The Fear of Success

WHAT DO I DO WITH MY HANDS?

For most of my life— and indiscriminate of my appearance or abilities— I’ve been visited by periods of doubt. When I was younger, doubt about the way I looked or moved throughout the world kept me from being social. I remember walking through my high school cafeteria and suddenly becoming painfully aware of what my hands were doing. The pained, sweat induced, awkward struggle of shoveling them into my pockets and then out to my sides; in the moment, it felt like everyone was watching me have a stupid crisis about where to put my stupid hands to look like a stupid normal human being. Meanwhile, here I was so self conscious trying to look like a regular dude that I made myself out to be deranged.

“Doubt makes us a little bit narcissistic.”

But just a little.

DOUBT MAKES US A LITTLE BIT NARCISSISTIC.

This kind of cycle has followed me into every corner I put myself in. Whether I’m on stage or behind a camera, my doubt has developed it’s own little song and dance. Needless to say it is a part of me and sometimes tells me things about myself I otherwise wouldn’t listen to. And the most recent bought of doubt I’ve been rummaging with has helped me understand why I often pull back when great things happen in my life; the fear of success.

When I was in college, I read Audition by Michael Shurtleff. Among many internal dialogues frustrated actors have with themselves, Shurtleff talked about the dichotomy between green and experienced actors and their cycles of doubt. Young actors often feel that they’re not good enough and older actors feel they are undeserving of the success they have had.

In short, a lot of artists are tortured.

BTS from a recent trip to Corpus Christi, Texas shooting a series of mini-doc style testimonials with veterans in the area. Photos by Igor Nedvalyuk

As I approach my 28th year and enter my fifth year pursuing filmmaking, I’m finding myself experiencing both. In these past four years, I have learned a lot, thrust my nose to the grindstone. I have learned from embarrassing failures and come out the other end feeling grounded. I also am haunted by the things I don’t know to know. Having no formal education in production or cinematography, there are gaps in how I talk or communicate things, simply because I’ve learned to do things from a charcuterie board of YouTube University and trial by fire. It gives me that feeling Shurtleff talks about of being undeserving of success, an imposter in my own skin. It also makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing— fortunately as I get older I’m coming to realize a lot of people don’t really know what they’re doing.

I find I am often afraid to take next steps until I am encouraged. I wait for validation before I advocate for myself. It’s the same mental block that had me looking like a fool in my high school cafeteria, only now I’m an adult and I pay more taxes than Amazon. The desire to be seen as authentic, the hesitation to act and commit to being until first receiving validation first is an endless feedback loop.

My fear of success has compounded with wrestling a sense of permanence. I have struggled to make future plans, or to see my life beyond the next five years for fear of what our world may be like then. That probably sounds more dramatic than it is meant to, but in some ways it has me asking what and who is any of this for?

Why should I keep worrying about money if we won’t have stable water in 5 years?

But that’s a thought for another time. For now, I’m opening my mind to what this fifth year will bring.

The Decision to Leap

When I was studying Acting in college, there was a kind of thrill that came with the grind of the work. I could simultaneously feel myself getting closer to the craft and further away all in the same breath. It was this duality of experience that drew me in; the challenge, the inconsistency of really nailing a scene or a monologue or a performance met with the desire to jump back into the work and do it all again. The issue was that, at least for me, I never controlled when my acting would come alive— in fact, it required quite the opposite: to surrender.

Photo from the 2019 production of Oh, God with Mosaic Theatre Company. I played Lior, an autistic teenager in a play challenging the role and history of God.

As I transitioned into the world of film, a somewhat Wagnerian mix of multimedia and storytelling, I learned that in this craft more control led to better performances— but there’s still a balance. As an actor, I learned to trust my instincts, to depend on them when I didn’t know where else to turn. I was taught that times of uncertainty often lead to the most creative—and markedly human—choices. I learned to deconstruct hierarchies and wear them, lose them, or reconstruct them. I learned that nobody really knows what they’re doing despite how much they try to tell or show you otherwise but that there’s still an infinite you can learn from them. Everyone has something to offer.

None of this is really lost in how I approach filming a story. Even in the most literal of settings cinema is actually quite theatrical. Intention drives drama because of how we process the world. To me, filmmaking is still all about preserving and expanding the details that make us human, but doing so by constructing either fragments or whole parts of the world around people. Instead of embodying the inner life of a person and walking a mile in their shoes, what you have with film is essentially embodying the life of an entire world, an ecosystem of experiences, relationships, trauma, hope. Of course, most projects don’t demand the construction of the heavens and the hells, but we as people project ourselves onto our environments and therefore can use the world around us as a means to talk about our inner life, to reach for metaphors, or share our secrets. In film, sometimes the world is a soliloquy.

