One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. - Bertrand Russell
Bang on Bertie- as always!
I've realised that my Inner Critic warns me to avoid being 'charming' because, quite irrationally (as I base this assumption on people who hurt me when I was very much younger), he equates 'charm' with insincerity, hypocrisy and manipulation. As the reader might appreciate, this severely limits my options when it comes to relating to others! I deliberately cut off from being funny and too light because I don’t want to invite accusations of being unprofessional and not serious about the work. In fact I separate work and play when really there need be no such distinction, especially when it comes to doing something I love doing i.e. acting. A part of this is to do with guilt about it not being a proper job, the idea that it is 'easy', that 'anyone can do it'. These shibboleths have been adopted by the Inner Critic as sticks to beat myself with but I can afford to let go of them now. You ARE charming, you are funny, you are warm, you are sensitive, generous, loving and lovable, and you are a very VERY good actor. If others compliment you they are not necessarily patronising you like your mother used to with these comments, or trying to take ownership of you or control you! They may just mean it! You have so much more power than you think you do. Your Inner Critic convinces you you have no power but you really do.
What would happen if you did desert the inner critic?
You fear you would be ordinary, that you would blend into the background and never be noticed. Your talent would go. You would just be nobody. People would think you were just an amateur who didn’t care about the work. You would humiliate yourself. This Inner Critic wants you to fulfil your potential but the criticism has been so crippling that you are actually sabotaged by his constant interruption. The origins of this Inner Critic are in your early family life. As Philip Larkin put it, they fuck you up your mum and dad!
Identify the common themes here:
You aren’t allowed to think you’re special, but you will not get anywhere unless you do. You have to earn love by hiding your faults and obeying, maliciously if necessary until others worship you and you can say “I no longer need you.” Getting clearer about what the critic is really trying to do is going to make it easier for you to deal with him. The time to start doing this is now, before you go to college and risk wasting your time and possibly hurting others because of these reptilian daemons.
Actually your Inner Critic wants to make you a better person, and is willing to put up with you trying to hide your confusion, stupidity and egotism from others in order to gain that credibility from others which you are not allowed to give yourself (for that would be ‘big-headed’). He doesn’t want you to be bigheaded, but he wants to make you a genius. You cannot be proud of yourself and be a great actor or a great person, so he tells you that you have to go the opposite direction and at all costs hide from yourself. The trouble is he then he gives you a hard time for doing just that too, hiding your light under a bushel!
Clearly this is all to do with inaccurate and deeply confused and tangled-up self-esteem issues. He longs for you to have permission to think well of yourself, but puts you down in order to ‘help’ you achieve that. ???!!!*!?**!!
You need to tell him to, “Fuck right off, and let me be at peace with me. You think like a child. You patronise and bamboozle me like my mother did.” Your Inner critic is only a part of who you are. There is a deeper, more essential part of you that knows you are super-talented, highly experienced and capable of incredible work. Your Critic is a never/always, all-or-nothing, black-and-white ‘Child’ sub-personality. Remind yourself of your achievements in the past, your successes that; you are capable of being kind, considerate, loving, happy, joyful and supremely talented. You are allowed to be all those things. You really don’t have to be cold, nasty and withdrawn to be a respected actor. Those features of your personality have to be accepted and loved too if they are to lose their grip on you. But remember this: you have no reason to assume that people are lying to you when they like you or say you are good. You can afford to believe it sometimes, you know! Give yourself a break. And remember to see the funny side and that it is not a case of all or nothing. All or nothing is a silly choice. You can choose a happy medium and that does not make you bland and ordinary. It makes you a very good tightrope walker. In fact it very rarely is all or nothing. All or nothing cuts don your options. Mix and match for that is not really a compromise made by fools and normal folk. It is right to steer a course that is healthy and rich. You can have it all by not thinking you have to be perfect. You are OK.. It is not as if you are either better than everyone else, or you are the worst, and never anything in between. It is not a failure to be average. You are particularly prone to attack when you are in the throes of creating because you become a vulnerable and open door to criticism and judgement. You try to get in there before anyone else does. Identifying this voice and then telling it you are old enough now to make your own choices.
