Fear Factor: Creativity Edition

I've been thinking a lot about the creative process right now, as I'm embarking on a new creative project. I'm not a stranger to the creative process, but, like giving birth or learning to ride a bicycle, I've forgotten how painful it is. Soul-crushingly, grit-in-your-eye, finger-trapped-in-a-door painful. Which makes me question why we do this to ourselves.

The source of the pain - for me anyways, I'll not assume my creative process is exactly like your creative process, though they're probably similar - is the fear of the unknown. It's not exactly like the fear of aliens - which actually does keep me up at night - but more specifically, it's the fear of not knowing.

We live in a culture that puts a high price on knowing things. Truth be told, that's how I make a living as a consultant. I'm very comfortable operating in my small sphere of expertise, and I enjoy my work very much. I get excited by projects, but I'm usually comfortable in my ability to bring what's needed to the work, and therefore, there's no fear. It's a nice, if stagnant and complacent, way to live.

Enter the creative project. That's all I'm calling it in my head and out loud to other people, because to be more specific about it - a novel - seems both pretentious and completely pedestrian. I know a million people (seems like it) who are all "working" on novels. I've been "working" on novels for nearly 15 years, and while I've got a few in my computer, they're all a) crap, b) unfinished, and c) did I mention crap?

So what makes this creative project different? For starters, I've given myself a deadline - actually, life, and my husband, have both presented me with a firm external deadline, and expectations for completion, neither of which I've had in the past. Secondly, I'm vastly expanding my pre-writing part of the process, which in the past consisted of vague-idea- to-story-start-to-getting-miserably-lost-in-the-middle, and this time involves figuring out just about every detail before I put pen to pixel.

Which brings me to the fear part of the equation. I'm launching myself outside of the definition of insanity for the first time, and am breaking my own patterns. Which (hopefully) will set me up for success. But that means embracing the fear. Fear because I'm operating in a space of not knowing. Which goes without saying is absolutely terrifying.

As an actor, I worked once with a wonderful director who would say, "It's ok to not know." And I would always respond with panic, because for me, it's never been ok to not know. I prided myself on knowing things. I was the kid who'd rip her own arm out of her shoulder socket to say to the teacher "Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!"

But here, in my euphemistic 'creative project,' I don't know any of the answers. I don't know if it's good, I don't know if I can do it, and frankly, while I now finally have a plot outline I'm happy with, I don't know any of the words I'll use to tell this story. And that's freaking me the hell out.

But the fun of the creative process, I think, is in the finding it out. It's going from the unknowing to the knowing. It's the process of discovery that keeps me up at night - in the best possible way. While not knowing is uncomfortable, that sudden moment, or sometimes that slogging towards the known is what creates the euphoria, the miracle of birth.

And every time a new idea is born, it asks another question. Which creates a process in a series of concentric circles. Just when you think you've got it figured out, it throws another question your way. Which is both the agony and ecstasy of creativity.

Embracing the unknown is hard. And it takes support and discipline. Support because ultimately I suspect most creatives are afraid of failure on some level, and I think a lot of us blossom with approval. Discipline, because it's much more fun to watch Netflix/clean the toilet/get a root canal than it is to walk right up to the unknown door, knock on it, and let yourself in.

But isn't that ultimately what we need to be happy in our lives? That's why travel, adventure, getting married, sky-diving, parenting, and creating are all so satisfying. It's embracing fear and overcoming it. It's going from a place of not knowing anything, to knowing something new.

And that's a pretty great way to live life, I think.

The Beauty Test

 I’m on the pier in Brighton. 1993. On summer holidays in England. I’m sixteen and I’ve been trapped in hotel rooms with my parents for the last three weeks. And we’re here in Brighton, and finally I’ve managed to escape my mother’s over-protection by begging for just “ten minutes to myself. Gahhh.” My mother, ever worried about the white slave trade, lets me walk by myself to the end of the pier, all the while, I’m sure, she’s vigilant for flashes of red hair and smothered screams and black gloved hands. Imaginations are genetic, and I got mine from her.

But I’m fine as I walk past buskers and artists and hawksters, and I reach a look out where I can watch the water and families on the rocky beach.

I’m buoyant because I’ve been cooped up with my parents for an interminable time and now I’m free, if only for ten minutes. And I’m pensive because I’m sixteen and feel like I’m not quite the person I ought to be. I have high expectations of myself, fueled by 90210 and John Waters movies. I need a boyfriend. I need to be wanted. I need to be beautiful and told that I am. Often.

