Chance
A friend of mine had his entire life change direction because of a single human hair. Back in the early Eighties he wanted to be a filmmaker, so he got a stop-motion project off the ground. On the first day he noticed a hair in shot. He mentioned it to the guy he borrowed the camera from, and was told not to worry about it; the hair was in the viewfinder, not the gate.
A year later the work was done, he got the money together to get the film developed… and in every single frame there was the hair. The whole thing was ruined. He packed it in, gave up on movies and became an artist. He’s now a very successful writer and illustrator of children’s books. When he told me that story I couldn’t get past the fact that a single strand of human hair was possibly the single greatest formative influence on the person sitting in front of me. So much about he and his life would have been different if that hair hadn’t been there, if his friend hadn’t been wrong or if he had sourced the camera from somewhere else. He wouldn’t have met my best friend, for a start, and they wouldn’t have been together for the last twenty-odd years. His books and characters wouldn’t exist. He may not have had the house I was in when he told me.
One hair. That’s all it took to shape an entire life. That was his big, hidden influencer.
It got me thinking: what was my mine?
Approval
Marc Maron, a 30-year comedy veteran, went on record as saying that he’s never met a comedian who hasn’t come from a home with an absent father. His take (and I’m conflating it with my own views here, slightly) was that you develop early as a comedian in order to please your father, to keep things happy at home, and that later you get on stage in order to have the relationship with an audience that you didn’t get to have with your dad: you’re getting on stage to have someone tell you that you did good.
I took a crack at stand-up in the early Nineties, doing a total of three sets and killed each time. Twenty minutes of material delivered easily, not a lot of movement, constantly reminding myself to slow down, and the first night went so well I had people giving up their seats and the MC felt her job was threatened. This was small-time stuff in Cairns, at a place called the Sit-Down Comedy Club. I could have used a connection with a visiting comic to take it from Cairns to Brisbane, but gave it away. I realised early on the crowd was made up almost entirely of the kinds of people I dreamed about getting away from, and making them laugh left me certain that this was exactly what I didn’t want to do. I wanted to slap them in the face. I hated that audience. I hadn’t heard of Bill Hicks yet, but now I think I understand a little of what he felt; only he strapped himself to that life while I chose something else. It was the beginning of asking ‘What am I doing here?’, and it’s never stopped. But I’ll tell you this: it showed me the importance of being angry. I’ll get to that later.
A friend texted me shortly after I posted those photos last week: “Get ready 2 blush. I never thought I’d say this 2u but that is a very sweet Cam Rogers in 1992… Nowadays u r so serious & sombre & that cheeky, innocent smile just leapt off the page” They were right. I haven’t smiled like that in a long time.
My friend Alex reminded me of a line delivered by Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: “Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.” I heard that line and felt like my heart lost five pounds.
I don’t do that. At all. Dmetri knows how to do that. We were driving one night a week or so ago, and I commented that I really admired his ability to consciously enjoy himself at least once a day. He looked at me and said he’d go mad if he didn’t. I’m finding it very difficult. A day’s over before I remember to do it, there’s so much future-critical stuff to get done. You’re probably thinking that it’s not like that for a lot of other writers, and you’d be right. Like it or not we’re all the product of our influences. I made the choices I did because of those influences, and my influences held greater sway because I wasn’t aware of them.
And now here I am, I thought, robbing myself on a daily basis.
My life is like this, right now, because I grew up like a comedian. Unavailable parents, in it alone, early realisation that I was the prototype for my brother, comedy as a tool, desperate need for approval and not getting it from anywhere. First World problem, granted, but as a kid I didn’t know it, as a teenager I didn’t care and by the time I hit my twenties all I’d known was a quarter-century of having to tell myself I wasn’t irrelevant because no-one else was going to. So I hit the mid-Nineties high on a fresh escape from twenty years in FNQ, with great new friends, an entire lifetime ahead of me and a solid direction… unaware that my Directive 4 was “Fall in love with anyone who loves you.” Over a fifteen year period that pounded me like a tent peg.