Still from my short documentary, the Great Victory of Isabel.

As I come into year 4 of embracing filmmaking as a career and life path, I want to honor both the history of where this passion evolved from and return to the origins of how I approach this work. Every day life is drama, that news shouldn’t feel new to anyone at this point. But how can we re-learn to open up to each other in such a hostile space? How can we take all this anger, exhaustion, despair, confusion that we’ve lived in for the past two years and make something with it that inspires hope, honesty and solidarity? Those are the questions I’m leading with. I don’t have the answers and perhaps I never will.

But alas, we’ve got work to do.

Profit Cannot Come First in a Post-Pandemic World

A couple of months ago, I turned 27 and it was the first time in my life I thought to myself wow I’m getting old. The last two years we’ve been living in the pandemic, I’ve felt myself creeping into an age beyond that I’d ever known; long nights held awake with the grip of existential anxiety, even longer days plugged into a chair working hours off my life, and a scarce sense of time and direction.

Like a lot of people, I had more time to sit, think, and reflect on the quality of my life and what I want out of this journey than I’d ever had before. I’ve thought a lot about the country and the way it’s mismanaged; who’s interests are pursued and who’s are consistently left behind. It’s not new that political tensions are as high as they are; while the rich get richer working people are divided by their identities, culture, and their need to survive week to week— it’s the classic playbook for preserving oppressive and exploitative hierarchies. And yet despite the alarm bells going off spelling out disaster everywhere from climate change, to hate crimes, to deepening disparities in wealth and declines in working conditions— we are so committed to doing business as usual. But why?

In the 1970s, amongst greater competition in the marketplace, the US shifted to prioritize shareholders and exponential growth to generate the largest possible return. This in large was prompted by Milton Friedman who paved the way for this philosophical breakthrough which would carry on for decades to fuel some of the strongest bull markets our economy has ever seen. In this timespan, our social, as well as our commercial apparatus, has frenzied on consumerism and consumption at excessive levels. While growth is to be expected as new technology scales with innovation, the year after year expectation of massive growth leads companies to make terrible long-term decisions in pursuit of short-term gains. Offshoring labor, cutting or stagnating wages, overproducing to meet a fractional threshold of demand have serious economic and environmental consequences. And while we’ve produced some of the most amazing technological creations in the last fifty years, it beckons the question at what cost?

The Return to ‘Business As Usual’

In the last year as our country gets back to work, there’s been a level of labor organization unseen since the great strikes of the 1920s and 30s. Workers who were forced into hazardous conditions throughout the pandemic while their companies generated billions of dollars in return for shareholders are demanding their pay and benefits keep to scale. We see narratives like the “labor shortage” discount the fact that as soon as the pandemic hit, many of these companies’ first instinct was to throw their employees to the wind, cutting health insurance and pay at a time when people needed it most. And when companies received economic stimulus, many of them prioritized share buybacks.

Meanwhile, our infrastructure bill, which would allow investments in renewable energy—hedging future inflation and providing millions of good-paying jobs— is being held hostage by a Senator whose yacht was paid for by Exxon Mobil. While scientists issue dire warnings about the fate of our climate without immediate action, we put out 30+ year timelines without firm commitments or investments to help us get there. An entire power grid in Texas was shut off for weeks last year freezing hundreds of people in their homes, and yet we refuse to invest in infrastructure to meet the needs of our times. Year after year, our coastal cities shell out billions in damages due to hurricanes and floods, but somehow pre-emptively addressing these issues with meaningful investments is inflationary? We pass a $760+ billion dollar defense bill and no one bats an eye but when it comes to investments that will not only improve the quality of life here in the States but also increase our GDP we scream inflation because it goes against the interest of the status quo. 60 years ago fossil fuel leaders knew climate change was an issue and they failed to adapt. If we were to apply the “free market” thinking to these same companies, wouldn’t that imply it’s time they kick the bucket? But the divdends!

Emerging out of Covid— despite not conquering Covid— it’s become clearer to me than ever that profit and revenue are no longer scaleable motives to solving the greatest challenges before us— they’re obstacles. To think that the years of death, economic devastation, medical bankruptcies could all have been prevented if we’d just committed to shutting down our economy for three weeks, paying people to stay home, and taking the hit. But because we failed to act, millions of people around the world are dying, economies are shrinking, and we’re nowhere closer to getting this pandemic under control.