And it’s with great irony I realize the song that’s underscoring my mood: that boppy, poppy song from the sixties, “You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful,” croons Johnny Burnette, “And you’re mine.” It’s the song that’s blasting over the loudspeakers, adding to the balloon animals and competing mimes on the pier to make the cloudy Brighton day feel like a carnival.

I smile to myself, feeling strangely connected through that song to the cosmos. Defined by it. Or rather it defines my place in the world at that exact moment. I am sixteen. I want to be beautiful. And I want someone to call me ‘theirs’. I want someone to be ‘mine’.

I’m sixteen. I know I’m not beautiful, but I secretly hope, long for the day, when I might be. There’s nothing wrong with my features exactly, and their arrangement is more or less ok. I spend hours gazing into the mirror, sucking in my cheeks to create a bone structure that isn’t there. I am perfecting my mirror face, the sucked-in cheeks, the pursed lips, the haughty brow-raise. It is the face I will be mocked for by my parents, my future friends and husband every time I put on lipstick in a mirror. But at sixteen, I study each feature with intensity, checking for flaws, crying over them when I find them, and secretly approving of certain details: my lips, my chin, my left eyebrow (but not my right).

I’m sixteen in the era of Cindy Crawford and Brooke Shields, Christie Brinkley and Julia Roberts. I grow up learning about the homogeneity of beauty. To be beautiful you must be enormously tall, blond or brunette with a great tan and perfect teeth. You must be leggy, and coltish and willowy, and all of the other words used to describe celebrities in the magazines I scour. Your eyes must be sparkling and dewy, your skin taught, your breasts perky, and your disposition sunny.

At sixteen, I’m none of these things. I’m barely five feet. I’m skinny. Not desirably thin. Just plain skinny. I have a weird high hip from scoliosis. My skin is whiter than white, my hair red, my eyes brown. I pretend that they’re hazel, because this sounds more interesting, but in reality, they are a dull, ordinary brown. I have terrible teeth with huge spaces between them, and just as my friends are starting to graduate from their braces, I will get mine in the fall when we return home from England.

But I secretly believe I might be beautiful somehow, someway, although no one has ever said anything to me about my looks to my face. My father says that I ‘look nice’ when I get dressed up, but he’s my dad and he’s supposed to say things like this. My mother is silent on the matter, except to tell me that my facial shape is oval, when I fear it might be round.

My friend Anna and I puzzle over which box to check when taking a Cosmo quiz. “Knockout”, “Attractive”, “Average”, “Homely”, “Dog-faced”. She looks at me appraisingly, as I do her, and we both generously settle on “Attractive”, and this is the most validation I get about my looks until I’m well past sixteen.

And at sixteen, I’m terrifyingly aware of the connection between being beautiful and being loved. It’s the beautiful girls at school who have boyfriends, the beautiful girls on 90210 who have excitement and romance, therefore, the absence of beauty and the absence of love are profoundly linked. Without one you can’t have the other. Ever.

And the absence of a boyfriend, right there on the pier, is proof that I’m not beautiful. Because I’m nobody’s “mine.” It is an ugly two-way logic that seems indubitably true to my sixteen-year-old brain. I stare out at the water, suddenly feeling quite depressed in my ten minutes of freedom.

I make a few decisions about life.

It’s important, I decide that day on the Brighton pier, that I be beautiful. My whole future life depends on it. The Johnny Burnette song is not just a pop ditty, reflecting the innocence of an earlier era. It is, for me on that pier, an equation of how the world is, how things work. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’re loved. A+B=C. Heaven forbid if I should ever be old - like, thirty – and not beautiful. How could I ever be loved?

I realize now, twenty years later, I’ve continually tested this theory. With each new man, I’ve tentatively exposed my penchant for lumpy pajamas, frizzy hair and no make-up. It’s like a challenge. I say, “Can you take it?” when I show up in sweats. I’m not just being comfy and me, I’m testing them, seeing if they can handle it when I’m red-faced from crying or puffy-eyed and baggy from staying up too late. It is largely unconscious on my part, when now, at thirty-six, I’ve spent nearly 15 years being reasonably confident in my looks, validated by both men and women, and by general satisfaction when I look in the mirror. But still I test.

For I recognize the power in being a beautiful girl.

It’s hard to move past the lesson from that simple pop song.