Couple that with a habit of taking commitment seriously – really seriously – and I did myself a lot of damage.
I went to New York and got this Coyote tattoo for a reason. He’s funny, he’s odd, he’s possessed of a sly, opaque wisdom, and he excels at self-sabotage. But he always gets up. Always dusts himself off. And always steps on another landmine.
It’s a big thing to look in the mirror and admit that the person you think you are probably isn’t the person other people see. But I’ve always been good at murdering my darlings, and one positive thing I learned early on was to not care that much about what other people think.
Anger
I’ve been told that a large part of depression is stifled anger. I’d pay that. Repress anything and it’ll rot.
Personally the best cure for depression I’ve found is to get angry. It’s why I loved doing standup, and probably why I could never do it again. It’s what made me a good actor, though the audience never knew it. It was this bottled, throttled, controlled fuck you. It’s what makes good music.
The darkest periods of my life – and they’ve been long – always lacked that outlet.
One of the best ten minutes of my life was showing up early to the Rondo for rehearsal, letting myself in, turning on a single droplight, standing in the centre of the stage and just screaming my head off.
In hindsight that was my whole life, right there.
I’ve never had a place to do it since.
Two years ago I lost everything: all my savings, my house, my cats, my relationship, the family home went, I also lost my hometown as a result, my career had been on life support for five by that point and my prospects had dwindled to very few. Things weren’t looking great. The lead-up to that, for four years, was grim. I realised I was closer to killing myself than I’d ever been in my whole life. My stance on suicide had always been ‘Why would you do that when you have nothing to lose by staying? Even the worst life is more than oblivion. Especially given that the likelihood of your being here at all is so astoundingly improbable we may as well call it impossible.’ And yet there I was, standing in the kitchen, staring out the window, trying to work out how serious I was about this. David Foster Wallace said suicide was as sensible to the person who does it as stepping off a balcony is to a person trapped in a burning high-rise. That made a lot of sense. Of course, he also killed himself.
That was the payoff for thirty-five years of being oblivious to Directive 4: winding up almost entirely abraded by life, my understanding of who I was perverted by stealth, and having no idea how I’d gotten there or that any of that had even happened. Also, it’s worth mentioning, two years ago wasn’t the first time something that disastrous had happened. It was the second. All because I kept stepping on the same landmine, out of the same need for someone to see me for who I am.
When I finally got perspective on it, I got angry. Haven’t looked back since. I kind-of like it. It’s still touch-and-go, but life’s closer to feeling like a game than it has in eight years.
I still ride myself hard; there’s seven years of stasis to make up for, but there’s more to it than that. It’s a fear of failure. I wake, I work, I sleep.
But, just last night, I went and watched TV for the first time in nine months. I patted the cat. He pressed into my chest and tried to eat my earphones. I drank some of the mead I brought back from Sussex and remembered how green that pond had been, how many wasps there were, and Bean trying to make friends with a chicken.
I really had to wonder what the hell my problem was.
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Funny/angry is the lifesaver, it’s when you lose the anger that you lose the funny (even the savage funny) and you just feel too defeated to go on.
Women in particular are conditioned in Australia to suppress anger, to be ‘nice.’ That is not a good thing.
In short, all this resonates with me even though at the moment, I do feel defeated and weary.
I find it’s most likely to kick in when I get tunnel vision, if I let life narrow to a focus on one thing. Sometimes I have to, but if I break it up with exercise and a conscious effort to smell the roses a couple of times a day it’s fine.
I never feel like this when I travel, for example. It’s always getting static that kicks it off. Your mileage may vary, but I’d suggest the solution isn’t always as front-door as getting angry or laughing at it. Sometimes all it takes is a daily dose of being good to yourself. Like putting aside a half hour to read, or slotting in an hour on a couch with something on the box that you know is going to make you laugh, or sitting someplace beautiful with your thoughts and a cup of coffee.
I don’t mean to come off all Dr. Phil, but remembering to enjoy what I have gives the goblins less traction.
