Rolling around in the back of a car once again, trying to get some thoughts to settle. The car is headed to Preston and, bizarrely (to me who has a limited knowledge of the geography around Liverpool) after pushing our way through football traffic and city life, the scenery has peeled back to reveal rolling hills, wreathed by misty golden light. The landscape seems to reflect the highs and lows I repeat to myself like a mantra, the days speeding away as quickly and easily of this Audi’s tyres (no, it’s not my car…although I suppose if it was I wouldn’t be typing).
Frankly I’m getting a little tired of it. Of course life has it’s highs and lows- our control over such things stretch only as far as our perceptions of such things. Maybe it’s simply something to accept as part of a career in the arts- a journey filled with potholes (may the road metaphors live on!)- or to bear as part and parcel of being in your twenties, perhaps. I saw a comedy sketch explaining that the lack of responsibility people in their twenties have is due to absolute incompetence and capacity to mess everything up. Both notions seem pretty accurate. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I think for me it’s my perception of how I’m doing that is the most exhausting. For though I fantasise about punting my phone out of a fifth story window every week, I spend a lot of time on it (doing god knows what) and whether I’m aware of it or not, it shapes a lot of my perception about life. It effects the way I put my schedule and my work together, too, with posts popping up all the time about how to maximise efficiency according to your sleep schedule. This content always seems to be disguised as ‘self-care’ when really it’s all about feeding our capitalist mindsets- maximise efficiency and work harder.
But this all creates so much mess. It becomes less about creating a life worth living, the career of your dreams (which might have been the original point of the information shared) and more about obsessively curating the illusion of success- trying to fool one’s own self. For me it’s a clear cycle- striving for perfection (down to a large glass of bloody lemony water in the mornings), doing well (which means I can tick the boxes in my nicely laid-out planner), failing, feeling terrible about it and often sabotaging my progress, before starting again.
I’m missing more of a consequence-driven satisfaction. If you manage to do that yoga or reading or healthy eating every day, how do you feel? Good? Excellent. And that’s your reward. There is a danger in expecting a different consequence than what you put the effort in for. Working towards something should be about putting in the same energy that you get out of it- be it in job satisfaction or whatever it is you’re working towards. I think things can often get confusing when this is all tangled with our emotions with things. I think this is especially tricky when you’re working in a career like the arts, where often you will be so passionate about the work you’re doing (or working towards doing at least) that the outcomes can become very attached to our egos. It becomes difficult to let go, just do the work and move on.
We’re all human- we’re going to feel emotion every day, whether we’re even aware of it or not. But that must be compartmentalised from work- like giving yourself a stern talking to that the work that the feedback for the project you’re doing shouldn’t have an impact on your self-worth. Be aware of how you feel about your work- it aids your instincts, might help you to avoid that which isn’t worth your time. It can help you develop insight and articulation. But when does having a million different ideas about what something is ever make space for things just to be as they are?
On the ‘How to Fail’ podcast, Andrew Scott talked about how growing up is about shedding the weight of things we’ve accrued along the way, and how that can be a relief- like one step closer to being as we were when we were born. I’d like to think that doing a career that you love can help you to do this- the things we love (whether career or not), can sometimes serve to untangle our heads, I think. It’s talked a lot about- this notion of having things that ‘hold us back’. I don’t know whether thinking about things like this is helpful. At drama school I was terrified of networking because I had a notion that I would create relationships that weren’t genuine. But I think by focussing on this aspect I struggled to move on from it. Whatever it is that we perceive to ‘hold us back’ from all those things we believe, we know, ourselves to be capable of, this focus on what we lack puts us in a mindset which I think is more damaging than the thing itself. If you tell yourself not to think of an elephant, chances are that you will- it follows that the more energy we put into the thoughts of things, the more energy the brain will put into that thing. It makes sense that if you’re worrying about something holding you back, your brain will subsequently hold you back- more. So don’t do that. So much easier said than done of course.
Forget not being negative (that’s a confusing sentence in any setting) and forget about perfect positivity because that doesn’t encapsulate the full spectrum of our experience either. Let’s work towards neutrality so we can focus on action and getting work done. I think being an artist can teach you a lot of self-awareness, because you have to be aware of how you are selling yourself and selling what you are doing. But once that self-analysis is done, it is perhaps even more important to learn how to let that go and get on with the day.
Whatever your lifestyle, it doesn’t seem healthy to always have so many highs and lows. But maybe it’s about perspective. Worrying less about what you’re doing seems to me to be a lot about worrying less about what other people think about what you’re doing. Maybe try being a version of yourself you’ve rejected for being too boring or lazy or loud- because maybe it’s exactly what you need.