I watched Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion earlier today. It’s a movie that really touches a nerve. Because at it’s heart it’s a movie about being good enough, about impressing people. If I’m being honest that is something that weighs on my mind a lot and dictates a lot of my actions. I want to impress people. Infact I find myself avoiding people – even people I really like – if I feel like I haven’t done anything impressive recently, and have nothing to report to them. I saw my old high school year advisor in an office supplies store last week. I should’ve talked to her, but I didn’t. I was worried that my response to the inevitable “What have you been doing?” question would be frankly uninspiring.

In the movie, the lesson is ultimately to be yourself. Everything blows up in their faces as Romy and Michele pretend to be successful business women (having invented Post-It Notes, no less). When their facade is removed, they decide to be themselves. They decide to confront the people who made them miserable. The whole social dynamic has changed. And everything works out happily-ever-after in true Hollywood style…

I’m not sure things will necessarily work out as well for you and I if we embrace our true selves. (Though it would be nice if some old high school colleague, now a millionaire, was romantically pining for me.) But it really speaks to the energy – mental, physical, emotional – that goes into keeping up appearances and constantly evaluating yourself from the vantage points of others.

I probably would’ve gone to my ten year high school reunion had I been able to impress people. And again you sort of have to wonder what the drive is to want to impress people you don’t even like…

I guess people are always casting expectations upon us. Sometimes we shake them off, sometimes we internalise them. We want to prove to others – but especially to ourselves – that the unkind aspersions are indeed untrue. Our concept of self can be a little murky. We might not be certain that it is untrue. We hope it is untrue. Our ego wants to demonstrate for all and sundry that is untrue. But what if (gasp) it isn’t…?

That doubt can make us crazy, and that doubt can be used to leavage us by unscrupulous people. Remember Romy and Michele didn’t look foolish being themselves, they only looked foolish when they felt so inadequate that they misrepresented themselves and were shown to be untrue.

A lot of ‘stuff’ is attached to social standing, to popularity. What does it ‘mean’ to be popular? What does it mean if you aren’t, or weren’t? What does that say about you? Of course it could mean anything you want it to mean. And it some ways it doesn’t matter what it means, or what you decide it means. It doesn’t have to have an obvious conclusion. It just has to introduce enough doubt to make you crazy. It just has to make you doubt your likability just that little bit.

So maybe it isn’t about proving them wrong. Perhaps it’s about affirming for yourself that you’re a worthwhile human being. It’s not that their opinion is particularly important, it’s just that that’s the origin of the doubt you’re trying to reconcile.

Farewell NaNoWriMo, though I hardly knew ye. I wrote some 7,356 words in the first week and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the month. And not because ‘real life’ came between me and my lofty writing ambitions. This is an excuse a lot of people will cite and I imagine for most of them that is quite true. For me NaNoWriMo set off some horrible internal battle. It was horrendous.

I can write this.
(Sure you can.)
No, really. Just 2000 words a day. It’ll be fine.
(Then what happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday?)
It doesn’t have to be ‘good.’ It just has to ‘be.’
(Then why aren’t you ‘doing’ it?)
Maybe I can’t do this.
(Of course you can’t do this! You were a fool to think you could.)
But random annoying happy 14 year olds are doing this and ‘winning…’
(Ahem. Yes…)
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’m not sure I like writing. Infact I think I might hate it. Maybe I’m not cut out for this? Maybe I don’t have the right to refer to myself as a ‘writer’ or even an ‘artist.’ Hmmm.

NaNoWriMo was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. I’m not creating anything. For the most part I don’t want to. I’ve come to hate and resent the world. There’s no joy to be had here. It’s all about “harm minimisation.” I read Julia Cameron’s books (The Artist’s Way, Walking In This World) and think, “Wow! This woman gets it.” I find her words soothing and comforting. Unfortunately at times I am so comforted in those moments that I relax and don’t do anything any more. I don’t do the exercises, I don’t do the art, I don’t do ‘the work.’ I don’t even show up. But one of the things she talks about is having a self to express, about being somebody. Cultivating experiences. Filling the artistic well so you have things to draw upon when you address the page, stage or canvas.

I think I need to do that more. Actually get out and do things, experience some sort of life, develop a self worth expressing. I see myself too much from other people’s vantage points. I need to say what I want more. I need to be more honest with people. I need to dream more and do more. But I hate dreaming. Dreaming is the first stop towards disappointment. But what is life without dreaming? It’s pretty sucky. Perhaps more sucky than this dreaming and failing. I certainly don’t feel like I have much to lose. So, wonderful. Let’s keep the expectations low. That will help. Probably.

