Embrace Your Weird

by Felicia Day

  If we were to list everything about our lives that we’d love to change but haven’t, from “the rug in my bathroom” to “working out ever” to “what do I do about rain forest deforestation, I can’t stop crying,” I’m sure we’d each come up with a very long list. (The rain forest thing is what keeps me awake at night. They’re the lungs of the Earth, ya’ll! Why do we keep cutting them down for coffee tables?) The “fun” fact is that our brains constantly keep track of this “I can’t do it” list. That’s why, during a sleepless night, I’ll suddenly remember that I haven’t ever finished that screenplay about my college experiences, which I started FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. Our mind sees all, worries about all. And by carrying around a long list that we feel we can do NOTHING about… well, no wonder we feel stagnant and powerless! In the face of ALL OF IT looming over us ALL THE TIME, it’s easier to curl up into a ball and binge-watch something terrible but soothing, like five seasons of Master Chef: Kids. (Which is actually not terrible, it’s FABULOUS and just thinking about it makes me want to give a random child holding a plate of pasta a hug.)

  We have to give ourselves the confidence that we can, indeed, change things in our lives. Big and small. And the simplest way to do that is to exercise the power we already possess in order to build up trust with ourselves that we can deliver.

  My acting teacher, Iris Klein, has a quote that resonates with me every time I think about not replacing an empty toilet paper roll in the bathroom. “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” (I always end up replacing the toilet paper roll. Even in public stalls. Basically, I’m Mother Teresa.) I love the idea that if we exert power over small things in our lives, we can develop a reflex of exerting power in all the other areas where we may feel stuck.

  * * *

  List the ways you feel powerless in your life right now. Ways as big as your entire career, as small as replacing a broken light bulb in your closet. List until you can’t list anymore. Then go further! (If you worry about it, chances are you feel powerless about it.)

  Now circle ones you can do something about immediately. Go do one small one right now!

  How does it feel? Amazing, right? Now try another. And another. This is just the start of feeling powerful enough to tackle ANYTHING that’s holding us frozen! BOOYAH!

  * * *

  A nice way to start practicing being powerful is in the privacy of our own homes. Take a tour to identify physical areas or objects that make you feel powerless. Performing this mental “sniff test” is a wonderful way to help purge things that are psychologically weighing us down. If we’re constantly surrounded by disarray and chaos, hemmed in by objects that we endure rather than embrace, it’s a signal to our brains that we don’t have power to change things. BUT WE DO! We’re powerful, creative beings and we deserve organized sock drawers! Yes, I’m saying there’s a link between our worn-out socks and our writing the next Great American Novel! Just go with it! Worst-case scenario, we won’t grab those annoying socks (the ones with the hole in the big toe) that we keep meaning to replace anymore. Win-win!

  Our surroundings are a reflection of our states of mind. So look for opportunities to excite the eye. Because our eyes are connected to our brains. And excited brains feel powerful and spark imaginations! Personally, nothing is more satisfying, and fuels my creativity afterward more, than throwing out all my bras that droop open at the top like a gaping fish’s mouth. If something doesn’t make my brain buzz, why keep it? My grandma won’t know I threw that vase out, she’s dead! (Sorry, Grandma.) Sure, it sounds dorky, but exercising this kind of power in mundane ways can help us feel, deep in our bones, that we have power over our creativity too.

  * * *

  Walk through your home and make sure every object passes the mental “sniff test” of activating your enthusiasm. Does any object feel like it weighs you down? That you’ve kept it out of guilt? You hate it but “one day you might need it”?

  Take a box and put all those items in it. Then put it away in a closet. Out of sight.

  If, after a month, you don’t miss any of it… donate it. You didn’t need it. You deserve to have power over your world!

  * * *

  Clean out your closet. Purge anything you haven’t worn in a year. Anything that has a bad memory. Anything that doesn’t make you feel powerful and confident.

  Even if you’re left with a much smaller wardrobe, how do you feel when you look in your closet NOW versus BEFORE?

  Now put on an outfit you usually reserve for looking good for OTHER PEOPLE and wear it only for yourself. Does it feel self-indulgent? All right. But don’t you deserve your best too?

  * * *

  Take a room in your house and change five things about it. You don’t need to spend money. Just move a painting in or out of a room. Move a couch from one wall to the next. Clear a bookshelf and put a vase and a picture on it instead.

  Make those changes, then sit down in the room and look around. Does it feel different? Does your brain feel more engaged and excited, seeing something you’re so familiar with in a different way?

  Take a picture of anything you tweaked to preserve it—as proof that you ALWAYS have the power to take control over your life.

  * * *

  Once we are able to assert our power over the immediate world around us, we can move toward exorcising our feeling of powerlessness within the world at large. It’s easy to feel guilty when exercising our own agency butts up against someone else’s needs. (Yes, I typed “butts.” If you giggled, five points.) BUT RESIST THESE EMOTIONS AND DIG IN! If you don’t want to go to your friend’s cousin’s wedding and would like to stay home reading romance novels about broody Highlanders instead, DO IT! We have a right to control our bodies and minds! THEY’RE OURS! WHY DO WE GIVE THEM AWAY SO EASILY? AND WHY AM I YELLING?

