Slacking, and fear of moving forward
The past few weeks have not been filled with productivity. As I joked to a friend, if I’d known I was going to be this bad at responding to emails during the holiday I would have put up an “I’ll be back after New Years” auto-responder. Even today – my day for renewed productivity – saw me hit the snooze button from 10AM to 10:45, before finally turning my alarm off entirely and sleeping until almost 2PM. (In my defense, I had a really difficult time getting to sleep last night, but I’m still not proud of my four hour snooze fest.)
I’ve been trying to pin down the source of my laziness. The more I think about it, the more it feels like fear: Fear of failing, fear of being unable to continue this artistic and professional momentum, fear of success, fear of surgery (about which I’ll write more in another post), fear of dating, fear of not dating and being alone (about which I’ll write more in another post), fear, fear, fear. I know enough about myself to have realized that I go through these cycles of productivity and laziness (one could more generously call it productivity and personal renewal) so I’m not too worried. At the same time, I’ve missed some deadlines recently, been slow to respond to emails, generally not acted in the professional manner I’d like to.
I don’t know why those fears keep creeping up. I know from experience that good things happen when I get off my ass and work. I don’t know why I still worry that I’m going to put in all this energy and get nothing in return; it flies in the face of personal experience, especially over the last few years. But putting myself out there remains scary, and I still sometimes feel like I’m faking any success I might have. To use a concrete example, on New Years Eve someone I was chatting with asked me what I do. I replied, “I’m an artist and educator – I tour to theater festivals and colleges conducting educational workshops and performing solo pieces focusing on gender and sexuality.” That’s entirely true, but it felt fake and show-off-y when I said it.
Hopefully doing The Work will help lessen my my worries and hangups around it. I am excited about what the future brings, but also scared at its uncertainty. My hope is to enter 2013 thinking more about the former than the latter, and stepping up my artistic and productive game.
Here’s hoping!
Themocracy
there is a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (and I’d post a link but I’m too lazy to look for it) in which she describes her writing process; cutting to the chase, she says she was filled with thoughts of how her book wasn’t good and no one was going to read it, the entire time she was writing it (Eat Pray Love, one of my favorite books, and it’s also a movie which I haven’t seen)–and her point was to just CREATE through all the bullshit. So just ignore it and don’t take it personally; imagine that it’s not even about you, that it’s just some force out there that doesn’t want CREATION to happen. And I was just thinking of you today (I’m pretty sure it was because my daughter said she wished she had a penis and I was like…wait…maybe we can work something out…) –thinking that you have such a great niche, a unique experience that hardly anyone has ever had, and my unasked-for advice is to get personal, even more personal than you think you are getting (because I end up having questions, such as exactly what porn you were looking at in the laser-thing; doesn’t everyone else wonder that?) because within the personal is the Universal, the part that strikes a chord with people due to its honesty and human-ness. And what if you said that sentence a hundred times, till you felt zero fake and show-off-y…? Meanwhile I feel the same way: procrastinating everything possible and no good explanation for why.
I remember hearing that, either through TED or something on NPR, and I liked her take on the creative process. Thanks for the boost!