Cannon Beach, Oregon 10/11/2021

We’re going to repeat the same mistakes with our climate if we continue this way of thinking. For the last two years, it’s been really challenging to feel a sense of permanence. Obviously, there’s a lot happening in the world to prompt me to feel this way, but to think we can still do something to improve the quality and security of our future and we just….dont? That’s a hard pill to swallow. Hunger shortages, water scarcity, rising sea levels, destroyed ecosystems— all the price to pay for inaction. And yet to be so in love with this planet and the people on it and the community of people I respect, admire and learn from— to see that threatened because a handful of people want to stay rich and powerful— I can’t accept that.

Last year, as we were remerging and there was hope that the vaccines would damp Covid away, I pledged to myself that my life had renewed meaning. And while I still feel that way, it’s colder in the sense that I want to live my life fully not knowing how much time we have left; time left for normalcy, left to fight for the future we deserve.

So I’m entering 2022 with a new conviction in the work I’m pursuing as a storyteller. At the end of the day, we have to believe that this world and the people on it are worth fighting for. We are not going to “capitalism” our way out of the challenges before us; we’ve seen how we become collateral damage to the industry of shareholder return. It’s time for something new, a new way of finding value in our communities.

Literally Nothing Matters If We Don't Address Climate Change

In the last couple of months, Congress has been lit ablaze over the battle for our infrastructure— a deal that brokers the opportunity to meaningfully address climate change through smart, impactful long-term investments. Over 10 years, Congress would divest from fossil fuels in favor of cheaper, renewable green energy and build up the nation’s infrastructure to support a more stable electric grid, improve public transit, incentivize electric vehicles, ban loopholes like fracking, “net emissions” and put an end to offshore drilling. It’s not a change that would happen overnight, but it’s one that would secure us a longer less conflict-ridden future as the world scrambles for resources like water, food, and livable shelter.

We in the US are fairly protected from the implications of climate change— that is, if you’re not poor or living on Indigenous reservations where toxic spills, poisoned water, cancerous air are built into the fabric of infrastructure. Even then, our countryside in recent history has witnessed historic floods, droughts, and wildfires as well as devastating storms wringing in death tolls in the thousands, billions in property damage, and community trauma. But in places like Central America, changes in the patterns of weather are driving some places into famine.

Yet, the US and many other countries that follow in our path have adopted a ‘business as usual’ approach to climate disaster at our doorsteps. Just one day after the climate summit COP 26, President Biden leased the largest amount of contracts to offshore drilling in recent history. Senators like Joe Manchin are inviting Exxon executives to write US climate legislation despite their public history of actively denying climate change in pursuit of short-term profit.

Activists pursue Joe Manchin coming off of his yacht in Washington D.C before an energy subcommittee meeting with Exxon Mobil.

It’s the same business as usual approach our country is taking in keeping healthcare behind a paywall despite the devastation a pandemic has caused people— notably the working poor—where healthcare is out of reach. Not to mention the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is medical debt, but that’s for a different article.

OIn my opinion, our solutions have to transcend green energy; we have to look at what's fueling our consumption. Year after year some of the largest public companies are incentivized to cut costs and make decisions, no matter how bad, that will lead to exponential profit growth. Despite record gains on Wall St in the last decade, worker wages have remained fairly stagnant— only a handful of people feel the return of their labor. But every year companies raise the ceiling a little higher and pump out artificial demand for material goods we don’t really need. Overproduction and overconsumption are also driving climate pressures and that’s a cultural and economic issue we deeply need to reflect on.

Not only that, fossil fuel-dependent supply lines and infrastructure lead to inflationary pressures every time oil and gas companies decide to hike rates, passing on costs to consumers which inequitably hurt poorer communities. Moreover, inflation only becomes a talking point when it comes to legislation that supports poor folks— nobody batted an eye when earlier this year we passed a 768 billion dollar defense spending bill.

Consider this a reminder that if we don’t meaningfully address climate change literally nothing matters.

Your stocks don’t matter, your career doesn’t matter, that home you want to buy doesn’t matter, my future, your future, your kids future, your parents future, the futures of people in threatened communities— all of that is what we are wagering when we continue to pander to executives chasing short term profit. Most of those making decisions on our climate won’t be around to see the consequences.

But hey, if none of that moved you, beyond the existential reasons to support a green energy transformation— you won’t have to pay sky-high gas prices.