I read a very good book on writing or performing comedy that suggested that there were several likely factors that led to someone being a comic. The ones I remember are that a combination of a family where people didn’t talk about things, an urge to understand things and being angry a lot make if likely you’ll end up shouting from the rooftops about topics most people try to avoid.
Ahem. Anyway.
As for ricochet moments – holy shit, I’m in Australia! When did that happen?
The ones I remember are that a combination of a family where people didn’t talk about things, an urge to understand things and being angry a lot make if likely you’ll end up shouting from the rooftops about topics most people try to avoid.
Why did I have a sneaking feeling you’d relate to that somehow. But yeah, that’s it – and it’s something I love in some of my friends.
I love what I do, but having something to say is a big component in all of it. With the books it’s usually non-soapboxy, more conceptual, but back in the acting and comedy days… hell yeah.
Also, what did result in you being in Australia? It was a trip that flipped, wasn’t it? Got here, liked it, never left?
More like the tripswitch that flipped. On Sept 30, 2005, I was in a job that bored and frustrated me, miserably single, drinking incredibly heavily, lonely and staring down the barrel of a long dark Irish winter.
A week later, me and mate had tickets to Aus for December. She, half-seriously, said, “I’m going to run away to Australia” and we both realised it was the best idea ever.
I plan on going home though, but five days in I had realised that I was going to stay as long as the country would have me. I’m amused my only experience of love at first sight was with a country.
That’s brilliant. More people should get a great third act like that.
I had that love-at-first-sight thing with Iceland, but I’m not sure I could live there permanently. Had it with Edinburgh as well, and NY. NY I think I could do. Just need a few of these plans to pay off.
I do hope Cat makes it back over here.
“the same need for someone to see me for who I am”
I’ve been pondering this. I don’t really know what happened two years ago, and I’ve been known to get myself in trouble, taking one sentence from a post and running down a tangent with it, so this comment may not speak to what you were actually trying to say but…I think it’s a really hard and fundamental human issue, that one. It is, of course, tremendously difficult for most people to conceive of the ways in which others differ from themselves – a lot of the time with other people we’re just trying to look in the mirror – but there’s also often a form of denial, where we want badly to believe that someone else is a certain way, whether it’s an idealized image or just still the way they were when we met them, without all this pesky ‘change’ stuff. But becoming someone else’s idea can be seriously warping. And a lot of times the fabulous complex uniqueness of each other gets entirely overlooked at just the time when we most need it recognized.
Hey Kest.
What happened years ago was, literally, a series of unfortunate events and no, I think you’ve pretty much nailed it.
Still, I figure nothing’s a total loss if you learn from it. On the subject of self-knowledge, probably the most instructive thing I did at that time was to sit down, list all my major relationships, list their pros and cons, and then tallied the pros and cons they all had in common. It shocked the hell out of me, the portrait it painted of the kind of person I’m drawn to. Now if I realise I’m talking to someone like that – especially if there’s interest – I walk.
If you don’t mind my asking, how’s that working out? By which I mean, if the people you’re drawn to are problematic, what do you do instead? Or is that still a work in progress? As a person who tends to be drawn to a particular ‘type’, who often isn’t much good for me, I’ve been doing a lot of self-analysis lately about what it is I get out of that, and if I don’t want that, what *do* I want, but the unfortunate downside of too much analysis is painting oneself into a corner, so I’m highly interested in outside opinions and options.
Without going into specifics, my long-term relationships tended in most cases to be with people who win me over because they satisfied weaknesses I didn’t know I had (the whole ‘fall in love with whoever loves you’/need-to-be-known thing), and then once the relationship was in full swing I began to realise who the actual person I’ve allowed into my life was. I’ve had about seven serious relationships, five fit that mould and all five were almost identical; both in how I wound up there and who they turned out to be. Doing that exercise with the lists gave me objectivity – I couldn’t romanticise the situations I got myself into any more which made it a lot easier to not get into those situations in the first place.
So, to answer the question, it’s working out well because walking away isn’t hard when I know the person I’m walking away from is bad for me.
I get your problem though: you like what you like, what you like is bad for you, so what’s the alternative, how do you get it, and will you like it as much as that thing that’s so bad for you?
