Motivation

Seven hours

I have an aunt and uncle who are professional artists.

I have vivid memories of being a little kid and having sleepovers at their house. Almost all of those sleepovers included a trip downstairs out of their living space and into the studios they owned in the same building. Walking through those two adjacent rooms, seemingly filled to the brim with potential and possibility, I can still feel the part of my younger self that looked around in amazement and thought: “Woah. This is what ART with a capital A looks like.”

In this room we created beautiful things that I was genuinely proud of. Miniature paper dolls of myself and my sister that we dressed in wild and colorful handmade clothing. Bottles covered in extra bits of mosaic tiles that we designed, glued and grouted ourselves. Bas-relief clay carvings that we snuck our initials into that went into a real life public sculpture park on Chicago’s Navy Pier.

Surrounded by the incredible sculptures of my uncle’s nestled on every flat cabinet top or file drawer I developed a sense of how artists lived. Amidst the wall-sized design plans for my aunt’s next mural, I found myself thinking, “This is the kind of life I want to lead someday.” Art was never a distant concept to me, it was something that one moved through and existed within. It was a place one created for themselves. I sensed that there would be a time when I too had a room full of potential-ness that I would go to every day and create new and exciting things.

This was my idea of how art worked: You were inspired and you spent time playing and laughing and creating something would cherish for years to come.

My aunt, I now see as an adult, is also a serious academic and a leader in the national discourse on art education. My uncle not “just” a creator but the executive director at a leading public art non-profit. They are both deep thinkers about the way that art works integrate with the community they exist within. They are leaders in their fields. In so many ways I see them as I see many of the people in my own artistic niche that are a generation ahead of me: They are the people who have made the communities that I (and those like me) became part of. I thank them for it. I appreciate their immense efforts.

But…You knew (you had to know) a “but” was coming.

The thing is, when I was a little kid and I talked to my aunt and uncle about making art, all we talked about were colors and shapes and beauty and feelings and making. When I started seriously making work as a teenager and early adult we talked about ideas and influences and impulses. Now as a “career” artist roughly a decade into my work, almost all we ever talk about is professional development and money.

I wonder in retrospect what those two rooms was like when I wasn’t there. I wonder how often the spirit of freedom and play that I felt so strongly was still present when I wasn’t around.

Let me back up for a second.

I know this isn’t news to anyone. I know that it isn’t even a new topic to this particular blog forum. But it’s still the thing that continues to confuse and bewilder me.

How the hell do I keep the art in my artistic career?

I remember a few years ago this guy from NYFA, a nationally recognized fiscal sponsor organization, came to Philly and offered free one on one coaching sessions. I signed up and was encouraged to bring in questions that I wanted professional advice on. I think that what I was supposed to ask where things about taxes and health insurance. I think that’s what this guy was prepared to help with.

But I know that I can look up more info on that kind of stuff. By that point, I felt confident that if a business type problem arose I was capable of solving it. Not that it’s always easy, but at least it’s usually pretty concrete. There’s information listed on the internet about these things. Effort-full, yes, but in someways blessedly defined. And the truth was, I already had no shortage of the “business” side of stuff to do.

What I really needed guidance on what the panicky feeling that I got when I looked at the amount of time I spent actually making the work. Especially compared to the amount of time I was spending doing all the other stuff it seemed the work required. It was to the point where there were days that I sort of wondered if I even knew what making the work was any more.

What I asked this guy was, “How do I stop my administrator brain from ruining everything? How do I keep enough hours of artistry in my theatrical business?”

He looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean, how do you make sure you have time for your studio work? Uh… I mean… Just do it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not understanding what you need help with. Scheduling? You could set up a calendar…”

The total unhelpfulness of his answer blew me back a little bit. I wanted to yell at him and say, “Really, buddy?! You have no idea what it feels like to have the business side of art start to eat up everything that you used to devote to creating? You’re telling me that it’s just as easy to find the energy to make stuff as you used to? The answer to how do I keep motivated is ‘Just do it.’ If so, I guess I’m just crazy then.”

Apparently, this guy had a similar experience with a whole bunch of Philly artists that day.

And then a really really tense info session following that.

It’s about as close as I’ve seen collected Philadelphia creators come close to a mob riot.

This past weekend during a round of auditions for The Tempest, even under the stress of time, I was struck with the sensation of how much fun it was to spend time with these actors and these scenes. When I made myself relax a little and stop worrying about auditioning “right” and really just have fun looking at possibility, I started to see how the play could become so many interesting variations on itself. I started to love the different versions of the characters people created and started to note all the little additions and interpretations they brought. I wrote down dozens of ideas that struck me or lines that could potentially open up in new ways I hadn’t imagined.