  When other people ask things of us, something that helps disengage our autopilot of powerlessness is to automatically say:

  “I’LL HAVE TO GET BACK TO YOU.” Magic words!

  Especially on the phone, this has helped me immensely. When I can’t see faces, I used to just say “Yes!” to whatever someone was trying to get me to do. I have SO many magazine subscriptions, ya’ll. I literally had Cat Fancy for three years before I finally unsubscribed because a woman named Pam cold-called me and was really persuasive. So be bold and put the world on pause when confronted with choices about what to do with your own body and mind. We have the right to FREEZE, have a cookie, and ask ourselves, “Which of these choices makes me feel most powerful and protects me more? Okay, let’s go with that one. Also, let’s have another cookie.”

  Be judicious. Stand strong. But don’t be a selfish jerk. I mean, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and go to your boyfriend’s mom’s house for dinner. Or not. (You’ll definitely have to go occasionally. Sorry.)

  * * *

  For the next week, if someone asks you to do something, automatically make yourself respond, “I’ll have to get back to you.” Take time to decide how best to answer for YOURSELF and not for others.

  Then list what you did differently than you might have below.

  Look at the list. How did exercising your power make you feel? Like a superstar? Great! Now keep doing it!

  * * *

  Don’t worry if this proves difficult at first—being powerful takes practice. (Just like being powerless took a lifetime of practice to perfect!) We shouldn’t feel bad when we revert to old patterns of behavior. If we can’t get a six-pack overnight, why would we be able to get a deep-seated sense of emotional power quickly? Duh! This is a PROCESS! It took years for me to realize that I did NOT have to buy the same dish soap as my mom used to. And that I could BLOCK anyone I didn’t like on social media, even for spurious reasons! Confederate flag emoji in your Twitter handle? See ya, dickweed! Every tiny step we take to assert our power will be accompanied by inner resistance. But where we persist, we succeed.

  It’s difficult to create. And that can make us feel… *ding ding* HELPLE
SS! But when we start small and figure out how to approach our creative goals in an empowering way, we can start to do the work. And find the strength to keep it up. Approaching big ideas—like filming a whole movie on our iPhone, or learning to speak Dothraki, or solving the problem of world hunger—can morph from pipe dream to possibility when we demonstrate to ourselves in big ways and small, “Yes! I can be powerful! Let’s flex those muscles and start to make this thing happen!”

  * * *

  Pick one huge item in the world that you feel completely powerless over. Politics. Poverty. Injustice. Brainstorm ten different ways you could take action to tackle your feeling of helplessness around this issue.

  Whether you act on this or not, you have demonstrated that you, indeed, have the power to impact something larger than you ever thought you could tackle. ANY amount of action is enough to prove that you CAN make a difference!

  * * *

  Download Snap’s “I’ve Got the Power” and just play it on a loop as you write the title over and over again for the duration of the song.

  Just kidding. Except do it anyway. You WILL feel more powerful.

  And groovy too.

  * * *

  When we demonstrate to ourselves that we have agency over own lives in small ways, I guarantee that exerting power over bigger things in our lives seems less intimidating. We can feel safe and in good hands—our own.

  Anxiety

  Hey, you know what’s awesome?! Feeling like we’re drowning in the panicked emotions of our own out-of-control body after the slightest stressful encounter with the outside world! It’s SO fun to lie in bed afterward, sleepless and sweating, as we brood over what happened, positive that a ton of people now despise us! SUCH A FAN OF THIS STATE OF BEING!

  Not.

  Real talk. Anxiety is the great enemy of my life. My Sauron. (Scratch that. Make it my White Witch. At least she had some fashion sense.) It has silenced my voice in so many ways, and sabotaged my dreams over and over again. At a certain point, I assumed, Oh, I’m just broken! At least I know myself now! and I surrendered to the fact that I would never be able to represent my creative work in public as well as I’m able to in the privacy of my own home. (Guys, I sing Boston’s “More than a Feeling” so well in the shower, you can’t EVEN.) In part, I am writing this book to tell you: I was wrong to give up on myself. There is always hope. There is always a solution. And there is NEVER a good reason to give up on YOU.

  Awkward group hug.

  Like powerlessness, anxiety is a larger umbrella issue that can encompass way more of our lives than just creativity. But it’s able to encompass ALL aspects of our creativity. What a douche of an overachiever, right? It can attack us at the beginning, middle, or end of the creative process. Prevent us from starting. Cause crippling doubt in the middle that makes us want to abandon ship. And strike us with terror after we finish as we think, What I made is so very very terrible. It’s an underlying cause of a lot of the issues discussed later in the book. Have a creative block? Anxiety is DEFINITELY behind it somewhere, ten layers deep, lurking in a fancy conference room, wearing a very expensive suit, muhahahaing its little heart out. It’s like the Illuminati of Enemies! Why does it torment us this way?

  In order to be creative, we need vivid imaginations—to imagine the impossible, to invent new ways of seeing the world. The flip side of it is that when we’re anxious, we’re able to use that creativity to imagine all the BAD things that could happen too! Yay! Every bad consequence, terrible rejection, and awful outcome. The more creative we are, the more awful fodder we can come up with to trigger our anxiousness. Awesome/awful, right?

