Remain Anxious and Carry On
If you are on the performing side of the performing arts, you either have an upsettingly strong sense of self or a large, internal steel wall to use for compartmentalizing. If you are an anxious person in the performing arts, that wall had better be pretty strong, because it will not only have to handle the run-of-the-mill external criticism that is part of the industry (your appearance, your talent, your work product) alongside your internal critic which, let’s be honest, never takes a breath in the middle of the constant stream of rational and irrational criticism.
But there are therapists, thank heavens, and strategies. And my best strategy has always been KEEP BUSY. It’s not that the anxiety goes away, it just has a lot of company, which pulls my focus away from the spiral.
January is the season of Instagram pseudo-therapists (read: white ladies with the same hat and a lot of disposable income) extolling the virtues of REST. Follow the seasons. Be a turnip. I’m decently sure it’s because they’re finished showing you smug videos of their holiday decorations and there’s nothing to post about until Valentines’s Day when they split between “here’s bae” and “date yourself!”
What are you even on about, Colleen? Who knows. You’re welcome.
“I rediscovered all the unresolved questions I’d stashed on the shelves of my mind; all the doubts I’d previously tucked away. And once I’d pulled them out, I couldn’t readily tuck them back in. Nothing seemed to fit.” - Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry
I listen to a ton of audiobooks these days. Mostly autobiographies. Definitely read by the author. And as I was washing the dishes last night, Michelle Robinson Obama read these words into my ears as she was talking about the beginning of her pandemic experience. And I felt immediately in step. But for me, it’s not directly pandemic-related. Sort of.
As the world shut down for music, it opened up for flowers. Which meant more time in the dirt, more time in my head, more room to let the wall down and sift through what had been carefully placed on the shelves. Out of their constraints, some of those things shifted, morphed, or even grew, no longer fitting on the shelves that were built over nearly 47 years of life as an anxious person/an anxious person in the performing arts. Seams began to show themselves like precious metals in a mine. Truths. About how I want to spend my time, and with whom, doing what. But that’s a different blog post.
Productivity is a strategy and wielded thoughtfully, it keeps me in command of most of my circumstances. Rest is defined differently for each person. Turnips can be bitter. Ignore the influencers.
The internet wants to see winners. The algorithm rewards the before v. after. It needs a moral to every post about difficulty. Sometimes there isn’t a tidy moral. Sometimes, like the generations of my British (you heard me) ancestors, you just remain anxious and carry on.