At one point it struck me that I was actually thinking artistically. It struck me how much I was enjoying myself and how long it had been since I felt that.

And then I went home and wrote a bunch of emails following up on 1099 tax forms, looked at the grant plan I created last week, thought about how behind I am on sending info about another set of auditions coming up, about prepping for 3 separate presenter meetings, the new class I need to promote so I have a teaching gig next term, the grading I need to do for the class I’m teaching now…

The list goes on.

With it out in front of me, I see that all the things on my “artistic” to do list are not art. Following up on funding, seeking new sources of income, thinking about how to use a new intern effectively, laying out budgets and schedules, even when I have figured out how to pay myself for the admin time, even when I’m diligent about not letting these thoughts infect the rehearsal room when I finally get there, I still find myself overwhelmed by a lack of time I have for the work itself.

We artists are constantly bombarded with “career” advice about updating websites, polishing work samples, cleaning up mission statements and promoting ourselves in the various medias social. There are so many lists I’ve made of people I ought to invite and promoste my work to. I think we all get a lot of professional development advice. And the people who tell us to do all these things aren’t wrong. These things are important.

But we need to remember that they are not the work. They are tools, useful ones, but they cannot be the focus. They are not the work. They are work. But they aren’t the work. They are effortful and time consuming and attention demanding. But they will only matter if you remember that your work is thing that creates the need for them and that they are extra and will be only useful if they support of that central core goal of art making.

It’s got to be a daily mantra. You have to keep reminding yourself. Your work is the work. And if the other stuff takes a few years more to get in gear because the work is still the work, well, maybe that’s fine. The other stuff will get there. There’s always time for that. The thing we most cannot afford is to lose touch with the thing that drives all the other things.

We have to make time for it.

The funny thing is that now, as an adult, I have a room in my house like the one I always imagined. I wake up many days with an open calendar and room to laugh and create and grow as I always imagined I would.

But I often don’t. Sometimes, I feel like I have forgotten what the room is for.

And when I think back to that guy from NYFA, misguided as he might have been, I think there was a weird kind of truth to his “calendar” statement. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately about how transformative it was for me to know that I had to commit the 60 to 90 (120, 180) minutes a day towards writing in this space. Now that I am not officially “required” to write something it is a choice each day whether to write anything. And I wonder if it isn’t time to actually require creativity every single day.

I wonder if it’s time to force myself to make a commitment to even just an hour every single day of some creative effort – researching, writing, sketching, conversing, whatever – that moves my theater work forward in the same systematic and “professional” way that the money and administration seems to require.

Maybe it is time to set up such a calendar.

So I think I’m starting with 7 hours. An hour a day. 7 hours every week that go into written form on my schedule in the same way meetings with producers and grant deadlines do. Because if it isn’t as solid as that meeting, how can it stand up?

Checking in

Two months ago it was Christmas. I was in a cabin and desperately trying to get in a bit of writing every day. One of those things was this post about some stuff I hoped I’d make happen in the coming year.

Well part of the idea of this writing as a public project was to make myself culpable, to make sure I had to tell people whether or not I was actually succeeding at the things I was hoping for. So here’s the list again and here’s where we are 2 months into the new year.

In 2013 I want to:

– Spend a few days making something with a person in Philly I’ve never worked with:

Mmm… Debatable. Since that time I have gotten myself into a new project with Shakespeare in Clark Park where I’ll likely work with a fair number of people I don’t know. But I don’t think that’s the spirit of the thing, so I’m giving myself a “No” on this one.

Amy Smith! I’m looking at you.

– Sing with a choir:

Nope. Anyone know of any?

– Work with a visual artist

Talked to a few. No formal collaborations yet.

– Make something for an audience of less than 10

This I actually HAVE made progress on. We’ll cross-file this under “Make a board game.” Watch for some first experiments coming in April.

– Look up a bunch of Norse mythology

A teeny tiny bit. Did you know there’s a Norse God named Ull who is Thor’s handsome stepson and presides over snowshoes?

– Make a piece that’s no longer than 5 minutes

Some planning in process. Four words: Johnny Showcase Youtube videos.

– Learn a lot about wine

No! And what’s up with that?

– Work with (in?) water

Not yet, but again, plans for the summer production.

– Play the piano

Yes! And I need to do more.

– Create something performed in another language

No and I totally forgot I even had this on here.

– Get onstage myself

Again, half credit. I’ve done this with Lefty Lucy Cabaret but since it’s something that I already have a history with, I don’t think it counts yet.

