Embrace Your Weird

by Felicia Day

  When blocked, why not create a daily “Trash” file to dump thoughts into before embarking on a bigger creative project? Write about fear. Write about cats. Anything goes! The words are just fuel to break down the wall between us and our inner Hero-Selves. Delete it afterward. It never happened.

  Is it a “waste of time” to write stuff we’ll throw away in the end? Well, time passes either way, so we can “waste time” being stuck, or “waste time” trying to get past it. I guarantee the time we spend procrastinating on our phones because we’re blocked by perfectionism will be much more than the time spent writing in a Trash file. Which act feels more empowering? I mean, taking out the Trash, obviously. Who DIDN’T want to drive a garbage truck as a kid?

  * * *

  Before embarking on whatever creative venture you want to practice, create a Trash file, whether a physical one in a journal or a virtual one on your computer. Take a set amount of time and write. Dump out your worries, thoughts, jokes, literally anything you can think of. Then turn back to your original goal.

  How do you feel after taking out the trash? Does it make you more eager to start working on bigger things?

  * * *

  Below is a stone wall. It’s what is keeping you from your creative goals. The only way to get through it is to heave everything you can at it until it crumbles and lets you through. Draw as much as you possibly can over the wall, write on it, weigh it down with every word you can think of. Write so much over the words you’ve already laid down that the wall turns inky and black from so many layers on layers. Once you have thrown everything you can on the wall, start drawing cracks in it. It is cracking! You are making it crumble! Your strength is incredible! BREAK THAT WALL!

  See? YOU HAVE THE POWER TO GET THROUGH ANY BLOCK BY DOING!

  * * *

  Make no mistake, creating is hard. It’s work. But the secret weapon here is that we can DO anything. The physicality of moving a pen on paper, programming games, or soldering giant metal robot sculptures is only limited by our own physical abilities. It’s the fear of our quality of work that most often stops us in our tracks. Learn to love the extra work that being FREE welcomes into our creative world!

  So, bye, perfectionism! Are we cured yet? Do we have all the tools to begin creating? Can I go to the bathroom now?

  Er, no. We still have to dig deeper. Because anything we’ve solved in the previous sections are just Band-Aids on one of the deepest and darkest of the issues that stymie our creativity. It’s time to get in the hole again.

  Dig.

  Dig.

  One more layer down.

  Dig.

  Ugh. We’re here. Gross.

  Fear of Failure

  Perfectionism, procrastination—these problems have their root in our fear of failure. (Each of which can then trigger anxiety. And powerlessness. See how they’re all a swirling vortex of connected awfulness? Our enemies are organized! They must have a Slack channel or something!) No one delays working on something creative because they’re confident it’s going to be great when they finally get around to it. Underneath the “Gee, this pantry organization is an emergency situation; writing that album of kids’ songs can come later!” is a pulsating fear of not being good enough. Of being mocked. Of having the end result we present to the world not be equal to what we visualize in our hearts and our dreams.

  Fear of failure is the strongest deterrent to becoming a creative person, so it’s time we tackled it head-on.

  * * *

  Fill in the details of the monster below. Embellish it with color. Markers. Tape. Smear chocolate on it. Whatever works to make it feel real and monstrous. (If I could make mine smell like brussels sprouts, I would.) This monster is the representation of our own deep-buried fear of failure.

  Look at it and say, “I forgive you for making me afraid. But I can’t let you control my creativity any longer.”

  We’re taking this monster down!

  * * *

  By making our fear of failure solid and real, even in silly colored-in monster form, we’re able to start confronting it. Because when we let our fear of failure operate in a generalized, amorphous way, there’s no way to combat it. It’s rock-solid now, so we can attack! Not with actual weapons, don’t be violent. With… LOGIC. In a few words: Spock it out!

  Assume your fear’s worst fear will come true. For example, start with, “My creativity is not good enough.” What then? Do we quit? Or continue? Well, quitting would make us sad and empty and unfulfilled. We can’t quit! Also, why else did we buy this book? So we will keep creating. Check.

  Then what? If we keep creating, we’ll get better. What if we don’t get better? Well, we can study. But what if that doesn’t work? Okay, suppose we’ll never get better. Do we stop? Yes or no? I don’t know! STOP SPOCKING ME! YOUR LOGIC IS REMOVING MY FEAR AND STUFF!

  See how the Flowchart of Fear undermines itself? (Worst ride at Disneyland ever!) Fear’s strongest weapon is the unknown. So no matter what, the question, “Then what?” can respond to our Fear’s attacks and match them. And we are able to demonstrate that we can survive anything. Yes, the battle may CHANGE us, but no matter what, we survive! (Gloria Gaynor was right. Disco has all the answers.)

  * * *

  List your greatest fear in the top left box. Now write what would happen if it came true in the box on the right. Keep following the boxes with the mental question, “What then?”

  Do you see how there is always a step afterward? You can cope with anything! No matter what happens, there is always a next step. Just. Keep. Stepping!

