquiesced to buckling down and working on through to next Friday, Sunday afternoon one can’t quite let go of the weekend. It is like the last ravioli in what was once a beautifully full bowl of delicious pasta. There’s so little left of what you once had, and once you take this last bite, it’s all over. Sunday afternoon still leaves me staring at a pile of work left undone, knowing that it must be finished in the next few hours, and resenting it for jailing the last remaining freedom that the weekend holds.

That Country Time commercial made me cry because I felt that is said this: Life ahead is a promise of infinite potential. Life lived is an unsatisfying catalogue of the actual work that one has gotten down and done. It made me confront my mortality. It made me feel small. It made me imagine that I could do many things, but I couldn’t do all of them, and I probably would do many of them imperfectly.

As a product of German and Scandinavian heritage, one thing that both of my ancestors share is a drive to work hard and be productive. There are few aspects of a Midwestern upbringing that I can specifically point to as an obvious influence on my art making, but this one I know:

I need to feel like I’m making progress.

I need to believe that hard work will make me better.

I want to have done a job to the best of my ability. I want to feel that I have made good use of my time and that I’ve been productive. In friendship, in artistic work, in love, I want to be moving forward. And to move forward with progress one needs to believe their best work is still in front of them.

But is it? Is the best yet to come? Or am I sitting on a porch with grandpa?

I know that sounds melodramatic. But I do think that my most radical notions, my most openness to truly new ways of thinking feel like they are harder to hold onto as I age. I fight it. Hard. I consider and weigh these questions often and to me it is the way I make sure I am still doing the hard work. But some days it just feels like the potential energy of my earliest questions about theater are slowly dissipating with time. It feels like I need another height to lift it up to.

It feels like I need another Friday.

Is that a new art form entirely? Is it throwing away most of what I know about how I do things? Is it picking up a new canvas so that I have to start over?

I don’t know. But I want it.

I want it badly.

Criticism

One of the things that I really love about Philadelphia is the supportive nature of the community. We are, by and large, a city that prizes community over competition. I’ve had people who’ve taught me to write grants, given me tips on where to find cheap equipment, loaned me costumes, offered me innumerable rides, donated space, the list goes on and on and on. Lest we forget, there are a lot of places that aren’t like that. There are a lot of artist communities where the initial instinct is to undercut each other to get oneself ahead.

This is Philly’s superpower.

Sometimes, though, it also feels a bit like our kryptonite.

In our instinct to be kind and supportive, is it possible that we are sometimes TOO nice? Too nice in a way that isn’t actually genuine. If we aren’t willing to receive and encourage useful and productive critique, do we doom ourselves to a community-wide creative dialogue about our work that is surface level only?

There is a right and a wrong way to offer constructive observation. We’ve all had experiences with a peer or critic who speaks or writes about our work in a reductive way that focuses on a tiny issue or comes from a personal perspective that doesn’t take into account the project’s overall aim or discourse. We all have been there when a particularly nasty something comes out and seems to be there simply to wound.

On the other hand, I also find an unspoken pressure to always have a cheery, unequivocal rave response to anything I see. I feel the need to do it. And I feel it from people I see after my shows, this plastic face people put on with a giant smile and that horrid, omnipresent phrase: “Great job! Congratulations!”

When I was in college I took the simplest directing class in the world. We got an assignment and then once each week presented the work we’d been doing to the other classmates, their respective casts and the professor. It became our artist community. We learned how to talk about what the piece was trying to do, how we all felt it was doing on that front, what frustrations and exhilarations the process was offering and any other observations that might be useful.

There were times some pieces got more laughs. There were times some pieces made us cry. There were times when the work seemed super hot and others when it was stuck in the mud. Everyone’s stuff went through highs and lows and over time, you learned that one week’s success was nothing to get too boastful about because a few weeks later you were bound to be feeling lost in the artistic forest. But that openness of dialogue meant that I always felt like I was getting a real beat on what kind of responses my theater was provoking. I loved that chance to really talk and share what I was doing with people that would watch with keen eyes and interested minds.

