Career as Devotion?
Autumn has arrived in Glasgow. The air has a bit of a chill to it and the leaves are falling. We’ve had thick-grey-cloud-layer days and lots of rain marking the shifting of the seasons.
I bought a massive 1L pumpkin scented candle and a black cat mug and am ready to watch Dracula when it’s out, and all of the spooky seasonal films at the cinema and at home.
I’m going through my newsletter notes of the past 2 weeks and am finding a dream I had about a war between Germany and the UK. In the war zone, I was trying to walk on the UK side of the street because I’d lived here for so long, I thought that I belonged in both places, but they reacted very strongly to me and told me to walk on the German side. I remember trying to argue with them and a confused look on their faces about where to put me. It was surreal as dreams are. I ended up in hiding, meeting other people who weren’t safe in any place either, living underground.
That morning, I got up and drank some water and prepared coffee while brushing my teeth and went back to bed with my coffee and muffins that I had baked the previous day, and I had a call with a dear friend of mine, which was the best medicine.
What a year it’s been so far. So much hatred is being spread and people physically attacked, and in the middle of it we try to live our private lives, and build something for ourselves, for people around us.
Autumn blues. While I’ve been excited for crisp mornings and wearing cozy sweaters, there’s such a pressure to get all the stuff done that hasn’t yet gotten done this year. There’s a sadness about how fast this year has already passed by.
My focus has been on building a professional acting career, applying to jobs, auditioning (rarely), getting new headshots, planning my next moves, keeping the day job after lots of back and forth about it.
It can be joyless. This is a profession of rejection. And I recently saw an Insta reel where a woman was excitedly advocating for rejection. She talked about learning from it, that it’s a marker of putting yourself out there. As if a certain number of rejections would guarantee a breakthrough. Perhaps it’s what we need to believe.
In one of the talks at the GFF industry panel this year, a producer mentioned her friend who had moved from sales into producing. In sales this friend learnt that for every 100 no’s there will be a yes. That mentality was extremely helpful in producing, looking at the no’s in a positive way, like breadcrumbs leading to the gingerbread house.
Sometimes I’m too cynical.
I finished Angel last week, the spin-off series of Buffy, and (spoiler alert!) the end wasn’t very satisfying to say the least. But the message was a good one. While he loses all hope for his own future, he keeps on fighting. Why? Because that’s just what he does. What would be the alternative, to give up?
And this is the mindset for the cynic in me, for the one that loses hope. That even without hope the show must go on.
So when the hope of a breakthrough seems too far to reach, it’s good to know that either way, I just must go on.
And why all this cynical glumness?
Maybe sometimes we run out of hope, out of inspiration, out of fire. And the only thing we have left is to keep going.
This is the kind of year it’s been for me. At a Spotlight talk about how to present yourself to the industry, someone asked how to present yourself when you don’t have a track record of impressive work behind you. The woman replied that being new to the industry, but excited and fresh is also very attractive, that people love this energy.
Cynical me thought, great, I don’t have either of those things. I feel like I’ve been at the edge of this industry for so long that I have no excitement left, but I also don’t have the impressive credentials of someone who has been ‘in the industry’. Basically I’m scr*wed.
But what am I gonna do, give up on myself? No, no, no.
I’ve been working on a music video, and by working I mean sitting, staring at the blank page and complaining about being blocked and uninspired.
With the shoot date coming closer, I finally had a realisation last week.
I was focusing on the pretty pictures.
I was concerned with how to make something pretty and impressive.
And what I forgot is turning inwards and figuring out what I actually want to say, what is important to me.
And absurdly in the same way I’d looked at my career and forgot my art, what I actually wanted to make.
They’re so interwoven. A career means resources to make art, and yet to get there you need to make outstanding art somehow, rogue, Herzog-style.
When you’re making something, you find things unexpectedly, the project starts shaping itself. That’s the magic of it. It’ll turn out differently to what you expected. Sometimes, during a shoot, the sun will break through the clouds and give you the most amazing light. You just couldn’t have made it up, or planned for it.
This is the joy of actually making something. And it’s been so long that I’d forgotten.
Applying for funding, pitching something, making it appealing to someone, making yourself appeal to the industry. All of that stuff is pretty pictures, none of it is creative.
It’s easy to get lost in that. It’s easy to focus on the lack of things, the absence of funding and opportunity. The thing that makes it worth it is when we do get to create.
Sometimes it’s like trying to squeeze juice out of a very dry lemon, and sometimes it’s a flood of ideas, making us try to type faster than we can to try and keep up with them.
I saw an interview with Rick Rubin where he says that art is a devotional practice.
You don’t get to control the outcome. He says to not put any energy into the part you can’t control, but to focus on making and simply make the best thing you can make.
The best thing you can make will always be a product of the moment. We have to make them and let go.
I’m gonna finish this with a quote from Megalopolis, which I finally managed to watch: ‘When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.’
// Siris
Hard truth...