I am traveling interstate over New Years Eve. There’s this other world waiting for me somewhere else. I don’t know what exactly. Infact I’m quite wary of it. My inner control freak is alive and well, and wants to endure experiences it can manage carefully. And actually it’s quite foolish because there is so much outside of my control. Sometimes you’ve just got to go along for the ride. But I’ve never done that. I micromanage my environment as an adult because I had to micromanage it as a kid. I feel foolish when I take chances and things don’t work out. I feel foolish when I tell someone how much I care about them and their response is unenthusiastic. I tell myself each and everytime that the chance was worth taking and that the action was noble, but I don’t really ‘feel’ it. That’s the theory of it, but the reality of it is much closer to “Well I’m never doing that again.”

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I don’t know very much… and that’s okay, hopefully.

Dr. Jane Turner speaking recently on Radio National’s Encounter program:

Certainly there’s been quite a lot of work about the ages of children and how they cope, and also after bereavement. There are loosely three stages that cover the issues: so the first stage is up to about 8 years of age, and up to about 8, children believe in magic. We give them a birthday cake; we put candles on and tell them to blow out the candles and make a wish, you know, we’re encouraging them to believe if they want something and wish for it, they can make it happen.

Now the corollary of that is young children don’t believe things happen by accident. So if something bad happens, it’s their fault. It’s because they bit their sister or they were naughty or they played outside when they shouldn’t have. They are also very fearful. They’re the centre of the universe, you know, the moon comes out at night to give them pleasure. And if bad events don’t happen by accident, they become very fearful that if one parent is ill, maybe the other parent would be ill. Who will be there to look after them?

The whole episode, Give Sorrow Words: Cancer and Communication, is deeply moving, both sad and strikingly beautiful, and I highly recommend you check it out. But this one particular section of the program stood out. Infact it provided a lot of clarity, and a lot of developmental concern. I realised on some level that I hadn’t grown out of this belief, that in a real sense I do tend to assume if something goes wrong that I am being punished. Still. Even now as a twenty-something… If the car breaks down, if the feedback is crummy, if the relationship implodes, I ask myself, “Why me?!” Not merely in the spirit of frustration, but with a genuine expectation that there is a reason, that there is a cause for this effect.

[ad#adsense250]This is surely why I am so preoccupied with ideas of predestination versus free will. I can’t make a compelling case for predestination on the page – I really can’t, but it still dominates so much of my worldview. It just seems that life is a confusing combination of things I can control and things I can’t control, things that can be reproduced and things that cannot. The planet is subject to natural laws and seasons, there is a certain ebb and flow to all kinds of thing, a sense of order. And when things are going well it can be deeply comforting to think there is some rhyme or reason to it all, some force steering things. Of course, as Dr. Turner notes, what is comforting during the good times can be perplexing, even devastating, in the bad.

It doesn’t help though that sometimes things happen that seem so profoundly unlikely as to be laughable. The kinds of ‘series of events’ you would include in your novel except that nobody would believe them, even though they happened. Strange impulses to go to places you wouldn’t normally go to and do things that you wouldn’t normally do. I find when I take these impulses, inexplicable things happen. (Like the time I felt this strong impulse to go to a cafe I never went to because I felt awkward and out-of-place with their regular clientile; I didn’t have time to look at the sandwich board before I heard ‘John!’ and an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year appeared. The perplexing part isn’t the encounter, so much as the feeling that preceded it. I could’ve easily invented a meaning after a chance meeting, but that the feeling came first, the feeling inspired the action. The action was severely out of character.)

I feel as though I am deeply rooted within my creative work. I usually have to work at the things I produce. I have an understanding of my own sense of ‘voice’ and personal conventions. But there have been times when work seems to have originated from outside of me, things that I would re-read and go, “Huh? I wrote that?” Things that I would scribble down onto pieces of scrap paper feverishly as if I was performing some sort of impromptu personal exorcism. I have had a third party evaluate one such piece and he suggested that it was a metaphor for a part of my life. He went on to suggest that perhaps the trauma associated with the experience prompted my subconscious mind to ‘cloak’ the output. I can’t dismiss this theory, but still I wonder…

Most of the creative materials I encounter encourage belief in some sort of external factor or force. This can be as abstract as the idea of ‘inspiration’ or as scientific as the untapped power of the subconscious mind. It can be associated with religious ideas, belief in a God (“the great creator”) in a literal sense, as in the case of Julia Cameron’s work. Elizabeth Gilbert proposes a similar idea, not because she believes it is necessarily true that there are paranormal ‘muses’ but for more practical purposes. She explains that this helps artists disassociate from their work, when the work is bad they can’t take all the blame and when it’s good they can’t take all the credit. This keeps us grounded in process rather than fixated on product. It is interesting that here we are citing paranormal forces to shield us from fear and hubris. We’re still expected to believe in magic, this time as adults, but to derive a different meaning from it.

That’s probably the chestnut here. Believe in whatever won’t drive you crazy; believe in whatever works (even if it isn’t technically true, or can’t be proven). Embrace the placebo effect if it results in your symptoms vanishing.