I’m My Own Kind of Messed Up, Thank You
“What about this surprises you?” my counselor asked as
I flailed my hands like Billy Mays with a waffle iron.
“It’s not a surprise she lambasted me with insults. It was that she could’ve been talking to anyone! We’ve been
friends for two years, and she doesn’t know how to hurt me?”
Analytically speaking, I’m scared of the deadness: the apathy from the
last four years of my life. I blame everything wrong on the void—the lack of
optimism, the lack of yearning, lack of impulsivity. Emotions hurt, but their
absence, feeling the biting cold of where passion should be, killed my body far
worse than what anger or rejection could do. It was scary how little her words
bothered me.
But these generic insults of “You’re shitty”
had more to do with her fears than mine. She said things that glanced off me
like marshmallows, and fresh ones at that; a frustrated mourner taking out her pain on a stoic stranger. Maybe it’s that I misinterpret her
reasons behind blitzing me with broad judgments, but at the time, it not only
seemed she couldn’t step in my shoes, she didn’t even know me well enough
to hit me where it hurts. And we were close. If she didn’t
understand how I saw myself…
Last April, I woke up to the announcement my script, To Waste, won first place in Riot Act’s New Play Festival. A reporter came to
interview me. He pulled out a recorder, enthusiastically asked deep,
intelligent questions, and morphed the strange gut punch from when I heard about
my win, twisting it back into the tickling, butterfly-filled queasiness I had
come to know and love. (Look, I don’t like change.)
Then the paper arrived. And misquoted me. Slapped my
verboseness around until the reporter came up with a simpler viewpoint. A naive
viewpoint. The greenist viewpoint a greenhorn could ever gleam.
It’s not the first time a newspaper messed up. Typically
understandable. An interview earlier this year was with a peer and me over the
phone. Quotes got misattributed. I didn’t see the world like my companion, and
I certainly didn’t want the world to see
me like my companion. But it
was what it was. C’est la vie.
I called up my friend in shock of my distress, and she quickly jumped to her story: Emancipated, she managed to
move halfway across the country at 18, receive a scholarship, and grow from a
troubled teen to a disgruntled artist. After graduation, her story gained the
attention of a national newspaper, and thus one day, my friend’s mother picked
up an article explaining in gory detail the horrible monster she was. Yet, my
friend claims she never said any of that. She never even believed it. The
interviewer already had a narrative of what happened, and she wasn’t listening
to the view of the person experiencing it.
What surprised me was my reaction. The misquote in the
newspaper wasn’t even the first-time people assumed I was unprofessional or
inexperienced. Possibly, earlier events were what caused my pain.
When my depression eased, a colleague pulled me aside
to inform me he didn’t like who I was becoming. I felt more like myself than I
had in a long time. My apathy, lack of interest in attention, lack of humor,
lack of drive, lack of opinions, made me pretty malleable. Now that I started
to care about things, well… Now I was morphing into a square peg. How dare I?
But I was always a square peg, really. I was just so
tired I couldn’t hold my shape. I didn’t see the point in having a shape. I
could fit into any hole because I simply didn’t care about where I went. Put me
where you want me. Now that I’m a person again, I’m changing for the worse?
Fantastic.
On top of that, the play writing group I founded was
imploding. Two members were at each other’s throats. Against my insistence that
no one was getting kicked out, they still didn’t want to end the conflict. Problems
spiraled, making every one of us look a gaggle of schoolgirls trying to
green-light our own Desperate Drama Queens of Atlanta.
All of a sudden, the reputation I built was gone. Not only was my group’s name losing
respectability, I (and our other member) became “one of them.” The man I just
started dating made a comment about how the problem was we were all difficult
to work with, even though the only time he’d witnessed how I act was one
critique reading I headed. It went extremely well. He had no reason to think
that outside of the rare drama then around me.
Too easily, people shifted their view of me on par with
the two members who notoriously burned bridges. Individuals I’d created with
successfully for years, people who requested me often, people who couldn’t work with anyone else but me,
even people who had several negative experiences with these women still talked to me like
I was another emotional amateur letting my ego ruin everything. Everything I
had done to be trustworthy, the effort I’d put in for someone specifically,
projects they personally witnessed going well, didn’t matter at all, it seemed.
When you walk into a room, people start developing a
story about you. Their perception is not always defined by what you say or do.
This is terrifying, even for a white girl. I just turned thirty, but to some, I
look sixteen. They don’t know why I speak like I’m not. They smile at me
placatingly as they tell me the ways of the world and wait for my youthful
wonder. I’m not only plastered with doubt because I look like I’ve never seen a
flip phone—even those who know my age still presume my 60-year-old
counterpart has more experience than me, even when… they just don’t.
There’s aspects like my posture, my high-pitched voice,
my empathetic-oriented style of speech, that detract from my respectability.
We all know that inexperienced egomaniac who people have faith in simply
because he announces he deserves it. Because he struts like John Travolta,
because he speaks with certainty, because he is older, therefore wiser, right?
Since I find my natural intensity scares people into not
telling me their opinion, I trained myself for years to encourage everyone’s
ideas. To be sweet. Yes, I’m an opinionated asshole, but the existence of my
thought does not detract from my interest in hearing yours. At the same time,
just because I listen to you doesn’t mean I think you’re a genius. Yet, when in my
diplomatic state, I’m seen as submissive, passive, naïve, insecure, ready to learn,
and apparently, have nothing of value to say.