Even after I finished that track of courses, it felt like those that I’d shared the experience with were still able to hold on to that sense of interest and honesty as we moved into new projects. I liked coming out of a show and having them ask questions about what the piece was trying to tackle and having a genuine conversation about when it was (and wasn’t) doing what I’d set out to do. In many cases, the opinions were wildly different, which was SO incredibly useful. People picked up things that I hadn’t intended or missed giant swaths of stuff that I thought were obvious.

I’ve found myself every once in a while back in a situation like this – in my voice training programme for Roy Hart, in the LAB fellowship, in a small circle of directors that make similar work – but it feels notably absent in the majority of interactions I have with other artists in Philly. More so than in other places I’ve lived and worked in. Am I alone in thinking this? I don’t think so.

Again, I think it comes from being, on the whole, a small supportive community. But like many small supportive communities, we have to be careful about gentleness to a point of over-protectiveness. I think this impulse is worrisome not only because it gives us a false sense of how our work lands with people, but because it encourages us to think about our work as “good” or “bad.” If we make complex work, that has lots of layers, especially from scratch, it’s likely that it will be neither of those things. Or it will be both. It will be “it.”

If I see a raucous comedy show and I come out with my sides in pain from laughing so hard, is that the same “good” as an emotionally turbulent sweeping drama about genocide that leaves me numb and raw at the same time? Of course not. But I do what everyone does when they see people after a show, “You were great, congrats.” Or “Congrats! What a great play.” Or “Great job. Congrats.”

At this point, the congrats/great is so ubiquitous as to be an empty gesture. It had become so devoid of meaning that I used to see any sign of anything other than complete and total positivity to be a mask for hatred or disgust. Which was crazy making. So I’ve pretty much stopped listening to comments post-show. I assume they don’t mean anything and that the comments that people have that will mean something aren’t going to be said to me. Which is too bad. Because I think I could probably use them more than whoever else they’re going to be said to. But it feels like there’s not a lot of space to hear real responses.

Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Like we’re all some kind of “congrats/great” artist lemmings constantly running up to friends, “congrats/great” hugging them and running away to leave them to receive the next “congrats/great” in a giant “congrats/great” receiving line.

When someone says that to you, does it mean anything? Especially when you know a play isn’t simply “great,” (maybe it’s complicated, in-progress, raw, beautiful, heart rending, personal, silly, unfinished, whatever) when it’s something that is more complex that just “great” does that “congrats” mean anything? Wouldn’t you rather that same person just walked up to you and said “I was here for you” or “I am so happy I got to see what you made.” Because, really isn’t that what you’re trying to say?

Regardless of how “good” or “bad” the thing that the person made was, you’re coming up to them because you’re saying “I support you in this crazy endeavor. I know that you, like me want to make something that moves your fellow human beings in some way. And you did it! You threw your heart and sweat into this thing and now it’s been put out in front of all these people. And I was here! I saw it and now I’m seeing you and more than anything I want you to know that I am proud of you.”

At least that’s me. After a show, when I see my artistic peers, that’s what I want to hear. Not that you loved it or hated it, but that you came and you saw the work that I did and likely you know what it took to do what I just did.

I can understand if you’re in a place where you don’t trust people, where you feel like they might undercut, where their motives aren’t in your best interest, you might not want someone’s advice or response. But this is a town where I feel like respect and trust are pretty flush. And you are a bunch folks whose real opinions I’d want to hear. Because I doubt that what I make is only great or terrible. It’s a lot of things, many of which I probably don’t even know.

I am here to learn. Most things I make are in progress. And all of them are still conversation as they enter into performance. I wish there was a way to let people know that it was ok to be however they are after seeing the thing I made – happy, sad, confused, alienated, indifferent, or pensive – and that they have permission to express that being in whatever way they can, without worrying about whether it’s great. Without needing to give me congrats. Seeing them is great congratulation enough.

Next time after a show just walk up to me and say, “No lemming?”

And then I’ll say “No lemming.”

And then you can say whatever you want.