You may just have to face up to the fact and admit to yourself that you do have an extraordinary gift! And, yes, that idea may make you squirm, it may make others jealous and opens you up to accusations of arrogance and self-delusion. So what!? Laugh at yourself. You may even have to acknowledge that it is God working through you, which sounds even more arrogant to most people! And so you have been reduced to covering it up in shame, and berate and down-rate yourself -“Who the fuck do you think you are?” This inner critic wants you to keep improving and is frightened that if you rest on your laurels and get complacent and self-satisfied you will stop growing as an artist because you will no longer feel the need to prove yourself. He is trying to motivate you, to get you fired up. He is just a bit too much! It is therefore extra important when you are doing your creative work that you keep your inner critic in its place. His watching, carping, judging presence stops your flow of creativity. Let the judgment voice come afterwards, not during the rehearsing work. Just say, “OK not now. Later.” Go away. I’m busy.”
This inner critic has encouraged outer critics to lay into you more than they otherwise would. His presence almost encourages them! It might hurt you to lose the approval of others, but it won’t kill you. You are an adult now, you can stop allowing the inner critic to encourage you to think like a child.
You need the freedom to follow your own muse, but that does not mean you have to cut everyone else out, or cut yourself off from your feelings. You want to be part of what Carolyn Myss calls your “tribe”- i.e. in your particular case the club of ‘The Professional Actor Society’, “The Consummate Artist Consortium”. But if you can stop thinking like this for just a bit and allow yourself the freedom to be you, just you. It will remind you of why you are still doing this acting lark if it isn’t just to gain their tribal approval! This will give you the freedom and space to glimpse why you are really doing it, above and beyond being approved of.
You hate the idea of being called unprofessional, just an amateur, a self-indulgent and insincere luvvie. The threat of these accusations pushes all your buttons, so you go completely in the opposite direction.
Equally don’t allow directors and great teachers diminish your self-trust.
Give yourself the love and approval you want sometimes. You deserve that more than you deserve to be bullied. You wouldn’t allow anyone else to talk to you the way your Inner Critic does after all. Bullying is bullying is bullying. It has nothing to do with love, no matter what excuses are given.
Your Inner Critic warns you not to be charming because you equate that with insincerity, hypocrisy and manipulation. This cuts off your options when it comes to relating to people. You cut off being funny too because you don’t want to invite accusations of being unprofessional and not serious about being good. These have been adopted by the inner Critic as sticks to beat yourself with and can be let go of now. You are charming, you are funny, you are warm, you are sensitive, generous, loving and lovable. For when others say that to you they are not patronising you like your mother used to with these comments! They mean it. You have more power than you think. Your Inner Critic convinces you that you have no power- but you really do.
It’s time to let the real Mark out who is charming, kind, generous, loving, funny, easy to be around, full of light and so incredibly warm and sweet- all the things that I am usually not! And the only reason it is so well hidden is because you Inner Critic convinced you somehow that you had to be a monster if you wanted to go where you wanted to go. You confused the word “Professional” with “strictly self-disciplinarian who doesn’t allow emotions like humour and tenderness to get in the way of clawing his way to the top” You keep people at an emotional distance , frightened and confused by you, all the while allowing the Inner critic is convincing you that the loneliness and pain you are causing yourself is a fuel. And it is – a fuel which consumes and kills you!
I confessed to a friend recently that it is one of the most spectacularly peculiar ironies of my life that in my obsessive desire to protect myself from becoming the cartoon cliché of the insecure temperamental aging performer- childish, selfish, painfully self-pitying, self-dramatizing, egotistical, paranoid, riddled with irrational fears, neuroses and hideous insecurities, prone to diva-like sulks and tantrums who has so many sub-personalities he no longer has any idea at all of he really is and who causes everyone around him to dance around to try and please rather than risk upsetting him- that that is precisely the person I have become! I have now come to see that the root of these issues is not anything remotely resembling a “ troubled genius” but massively damaged self-esteem. My Inner Critic has wielded such power over me and has allowed me to abuse, berate, bully and ill-treat myself for so many years it has eroded my talent, my relationships, my inner beauty.