  * * *

  As any good gamer or actual warrior can tell you, the easiest way to defeat an enemy is to know their weaknesses. Ice monster? Use a fire axe. Superman? Use Kryptonite. (Wait, that makes us evil, scratch that.) If we’re able to attack a vulnerability, BAM! The magic sword is ours. We rescued the prince!

  So how do we identify our fear’s vulnerability? We give it a name. When we give something a name, it becomes tangible. And vulnerable.

  We’re afraid of failure, but each of us has a unique way that it’s activated around creativity. A while ago, I realized that I could describe my own fear of failure this way: “I am afraid that I will not be loved if I mess up.” When I hit upon that phrasing, it was like my whole life had been summarized in one sentence. “AHA! So that’s why… and then I did… and of COURSE that makes me… DUDE! Light bulb time!” With that, I was able to realize that when I enter situations that expose my creativity, I place my whole sense of self in other people’s hands. And if they don’t like it, I believe they won’t love me. NO one will love me. And I hand this power over to people I’ll probably never meet again.

  Let me repeat again: I constantly hand my heart over to strangers to batter however they wish, and I wonder why I’m constantly wounded all the time, and this makes me reluctant to create. GOOD WAY TO OPERATE? NOT REALLY!

  But when we identify the root of our fear of failure, then we can DO something about it. We can create a counterspell. (That’s a spell to counter another spell, just to explain that to any nonnerds reading this book.) Compose a sentence or phrase that gives us the power to cut off our fear before it can begin.

  Knowing I’m afraid of not being loved if I do something badly, I now prepare myself as I go into situations with the thought, “It’s okay, monster. I do not need these people to love me. And if I fail in front of them, I promise I will still love you. And myself.” Since I had my baby, I often include her as well. “I will still love my fear if I fail. I will still love myself. My baby will still love me. I should get a dog soon to make it a quorum. But in the end, no matter what happens here—I will be loved.”

  Whatever phrase resonates, we need to make sure it activates feelings in our hearts and our guts, not just in our brains. It needs to warm us all over, like a hot toddy of emotional acceptance. Only then can our counterspell give us the strength to be willing to fail. In a funny way, embracing our fear of fai
lure is the quickest path to reach our joy. There’s probably a philosopher out there who said the same thing somewhere. But I googled it with quotes around it and found nothing, so consider that a Felicia Day special!

  * * *

  What is the root thought behind your fear of failure? Dig deep. Write until you find a phrase that makes you go “AHA! That’s why I am afraid!” Look for an inner feeling as you write it that tells you, “Finally! Someone understands me!”

  * * *

  Now come up with a sentence that soothes your fear. A counterspell of sorts. One that, when you think it, tames the monster inside you.

  No matter what, you can always forgive yourself for failing. And love yourself afterward. No one can ever stop you from doing that.

  * * *

  Everything creative starts sloppy and terrible and raw. It’s like the messiness of raising a pet or a child. We have to guide it and sculpt it as it grows, teach it not to run out into the street and get hit by a car, annoying stuff like that. We can only do our best along the way with the tools we have, and then at a certain point… let it go. If what we make has a flaw, it’s a beautiful flaw that makes it unique. And guess what? Next time we get to make something new with yet a different flaw! What a beautiful process to discover all the uniqueness we could put in the world!

  In looking back over procrastination, perfectionism, and fear of failure, I hope we can all feel more confident in our ability to beat these inevitabilities back when we create. And get to the bottom of the yummy party dip that much faster. We’ve dug through a lot of layers that have been keeping us stuck and silent. But in the end, all the work will have been worth it. Yum.

  Shame/Regret/Jealousy

  We’re going to VERY briefly stop to survey this group of issues. We don’t want to dwell here long for fear of absorbing the toxic, bitchy goo. It’s gross here, guys. Like nails-on-a-chalkboard icky. If it was a color, it would be… sludge.

  These are the mean girls of creative enemies. They fill us with awful negative energy, and underneath they probably all use our mothers’ voices, but that, again, is probably better discussed in therapy.

  Unlike some other issues, shame, regret, and jealousy don’t completely block us from creating, but they do have the ability to taint everything we make. They’re like pollution. Yes, we can live with them, but if our insides are being poisoned with every breath… why exactly are we hanging out here again?

  Let me hammer this home a bit before we continue:

  Shame: “I screwed up so bad!”

  Regret: “If only I could go back and fix that screwup!”

  Jealousy: “Why are THEY allowed to be screwups and not me?”

  None of these will ever be supportive bridesmaids. And yet we hang out with them ALL THE TIME! Let’s take a tour of our poisons and see exactly how bad each one is for our creativity, shall we?

