I’ve been talking a lot of shit lately. To myself. About myself.
Standing at the sidelines of my own infinite gold medal round, an open firehose of spittle and obscenities, ‘fucking moooooove!’
But it’s nearly AUGUST, I calmly remind myself. The dog days. If ever a time for minimal movement, especially in the wet sauna of the American Midwest, it’s now. It’s even the particular summer I’ve personally intended on having… slower… striving is out and leisure is in. All languid and loose.
I’ve well attuned my physical pace to my aim, but my inner voices are in open revolt.
Time is evaporating. Your dead ends are stacked in a mass grave of spent efforts. You’ve taken too many risks. You haven’t taken enough risks.
Shit or get off the pot.
We all do this. Self-criticism is universal in us human folk, and so much so that I earn some of my living helping people (creatives in particular) negotiate its insidious tactics and effects.
Spending as much time as I do on the topic though, my lack of immunity sometimes makes it feel all the more painful. I well understand how both care and comparison motives work, about how our brains have self-sealed over millennia, preserving our penchant for easily recognizing our short-comings in favor of survival.
I do all the stuff. Walk the talk in service of myself, my creative work and my clients, and with even deeper utility intended for my family—as a daughter, sister, wife and parent.
And yet with all the gratitude, self-examination and forgiveness, intentional care and emotional latitude, I struggle. And not only do I struggle to process my thoughts and emotions around all this, but I also strain—as I’m 1000% sure you do also—under the conflicting messages we’re bombarded with from all corners of our information-obese lives. Those other voices…
Optimize everything or nothing. Purpose is essential or an illusion. Push to be seen because it’s the only way toward success or do it all only for yourself.
Dreams are your north star or dreams are for sleep and children.
If you’re not moving, you’re dead.
You know that thing that happens, the chaos magic of a song, piece of art, conversation or book that seems to have chosen you for and in this exact moment instead of you choosing it?
It’s just as often a delight as it is insult to injury.
To wit, I’ve been completely preoccupied this last week in reading Mark Seal’s incredible book on the making of The Godfather: Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.
It’s been on my list since early this year (and by ‘list’ I mean, as a photo on my phone, in between bar stools to be posted on FB Marketplace and our youngest surveying his private nature reserve on the north bank of our lake), and I keep chucking it to the side in irked protest of it’s hold on me. It’s one of those terrific and terrible books you both can’t bear to put down and pray never ends.
I’ve been a Francis Ford Coppola stan since high school, the memory of seeing Apocalypse Now for the first time still fresh and juicy and a little painful—like a first injury, or, if I’m honest, losing my virginity. A clichéd line to draw, but a truthful one.
Most 13 year-old girls I knew were crushing on Michael J. Fox, Prince, Simon LeBon. I had my American Cinematographer subscription and fantasies not of marrying, but on being. I admired, fell in love with and wanted to become Coppola, if only to understand what it was like to create things as comprehensively magical as even a single scene from one of his films.
I took my VHS tapes of The Godfather trilogy on my babysitting jobs back then, watching them like porn in a darkened living room after putting kids to bed. I reckon the my parents had no idea (Mom, I know you’re reading this… feel free to confirm or deny), the employing parents sure didn’t; no one did.
So, I’m reading this incredible story of the making of the film of the story, and it’s bringing up all this heavy stuff, and it’s making ME feel like… a can of paint. Unopened, eggshell white.
The literal insanity 29 year-old Francis Ford went through, as a relatively unknown and untested filmmaker, in debt, married with two kids and one percolating, to produce the make and model of film he somehow knew he was capable of, is actually beyond most anyone’s capacity to understand.
And that’s just Coppola. If you think you know anything about Mario Puzo, particularly if born after 1970, you’re likely wrong.
Hard truth is, they both (and many involved) bet everything they had, even things they didn’t yet have, on their creative dreams. They took enormous risks—financial, physical, psycho-emotional—to become the artists they were driven to someday being.
And they both suffered for it. We all do, while most of us abandon those dreams far short of making them real.
Curious… tragic.
I haven’t yet finished the book, and am now on a steady but restricted pages/day diet for the remaining half, but know how it all ultimately turns out.
The Godfather was a massive success, for young Coppola, for shy and broke Puzo; for failed and failing Paramount Pictures, a completely unknown Pacino, the unemployable and washed-up Brando, first time actors and industry veterans; for every person who’s ever watched it and then watched it over and over, and then over again.