I think that me being uncommunicative and dour is coming from my father who was so single-focused that he couldn’t allow for laughter because he was so focused on what he thought were higher and more important things. It is this that has been adopted by me when I am working, and which is so alienating. It is because I never feel there is enough time, as my friend Peter put it, to “piss around”. It makes me pompous, legalistic, remote and unreasonable. I can afford to lighten up- in all senses of the word.
You do not need this agony, or this Inner Critic beating you up and telling you to hide what you are feeling all the time, and warning you that you are wasting time by being human.
It was your Mum who always told you what you were really like this underneath your hard mask of stone was kind, gentle, sensitive and loving, and you didn’t want to believe her. After all she was also the person that laughed at you, and fed you the message that you were daft, stupid, a baby, soft in the head. You couldn’t deal with these mixed messages. It wasn’t possible for you to accept that both of these might be true. Or neither! You thought she was tricking you into being a child again, or at least less than man. Your father was a model of the studious person who won through in the end; who was able to use his fury with himself and the world as fuel. His life was about vengeance on those who had underestimated him. In fact he was an extremely damaged individual, whose strength could have been put to infinitely better use if he hadn’t been so far up his own selfish, joyless and frustrated arse. And yet you chose to go down his route, stoking the fires of toxic rage in the hope that it was going to make you into a great man. Closed up in a crucible of self-loathing you thought would purify you. You decided you didn’t want to be liked, or loved but would settle for being respected, feared, envied and despised. A victim, a Mr Spock who buried his emotions; or like Riddler in Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart, a genius who sublimated all positive emotional energy. You didn’t believe you had any talent, any likeable qualities that were of any use to you; no real charm or talent, just weaknesses and vulnerable areas of your being that would never help you to achieve anything. So you thought it a better choice to be a pain in the arse who was at least able to be brilliant at what he did even if it meant cutting himself off from others so much that he had more time to focus on work, work, work. You decided to be lonely rather than have to deal with others who you thought were trying to deflect from your path, and pull you out of flow. You got paranoid, jealous, quiet, sulky, resentful and dark. You became Mr Angry, thinking that that somehow made you a more authentic and better artist. It didn’t make you a better artist, and people didn’t take you more seriously. They just thought you were an arse! And those that didn’t were actually doing you a gross disservice by not telling you. Let the work go, don’t make it the be all and end all and be light, light, light and you will find that your wonderful laugh will start to warm up all the people you might have alienated in the past, and begin to revive your career and reputation in ways that you cannot imagine. Stop gripping so grimly to the idea of the suffering, tortured artist, because that is really total bollocks. The work does not get easier; it gets harder, much harder when you cut yourself and your feelings and thoughts off.
You now realise that you have sabotaged yourself for 40 years and that now it is time for you to come out of that self-imposed confinement and be free of the need to obey your gaoler, your inner critic,. He is not your friend. He is your worst enemy when he is the only voice you can bring yourself to trust. Trust that you are loved, loveable and respected. You are a joy to work with when you want to be. If you sense yourself tightening up your heart and soul again, remember this: you are light, you are love, and like the L’Oreal adverts- you are worth it! Humour is really God working in you, and it is not irresponsible to have a laugh sometimes. Lighten up now, for God’s sake, Mark, for this will be your salvation, and ensure that when you leave college you could have a career as an actor.
You can expect to be liked, because you are a loveable guy.
You are extremely talented
You bring light, laughter and joy wherever you go.
A lot of this was taken from my Morning Pages and letter to myself and friends, and was written quickly, but it was honest when I wrote it and there will be stuff here that I'll need to come back to in the coming year. The key thing is for me to stop being so fucking self-obsessed and to 'Only Connect' with others now.
Bang on Bertie- as always!
