Giving something a label, ultimately, is about trying to define a thing, an activity, an individual, whether you are outside looking in or inside looking out.
On one level, this makes sense as it gives us the tools and resources of common language.
Where this is a problem for me is that it tends to establish boundaries in our minds of what something is and what something isn’t.
My cousin and friend, Ian MacDonald, just published a blog post about the labels craftsman and artist, and the semantics game that swirls around those terms in his music and photography.
In my own teaching experience, I have witnessed innumerable students striving and struggling to achieve Art; in some cases, frozen in sheer terror at what they believe is unachievable and ironically, unwilling to work on the craft of writing. Unwilling to create dreck on the way to Art, however they define either.
To minimize these boundaries and yet still be able to communicate with people, I strive to use the broadest terminology I can. This is why, when pressed, I refer to myself as a storyteller.
I tell stories with my writing. I tell stories with my photography. I tell stories in my social interactions. I tell stories when I am alone. I tell stories with my body language. I tell stories when I sleep.
Are my stories a craft? There is an element of that, particularly when I tell stories for money.
Are my stories an art? That is a personal choice of whomever experiences my story, including me.
Am I more than my stories? Most certainly. I am not my stories.
My stories are how I interact with my universe. They are a vehicle of communication.
Storyteller is just a label, a definition; but I do not let it limit me or my sense of self.
I lived a large portion of my life in search of the next label. I am now content to be.
My thanks to Ian for his blog post. Even if you’re not interested in photography, his web site is worth checking out. At the risk of labeling him, Ian is quite the philosopher.
In keeping with my recent focus on happiness and passion, I want to let you know that it is perfectly okay to be unhappy.
Really. I promise.
If you’re unhappy, you have every right to feel that way AND to express your unhappiness.
Social pressures
We live in a society that is terrified of unhappiness. Our consumer ways are designed to give you everything money can buy to be happy.
When we see someone who seems unhappy, we try to get them to smile. We ask them what’s wrong.
And in more extreme cases, we try to medicate the unhappiness out of them, the premise being we would rather that you be an emotionless zombie than unhappy.
And rather than face being unhappy, many take to self-medicating whether through narcotics or alcohol, food or sex, or other social mechanisms to display an artificial happiness to the world.
We can be afraid to express our unhappiness with the world for fear the world won’t accept us, that they will take offense at our unhappiness as though we were blaming them for it.
Will my partner think I am blaming him or her? My family members? My co-workers? My friends?
If I tell them I am unhappy and can’t explain why—and often we can’t immediately see it—will they abandon me?
In some cases, with some individuals, the answer may be yes, and that is unfortunate. But in my personal experience, the answer is no.
My unhappiness
I worked for several years with friends on a sketch comedy show. It was a labour of love all the way around, but at a certain point in the project’s development, long after my creative contribution culminated, I became unhappy with my involvement in the process. But I was afraid to say something.
How could I tell my friends I didn’t want to do this anymore, that I didn’t want to participate in our dream project? Would they hate me? Would they tell me to fuck off and die?
I eventually worked up the balls to discuss this with them, to lay out my dilemma. They saw that I was serious and that I was struggling. They asked a few questions for clarification. And then they accepted my decision and continued to love me (and do to this day).
Knowing I was miserable working for one company, another friend got me a position in her company (we had previously worked together). My new coworkers were wonderful, the job was what I had wanted. But six weeks in, I realized I didn’t want to do this job anymore…I wanted to move on to a different dream.
How could I turn away from a wonderful job? How could I betray my friend who introduced me to this company? How I slap these amazing people in the face?
I told my friend I was unhappy and wanted to explore my new dream. She was delighted for me and knew I would be brilliant. I told my new bosses that I loved their company but had to follow my heart. They were thrilled and agreed that I had to pursue my passion.
We often don’t give the people in our lives enough credit for wanting what is best for us. We let fear get in our way; fear of rejection, fear of the unknown.
It’s okay
We are repeatedly told and have come to believe that unhappiness is wrong; it is an aberration; it is an affliction.
It is none of these.
It is a feeling, an emotion, a sign. And we must give it the same respect that we give our other emotions, from anger to joy, from sadness to elation, from frustration to fulfillment.
There are not positive emotions and negative emotions. There are no good feelings and bad feelings.
IT IS OKAY TO BE UNHAPPY!
Until we accept and embrace that we are unhappy, we can never figure out why we are unhappy or what we want to do about that feeling and those circumstances.
Love yourself enough to listen to yourself. Feel what you feel. Share what you can.
Ironically, being unhappy may be your first step to being happy. And if it isn’t, that’s okay, too.
I suck, too; quite regularly, in fact. Possibly unlike you, however, I revel in that fact.
In almost any facet of life, when we are called upon to do something, many of us have concerns that we might not be up to the task, that we suck.
Depending on the task, the individual, the timing and innumerable other factors, this fear may give only the slightest pause or it may result in complete catatonia, leaving us bereft of the will to do anything let alone the requested task.
And I think this fear of suckage—yep, just made that word up—is perhaps the greatest in creatives as it is in creativity that we face our harshest critic: ourselves.
I have myself, and seen others, stare at a blank page, completely immobilized, incapable of the first squiggle that would start the creative process.
At best, we’re trying to consider every starting concept in our heads, lest our suckage be recorded for posterity and later ridicule. But just as often, it is blank-screen paralysis, our thoughts as immobile as our body.
I’m here to tell you that they are just negative manifestations of a positive experience.
