Dreaming of A Life in the Arts is Like a Bad Dating Pattern

In my dating days, I routinely projected all kinds of need- and wish-fulfilling things onto various women. It didn’t help dating. In fact, it often shot it in the foot.

Similarly, back in the day, I projected all kinds of need- and wish-fulfilling things onto “being an actor,” “being a filmmaker,” “being a theatre-maker,” or basically “being an artist.” And it did not help me create a single thing or advance my career.

Both romanticized ideals, of love and art, can be motivating in a raw sort of way. The desires to have “that” in my life got me up and working. But they did significantly more harm than good.

If you look forward dreamily to a vision of how wonderful your life will be once you “make it” in some way as an artist, quit it. It’s the very thing that’s stopping you from getting down to the real work.

A month ago, I officiated at a friend’s wedding. The following is part of what I said…

“But I’m still left with an abiding sense of humility in the face of the invitation to speak today. I want to say something like ‘I am in no position to give a homily about love.’ Not with authority. And that’s true. But it’s also true of all of us…a few saints and poets excepted. 

I have been joyfully thinking a lot about marriage and commitment and love of late. (Caught me at a good time.) And I’ve been looking at the fear that can come along with or may even be a part of marriage and commitment and love, in the way that it’s a part of those things that make us grow the most. I’ve come to some clarity on what love is not. I used to think that love – marriage love, the finding of a partner – was something that would happen to me. I would receive it, almost passively. Some gilded woman would enter my life and – merely by her presence – would fix all my problems, alleviate all my fears; she would make me whole.

[Hopefully a laugh]

I really thought this! Not always consciously, but somewhere very deep. And we’re all shown and taught images of this story of love – a love that takes no strength because it asks nothing of us; it takes no wisdom because it is so obviously cosmically correct that it annihilates all insecurity; a love that, in a sense, takes no commitment, because the commitment is forced by the universe.

So when I came to the cliff’s edge of my marriage-bound relationship, when I came to the point in our dating when it was time to commit – or not – I was painfully, really painfully, aware of my humanity. I still had problems! I hadn’t been made whole! The image in my mind was literally that I and we were standing at a cliff’s edge. The path of our relationship had been beautiful and wisely walked, but now I stood at that precipice. And I looked out into thick fog. I saw only a few inches down and a foot or so forward. So I did what any man would do. I stood there. Frozen. Waiting for the fog to clear. Figuring that, once it did, either there would be no actual drop – maybe a foot or two and that’s it – or the path would rise up to meet us. That, in some way, it – the future – would all become Certain.

But then I realized: our futures will always remain shrouded in fog. The cliff is a cliff. The question is not ‘who will make me whole and all things certain?’ The question is: ‘Whom do I want to leap with?’ It is a leap. And that takes guts. It takes strength, wisdom, and more. This is the commitment.”

This paradigm shift I’ve – thankfully – had about love in the past many months took me years longer than the one I was forced to have about my life as an actor and producer. But it's essentially the same shift.

Years ago, despite the fact that I was already making and acting in theater and film, I spent emotional energy looking forward to some gilded future in which I would “be” an artist in some way I deemed more legitimate. It wasn’t about accolades or praise, it was about a kind of peer recognition, a sense that “they” – or even “you,” since many of you readers are theatre- or filmmakers – would see me as “really” an actor and producer, and then I would feel…well, great, I suppose. Or, more apt, Certain…about my future, my identity, having made the right choices. Certain.

And, because I didn’t feel Certain, that implied to me that I wasn’t yet legitimately an artist. I knew I wasn’t perfectly gilded, so I figured I must not be ready to enter the perfectly gilded future I had dreamed of since I was a kid.

Except here's the thing: making art isn’t gilded. Just like real, beautiful, deep love, it’s sometimes messy. It makes you face parts of yourself you don’t like or, even scarier, don’t even recognize at all. It requires of you that you bring, explicitly, the non-gilded parts of you into the world and let ‘em all shine. It was only when I realized that just the normal old me doing normal old day-to-day work is all that art making ever is that I started to both do my best work and to see the right external success for it.

Just like standing at that cliff, the very belief that Certainty even matters got in the way more than anything else. Art making isn’t Certain. If you’re not doubting and sometimes afraid, you’re not reaching far enough. No matter how fancy the rooms you start to enter, there are always people in them that are less than brilliant. Nobody’s gilded. At best, we’re all just folks who work hard, most of us not hard enough, to make stuff. Some of the stuff turns out to be good, some of it turns out to be successful in the market, and some of it turns out to be both.

Or, as Charles Bukowski said better than I: air and light and time and space.