I've realised that my Inner Critic warns me to avoid being 'charming' because, quite irrationally (as I base this assumption on people who hurt me when I was very much younger), he equates 'charm' with insincerity, hypocrisy and manipulation. As the reader might appreciate, this severely limits my options when it comes to relating to others! I deliberately cut off from being funny and too light because I don’t want to invite accusations of being unprofessional and not serious about the work. In fact I separate work and play when really there need be no such distinction, especially when it comes to doing something I love doing i.e. acting. A part of this is to do with guilt about it not being a proper job, the idea that it is 'easy', that 'anyone can do it'. These shibboleths have been adopted by the Inner Critic as sticks to beat myself with but I can afford to let go of them now. You ARE charming, you are funny, you are warm, you are sensitive, generous, loving and lovable, and you are a very VERY good actor. If others compliment you they are not necessarily patronising you like your mother used to with these comments, or trying to take ownership of you or control you! They may just mean it! You have so much more power than you think you do. Your Inner Critic convinces you you have no power but you really do.
What would happen if you did desert the inner critic?
You fear you would be ordinary, that you would blend into the background and never be noticed. Your talent would go. You would just be nobody. People would think you were just an amateur who didn’t care about the work. You would humiliate yourself. This Inner Critic wants you to fulfil your potential but the criticism has been so crippling that you are actually sabotaged by his constant interruption. The origins of this Inner Critic are in your early family life. As Philip Larkin put it, they fuck you up your mum and dad!
Identify the common themes here:
You aren’t allowed to think you’re special, but you will not get anywhere unless you do. You have to earn love by hiding your faults and obeying, maliciously if necessary until others worship you and you can say “I no longer need you.” Getting clearer about what the critic is really trying to do is going to make it easier for you to deal with him. The time to start doing this is now, before you go to college and risk wasting your time and possibly hurting others because of these reptilian daemons.
Actually your Inner Critic wants to make you a better person, and is willing to put up with you trying to hide your confusion, stupidity and egotism from others in order to gain that credibility from others which you are not allowed to give yourself (for that would be ‘big-headed’). He doesn’t want you to be bigheaded, but he wants to make you a genius. You cannot be proud of yourself and be a great actor or a great person, so he tells you that you have to go the opposite direction and at all costs hide from yourself. The trouble is he then he gives you a hard time for doing just that too, hiding your light under a bushel!
Clearly this is all to do with inaccurate and deeply confused and tangled-up self-esteem issues. He longs for you to have permission to think well of yourself, but puts you down in order to ‘help’ you achieve that. ???!!!*!?**!!
You need to tell him to, “Fuck right off, and let me be at peace with me. You think like a child. You patronise and bamboozle me like my mother did.” Your Inner critic is only a part of who you are. There is a deeper, more essential part of you that knows you are super-talented, highly experienced and capable of incredible work. Your Critic is a never/always, all-or-nothing, black-and-white ‘Child’ sub-personality. Remind yourself of your achievements in the past, your successes that; you are capable of being kind, considerate, loving, happy, joyful and supremely talented. You are allowed to be all those things. You really don’t have to be cold, nasty and withdrawn to be a respected actor. Those features of your personality have to be accepted and loved too if they are to lose their grip on you. But remember this: you have no reason to assume that people are lying to you when they like you or say you are good. You can afford to believe it sometimes, you know! Give yourself a break. And remember to see the funny side and that it is not a case of all or nothing. All or nothing is a silly choice. You can choose a happy medium and that does not make you bland and ordinary. It makes you a very good tightrope walker. In fact it very rarely is all or nothing. All or nothing cuts don your options. Mix and match for that is not really a compromise made by fools and normal folk. It is right to steer a course that is healthy and rich. You can have it all by not thinking you have to be perfect. You are OK.. It is not as if you are either better than everyone else, or you are the worst, and never anything in between. It is not a failure to be average. You are particularly prone to attack when you are in the throes of creating because you become a vulnerable and open door to criticism and judgement. You try to get in there before anyone else does. Identifying this voice and then telling it you are old enough now to make your own choices.
