Celebrate the Unseen

Fresh from the Lighthouse International Film Festival (at the Jersey beach!!), for the premiere of my short film How to Pack Up Your Life in One Day, and still dizzy from the red carpets, the phenomenal filmmakers, the profound screenings. 

I've been thinking how these moments of celebration - our crew gathering, our friends thrilled, an audience applauding - are such highs in the journey. 

Such an external reminder that the work is good, that it matters, that it belongs.

But what do you know in between?

How do you celebrate all the unseen work - the submissions to festivals, the revising of scripts, the long nights editing, the hours of practice?

I have some ideas. 
And one especially goofy one that I hope delights you, and inspires you.

x

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi my friends. Uh, welcome back to the podcast. I feel like I'm the one welcoming myself back. Hopefully you never left. It's , uh, been more time of medical stuff, which we'll skip over entirely and talk about how I just came from a film festival, which was amazing , uh, short film that my dear friend Albert Beta and I made together called How to Pack Up Your Life in One Day, which was very much inspired by my own experience of leaving Brooklyn after 15 years and getting a secondhand car and driving out into the world to try out different cities and figure out where felt like home next. And we shot it in one day in my apartment. It was half packed, mostly empty. We brought in a really brilliant , uh, cinematographer and a jack of all trades , uh, lighting designer. And uh , anyway, this beautiful four minute poem of a film. Got into the Lighthouse International Film Festival out on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, one of the best festivals, just the best people, the best programming, the best parties like this beach vibe, you're literally on the ocean. Um, they bring in really phenomenal programming from South by Southwest and Khan and Sundance that they have recently seen. They bring a lot of New York filmmakers who get to travel out cause it's not that far from New York City. Anyway, I could rave about it. What I'm actually here to talk about is all the behind the scenes blood, sweat, and tears, and also successes that build up to the ones that everybody gets to see. You know, going to a film festival, it's a , it's a photo op bonanza . Like that's literally the whole point is you wear a pretty dress or a nice suit or whatever your fancy is and you go in front of what they call a step and repeat , right? Which is this , um, sheet with all the logos of the festival or if it's, you know, for an ABC network it'll have all those logos behind you. And so you're very much promoting the festival and yourself and, and you give interviews and you talk about why this, you know, film mattered to you and it's very public and you get to celebrate with your friends who are all excited for you and you get to show the trailer and the poster and blah, blah blah blah. It was so much fun. And it's interesting cuz I've been knocking around this idea for this episode , um, in my head for a while and it's about the opposite. Um, you guys know that if you've been listening, I am a huge fan of stickers to the point where I think I know every single dollar Ramma , um, in uh, <laugh> Montreal where my aunt lives. Cause I spent a month there in May. And I just love going to dollar stores and seeing what kind of sticker collection they have, especially when things are rough and I'm kind of pushing myself to get stuff , uh, sorted. I, I use them mostly for journaling actually. I do a lot of inner work and it's very uncomfortable and it's hard and it's very invisible. And so when I'm particularly gnawing at something that is an old belief system that's not serving me, that is a resistance that I wish was not holding me back. And I'm doing the work of sorting that out. Um, and I just feel icky cuz I spent time with it. I will put stickers all over that writing because I want my brain to associate reward and excitement and pride with the thing that I did. And this kind of escalated recently and I had to share this story cause I think it's absolutely hilarious. Um, also if you've been hanging out with me, you probably know that I've been in physical therapy a lot. I have some medical stuff and I get a lot of chronic tendonitis. Um, and I had it in my hip really badly. And then my ankle really badly. Like I thought I broke my ankle, it was that bad. Or I torn the ligament in the achilles heel turn out . I hadn't, which was really good. But I found this really phenomenal app online , uh, that has now shut down much to my chagrin that allowed for remote physical therapy, which was fantastic cuz I was driving and I was paying out of pocket. But it was really affordable, which was also amazing cuz if you've been to physical therapy, usually your insurance lets you go six times and it's usually 50 bucks a pop for a copay . Um, which is a lot of money. But on top of which six sessions is not really enough, they kind of are like, cool, I guess you're better. Go fly little bird <laugh> . And I'm always like , uh, I mean I feel better now, but I don't know how to like live in the world with this chronic thing that keeps breaking and I'm just gonna be back, which is what happened. Every six months I'll be back with something else that was strained. And I just wasn't learning how