Values and 2 Nights in NOLA
For a long time, my values as an artist and as a person were subconscious and therefore shitty. I valued being talented or good in the eyes of others, and I only did things that I knew would lead me to other people’s ideas of success. Until I met Jeff.
I talk a lot about Jeff, but he came into my life at a critical point. I was battling depression and an overwhelming deluge of negative thoughts that made it almost impossible to act (or even hold a conversation) at a time when I was cast in a repertory company that performed three times a week and two Mainstage shows. Jeff also happened to be leading a workshop on the thing that terrified me most about performance art — improvisation. Improvisation was free fall. I couldn’t plan, I couldn’t cling, and I couldn’t control it. It was surrender into a chasm of vulnerability, like standing in front of the class in a thong and pasties. Or maybe that would’ve been easier.
I didn’t know if I would be successful at it, and it wasn’t Math class, so I wasn’t sure that I would fail. It was the first time that I had had to face my fixation on outcomes. I had avoided things I knew I wouldn’t be successful at like team sports, AP Chemistry, and my aforementioned arch nemesis, Math (I literally put it off until the second semester of my senior year of college). But this was different. I wanted to be a good improviser, and it was an important part of my field. My value of growth was coming into direct conflict with my value of being dependably successful in the eyes of my peers, my theater program, and myself. It was brutal. I couldn’t get up in front of the class for the first three days. I went up to Jeff and said, “I really wanna get up there, I’m just terrified I’m gonna suck.” And he gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten: “Then suck. Try to suck.”
The funny thing about trying to suck is you realize that it’s impossible to actually suck when you’re trying to. When you stop holding onto the idea of success or failure you realize that you are finally allowed to just play and explore. It doesn’t matter if it sucks. What matters is the exploration and that you did it. Keep doing what you’re afraid to suck at. Again and again.
One of my favorite tools comes from the The Confidence Gap: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt by Russ Harris. He says, “The actions of confidence come first, the feelings of confidence come later.” Much like the long time philosopher and scholar, Shia Lebeouf, asserts: Just do it. Maybe you’re scared to get up in front of your peers and give a speech or maybe — just spitballing here — you’re scared to start a blog.
Let your value be action. It doesn’t matter what you feel or how good it is (at least when you’re starting something). It matters what you do.
In Nelson Mandela’s epic autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (which inspired the name of this blog), he talks about feeling fear and wearing a “mask of boldness.” People thought he was fearless, and he was, but that doesn’t mean he always felt fearless.
Let your value be action despite your feelings. Then, if you do it at all, you will have succeeded. More importantly, you won’t be blocked creatively because you’re not performing for rewards and in fear of punishments. What impresses me most about people is often not how well they can do something, what they talk about doing, or what they think, but what they actually do. Most people don’t do. They wait.
Some of us are also waiting to feel motivated, and the world supplies us with endless excuses. The truth is: Action leads to motivation, which leads to more action and motivation. Maybe you really don’t want to study Russian today. If you force yourself to do something simple like watching a YouTube video in Russian, you will find that you’re hungry for more because doing begets doing. If you wait to feel motivated, you’ll reach your goals sporadically at best. Do what you want to do whether you feel like it or not. Act fearless whether you feel fearless or not.
Speaking of acting fearless — today is the Day!
All my things are in a pile, contiguous, in the center of my room. The walls are bare, and it’s time to call a new place home. After a heart-wrenching goodbye to my mom, I’ll be hitting the road. Luckily, one of my best friends is here to accompany me on the ride over, and we’re stopping in New Orleans on the way to get some rest and see the city before the rising sea level makes it an aquarium.
We are quite a pair. Two ladies with names that are also mundane objects. Punny and monosyllabic: Bell and Paige. The two amigas. The two musketeers. Bonnie and Bonnie. Batgirl and Catwoman. Ilana and Abby. Two curly-headed theatre types who have a penchant for talking as if we’re at a loud concert when we’re actually in small, confined spaces. She was the friend I couldn’t invite over without express permission from everyone living in the house because when we got together it got louder exponentially. We also both have huge, ridiculous hair that expands up and outward in humidity and could threaten to make us the stars of an 80’s throwback on any given day.
If Bell had a superpower, it would be her ability to fit into ludicrously small spaces or laugh at unfunny jokes. And for the latter, I have always been grateful. Cheers to memories about to be made. Onward!
The road trip to New Orleans reminded me how fun and unfun long drives can be. You’re tired of driving (it was only two hours before I gave up and asked Bell to take over. Luckily my driving terrifies her, so she was more than happy to oblige). You’re tired of talking. You’re tired of music. You’re tired of podcasts. Basically, you’re tired of everything except jumping out of your front windshield to freedom.