You may just have to face up to the fact and admit to yourself that you do have an extraordinary gift! And, yes, that idea may make you squirm, it may make others jealous and opens you up to accusations of arrogance and self-delusion. So what!? Laugh at yourself. You may even have to acknowledge that it is God working through you, which sounds even more arrogant to most people! And so you have been reduced to covering it up in shame, and berate and down-rate yourself -“Who the fuck do you think you are?” This inner critic wants you to keep improving and is frightened that if you rest on your laurels and get complacent and self-satisfied you will stop growing as an artist because you will no longer feel the need to prove yourself. He is trying to motivate you, to get you fired up. He is just a bit too much! It is therefore extra important when you are doing your creative work that you keep your inner critic in its place. His watching, carping, judging presence stops your flow of creativity. Let the judgment voice come afterwards, not during the rehearsing work. Just say, “OK not now. Later.” Go away. I’m busy.”
This inner critic has encouraged outer critics to lay into you more than they otherwise would. His presence almost encourages them! It might hurt you to lose the approval of others, but it won’t kill you. You are an adult now, you can stop allowing the inner critic to encourage you to think like a child.
You need the freedom to follow your own muse, but that does not mean you have to cut everyone else out, or cut yourself off from your feelings. You want to be part of what Carolyn Myss calls your “tribe”- i.e. in your particular case the club of ‘The Professional Actor Society’, “The Consummate Artist Consortium”. But if you can stop thinking like this for just a bit and allow yourself the freedom to be you, just you. It will remind you of why you are still doing this acting lark if it isn’t just to gain their tribal approval! This will give you the freedom and space to glimpse why you are really doing it, above and beyond being approved of.
You hate the idea of being called unprofessional, just an amateur, a self-indulgent and insincere luvvie. The threat of these accusations pushes all your buttons, so you go completely in the opposite direction.
Equally don’t allow directors and great teachers diminish your self-trust.
Give yourself the love and approval you want sometimes. You deserve that more than you deserve to be bullied. You wouldn’t allow anyone else to talk to you the way your Inner Critic does after all. Bullying is bullying is bullying. It has nothing to do with love, no matter what excuses are given.
Your Inner Critic warns you not to be charming because you equate that with insincerity, hypocrisy and manipulation. This cuts off your options when it comes to relating to people. You cut off being funny too because you don’t want to invite accusations of being unprofessional and not serious about being good. These have been adopted by the inner Critic as sticks to beat yourself with and can be let go of now. You are charming, you are funny, you are warm, you are sensitive, generous, loving and lovable. For when others say that to you they are not patronising you like your mother used to with these comments! They mean it. You have more power than you think. Your Inner Critic convinces you that you have no power- but you really do.
It’s time to let the real Mark out who is charming, kind, generous, loving, funny, easy to be around, full of light and so incredibly warm and sweet- all the things that I am usually not! And the only reason it is so well hidden is because you Inner Critic convinced you somehow that you had to be a monster if you wanted to go where you wanted to go. You confused the word “Professional” with “strictly self-disciplinarian who doesn’t allow emotions like humour and tenderness to get in the way of clawing his way to the top” You keep people at an emotional distance , frightened and confused by you, all the while allowing the Inner critic is convincing you that the loneliness and pain you are causing yourself is a fuel. And it is – a fuel which consumes and kills you!
I confessed to a friend recently that it is one of the most spectacularly peculiar ironies of my life that in my obsessive desire to protect myself from becoming the cartoon cliché of the insecure temperamental aging performer- childish, selfish, painfully self-pitying, self-dramatizing, egotistical, paranoid, riddled with irrational fears, neuroses and hideous insecurities, prone to diva-like sulks and tantrums who has so many sub-personalities he no longer has any idea at all of he really is and who causes everyone around him to dance around to try and please rather than risk upsetting him- that that is precisely the person I have become! I have now come to see that the root of these issues is not anything remotely resembling a “ troubled genius” but massively damaged self-esteem. My Inner Critic has wielded such power over me and has allowed me to abuse, berate, bully and ill-treat myself for so many years it has eroded my talent, my relationships, my inner beauty.
I think that me being uncommunicative and dour is coming from my father who was so single-focused that he couldn’t allow for laughter because he was so focused on what he thought were higher and more important things. It is this that has been adopted by me when I am working, and which is so alienating. It is because I never feel there is enough time, as my friend Peter put it, to “piss around”. It makes me pompous, legalistic, remote and unreasonable. I can afford to lighten up- in all senses of the word.