Amy, I’m looking at you again.

– Make a meal the central focus

Some small experiments with this during Swim Pony game night but I think there’s more to come.

– Work on a scene from a play I’m not producing, just because its fun

Not yet. Anyone have one they want to play around with?

– Read a lot about something I never got to take a class on in college

Been reading about the history of domesticity “Home” by Bill Bryson, highly recommend it. Not full credit though.

– Give myself permission to stop something in the middle

Does cleaning my house count? If not, then no.

– Take a dance class

Not yet. Dancers, where should I go?

– Contact a person I’d think would never respond and ask them for coffee

No. And I really should. I’m afraid of this one.

– Write something creative without a second author

I think I wrote this in a slightly masochistic fashion. The truth is, I think of the writing I do in this space as very creatively satisfying. It works the same muscle as anything I’ve ever written that wasn’t non-fictional. It’s pointedly without a second author. Did I mean it had to have a beginning middle and end? It need to be a play or novel? In any event, I think I’m pretty good on the writing front and I’m giving myself a yes here.

– Watch another person’s process

This one surprised me. I have talked a lot with others about their process but not had a chance to sit in and watch. Anyone have a rehearsal I can lurk around?

– Create a board game

Working on it! Some early explorations this spring, a few residency applications thrown to the wind and a lot of reading. I’m feelin’ this one.

All told if I add up some half credit for things I’m in the middle of doing or have made some significant progress on I’m giving myself 3.5 out of 20 items or 17%. Two months into the year is about 17% of the way through 2013.

Ok, ok. That’s somewhat on track. Let’s knock a few more of these out in the coming months…

It’s never what you think it is

Sticking with it: it’s where we separate real artists from the people who used to make art.

Because real art making is not about your amazing idea. It’s about not stopping. Real art making is about learning that ideas are only worth their executional salt. If you only dream it, if you never do it, you haven’t actually made anything.

And that’s as it should be, no? A cook who dares not near a stove can’t really claim his title. A swimmer who never hits the water doesn’t have much credibility. And plumbers are only made so by, well, plumbing things.

Do you feel despair, my dears, as I do between those long stretches of making anything? It’s because until you create again, you are just another person who used to make art. It’s because you can feel that impulse, that inertial force, that ease in which you just might stop and give up. Unless you’re making some art, you aren’t actually an artist.

And isn’t it just the bitterest of pills to swallow?

I look at the people younger than me and I want to ask them: How many of your fellow artistically minded graduates really hunkered down and decided to make a life in the arts? How many incredible creative compatriots decided to do something else? How sure are you that you’ll never give up?

I look at the people in my own age bracket and I want to yell: Think of all the people you’ve made work with in the last decade? How many of those people are still doing it? Isn’t that scary?! Aren’t you tired like me? Do you worry that you will keep going?

I look at the people a generation ahead of me that are still doing it and I want to inquire: How? How are you still here? Can you promise me it gets better? How did you make it work? Do you still worry about giving up?

In those times between being someone who used to make art and being an artist, how do you keep summoning up the energy and effort and love and vulnerability?

I don’t mean to say that if you aren’t cast in a show you don’t count. Art work is not limited to the opportunities that others afford us. Our work is so much more than the moment of performance in front of an audience. Our work is reading about the subject we want to create from. Our work is learning a new monologue or asking a friend to come and read our freshly written scene. Our work is discussing an idea and creating a plan of action. It’s searching out objects and finding inspirational images or writing 500 words a day to figure out what kind of stuff we actually want to make.

Our art is so much more than just an outcome. But it also must be more than just an idea.

The art in our mind – the play imagined, the painting visualized, the text to be written – is always perfect. And the actual work we make is always something short of that ideal. Ideas are not art. Art is when the wheel hits pavement and starts to generate friction. It’s when reality begins to pierce the perfection.

Want an ever bitterer pill?

Your good ideas and intentions simply won’t matter if they never get implemented.

Your beautiful dreams are of no substance if you do not hang out long enough to get them done.

There is a new push in teaching and child development to stop telling kids how smart they are and to instead praise how hard they work. Turns out that when someone is praised for being good at something, they are incentivized to keep this image of themselves intact. If you think you are smart, if you want to keep this idea of yourself intact, doesn’t it make sense that you won’t want to put yourself in a situation that would prove otherwise? And it turns out that when you tell children they are “smart” they are a lot less likely to try something beyond their current capacity to succeed. When you are afraid of failure, you play it safe.