Being bitch-slapped as I was by turning 50 last year, I’m finding the hardest pills to swallow are age-related. It’s of small comfort that Puzo wrote The Godfather at 45, though not considering how many years of open spigot pulp fiction he wrote for the wryly named Magazine Management Company. There’s exactly zero consolation to be found in Coppola’s early history—he arrived a storyteller and somehow knew to fight like hell for all of it.1
I take this information in with equal amounts respect and admiration. But it also makes me feel bad about myself, and about my choices. About how, if I view it a certain way, I seem to have talked myself out of my dreams and into a perpetual state I just this morning saw being referred to as ‘zombie burnout.’
Clay Skipper, writing for The Growth Equation, differentiates ‘zombie’ burnout from your average, burn-the-candle-from-both-ends burnout this way:
Type-1 burnout (overwork) comes from doing too much work without enough rest and recovery. It’s how people conventionally think about the issue.
Type-2 burnout (zombie) comes from not doing enough of what lights you up, from not taking on challenges that align with your values and goals.
I like what Skipper’s laying down here, because he’s divorcing achievement, success, any manner of result-oriented metrics from both the problem and the solution. Exerting ourselves as artists, physically and mentally, to the point of exhaustion is one thing. But better defining what can sometimes be mistakenly diagnosed as an existential or midlife crisis (or hell, even average-grade depression) as a matter of curation… that’s something I can get behind.
If our malaise is just as often borne from not doing enough of one thing vs. doing too much of another, there’s choice involved. And choice is, and will always be, unique and available to the individual.
We can moan long and legitimately all we want about the state of things these days. And truly, people, such is life. Every generation, every human, has their tragedies and glories, the roses and associated thorns that grow and die back through every season. It’s personal, communal and eternal.
Experiencing both, on the micro and macro level, and with constant cultural representations in varying shades of authenticity, it’s easy to think someone MUST have the answer for all this.
How can we dream, share that dream, build it with our brains, hands and bodies, become it, while also remaining physically safe and able to enjoy a certain percentage of return on our investments?
How can we dream, unencumbered as children, and then strategically as adults, tending to our primordial fires through the various and varying seasons of our lives?
And maybe in the simplest terms, how can we dream and then enjoy the incomparable thrill of making it real enough?
There’s some truly mucky spots in here, in and around the matter of circumstance. Not everyone, not even most, have been born into an environment that supports the freedom to grow as one chooses. I like very much how
Oliver Burkeman writes about this in Meditations for Mortals (and like the entire book even more), about how we do no service to those without the circumstantial favor we enjoy by denying it for ourselves.
So, yes. I’m writing for a particular audience, and with some overlap to those I actively mentor through some of these same dimly lit corners.
I’m also writing to give myself permission to continue, and to you, the comfort and ballast of companionship.
It’s rough out here, but the friction in no way means that which we feel we need to do, that we want to do, is impossible, lacking in value or at all like what anyone else can or ever will do.
The shape of your dreams, the lines, textures, size and orientation, will change. They should and will. But as with the mother that feeds loaves upon loaves through generations, your immaculate dream—the beginnings of which arrived with your recognition of your own existence—is both yours and for the world.
We, of artists’ souls and predilections, who dream big dreams because we were in fact born that way, it’s for you, and for me, that I write these words:
Do your dreaming in the daylight.
Your dreams breathe and age and change just as all living things, and need sunshine, rainwater… the deliciousness of your attentions and the energy of your efforts.
Your dreams will sustain others long after your body no longer sustains itself. And just like you, they are shaped over time by the confluence of your choices and experience.
Do your dreaming in the daylight. They’re just as real as you are.
A special thanks to Nolan Green from of sound and fury for the soundtrack by which the final hours of this essay were written. You’re a prince among bros, my friend, and… best playlist title ever. Might crib for a pen name, should I need one.
The Universe really belabored the point this week, insisting I get even more worked up for this essay by dropping a documentary about my other favorite film/director of all time. Spielberg was frigging 27 years-old when he made Jaws, and it took him years to get over the trauma of it.
This song is new to me, via the Kevin Morby w/Waxahatchee version, and Jason Molina’s original keeps arriving at the most beautifully disruptive moments. It’s as close to perfect as a single song can be, and I’m haunted by the loss of the human who made it.
On a lighter note: Detroiters anyone?? Rarely does a show representing a specific place also do that place right. I’ve been laughing into my bed pillows, lest I wake the kids with my man-chortles. Sooooo good.
Bree Stilwell 