You do not need this agony, or this Inner Critic beating you up and telling you to hide what you are feeling all the time, and warning you that you are wasting time by being human.
It was your Mum who always told you what you were really like this underneath your hard mask of stone was kind, gentle, sensitive and loving, and you didn’t want to believe her. After all she was also the person that laughed at you, and fed you the message that you were daft, stupid, a baby, soft in the head. You couldn’t deal with these mixed messages. It wasn’t possible for you to accept that both of these might be true. Or neither! You thought she was tricking you into being a child again, or at least less than man. Your father was a model of the studious person who won through in the end; who was able to use his fury with himself and the world as fuel. His life was about vengeance on those who had underestimated him. In fact he was an extremely damaged individual, whose strength could have been put to infinitely better use if he hadn’t been so far up his own selfish, joyless and frustrated arse. And yet you chose to go down his route, stoking the fires of toxic rage in the hope that it was going to make you into a great man. Closed up in a crucible of self-loathing you thought would purify you. You decided you didn’t want to be liked, or loved but would settle for being respected, feared, envied and despised. A victim, a Mr Spock who buried his emotions; or like Riddler in Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart, a genius who sublimated all positive emotional energy. You didn’t believe you had any talent, any likeable qualities that were of any use to you; no real charm or talent, just weaknesses and vulnerable areas of your being that would never help you to achieve anything. So you thought it a better choice to be a pain in the arse who was at least able to be brilliant at what he did even if it meant cutting himself off from others so much that he had more time to focus on work, work, work. You decided to be lonely rather than have to deal with others who you thought were trying to deflect from your path, and pull you out of flow. You got paranoid, jealous, quiet, sulky, resentful and dark. You became Mr Angry, thinking that that somehow made you a more authentic and better artist. It didn’t make you a better artist, and people didn’t take you more seriously. They just thought you were an arse! And those that didn’t were actually doing you a gross disservice by not telling you. Let the work go, don’t make it the be all and end all and be light, light, light and you will find that your wonderful laugh will start to warm up all the people you might have alienated in the past, and begin to revive your career and reputation in ways that you cannot imagine. Stop gripping so grimly to the idea of the suffering, tortured artist, because that is really total bollocks. The work does not get easier; it gets harder, much harder when you cut yourself and your feelings and thoughts off.
You now realise that you have sabotaged yourself for 40 years and that now it is time for you to come out of that self-imposed confinement and be free of the need to obey your gaoler, your inner critic,. He is not your friend. He is your worst enemy when he is the only voice you can bring yourself to trust. Trust that you are loved, loveable and respected. You are a joy to work with when you want to be. If you sense yourself tightening up your heart and soul again, remember this: you are light, you are love, and like the L’Oreal adverts- you are worth it! Humour is really God working in you, and it is not irresponsible to have a laugh sometimes. Lighten up now, for God’s sake, Mark, for this will be your salvation, and ensure that when you leave college you could have a career as an actor.
You can expect to be liked, because you are a loveable guy.
You are extremely talented
You bring light, laughter and joy wherever you go.
A lot of this was taken from my Morning Pages and letter to myself and friends, and was written quickly, but it was honest when I wrote it and there will be stuff here that I'll need to come back to in the coming year. The key thing is for me to stop being so fucking self-obsessed and to 'Only Connect' with others now.
I have a huge struggle with impatience- mostly with my own failings actually, although it frequently spills over into my relationship with others in the context of rehearsals. I over-react to things way out of proportion, and come across as very intolerant with even little things I perceive to be going "wrong", or maybe time being wasted for instance. I don't easily forgive myself either, and it can corrupt the atmosphere of the rehearsal room very quickly...I guess that is why I have a struggle accepting experimentation, getting things 'wrong', or not knowing how to solve things quickly.
Believe it or not, long ago, anger /rage fuelled some of my best creative work as an actor, but it's a really dangerous kind of addiction- a sort of heroin in fact. After the initial rushes of creative power it bestows it will slowly and insidiously undermine you as you start needing bigger hits just to get the same effect. Without going into too much detail, it's curious how bonds/ relationship patterns formed in the rehearsal room by people mirror ones familial paradigm if you know what I mean. My relationships with my parents and siblings were, to say the least, 'dysfunctional' - as I'm sure you might've guessed!! That's the sort of stuff I am working to unravel and deal with before I go back to college.