In many ways, sucking is not only normal, it is also wonderful.
When I teach screenwriting, I start every lecture with the same question:
“Who sucked this week?”
And at least until the students have adjusted to the question, mine is the first hand that goes up.
You cannot help but suck at something until you don’t, and the timeline of skill is different for every individual and every task.
But actually sucking—as opposed to the fear of sucking—means you are trying. You are making an effort to push through your personal suckage, and that is amazing and wonderful.
Even the fear of suckage is a good sign, if not a good feeling, because it is an indication of how important the assignment is to you. If it wasn’t important to you, you wouldn’t care if you sucked.
So suck. Jump in with both feet, ignoring as best you can that little voice that warns you of doom should you suck.
Take the next step, and then the one after that
For one thing, even once you have developed great skill in a field or activity, you will still have occasion to suck.
With apologies to the magnificent screenwriter Terry Rossio, for every Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean, there is the odd Lone Ranger.
For every record-breaking season, Wayne Gretzky missed an open net on occasion.
No professional photographer keeps every shot she takes, nor painter every painting, nor songwriter every lyric or note.
You are going to suck.
The silver lining, however, is that the more you suck now, the less likely you are to suck later.
God knows I still do. And I’m very happy about that.
To learn more about effective storytelling and maybe gain insights from my years of suckage, visit:
My friend Jarrod Terrell, whom I met through Kevin Scott‘s Effortless Alphas group, recently challenged his fellow Alphas to share their goals and dreams for life in a Facebook video.
In part, the idea was that verbalizing your dreams made them real for you, but it also opened the door to others in your community who might be able to help make those dreams come to fruition.
Here is my video.
How can I help you discover, explore and share your passion?
Although Star Wars will remain the apex of my formative years as a young writer and dreamer, Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays a close second. At the risk of blasphemy, the latter film was significantly superior to the Lucas’ space western, offering insights into humanity and our possible place in the Universe that I couldn’t begin to fathom until later in life.
Such films are rare.
Arrival, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened widely this week, is one of those films and is a worthy successor to Close Encounters.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, a man better known for horror films like the reboots of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Arrival opens with the arrival of 12 alien space craft—looking a bit like fat Pringles—at strategic positions around the globe.
Almost the entire story is told from the perspectives of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and shows their efforts to communicate with the aliens under the watchful eye of military commander Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), as scientists and military commands near the other 11 craft attempt the same.
While the trio works to simply comprehend the existence of the aliens, let alone try to communicate with them, the outside world falls apart as fear and a sense of insignificance grasps at the hearts of populations being told largely nothing, feeding the paranoid darkness that resides within all of us.
Without giving key aspects of the story away, the movie deals with broad metaphysical questions about existence and time, while at the same time, providing insights into our species at both its greatest apex and deepest nadir. And at its very base, it encapsulates the importance of trust in our evolution as individuals, as a society and as a species.
Amy Adams channels Richard Dreyfuss in her awe at the miracle before her
This is Amy Adams’ movie, and so all of these concepts are displayed through her fears and growth. She must learn to trust her human colleagues. She must learn to trust her alien counterparts, adorably nicknamed Abbott and Costello. And most importantly of all, she must learn to trust herself despite flashes of what seems like madness.
To tie back to Close Encounters, Adams is this movie’s Richard Dreyfuss, and she embues her character with both the same manic trepidation and child-like wonder as Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary.
Renner and Whitaker, for their parts, are incredibly subdued in this film.
Renner’s Donnelly is an emotional anchor for Adams. Coming from the academic world, his tone is at once familiar and playfully combative.
The photographic focus on Adams is representative of Renner’s role in this film.
Whitaker’s Weber is authoritative and yet unthreatening. He is the calm in the intellectual storm, grounding the two academics for what they are about to witness and becoming increasingly appreciative of the miracle that unfolds before him.
What I found particularly interesting about Heisserer’s story was that the antagonist of the film was Fear.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of mortality. Fear of our own insignificance. And more importantly, our deepest fear that as individuals, we simply don’t measure up.
And breaking the rules of screenwriting, this fear was not embodied in a single antagonist, but in all characters, and it was only in fleeting moments that any individual character acted upon his or her fear. And yet, as fleeting as those moments were, each was vital to the evolution of the story and the critical relationships to their next stages.
Connection relies on trust
Again, these moments fed back to the question of trust, particularly in the face of betrayal.
To assure everyone that this film isn’t simply a cerebral exercise—although it is beautiful in what it does accomplish—there is also a very deep emotional thread that runs through this movie, again centering on Adams. And from the opening, it seems like this personal journey is completely disconnected from the sci-fi plot.
But as the story unfolds and we begin to explore what is possible in an infinite cosmos, we begin to realize that the external and internal journeys are one and the same. There is no distinction. The line between physical and emotional is an artifact of our choices as humans and society.
Arrival continues the saga that started with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Will Arrival be to adolescent minds today what Close Encounters was to mine in 1977?
Probably not.
It is a much more adult film that its predecessor, with many fewer action sequences to engage the eye. And Villeneuve’s views and sensibilities are very different from Steven Spielberg’s.
But Arrival is the closest thing to those seminal films that we have seen in a generation or more. And for the more engaged child or adolescent, it will open a window to another plane of storytelling.
Mother, Nehiyaw, Metis, & Itisahwâkan - career communicator. This is my collection of opinions, stories, and the occasional rise to, or fall from, challenge. In other words, it's my party, I can fun if I want to. Artwork by aaronpaquette.net
createdbyrcw 