What to do? Tell them they are good at working really hard. Teach them that they will get a lot from trying really hard. Tell them the amount of effort and work they put into something will reap an equivalent reward. The difference between being smart and working hard is that one is a state to maintain and the other is an action to perform. Which one do you think is more productive?

You young ‘ens, with your amazing and fancy new ideas! Oh! How can I express how much I know where you are? Your artistry is like clay in your hands. You feel its heft and weight and shape. You know you are capable of making it into whatever you need it to be. You are strong. You are artistic potential incarnate, if only you could just get started. You know you can make awesome things. You just don’t have the right tools yet to shape this beautiful raw material. You just haven’t been given the opportunity to present what you can do.

Forget that opportunity. It’s never coming. Just throw that clay on the floor and start making whatever you can in the best way you know how.

I spent a year out of school waiting for the moment to become the artist I knew myself to be. I worked for others and held my own ideas tight inside myself. I waited and waited for the right place to display myself, to unveil what I knew I had to say. In that waiting I kept thinking “Oh how surprised all of you will be when you see what I really am!” In that year that I waited and dreamed and hid myself I wasn’t just less than the artists I wanted to be, I just wasn’t an artist. And it took me realizing that I’d spent a year working in a coffee shop and a cheese store (and that this was NOT going to be the sum of my very expensive education) to realize I needed to stop waiting and start doing.

That play you’ve been half working on for the last six months? You know, the one that you’re already not that excited about? You know that essay you have been meaning to write but just can’t get into? That painting that’s already a little underwhelming?

All those works of art, the ones that feel like they are already imperfect and kind of one dimensional and boring and maybe I hate them and this isn’t the art I was really meant to make…

Go finish it.

Not because it’s going to be good. (It probably won’t be.) Go finish it because it teaches you how not to give up. Go finish it because it teaches you to soldier on in the face of your own limitations. Go finish it because it teaches you the value of “working hard” and not “being smart.” Go finish it because this kind of work is the lesson that will teach you the most about what it really means to succeed, which is not leaving the work undone and unfinished.

I defy you to show me any company that you love, any artist you admire, whose cannon does not include some seriously stupid and poorly executed crap. I look back at the things I’ve done and I cannot help but wince at over-long and flowery writing, at “dramatic” directing choices that now simply read as amateurish and scene work that I intended as intense but simply came off as inane. There are essays I have written in the course of this writing project that I seriously hate, but I published them anyway. And truth be told, the ones that I deemed most perfect are not the ones that have flown into people’s hearts. They are often the ones I might have sat on if I hadn’t forced myself to put it out there.

Folks a bit further on in your careers, correct me if I’m wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the need to succeed only gets worse. As you develop better taste, you’re that much more aware of the gulf between what you want and what you actually are.

But isn’t that better? Would you actually want to know that there is some pinnacle of artistic prowess and you’ve achieved it? That what there is to learn is something you’ve already gleaned?

Artists that survive are not the most brilliant or the most talented or the smartest. They are the ones who don’t let the idea of their work get in the way of the work they’re actually doing. They are the ones that do not look at failure as referendum on their worth. They look at process and see if they did they best that they could do. Artists who are successful are the ones that keep making art.

Here’s a hint: some of your work will suck. No matter what you do, some of those babies you bring into the world are big fat ugly stinkers. And even if they aren’t, even if they’re great, even when they’re earth-shatteringly groundbreaking, they’re likely never as good as they were in your head.

Let me repeat that for emphasis:

It’s never going to be as good as it was in your head.

We all might as well get used to it now.

(I’m looking at you.)

Stop making excuses. Stop waiting for the impulse to appear. Stop waiting until you are as capable of execution as your idea is worth.

Stop waiting. Start making.

PS: You folks who’ve been around the artistic block a few times, help some of us feel better. What’s the worst thing you ever made?

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.

Owning It

There’s a great quote that starts one of my favorite books about the artistic process – Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland – that goes like this:

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

– Gene Fowler

The book is a pretty straightforward and unsentimental view about art making. It talks about how much of your output will be ignored (“Virtually all artists spend some of their time – and some artists spend virtually all their time – producing work that no one much cares about”) and the various ways we set ourselves up for self-sabotage. What this book also says is that the only way to get better at making work is to make a lot of work. As they say, much of your output is there simply to “teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

I like the idea that when I make crap, it’s not just crap, but crap that builds a bridge towards something else that is not crap. Then at least the crap is useful. And I need that crap to feel useful. Why?

Because I live, work and create in a shame-based economy.

