Protecting myself from myself: Lessons in restraint and freedom from expectations
Listening to my internal punk alter ego, aka Juliette Lewis
I wake up in the middle of the night and it hits me: I need to build something new.
A new brand.
A new media company.
A new something. Anything.
And I immediately begin to feel my heart racing, my mind beginning to sift through ideas I’ve been cataloging in the dusty storage halls of my brain.
I make outlines, search for domain names, write down marketing ideas.
I spend about two weeks doing this, and not much else.
I get everything ready and then I hear an unfamiliar voice in my head say “What the FUCK are you doing?!”
“What?” I respond.
“I SAID, what the FUCK are you doing?!” It says again, loudly.
“What is your problem?” I ask it.
“YOU. You are the problem,” it responds. It sounds a bit like Juliette Lewis.
“ME?” I am very annoyed now.
“Yeah, you. You think that you need to do something else. Something BIGGER. BETTER than before,” she laughs, disdainfully. She’s a she now that she’s Juliette Lewis.
“Yeah, because I’m really good at what I do,” I reply firmly.
“Yes, you did a great job. WE did a great job. But we talked about this before… that we wouldn’t do it again,” she reminds me. I don’t remember talking to anyone else about this.
“Um… I’m pretty sure you weren’t around then,” I say.
“Yeah, I was totally there alongside you that whole time. I’m the reason you left,” she tells me. “I am also the reason you haven’t started anything else,” she says with some snark.
“Oh… ok. I see. You’re the anti-establishment anarchist,” I say, feeling smug. I have a vision of Juliette Lewis in a ragged Rage Against the Machine t-shirt giving someone the finger. I start to remember this part of me. The tie-dyed t-shirt, doc martens, pink hair, poem-writing, patchouli-loving, fuck “The Man,” Courtney Love obsessed, sad goth girl weirdo. Except now, she’s all grown up. She has life experience. Perspective.
“What do you want?” I demand.
“I’m here to stop you.”
“Stop me from what?” Again, I demanded.
“From trying to prove your worth through pointless performance metrics viewed through an internalized capitalistic lens,” she said, with seriousness. I found it so scripted I began to wonder how I invented such a stereotypical character. Am I trapped in some sort of post-girlboss feminist Instagram quote carousel?
“OK, but what if I still have things to say and yearn for connection and community and some of the wonderful things the Internet has to offer?”
She takes a deep breath, and does the kind of overemphatic eye-roll only Janeane Garofalo could pull off. Then she exhales dramatically.
“When you left your brand, we made a deal that you wouldn’t let anything else consume you to the point that you lost yourself again.”
I nodded and she continued, “These past two weeks, you stopped making art, sat on the couch after work with your laptop, and agonized over trying to force something out. And what have you even accomplished in that two weeks? Nothing. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not something you want to do. If you truly wanted it, you would have done it by now.”
I opened my mouth to speak but she cut me off:
“You don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t need to level up. Just because you had a previous success doesn’t mean you need to replicate it, or create something even bigger or better. No one is putting that pressure on you except yourself. Stop measuring yourself by society’s standards like financial success, or followers, or views or whatever. You can’t measure freedom, contentment, or time, and those are the only three things you should be focused on.”
Juliette has a point. I stop to ponder this for a moment.
“So, what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t create anything new?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Right now, you’re not creating anything anyway. You’re spinning your wheels trying to design something new that you can guarantee will be successful instead of doing something that you enjoy simply because you enjoy it. You’re mistaking anxiety for passion and excitement. Your reasons for creating are not pure—they’re all mixed up with expectations and productivity culture and internal pressures. Take some more time to be quiet.”
I slam my laptop shut and murmur under my breath, “What a bitch.”
Whew! RESONATES. I wrote/directed an indie series in this same vein — six "voices" in a writer's head come to life and try to talk her out of writing. My Juliette is named Edie. She wears alligator heels and smokes out of an opera length cigarette holder.
I find these voices hard to trust. Sometimes they're just being jerks. But also? Sometimes they're right. I, too, have been caught in the search engine trap for two weeks just to avoid edits on my screenplay. There's a wonderful recent episode on the Twelfth House podcast about the "bike shedding" effect and how focusing on the little tasks can sometimes be an unconscious strategy to avoid the bigger, more needle-moving tasks. I am guilty of this!
And I very much align with the stillness part of your creative process. My anxiety never wants me to be still. But I don't get any insights or intuition without letting up on the gas every now and then. Loved how you articulated all of this nuance. It's for real.
…I didn’t realize I’d been living with Juliette Lewis for a while, too…