I've realised I exhibit the classic low self-esteem pathology typical of the 'difficult' and 'insecure' actor cliché- and my inner critic admonishes that in me more than for anything else. When I try to sit on this critical voice it just emerges in other ways (passive-aggression, malicious obedience, frozen feelings, silences etc) and these tactics are especially confusing and scary to other people, I know that (But also to ME!) That's why I need to learn how to honour and allow that part of me a voice without allowing it to totally dominate proceedings. And that's also why I think it vital for me to not leave my sense of humour at the rehearsal room door from now on, and also to allow myself to state what I think/feel assertively (not aggressively or passively) before I go sit on my feelings and they get so totally squashed out of shape I don't even know what I am doing any more, or why! Laughter will defuse my impatience better than anything I think. That may sound to calculating, but that's what I reckon will work anyway. I've tried everything else!
It is not about self-transformation so much as self-affirmation. I am simply looking for opportunities now you share these qualities when with others, and to be lighter in the way I speak to myself, and to defuse the more dangerous and difficult aspects of how my Inner Critic is prone to bully me.
Be relaxed and at ease and quieten that shrill and irritating little voice of your Inner Critic and say thank you for your opinion but I am doing something else right now. If you must say what you have to say but I will consider it later. I don’t really need to hear that just now. Radiate love, joy and confidence. You have a right to be proud of who you are.
Open yourself,- as if you are a Cosmic Aperture spiraling outwards, - in the places you are closed.
Work on the craft and don't worry about the sharks. Even sharks like a good show.
Remember you can do it with wit, with charm, with eloquence and with confidence, expressing everything with such a deft skilfulness and a relaxed and easy quality that everyone will like you for it.
Believe it or not, long ago, anger /rage fuelled some of my best creative work as an actor, but it's a really dangerous kind of addiction- a sort of heroin in fact. After the initial rushes of creative power it bestows it will slowly and insidiously undermine you as you start needing bigger hits just to get the same effect. Without going into too much detail, it's curious how bonds/ relationship patterns formed in the rehearsal room by people mirror ones familial paradigm if you know what I mean. My relationships with my parents and siblings were, to say the least, 'dysfunctional' - as I'm sure you might've guessed!! That's the sort of stuff I am working to unravel and deal with before I go back to college.
I've realised I exhibit the classic low self-esteem pathology typical of the 'difficult' and 'insecure' actor cliché- and my inner critic admonishes that in me more than for anything else. When I try to sit on this critical voice it just emerges in other ways (passive-aggression, malicious obedience, frozen feelings, silences etc) and these tactics are especially confusing and scary to other people, I know that (But also to ME!) That's why I need to learn how to honour and allow that part of me a voice without allowing it to totally dominate proceedings. And that's also why I think it vital for me to not leave my sense of humour at the rehearsal room door from now on, and also to allow myself to state what I think/feel assertively (not aggressively or passively) before I go sit on my feelings and they get so totally squashed out of shape I don't even know what I am doing any more, or why! Laughter will defuse my impatience better than anything I think. That may sound to calculating, but that's what I reckon will work anyway. I've tried everything else!
It is not about self-transformation so much as self-affirmation. I am simply looking for opportunities now you share these qualities when with others, and to be lighter in the way I speak to myself, and to defuse the more dangerous and difficult aspects of how my Inner Critic is prone to bully me.
Be relaxed and at ease and quieten that shrill and irritating little voice of your Inner Critic and say thank you for your opinion but I am doing something else right now. If you must say what you have to say but I will consider it later. I don’t really need to hear that just now. Radiate love, joy and confidence. You have a right to be proud of who you are.
Open yourself,- as if you are a Cosmic Aperture spiraling outwards, - in the places you are closed.
Work on the craft and don't worry about the sharks. Even sharks like a good show.
Remember you can do it with wit, with charm, with eloquence and with confidence, expressing everything with such a deft skilfulness and a relaxed and easy quality that everyone will like you for it.
