The Ugly Part

A couple of weeks ago I got sick of myself.

I started to worry I wasn’t learning fast enough, that you were going to outgrow me, that I should go find someone else’s ideas and hand those to you instead. And all of this was happening at the same time I was watching other kinds of work operate at a speed I will never match and don’t want to. The kind that promises transformation by Friday. The kind that’s built on nothing. I was having my artistic winter uglies. And I was also having a rage attack at Demi Moore. Those two things were embarrassingly related.

Then I got an email from a longtime student writing to say he’d miss class. Almost in passing, he mentioned he’d gotten some scary news from his doctor, the kind where more answers are still coming, and the waiting is the hardest part. And in the middle of telling me this, he wanted me to know that what we’re doing in class is the thing helping him sit inside the uncertainty. That he feels safe inside the moment he’s in. He was teaching me something while carrying the scariest thing he’d ever been told. I thought about the impatience I’d been dragging around for two weeks and something clarified.

Here is what I know about the work:

It takes so long because your body has to feel safe. Not your brain, your body. There is no hack. First you have to stop abusing it. Then stop trying to figure it out. Then stop bossing it around. And then just ask: can we do this now? Because that door was bolted when you were seven and somebody made fun of you, and another one when you were eleven. It's a whole series of doors locked because you couldn’t face what someone else’s truth, reflected back at you, made you feel about yourself. You can have all of those moments back. But you have to update the file. And updating the file is monotonous and boring and hard and it requires feeling safe enough with yourself to hold this: nothing I learn about myself today is going to make me a fraud. Everything I learn about myself will give me more access to more of me. I have never once seen anyone open that door and find out they’re secretly a monster. The answer is never that. It’s always more.

If you’re safe enough with yourself that a note can actually land; not as “I’m a fraud, I failed” but as what it is, an invitation to embody something. You can collaborate. As long as you’re in emergency mode, every note sounds like a judgment of your value. You end up asking the director to manage your feelings instead of letting them help you tell the story. But when you’re safe? Everything becomes material.

The same muscle that makes the work good is the muscle that lets you sit with scary news and find safety inside the uncertainty anyway. That is the same exact thing. It’s not sexy. But what we’re building in here is something you actually get to keep.

I hope some part of this finds you. I’d love to see you in class.