  Shame

  Shame is one I like to keep around as a frenemy. I just can’t quit it! If I take a bit of time, I can come up with a dozen incidents in my life that will cause my body to flood itself with stress. Seriously, I’ll start pitting. In one incident that haunted me for years, I ditched a group of friends in Rome because I randomly ran into another friend who was more famous and I went to a nightclub with her because YOLO! But I was tired and didn’t want to drink, which I guess was uncool, so she ghosted me to go hang out with friends who were actual fun, and then I got lost in Rome trying to get back to the hotel, almost got mugged, no one was happy with me, and I spent the rest of the trip self-hate-eating pizza. (As I tell this story, it doesn’t actually sound that bad, but at three in the morning when my anxiety is kickin’, HOO-BOY, will I get the sweats!)

  Shame dredges up memories where we’ve misstepped or fallen short and POKE! reopens those emotional wounds. Over and over again. The act of keeping an incident fresh, ironically, only creates bigger trauma around it. And THAT trauma-on-trauma layering blocks us from being able to move past it. Just like Shame likes it!

  Shame is especially harmful when it comes to creativity. When we’re too careful, we can’t create with any authenticity. But shame ratchets up our fear of failure into overdrive. If we created something imperfect in the past and failed because of it? Don’t worry! Shame will never let us forget it!

  I had an encounter that racked me with so much shame it took me years to recover. There was a scene in a TV show where I simply couldn’t cry. I mean, at first I could. The cameras were rolling, I was feeling it, when, “RING!” someone’s cell phone went off. And that was it. My inner artist skedaddled. For every take after that, I couldn’t cry. Or feel ANYTHING. Except panic. We finished the scene, everyone was supportive, but… nothing. I faked my way through it—and unknowingly, was traumatized by the whole incident. I continued to feel numb for a day or two afterward, and then… big sobbing terribleness. I fell into a deep depression. About my career, my creativity, and myself as a person. For MONTHS.

  It didn’t make sense that I couldn’t move past a small incident like that, but the shame was unremorseful. I had to seek therapy and go back to acting 101 class to learn how to do my craft from scratch. I’d inflated the incident until it was so large in my mind that I couldn’t work through it alone. I’d trapped myself in a bouncy castle of shame and I couldn’t get out!

  Yes, making mistakes is the worst. Especially if they are avoidable. But COPING with mistakes is a skill we have to practice in order to create. We need to learn from them, offer forgiveness to ourselves, and move on. That’s how we take shame’s power away! And open ourselves to the possibility of creating, even after we screw up.

  * * *

  Name an incident in your past that you feel shame about. Where you messed up and it plagues you. If it’s around creativity, so much the better!

  How does keeping the trauma of the incident fresh help you? Are you learning something when you remind yourself over and over how you messed up?

  Write down what you can learn from the incident so you can avoid doing it again in the future. Then at the end write: “Thank you for this lesson, Shame. Now I forgive myself.”

  You have listened. You have learned. Now you’re ready to move on.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sometimes manifesting the emotional into something physical helps us move on with our lives. In the space below, describe a lingering piece of shame you can’t let go of, no matter what you do. Then tear the page out and burn it. Watch it disappear.

  You’re released of this shame. Forever. You have the power to do this for yourself!

  * * *

  Regret

  Shame is often accompanied by its creepy little pal Regret. “Hehe. Need more torment? I’m here to show you better pasts, and how you COULD be living now.” With this new “friend,” we get a time traveler AND a psychic in one package! How not very cool!

  “Wrong” choices are Regret’s jam:

  If only I had started doing X earlier.

  If only I hadn’t pursued Y and done X instead.

  If only I had been in the exact spot at the exact time when something miraculous would have happened to me, my life would be so much better. Maybe. I’ll never know, though, because I messed up so bad in the past. Congrats!

  Regret thrives on the future unreal conditional tense using modal verbs. And how practical does THAT sound? (I spent fifteen minutes googling grammar sites to come up with that sentence. I’m not sure it’s accurate but it sounds smart.)

  As creative people, we dwell in our imaginations. More than in reality sometimes. So we’re particularly vulnerable to indulging Regret. It digs in and polices our actions like a creepy crossing guard of doom.

  There isn’t a career choice I’ve made when I haven’t wondered, “If I had just made an alternate decision, I’d be so much more successful/rich/fulfilled/unwrinkled right now.” I constantly picture myself having followed different paths where I’m running huge corporations or winning awards or being friends with Reese Witherspoon. (I l
ove her book club!) I castigate myself for not having walked through more doors that were opened to me careerwise in the past, and of course, any creative idea I’ve ever had that I didn’t act on was clearly the one that would have solidified my name as a writing genius. Alternate-dimension Felicias are doing SO GOOD! But how does that help me now?

  In reality, there is no creative advantage to indulging regret. It just makes us more anxious and more scared to make decisions. Because we DON’T WANT regret in our future lives, we are reluctant to commit to a creative path for fear it’s not the “right” one. Welcome to Regret Highway! Once you get on, there are no exits!

  The thing is, even if we follow the logic of our regrets, and assume we could change the past and fix what we believe were mistakes… we would never be able to ensure we’d be happier in the theoretical THEN, either. An equal number of bad things could happen to us as a result of changing the past. As many bad things as good, if we’re to believe Dr. Who!