to be in the world with my body in the way that it needs to be. And this was like a huge source of frustration and anxiety and sadness. And I just kind of stopped doing stuff cause I was so afraid of what else was gonna, wasn't gonna break, but what else was gonna flare up so much that it felt broken. And so the gift of this online physical therapy is that I could renew every month. And so I ended up spending six months with this physical therapist. We would check in once a month and then she would upload exercises to this app and I would know what I needed to do and we would talk about, you know, how my strength was going and how my stability was going and give me new stuff. And she was brilliant. So every time we talked I would take all these notes about how to really know when my body's doing well and when it's not, and how to , um, how to really maintain and build on what I was learning with her. And so at the end of six months, the app was shutting down. So she said, well, you're graduated. And I was like, well, am I, or is this one of those well <laugh>, you're no longer gonna be, you know, working for this company and we can't treat you so congratulations, which kind of doesn't feel right. And um, I ended up going to Costa Rica actually , uh, in late April and found out that I could do a ton of things that I didn't think I could do, like swimming for an hour and , um, hiking and zip lining . And it was absolutely fantastic. And I came back and I was like, oh, I understand now. I can feel my body is stronger. Um, but I still had this incredible doubt, you know, like even when I was swimming at a certain point my ankle started to really hurt. And I said, okay, now I know that's too much. This is when I rest, this is when I go back. But my body still needs to keep getting stronger and maintaining and there's a lot of joints. So if you get joint pain , uh, in different places, I'm like , I don't know what the full body PT experience is and I just kind of want someone on retainer is my dream. Anyway, that wasn't gonna happen. So we agreed that I was graduating and I was like, I'm really trepidatious. And what I said to her was, it kind of feels like you're, you know, pushing me out of the nest and saying fly little bird and like, you're gonna be okay. And I'm like, I don't know that I'm gonna be okay. I, I feel having spent six months with her, that I had learned so much more and I knew better , um, how to not need sort of as much specific physical therapy tends to be you're injured, you wanna get to zero. And then once you're out of that you can go maybe to yoga or Pilates or Tai chi or something that's more functional movement and that tends to work most of your muscles. And so , and your joints and, and that kind of keeps you functioning was the idea. Um, but I I likened it too. Um, when kids graduate, graduate from kindergarten to first grade and there's often a ceremony and you know, the little kid gets to walk across the stage from their group of kindergartners and be greeted by first graders. And maybe they were cap and gown , maybe this is more middle school, but I was just imagining kindergartner who is, you know, there's like nothing different between where you are now and where you are going except the ceremony of being told you are in big girl panties now. Congratulations. And I was like, this is how I feel. And, and for some reason it made me kind of like chuckle and realize like, that is how you grow. Like you have to leave behind the thing that you were at and trust enough that you're going to be in this new thing and you're gonna feel like you don't know what the hell's happening and you're gonna learn as you grow and get more resources and you know, get smarter and and stronger. And so I was kidding around and talking about how much I wanted a trophy <laugh> for like a little award that said that I had graduated and oh my goodness, I didn't bring the trophy. Um, I'll have to put a picture up, but I , uh, I went to a trophy store in Montreal , um, and I got the most adorable, most silly trophy of this like star with like a face in it and a little graduation cap and just kind of like, you know, jazz hands. And there was three lines of engraving room for, and I said , um, I needed to say like PT graduation <laugh>. And he did. And I was like, you know , I'm getting it for a friend. It's kind of a joke thing. It's supposed to be kind of funny. He goes, okay. Um, and I got this trophy made and I brought it home and you know, it was like $11. It was super affordable, but it was this thing of I have busted my butt over six months, not just doing the work. Which isn't that hard. It's all of my fear of getting injured again. It's all my fear, like, can I ever be healthy? It's like years of going to physical therapist who told me that if something hurt, it was my body's problem because my body, no one else felt pain when they did that same exercise. Like there's just so much in my brain , um, having to do with exercise and moving my body. And so every time I come up to a new thing of learning how to move my body, I have to clean all that up, not just fight through it cuz like, I don't wanna white knuckle anything anymore, but sit with it, learn from it, go back through it and decide how I wanna feel differently. And it's not fun, it's just swimming through a swamp. Um, and I'd done all that work and, and I was being pushed outta the nest and told I was gonna be okay. And