On directing, direction, and work.
Completed my first week as a television director. Holy shit! That really sums it all up. I have never felt so fulfilled, nor pushed so hard as I have this week. All the things I have ever loved culminated in to this experience and it was truly incredible. I had moments almost hourly of total doubt and misery, followed by unbelievable satisfaction and excitement. Soon, the doubt was divorced from the misery, and I simply felt unsure. I felt ok about abandoning the misery because I knew it was fleeting. As well, I had no time to wallow. The speed by which our technicians work is staggering, and I was awe inspired by their dedication and work ethic.
I found myself feeling very emotional at several points throughout the week, just so blown away by the support and love that came pouring out of this group of people. It ‘s a real example of what we are capable of as human beings. What is so beautiful about us as a species and how truly beautiful our essence is.
I feel the need to apologize again for having dropped the ball on this community, but honestly, I think I needed to take a few steps back and begin to look at the reasons I was doing what I was doing for myself. I have spent the last 26 years playing for the audience and never really seeing myself in any experience unless someone else was there to witness it for me.
So I had 2 modes of operation.
1. Very vibrant, committed and aware aka performance mode, or
2. Totally quiet, often despondent, and quite shut off aka not performance mode.
Never really allowing myself to be a viewer in my own life, or ever seeing the value in taking things in for myself, I completely threw away any thoughts I would have that I didn’t share with another person in some way. So in building this community I was re-enacting this same habit.
Taking my own experiences and validating them through the knowledge that others would read and approve.
Consequently I was running around in my life looking for events to document, stories to tell, thoughts to share, and ways to gain approval. This then culminated into a lifetime of experiences once removed.
Always on the outside of my life looking in and waiting for the next cool something to come along so that I could use it to confirm my identity, my sense of myself, through the reactions of other people.
So I move through life, with no sense of self unless I am experiencing someone else’s reaction to me and no sense of alive-ness unless I am reacting to another person.
A life of objectification, entitlement, obligation, and anger. This is not what I want to do. And so the exercise of alone-ness, self identification begins. Within this process, I have taken more in for myself, and have been struggling to find the balance between how much to share and how much to hold, how much needs to be said and how much doesn’t and why. It all comes down to why?
So pardon me for taking a bit of time off, and pardon me for objectifying you in order to satisfy me.
All of this from directing an episode of Smallville, heh?
xo
warmly,
allison
Tags: Directing, objectification, work ethic
