I have this recurring scene in my mind’s eye that comes back to me when I’m getting some shut-eye. It’s me, standing outside a window, shivering in the cold, looking through into a warmly-lit room. The people I know and love are all gathered together; sometimes around a dinner table, sometimes around a Christmas tree, or in some nondescript living room. They’re laughing, they’re smiling, they’re trading jokes and swapping stories amongst each other. They’re having a grand old time.
But I can’t come inside.
I don’t know what it is that keeps me standing out in the cold. It could be nothing; it could be a million things. Am I choosing not to go inside? Or am I just not welcome? Either way, the scene remains the same: me longing to join them, to feel wanted, to feel valued.
To not be an outsider.
A lot of the dream’s content has changed over time: I get older, the interior of the room switches, the people in the room swap in and out depending on the relationships I’ve formed and may have let fall away. But the scene remains the same.
I don’t take dreams as gospel or use them to find parallels in my everyday existence — most of them make about as much sense as a Salvador Dali painting — but this dream just illuminates issues I’ve long wrestled with, and ones I don’t believe I’m alone in facing. I never quite felt like I fit; wherever I went or wherever I was placed. I was the square peg in a round hole, the fish out of water, the one that stood in the corner of a room, both hoping people noticed me and wishing I could blend into the wallpaper. Even when spending time with people I loved dearly — where there were zero logical reasons to be thinking these things — it didn’t matter. My squishy mass of cranial gray matter was determined to isolate me as much as possible.
I never quite felt comfortable in my own skin. I was too overweight, I was painfully shy, I had the conversational skills of a gnat. Even with a batch of God-given gifts — gifts that I should’ve been prouder of — it didn’t do enough to make me “normal.” If anything, it only further set me apart from my peers.
Talent is as distinguishable a mark as any out there; there’s this skill, this ability, this thing inside you that’s unique to your makeup and you’re the only one around that’s got the only type in town. In a creative sense, that can also come coupled with a different way of viewing the world than how other people see it; what your average therapist would call “divergent thinking”.
In my book, speaking as an artist, you’d have to be a divergent thinker in order to create the works you do; to conjure in your mind images, ideas, words and worlds that most people can’t perceive. More often than not, divergent thinking is “weird,” there’s just no getting around it. But it’s because of talented “weirdos” that we have so much classic media that’ve stuck with us and entertained us for generations. But talented “weirdos” also tend to have the biggest hearts, since it takes a lot of it to pour into our work, to make it good, to make it the best. These hearts are prone to getting scarred, deeply scarred, if people don’t enjoy, don’t respond to, or don’t like what we create.
To illustrate: I like to think of myself as a funny guy. My sense of humor has often shaped and influenced my work, my writing style and my creativity…which explains why a lot of my stuff can be pretty friggin’ off-beat.
I was a fan of crap like Ren and Stimpy, after all.
Even while I had a crippling case of stage fright up until my high school drama club days, there was still this inherent need for me to perform, to be the funnyman in the group, to break out the voices and characters in my repertoire and see how it landed after the routine was over. The awkward stares and silences more often than not outnumbered the actual laughs I got. Which, hey, I guess comes with the trial-and-error baptism by fire that is being an amateur comedian, but it did no favors for my already-microscopic sense of self-confidence.
Performing — like art or writing — became a facet of my identity, even if it wasn’t on a stage in front of a hundred or so people. It also made me feel like I was a curiosity in a freak show: hey, voice acting’s cool and all, but dang, what a weirdo that guy is! Cue canned laughter at my expense.
What was even worse than being made fun of? Nobody caring. Especially when it came to my cartoons: if I only got as much as a “meh” reaction, it felt like my heart had been torn out, sautéed, served, then had a cigarette butt put out on it. There was nothing worse than putting what felt like everything in you into a work of art, and it made barely a dent in the world. It was one thing to think about rejection being par for the course as an artist, it was a whole other thing to experience it, time and time again.
Because I didn’t quite feel like I was ever accepted, I craved attention more. I performed more, I threw more of myself into my creative work, I tried to stand out more. Standing out in order to fit in sometimes only pushed me farther away from the status quo. Eventually I stopped trying to be outgoing. I became more reserved, more unwilling to take risks, more guarded so people wouldn’t tear me down. I stopped performing, which is why my nascent days as a stage actor remained a blip on my radar. I became obsessed with ironing out all the imperfections in my work: I wasn’t about to accept anything less than perfect, so that way, no one would have an excuse to call me worthless, or talentless, or a hack, or criticize me in any way. But there were always imperfections, even when I thought I had cleaned house. So, I was never satisfied, and so I shelved more than I output.
I have many regrets about that. I’d heard stories of people who actually flourished creatively during their high school days, and their teachers and their peers supported them in it: the legendary Orson Welles was staging, producing and directing Shakespearean theater productions at a younger age than I was when I had first auditioned for that role in The Giver. I only wish I had even a tenth of the courage and conviction he had. I wonder how far I could’ve been along in my life and career had I seized that creative confidence earlier on. But like how people say you’re never too old to learn something new, there’s still a ton of hope and optimism out there for you late bloomers; trust me.
If there’s anything that I’d offer up my two cents on, it’s this: be confident in your talents and abilities and be courageous on expressing them; they’re gifts from God, and they’re unique to you. One, two, or even a million failures don’t and won’t define you or your worth as a person.
If you’re able to implant that in your mind early enough on, do it. For those struggling like I did, all’s not lost; it may take longer to reach that realization, and that’s alright.
But even then, work continually at re-shaping your confidence and conviction, and you’ll grow as an artist, and as a person.