  Ironically, the fear that anxiety activates in our brains is also its fuel too. “Oh no. My anxiety is here. I’m afraid. Crap, that just made me more anxious. Which made me more afraid. HELP! I’m caught in a recursive tornado of feelings that I’ll never escape and there’s nothing I can do about it! TOTO! TOTO!”

  The truth is, there are plenty of things we can do about anxiety. We just have to figure out what works for us, individually. And everyone can start with the knowledge that…

  It’s easy to accept anxiety as a part of who we are instead of separate from ourselves. I did for a long time. “My name is Felicia. I start to hyperventilate every time I’m in large crowds. It’s just part of my adorable quirkiness!” Nope. We need to believe firmly and state with a slightly badass edge: “Anxiety is wholly separate from who I am! We are not together. Not dating. Not even hooking up. End of story!”

  The “believing anxiety is part of who we are” trap is one reason we’ve spent so much time building a new, authentic Hero-Self. To establish a baseline of what we TRULY want and what we TRULY feel when we create. When we have a solid, authentic creative identity, we have a much better chance of separating ourselves from our anxiety when it pops up. “Why am I feeling this sense of doom as I try to write a sonnet to my parrot? This definitely doesn’t feel like it’s coming from my true Hero-Self!” It isn’t! Parrot sonnets are universally joyful! By making ourselves understand this fact, deep in our guts, we get on the road to extracting anxiety from our lives. (The fact that anxiety is not who we are, not that parrot sonnets are joyful.)

  * * *

  Think about a recent day when you were anxious. Approximate the number of minutes you were anxious.

  What percentage of that day did you ACTUALLY devote to anxiety?

  See? You are NOT your anxiety! It’s a teeny-tiny portion of your day. Just a blip you have to deal with occasionally. THAT YOU CAN OVERCOME! Rest assured: it is not YOU.

  * * *

  Write “I am not my anxiety” over and over below. As you do, visualize the link between you and this thing you thought was a part of you peel away.

  You are as separate from your anxiety as you are from your shadow.

  You may be linked to both, but only YOU are constant.

  * * *

  Before we start into specific techniques to deal with anxiety, let’s make ourselves super uncomfortable first. Ready?

  * * *

  Draw your face in the figure below. HUGGING your anxiety.

  Now look at it. Really take in the idea of embracing your anxiety. Go as far as saying out loud:

  “Thank you for existing, Anxiety. I am so glad I get to carry you around with me. I love you.”

  * * *

  Does the above exercise feel wrong? Strange? Uncomfortable because you’re in a coffee shop and it seems like you might be coming across as a crazy person to the people around you? Good! Discomfort is the start of something awesome! (See page 1 in “How to Use This Book.” See, I wrote all this stuff for a reason!)

  It’s probably difficult to embrace the idea of showing love to our anxiety. At first I thought it was repulsive, like eating a stranger’s used birthday cake. But treating anxiety with compassion can help us make this a solvable problem. It’s the universal lesson we learn from movies: if bad guys respond to the mere HINT of empathy, then they’re redeemable in the end. (If not, it’s fireball-to-the-face time for them!) Our anxiety IS redeemable, I promise. Because IT THINKS IT IS BEING HELPFUL.

  Every act of creativity is the brain equivalent of standing at the edge of a hundred-foot cliff and jumping into the unknown. It’s ultimately the BEST reward in life, but it also can be scary. And risky. Which invites anxiety to come and “do its thang!” It zings the “fight-or-flight” part of our brains to protect us, because we evolved to see unknown things as dangerous. Better to skedaddle than be eaten by a sabertooth tiger, right? It’s weird to think that “learning the trumpet” could equal “sabertooth tiger” in our brains. But it does!

  So try to be gentle with your anxiety balloon (and yourself). No one ever went to driving school after someone honked at them. “Gee, they’re right, I need to learn how to drive better!” No way. It’s middle-finger “Screw you, I’m right!” all the way. Same with our anxiety. If we throw negative emotions at it, our anxiety just tightens up and digs in. What we need
is to uncover how to loosen and extract anxiety from our lives, like the terrible parasite… I mean, uh, wonderful butterfly it is.

  I have studied so many techniques for dealing with anxiety. And I would try a hundred more. But the most effective techniques for me when I’m on the spot are the following six. (They go fast, promise!) And when I encounter a stressful situation, I mentally picture pulling out a die and rolling it to determine which of the techniques to use in the moment. Yes, I’m a nerd, if you didn’t get that on page one.

  Not all of these techniques will work for everyone. But one of them will work for someone, and that alone makes it worth including them all.

  When anxiety hits us, it’s hard to stop. Because it’s physiological. The actual insides of our bodies are activated in a different way than our normal states of being. Nerves are zinging, synapses firing. We can’t just stop on a dime! Not a good idea unless we’re playing that motorcycle video game called Trials and want to see our bodies fly off and flop around when we wreck in hilarious ways. (Like, ten of you got that reference.)