New Orleans is a trip. And there definitely wasn’t any rest. I had no idea this city had so much character. The first night, Bell and I wandered into a dingy but hipstery area (we later learned it was called the Marigny) where it seemed like every bar and restaurant had a live band playing. I wasn’t sure if I should be worried about someone breaking into my car or if we were in the coolest, actually upscale part of town. We peered through the windows of restaurants and watched some musicians play. One smiled back at us, plucking away happily at his big upright bass. There was even a cat sleeping in a funky bookstore window. We went to a nice joint called The Three Muses and paid $35 for what I would call a light snack. We left as soon as possible to crash at our Airbnb, curiously nicknamed “The Chicken Coop.”
The next day I woke up and realized why it was called The Chicken Coop. Not only was there rooster paraphernalia everywhere inside and outside the house, but there was an actual rooster and at least four chickens waddling aimlessly through the streets. I was under the impression that roosters only crowed in the morning, but this one crowed all day. Unfortunately, the sound of the crowing didn’t wake me up because I never fully went to sleep. An Airbnber who shared our room and was only a folding screen away was snoring the loudest, most obstreperous snores I have ever heard in my life. Not only was the sound inescapable, but the pull chain on the light was broken, and we couldn’t turn off the light to the fan. We only had the light switch, and it was Sophie’s Choice between light and fan or no fan and no light. And so we sweated through the night, waking up repeatedly to the sounds of the human foghorn. I don’t know why this guy was even in New Orleans because he had spent the day before watching TV in the living room, and when we came back in the afternoon after a sleepless night and a day of sightseeing, he was still gnarring away.
Mark Twain called New Orleans “a city of the dead,” and because I can’t resist, I’ll say he was dead-on. When Bell and I arrived at our Airbnb, a few children told her that someone had died in our house and that they’d be scared to sleep there. That really set the tone. Unlike most cities, the dead are in plain sight thanks to the dilapidated and weather-beaten above-ground graves located throughout the city center. The most popular cemetery for tourists and tomb defacers alike seems to be Saint Louis Cemetery Number One. It is mainly a Catholic cemetery, but I found it amusing to take a gander at the poorly kept Protestant section of the cemetery. It mainly looks like grass because most of the graves have sunk completely into the mud. They didn’t mind this at all at the cemetery and actually used this to their advantage. Once a grave sank, the Catholic Church just resold the land and built another grave on top. Efficiency at its finest.
Unfortunately, graves were not always built like mini marble tiny homes with wrought iron and cast iron gates. The water table in New Orleans is so high, that sometimes (even now) it rises above the graves underground and the water pressure forces the graves to resurface, initiating a horrifying and unwanted family reunion. Some of the bodies were not properly decomposed, so this was also obviously a health hazard.
It’s hard to imagine exactly how many dead bodies are buried beneath the French quarter and places like the St. Louis Cathedral. In 2011, fifteen coffins were unearthed when a French Quarter condo owner decided to build a pool in his back yard.
Ew.
After that, we rode some bikes down to “The Fly,” an area behind the Audubon Zoo that runs along the Mississippi river levee. Getting there was a little painful because Bell’s GPS took us down a long and convoluted path over some of the jankiest third-world country roads I’ve ever seen in America. So lumpy. I almost fell off my bike like ten times. We found out on the way back that our destination was actually just down the nicely paved street from the bike shop.
Bourbon Street.
One of the few famous places that live up to its name. It’s a Bachelorette’s heaven, a recovering alcoholic’s nightmare. The street goes on and on seemingly forever. Bar after bar, different bands and music styles battling to be heard from every direction. Women advertising their bodies on the street wearing whatever is smaller than a thong. Trash, the trashy, and the trashed everywhere, a street strung out in debaucherous chaos.
The only place I could stand to be was in front of some jazz musicians in a room with no AC or bathroom. I think they thought the lack of bathroom and AC was a cool idea. Jazz and tourism seem to be the glue holding the lawless, dilapidated city together, and no music is more lively and exciting than improvised music from Swing era instruments. These are not sounds you get to hear very often live, and in New Orleans, they’re ubiquitous and infectious.
Now I’m in Austin and tomorrow we start the real work. I feel as sleep deprived as a college student the night before a final exam. We threw a mini bachelorette for one of Bell and I’s mutual best friends, Leigh Ana, for a few nights, and I started my journey living in an artistic community space called Indra’s Awarehouse (it was a warehouse built like a haphazard, expressive work of art). Aesthetically stimulating and full of other artsy fartsy types, the space looked like a perfect place to land, and the big-hearted creatives that lived and worked there had opened up their shared space to me at a very low price. It was an exciting idea in theory, and a fucking horrible one in practice. In short, I couldn’t acclimate to the lack of air conditioning there. The first thing I was aware of at the Awarehouse was that I was dripping with sweat, and my body felt like it wanted a new owner. The traveling + the punishing Texas heat + the lack of sleep + the lack of air conditioning had left me feeling like a used plastic baggie melting in the sun. It was time to find a new place to live and to get to work.
