Fear

I realize now that back when I started college in 2003, I was filled with fear. Up to that point I had rarely made below a B in school and I was very concerned about letting my parents down. My dad had this reward system set up where if I got all A’s he would bring me out to dinner to celebrate and praise me. But if I got just one B, I would get, “That’s okay, you’ll do better next time.” It instilled in me this ridiculous need for perfection. I felt like if I couldn’t be perfect, I wasn’t worth anything. Mind you, it wasn’t my father’s fault that I felt that way. It’s not like he told me I was a failure or threatened me in any way for not being perfect, but I would only get praise and attention for perfection. And once I got to college I was overwhelmed with how much more work and self-discipline was required to reach that perfection. I was ill-equipped. I decided it was too hard and that if I couldn’t get all A’s then I wasn’t even going to try. After a few semesters and a plummeting GPA, I left school before I failed out. I started working full time and forgot about trying to reach any specific goal. I lived in this funk of self-doubt for a while, afraid to take a single step forward.

         It wasn’t until a few years later that I had reached a point in my life where I just couldn’t live without being challenged anymore. As a result of living on my own and travelling abroad for a while I had gained a great deal of self confidence and initiative. That’s when I set my sights on coming back to school and being an active participant in my future. I decided I would make a real effort to get into the art department on films. I love to be a part of the creative process and ultimately wanted to be either an Art Director or even Production Designer. And that’s when those familiar fears started to creep back in. I realize now that I still have an amazing amount of fear about not living up to expectations and failing in everyone else’s eyes. I have fear that I have no talent, no creativity, and that soon everyone else will know too. I’m a fraud and I have no business being here. It doesn’t help either that I’ve made a name for myself as someone very analytical and logical. Someone who is good at non-creative tasks like scheduling and organizing. I get approached much more often to be a stage manager or producer than I do to be a set or production designer. Even this is no one else’s fault but my own because I gravitate towards these jobs due to my fear. I have every confidence in the world that I can schedule and organize any show/film that you hand to me because there is a logical progression of steps. And how I do my job can objectively be judged as good or bad. But when asked to design for a production I shrink back into my self-doubt. Will I be able to come up with any ideas? Will they even like anything I do come up with? What if no one understands my concept?

For example, I’m the assistant set designer for “Carrie” and I feel like I won’t do the show justice. My skill level is too low, I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m just way out of my league. The difference at this point in my life is that I push past my fears. If I’m scared to do something, that’s exactly why I want to do it. I’m just taking each task one little step, one little bit at a time until I get through it. And I’m way too stubborn to quit. I interpret each new challenge as life throwing down the gauntlet and daring me to compete. Well, game on.

A Girl and her Anger

In my experience, it’s never a good idea to simply swallow things back and not get mad. When that happens, all you do is compound the anger and end up exploding at some later point over something relatively small. I’ve experienced it a lot with friends. The most frustrating of these situations is when there is a simple misunderstanding. Sometimes I’m even conscious of the fact that they may have misunderstood something I’ve done or said but now they are being cold to me and won’t talk about it. I’ll ask “What’s wrong?” and they invariably answer with the ever frustrating “Nothing.” They think they are making things easy for themselves, or even for me, because they don’t want confrontation. But all they’re doing is creating resentment in our friendship that’s eventually going to bubble to the surface and ruin our relationship.

Personally, I deal with anger in a different way. First of all, I’m not generally someone who is quick to anger. I understand that people have multiple ways of communicating and going about doing things that have nothing to do with me, so it doesn’t usually upset me. However, when I do get angry I give myself enough time to calm down about the situation before I can rationally discuss it. I use that time to look at situations from multiple perspectives so that I can put myself in the other person’s shoes. I think that most of the time, it is simply a misunderstanding because in my experience typically people don’t do things to intentionally insult or hurt someone.

The most important moment in shaping my relationship with anger was an experience with my best friend from high school. Notice the use of “was”. We are no longer friends. We were very good friends throughout all of junior high and high school. Unfortunately, our senior year she had to move back to Texas with her family because of her dad’s job. She was never an overly social person and it took her a very long time to meet people and make friends. For this reason, she began to resent me because when we would talk on the phone I would mention things I was doing or people I was hanging out with while she had nothing going on in her own life. I wouldn’t learn this until much later. She was angry with me for seemingly moving on so easily from our friendship and having so much going on in my life. This wasn’t true. I still very much wanted to stay friends, but I wasn’t going to lock myself away in a room just because she wasn’t there. So naturally it took me completely by surprise when one day she went off on me, spewing so much bile about how much she despised me and wished she’d never met me. What!? “What the hell did I do to you all the way in Texas?” I wondered. Years later she apologized, finally admitting that it was her own insecurities that created this rift. But it was too late to repair our relationship. I would never again be able to trust that she would be totally honest with me about her feelings. I fully believe that if we did try to fix things, she would have continued to quietly harbor resentments toward me because that was her personality. And then she’d just explode much later on to continue the cycle. This experience was a defining moment in my life. It was at that point that I decided that I would never again be able to be close with anyone who bottles up toxic anger instead of expressing it. Gradually I started “cleaning house” to rid myself of these sorts of toxic relationships and it has made a very positive impact on my life.