Jealousy.

Some people have all the luck

I will admit it. It’s really hard sometimes to be happy for your artistic peers. There are times when someone you know well gets a job, or some big funding, a fellowship and you just think to yourself, “Damnit. I am just as good as them. This is not fucking fair.”

There are times when I hear about people’s successes and my first instinct is to figure out how I could get a hold of the same opportunity. There are also times I despair at the seeming lack of luck, a random set of factors that make their stuff trendy and my stuff totally prohibited from some desirable professional stepping stone: I don’t do straight plays, I don’t have an MFA, I’m not great with Shakespeare, I don’t act, I’m not part of an ensemble, whatever. It’s harder, not easier, the closer the people are to you to stay happy for them. With a partner in the same field, you know a lot about what those successes mean and how much you’d like them. And it’s hard not to let that ambition and desire to get your own work made not tarnish what the other achieves. It’s hard with anyone close to you not to calcify that feeling into anger or resentment.

We have to resist impulses to wound each other. There will always be factors that change what kind of opportunities are presented to you. You can lament a lack of trust funds or degree in accounting. You can get pissed you’re an introvert and that social networking will never come easy. You can justifiably be mad that your niche of artistic interest has few roads to success, that your particular skill set isn’t popular right now, that your look isn’t what’s sought after. What you’re upset about is almost always totally valid. You are probably assessing the situation completely correctly. There is a naturally logical frustration in seeing the system you take part in unfairly benefit some, especially when it feels random or unmerited.

But you still have to cut that shit out.

There’s a mantra I learned from a mentor. Repeat it to yourself whenever you feel this feeling: “Other artist’s successes are good for me.”

You have to say it. And you have to keep saying it until you believe it. Because there’s no other sane way to live.

My fellow artist spouse has a fable his father used to tell him:

A man owns a farm and his prize mare runs away. His neighbors tell him what a shame, how terrible to lose the horse. He says, “Who says it’s terrible?”

Three days later the horse returns and following her are two massive wild stallions that the man has now acquired. The same friends stop by and say “How lucky! What a wonderful thing to have happened.” The farmer says, “Who says it’s wonderful?”

Two days later the farmer’s son is riding one of the stallions and is flung off. He breaks many bones and is told by doctors he will have to be in bed for months. His neighbors stop by and express their condolences, “How sad, how awful, we’re so sorry this happened.” The farmer, of course replies, “Who says it’s something to be sorry about?”

The following day, the country’s major general rides into town and declares that he must enlist all the able bodied men. The farmer’s son is spared.

This could go on and on.

The point is that, like the fable, we just don’t know how one thing leads to another. Not working on a project might lead you to having free time in which you conceive of the deepest work you’ve ever created. Or allow someone to approach you for something else you didn’t know you were in the running to be a part of. Not getting a grant might mean that you are forced to take the time to develop something more and ultimately make something far stronger. Maybe someone getting the thing you wanted puts a fire under your ass that you’ve needed for a long time.

Creators have dropped out of my works because they’ve gotten better offers. I’ve privately wept, tears from my face, because I was so attached to the vision of the piece with them in it. But that’s not the reality I was going to live in. So I kept saying it, until I could finally start to mean it. “Their successes are good for me too.” I don’t yet know why or how, but they must benefit me in some way as well.

I remember the first time I ever read over a grant proposal for a friend who was applying in direct competition with me. I kept thinking, “Am I an idiot? What if they get it and I don’t because I helped showcase their work better?” And I just had to believe that if that did happen I’d be ok with it. And that helping them out was worth it because I wanted their work to be better. The same way mine had gotten better because of others who had helped me.

There are lots of ways in the long run that it’s going to be better for you, for everyone if someone else kills it. They report back about whether things are worth doing. They give advice about how to get the same opportunity. They introduce you to the people they’ve met. They talk up your work. They connect presenters or bring important people into town. They raise up our entire community’s visibility. None of this can happen unless we’re all on board with looking out for each other.

Sometimes it’s not your piece of the pie. Just wait for the next one.