This begs the question: how much should you change to look like
you are who you feel like?
I feel like someone who loves other people’s ideas
helping them. Yet, if I speak naturally, so fast and loud with energy and
frustration and excitement and big words, I make so many people feel stupid.
I feel like my actions—producing other people’s projects
for no reward other than the vicarious excitement, for one—and my experience
level—two decades of writing, drawing, acting, a life’s commitment to the
arts—means nothing because there are people who see me as they want to, based off my looks,
or technical resume, or their own insecurities, or even others who I remind
them of.
This reporter—a smart and friendly, good-natured person
who paid more attention than I think I’ve ever seen any reporter give a
show—saw me as he did, saw me as he wanted, and didn’t question it. When I told
him anything that contradicted his view of me, he didn’t hear it. Despite my
excessive workload, despite any quality of my work, despite what I said, he saw
me, a young-looking woman from a small town, and something, something told him I hadn’t written much.
When he asked, “Did you write the show specifically for
the Riot Act Festival?” I praised the contest:
One of the beautiful things about the New Play
Festival—something other people have told me as well—is it gives you a
deadline; it’s short, it’s achievable. For many I work with, it is
excellent motivation to get something done when you’re struggling. I was
dealing with depression, and I wasn’t writing as much as I wanted to. Annually,
I try to create something new specifically for the festival, which can help me
get back into the swing of things, and this year it forced me through my block.
To be fair (and you possibly noticed this), I’m a
long-winded Mother-Mocker. I said a lot. In his attempts to summarize the
thunderstorm of words, he crafted a quote he considered the gist of what I
wanted—one that completely misrepresented what I was trying to say, to the
point of extreme embarrassment. Impressive, actually, in my zombie-like state.
It showcased his view of me, and that view was not a driven, experienced
playwright:
“I felt encouraged to submit something because writing a
short piece seemed reachable,” Daveler said. “Completing it was a personal
victory, and being able to share a piece of theater created from my experiences
might not have happened without the contest.”
Who am I?
I am not a short writer. Most
of my scattered manuscripts range between 100,000-200,000 words, which is a
shit-ton. Too much. My common goal for the first three drafts is to cut my
word counts down by half because I have a hell of a time being concise.
In fact, we probably wouldn’t be discussing this if I didn’t. Writing a short
piece is not so simple. Not for me.
As for the whole, not being able to share a piece of theatre…
I produced a hell of a lot of plays while I was living in Los Angeles. My plays even.
I am, regardless of my anonymity, a prolific writer.
I am grandiose. I am a risk-taker. I am driven! The test
that diagnosed me with three kinds of ADD even said so.
Does this quote come across as me at all?
I didn’t want to be seen as an aspiring writer who
finally made a piece because it was “attainable.” I wanted to be seen as the
depressive, manic genius filled with neuroses and hordes of mysterious scripts
no one was allowed to see. (For very good reason.)
And so, despite my tendency to turn the other cheek,
despite my knowledge, no one reads corrections. I sent him a (very diplomatic)
email. The idea of telling this guy that I
despised the piece after he took so much care bites like a rapid monkey, but
there was an online version, and I really needed that statement out of the ether-world and buried dead, dead, dead in the ground.
It occurred to me. It was not the embarrassment of how
people would see me on reading that quote in that bothered me so
profoundly, but rather that the reporter saw me that way from the jump, that he
ignored my actual words and told a conventional narrative based purely on
assumption. He assumed I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t hear any signs
that possibly I did. I know I had told him about my other writings. Something about
me made him think of me like that. Nothing I could do would have fixed it.
“I don’t think I believe in ‘deep down.’ I kinda think
all you are is just the things that you do.”
It stuck with me. I wish.
Sure, there are times are your intentions are good,
and the results didn’t happen the way you expected; stupid things happen to
tired people. But what happens when you’re continually making others miserable,
regardless of why?
More to the point, what happens you do something respectable and no one sees it? When they define you not by what you’ve done, not by
results, not even by intentions, but by something that tends to happen to
people “like” you? People seen as being like you, even when they’re not?
How much do you fake it until you make it, or do you ignore
how it looks and hope that someone will understand what’s really happening? How much time do you spend worrying about giving off the wrong perception?
While my depression has lifted, and I have moments
of authentic joy, real excitement, sometimes I feel desensitized. I don’t
necessarily feel like I exist, it’s hard for me to be flattered. What I do
changes nothing. They saw me positively because they decided to. I had no say.
What do I care?
When I heard I won first place in the festival, I was in
pain. Something was very wrong. At first, the win felt hallow, and I waited for
the other shoe to drop. I knew that some would scrutinize my play—a script I
considered some of my best work—simply to prove that I didn’t deserve to win.
That I wasn’t better than them. It didn’t matter if I had written gibberish or
genius; it was about expectation. There would be those who thought it was good
simply because it was a winning piece. My skill, my efforts,
and the parts of me I put in the writing simply weren’t relevant.
How can you be seen for you, rather than memories
of others? Stereotypes? Projection? Proximity? How can you be defined for all
your good actions unless you run around narrating them like a lunatic? You
better hope to God you’re what you think you are, in that case.
How can you fight being defined by a narrative that
stemmed from something outside of you?
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