It might not seem like it from the outside, but if I’m really being truthful, most of what I do is to avoid the pain of looking like an idiot. That awesome rehearsal plan didn’t just spring happily from my mind. It took the spectral terror of being left with nothing substantive to say in front of the room to make it come into focus.

People have asked me why this writing project was something I wanted to make public. I might, if I’m being cagey, tell you that I sensed a lot of people were feeling the same way I was.

True. But not actually the truth.

I do appreciate the people who’ve responded to what I’ve written. And I love hearing from you all that these struggles are shared. But the real reason I am writing publically is to shame myself into getting my ass in gear to put words on (virtual) paper on a regular basis.

I do things like this when I know I need a kick in the ass. When I decided I had to leave my day job at NBOME, I wrote a post-it that I affixed to my computer with the date. I gave myself one year from that post it to get out of that job. And then I told everyone I knew about it.

Why? Because, like I said, I live work and create in a shame-based economy. I knew if I kept telling people about the post-it, people would remember to ask me about it. And when those people asked me about, that feeling that I might not get it together to find some other, more sanity inducing, way to make money would surface. I did get nervous that I would disappoint, and I figured out a way to make life happen without the work that was making me miserable. And 4 months before the post-it deadline I left.

If I know that someone will think less of me, if I think that someone will perceive me as failing, I work harder. It’s why I love structure and clear evaluative systems. It’s easy to know if you’re staying ahead of the curve if it’s clear what wrong looks like. I spent a lot of my education in high shame-potential situations. I committed to more than seemed possible. I tried things that I saw other people do a lot better than I did and then held myself to their standards. Once in a while I felt a little insane. I beat myself up about stuff a lot. I was also really productive and found myself doing things I never knew I was capable of.

You might say that this is unhealthy. You might be right. Heck for a really long time I felt a lot of shame about feeling so much shame. That’s how deep it goes.

So for a period of time after school I worked really hard to remove all the shame inducing motivators and gave myself huge swaths of freedom for my art to wander through. I stopped comparing myself to people who had more advantage or resource. I kept things a little closer to the chest so that stuff couldn’t be critiqued until I decided it was ready. I wanted to give my art room to blossom on it’s own, without that fear of failure looming over me.

And while I was in the middle of doing that I noticed something:

I wasn’t making or doing anything I cared about.

I had tried to force myself into a place where I acted as if I didn’t need to care or listen to that niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I didn’t do anything creative for a few days. I had convinced myself that the ambition and failure terror weren’t linked. And I was semi-successful for a little while. Until I looked at what a life without one of my biggest motivators actually left me. And that was something I wasn’t really all that excited about.

And then I started to feel bad about that.

Oh, old friends embarrassment and remorse, you’re back! How I missed you so.

I’ve come to terms with regret and shame as ways that I learn from my past mistakes. Just as the impulse to jump too deep into the pleasure pool can get one’s life off track, so similarly can overwhelming feelings of mortification cause one to block their creative selves. But no one sane advocates for the removal of all of life’s pleasures. So maybe we can leave a little room for the negative emotions, so long as they help us get where we’re going.

Thinking about this I recall a thing that I always tell my students when they first start working on their voice. I say that there is no such thing as a “bad” voice, only voices that do what you need them to, and voices that don’t. The voices they have were developed from a style and set of communication patterns that helped them, at some point, achieve something.

High pitched and squeaky? Maybe it helps you to sound small and cute.

Low and monotone? Perhaps you need to show the people around you that you have emotional control.

The point, as I tell them, is that these patterns emerge when doing these things a lot offers some kind of reward. It’s efficient. And there’s nothing wrong with a sound if it’s doing what you need it to. The pattern only becomes a problem, only gets called a bad habit, when you decide you want something and the voice you have gets in the way of doing that. When the natural voice you have developed is something you can no longer control the way you want to. Flexibility is the key.

Whether it works for you is what actually matters.

“Ugly” voices aren’t bad if they’re useful. I think “ugly” feelings can be viewed the same way. Some of my best work has come to me when I have felt my worst. Which is different than saying that I need to feel at my worst to get anything done. For as long as I can remember, shame has been a strong motivator. Sometimes towards good things and sometimes not.

So the question isn’t, “Can I remove shame from my life entirely?” because from what I’ve lived so far, the answer will be no. Instead:

How do I use and shape the natural impulses I can’t always control towards a healthy and productive life?

There’s another saying in the Art and Fear book that I really love:

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

– Stephen DeStaebler

I write this blog knowing that other eyes will see it.

Because I want to be culpable.

Because I want to be exposed.

Because I want to increase the pain of not working.

It’s already worked, clearly, because I’m still here.

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.

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.