I’m sat in the glow of a sunny morning. These are the kinds of wintery (or dare I say spring…ly?!) mornings that I find most acceptable- when it’s sunny enough to enjoy being outside (without the danger of being pelted by flying bins). Isn’t it crazy how the weather can affect our mood? I feel like a football crowd when I’m opening the curtains- buzzing with anticipation. A rainy exodus and every atom in me collectively groan, a ray of sun and I’m all set.
How are you doing this week? It’s one of those questions that can often elude those that feel like they’re doing a million things at once- especially in creative work when there can be a pressure to take on everything.
This isn’t all bad- sometimes living like that can be rewarding and fun. Doing everything that interests and excites you- not only creative work but everything else in life too, going out, seeing friends, whatever. It’s no good to be scouring one’s psyche all the time for ‘how we really are’ and how to do better, be better. A lot of things will fall into place of their own accord if we let them- and failure is, really, the best way to learn. And yet as wonderful as a ‘fast forward’ feeling week can be- if packed with work you enjoy, time spent with others, and whatever else you count important- it’s strange how the single moment it takes to ask, ‘how are you?’ can slip between the cracks.
For me I find that if I dread the moment where everything slows down, it is time to do just that. This is something that anyone can only ever judge for themselves, because we all need different things. Awareness of one’s own ‘social battery’ or capacity is important especially when you spend a lot of your time working in tandem with other people. In the arts (right from an international scale to volunteering at local drama clubs) perhaps more than other areas of work, having one team member that doesn’t take care of themselves can be a disaster. Because working in the arts should feel like a joy and a privilege- it’s not like it’s ‘worth it for the money’ because usually that’s not why artists do what they do .
But it’s an over-simplification to say that just asking ‘how are you?’ does the whole job (unless that works for you). I think that it’s about building an awareness of one’s own self, your gut feeling, your instincts. Because at the end of the day, somewhere in us we all know what we need. Maybe not exactly what will make us happy, but at least the next step to work towards that. However small that step might be- listening to that ‘small voice’ even once makes a difference. All we can ever do is ‘work towards’ being happy. Even when we have times, even moments, of genuine happiness and satisfaction, it won’t stay. But that’s not a negative but a fact of life- forever moving and evolving even when we feel that we are stuck or still.
It's difficult to talk about connecting to one’s self without spinning off into realms that a lot of people find inaccessible. Some people find religion, or spirituality, but the truth is that everyone must find their own way of grounding themselves in their reality. Because everyone’s reality is different.
I think it’s such an important thing to focus on in the arts, because there can be so many people telling you what you should be or feel about what you have or experience. There is so much expectation about what ‘working in the arts’ is because we are given so many impressions of it from the media. We read about the lives of the rich and powerful, we are told that we should aspire to be like them, when anything you do could be creative in some way or other.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with aspiring to those things- wanting to appear on Vogue and getting prestigious awards. I just wonder, for those who haven’t taken the time to ask that question -how are you? Or even ‘is this what you really want?- how it ends up feeling when you get the things that you thought you wanted. For me, I worked and dreamed about going to drama school for a long time, and yet on the other side of it, now, I find so much value in trying my hand at a variety of artistic work. Not that focussing on acting won’t come back in my life, but that I find it most courageous for me at the moment to challenge the desire to be a straight actor, which I think for me could have been more to do with wanting to ‘succeed’ rather than something I actually wanted for me. Whatever your job is, or what you’re doing is (be it studying to be a teacher, or starting a new business) it should serve you rather than the notions that have been impressed upon you by everything external to you. In my opinion everything we do in life is a stepping stone connected to our values and what we want to leave behind when we’re gone. And so much of that we find through chaotic and messy times in life- so why not drop it all and study something different? Relearn, re-educate, challenge your internal biases.
In life we know when something feels wrong- you might be offered high-paid high-exposure role and feel the urge to decline, have a sinking feeling when you date someone. I think it’s so valuable to take the time to dissect that feeling -whether it be a self-destructive tendency, or on the other side of that, fear of doing something for ourselves. If we were able to follow our gut instincts, our life from the outside eye might look intimidating or overly/under-ly busy or weird or stupid, or any number of things. But I think that might just be a sure sign that we’re moving in the right direction. 'Looking after number one’ sounds like you're caring about no one else- but it makes it so much easier to do everything you want in life when you're not giving yourself a hard time.
Reference
I wrote this off the back of an amazing interview I had with Ngunan Adamu and Claire Bigley for our podcast 'Going Commando' that we've started amongst our Wicked Women cohort. It comes out on Tuesday, feel free to give it a listen :)
Also inspired by Jameela Jamil's iWeigh podcast this week which interviewed Mike Schur
Cover photo: Playing Polonius in Hamlet, with @meganroselowe and Rachel Halbrook. Directed by Judith McSpadden (@judemcspad). Photo credit to Jessica Wallace (@jlwjessica).