I can only speak from my own experience, and for me it works like this: first of all, don’t give a crap. This is critical. If you have a preoccupying *need* to be with someone, you’re screwed. You need to deal with that first.
If you can take or leave a relationship for the time being, then you’re in business. Once I realised what my ‘fatal attraction’ was (for want of a term that’s less purple) I just made a rule that I’d never go there again. That was stage one. Stage two was being open to the idea of getting close to the kind of person I’d never really considered before. Who or what that person was I had no idea, I was just open to the idea of being with someone who wasn’t my FA provided I felt comfortable with them, they were sharp, they made me laugh, whatever. As long as there was a click, or potential.
I should say part of the reasoning behind this was knowing that love is work, not infatuation. If I found someone on that wavelength then I’d feel good about building something with them.
How’s it working out? So far, nothing’s happened. Because I don’t particularly care about being in a relationship at this point. I’ve dated. In fact I wrote an article on it about five weeks ago, posted to this site. But the dating didn’t work out so well. I met some great people, but there was no click with most of them, and frankly that’s just going to happen more often than not. Especially through dating sites, which I think I’m done with. Fun experiment, glad I tried. There was some chemistry with a couple, though, and that was pretty good for the soul.
It’s worth saying that of the seven or eight people I saw over the last couple of years, two of them turned out to be pretty close to the type I used to go for, despite my best efforts. I guess sometimes one or two get under the fence.
It’s all a work in progress, is what I’m saying. Something that needs regular monitoring and adjusting, but it’s the only way to go as far as I’m concerned: own your wiring, then be good to yourself.
I can’t really talk about your particular ‘fatal attraction’ because I don’t know what it is, but I’d say there’s a reasonable chance you’re not even entirely sure what it is. Most people seem to have trouble nailing it down, and usually summarise it as something like “they seem so sweet, then treat me like crap.”
Does that help any? (It’s 5am here and I haven’t slept, so excuse any bits that may not make sense.)
I think being open is an excellent line of thinking. Especially since I think what I’m really looking for is an option other than turning into a curmudgeonly misanthropist.
“I can’t really talk about your particular ‘fatal attraction’ because I don’t know what it is, but I’d say there’s a reasonable chance you’re not even entirely sure what it is. Most people seem to have trouble nailing it down, and usually summarise it as something like “they seem so sweet, then treat me like crap.””
I’m not sure if that was a question, and in any case I don’t really want to be all ‘hey, look, a stack of life baggage, let me unload mine’ but suffice to say I’ve had a pretty good look at my dating tendencies, and I totally skip right by the ‘seems so sweet’ part. It bears some consideration when Dr House resembles one’s ideal dating profile. :/ I’ve even got the whys of that all down, it’s just what to do about it that I’ve been working through.
I’ve even got the whys of that all down, it’s just what to do about it that I’ve been working through.
I turned it into a game. I mean, I know what happens when I don’t walk away but I had no experience of what happens when I do. So, on principle, the next few times I realised I was attracted to someone for the same old appealing reasons I dropped the whole thing. And just got on with having as much fun with my life as I could. And the next time I realised I was talking to someone who didn’t fit that profile, I explored it.
Basically I just agreed to let that one decision – ‘walk away when you realise you’re attracted to someone for these familiar reasons’ – do the thinking for me.
The problem (and I’m still not sure that’s the right word for it) is that relationships with other types of people aren’t as exciting, right out of the gate. And that’s what I’m used to, so other types of relationships seem dull(?) by comparison – and that’s a description that says a lot about me and absolutely nothing about them. What I need to appreciate is that they’re not dull, they’re just sane and have a slower (and healthier) build than a relationship founded on naivete, instant gratification, sex, shared baggage and/or mutual self-delusion.
I’m hardly expert at this, but I do feel confident saying that getting out from under any particular monkey is a learning process – involving trial, error and experimentation – and that it builds in stages. And that if a person really wants to jettison that aspect from their life, they have to accept that and work with it. It’s not about getting what you want now, it’s about being ready when the real deal comes along.