Everybody wants to rule their world
Control is powerful f*ckery
Van Morrison had a reputation for being a bully. I suppose these days you’d call it being a badass but it being 1980 the term hadn’t yet been popularised. A badass commands a certain amount of respect whereas a bully just engenders fear.
I am in the lobby of a hotel in Amsterdam where the receptionist is looking at me with glassy-eyed indifference. She has in her hand a fax (Millenials, you can PM me and I’ll explain). Like the Ides of March, this scroll of paper announces my impending doom and proves beyond all doubt that I have monumentally fucked up the hotel booking.
I glance over at Van who thinks the five minutes he has been waiting for his key is already four minutes too long. His stare is piercing. I can’t breathe. There is no rational dialogue going on in my head. There are no kind sentences like “This is your first big job; everyone screws up sometimes; the rooms will be ready in a few hours; it isn’t a big deal; nobody died.”
There are no words period. There are just feelings… like intense shame and the desire to run away and hide; the humiliation of being ‘found out’, like a child in her parent’s shoes pretending to be a grown-up. I am waiting for Van to start his legendary rage “Who the fuck let a chick do this job?” Meanwhile, the receptionist is slowly looking through a lever arch file of room allocations. I am praying, though it feels more like commanding her to turn the pages faster with the force of my will.
I have completely forgotten how to breathe.
Van is now staring at me like Lee Van Cleef in a shoot-out. The rest of the band are wandering around the lobby staying out of the line of fire. I am fighting back tears that are doing needlepoint in my eyes, as I whisper something to the receptionist. I don’t want anyone to hear me beg.
A few tourists do a double take. One stops and reaches into his pocket. Oh God no… he’s going for his camera. All the blood has risen to my cheeks so my feet can’t move. The American pulls out a candy bar. Thank you God. Thank you God.
The receptionist sighs and makes one room available. I grasp the key as if it’s an ancient talisman, hand it to Van and apologise to the rest of the band members who roll their eyes and wander off to find the nearest bar.
Then I walk calmly to the toilet… where I burst into tears. Huge shaking sobs – the kind that come when you’ve hardly drawn breath for the past half hour. And in that moment, like Scarlett O’Hara shouting to the wind, I vow to the porcelain…
As God is my witness, I will never be humiliated again.
There’s something powerful about a vow. It’s different from an intention or a promise. It’s binding. It carries weight. It’s not something we can cast aside easily.
We all have this vow somewhere inside us. We might have forgotten the event that preceded it, particularly if it happened when we were very young. The mind is clever like that. It’s able to erase the tape. Unfortunately, the mind can’t erase the feelings. They go into an underground cave deep in our psyche, where they turn into kryptonite.
Whenever we want to try anything new (and creativity by definition is trying something new) the kryptonite gets activated.
We tackle this with more control, resilience, and determination. We fight to realise our creative projects. These strategies help, but they’re limited. We finish the work but feel like something is missing.
Hiding in the cave (along with the kryptonite) is a Gollum-like creature called our reptilian brain. This brain isn’t very smart but it is ferocious in its intent to stay alive. The greatest threat to the reptilian brain is anything new or different.
Creativity is the search for new and different… thoughts, words, ideas, expressions. We don’t know in advance how these are going to turn out because true creativity is co-creativity. We start off the process, then we meet what wants to be created and improvise together. The only problem getting in the way of this happy dance is Gollum whose philosophy is more like If I don’t know how this is going to end, I have to assume it ends with our death.
This is where we get the expression “dying on stage”. It feels awful because it’s the triple whammy of…
Activated kryptonite (the calcified feelings of past humiliations)
A broken vow (as God is my witness I will never be humiliated again)
A freaked-out Gollum creature (furious he wasn’t consulted about the crazy idea to be spontaneous)
Faced with this, we don’t need some silly strategy like imagine the audience are naked” or fake it till you make it or power stance in the toilet we need to enter the dark cave with a torch, some magic spells, and a lot of love for Gollum.
Live and online courses coming soon… Flow without the F*ckery on Amazon