I was like, I don't know that that's true. And so I was like, I want a little trophy. And I got myself a trophy guys, and it's hilarious and adorable and I told a bunch of friends about it and I absolutely need to put it up on Instagram because it needs to be seen by the world. And it's another one of those things that is so goofy, but also so freaking important because what I think we don't do enough is celebrate the unseen work. You know, going back to the film festival, when your film gets to screen somewhere or when you win an award for being an actor or you win an award for making a thing or an Oscar or whatever, that's absolutely incredible highlight of your life. Love it. And that is built on so many other moments of trying stuff and failing and getting your heart broken and , um, submitting, ugh , this is my other trophy story that I also freaking love. About five years ago there was a pilot competition for a TV show. And it was the time when TV pilots weren't really a thing that you could submit. It was either a short film script or feature film. And I was really excited and I was just starting to pivot into writing pilots. And I had this really cool idea for a pilot and I'd never written one before and I wasn't sure I could finish it. And the deadline was freaking me out. And I decided if I finished this script and submitted it, that I would get a trophy <laugh> . I went online to Amazon and I found this trophy of this like Hulk character who was, you know , uh, ripping through their clothes and just muzzling up and just like doing this really incredible work that looked painful of like growing into the next version of themselves. And I was like, that's the trophy I'm getting. And I finished that thing, I was up all night. Uh, it took way longer than I thought. It was so scary and so hard and I submitted it and nothing came of it in the sense it didn't get advanced in that competition. I've since retooled it and worked it and you know, it's something that I pitched. But to me, the greatest joy and the greatest threshold to cross was actually finishing it and putting it out there, submitting it to a festival. And once you click submit, there's like nothing to show that you did all this work. You know, so much of creativity, well, depends on what you do, right? If you're a painter, you got a painting to show. If you're a filmmaker , you got a film show. But even a film is usually what, five years of development and then five weeks of shooting and then a year of posts. There's so many steps along the way. If you only celebrate that one time when it gets seen in the world, you know, opening night or something, it's really hard to stay proud of yourself and excited and feel accomplished along the way. And I think we all need that sense of pride and accomplishment. Like, I have done something and it was hard and I don't have anything external to show for it, but I did it. So I'm a really big fan of literally rewarding yourself for stuff that you, and this is a cool thing. You get to decide what's hard for you for someone else physical. I have a lot of friends who've gotten injured lately, and to them physical therapy is just the thing they do. They have like no qualms about it. They're like, no , yeah, I'm gonna do it like five times a day, whatever. And I'm like, I have so much resistance and anxiety and fear and panic and blah , blah , blah when it comes to this stuff. Even though the actual exercise is not hard. I have all this mental work that I need to clean up in terms of how I relate to my body, how I listen to it, how I, how I honor what it's telling me, how I let myself be an expert in my body rather than someone else, rather than looking to someone else to know more than me. There's such a learning curve. And to have done all of that work and then just be in the world like it wasn't enough. And I was like, I need something that shows I did this thing and I'm ready for the next thing. And so I wanted to talk today about un celebrating the unseen about all the moments in time where either you submitted a script to 10 different festivals, you know, and, and that was really hard to keep going and you've gotta know from each of them, but god you sent it out there. You know, or um, you auditioned a ton or you, I don't know, even like networking can be hard. Maybe you went to five networking parties and you're like, oh my God, I talked to strangers and I told 'em what I do. And right. Everyone's got their own thing. Everyone's got their own thing and there are things that come easy to some of us and there are things that are just terrifying and hard to others. Like it's just, and that's the beauty of it. What you get to celebrate, you decide and how you celebrate. You decide you can make yourself a a card that's like, congrats you <laugh> . Like I know I'm a goofball, but this works. Like everything you learned about first grade , um, reward systems, totally a nap. Excellent reward, <laugh> snack, excellent reward. A really cute card that's homemade stickers the most brilliant reward, right? Also know what your brain lights up with. Freaking love stickers. I find trophies adorable and hilarious and anything that can make me laugh about something that was hard, I love, I think this is another way that you can express your creativity. How can you , um, celebrate the work that you've put into something that maybe no one will ever know about and no one will ever see? And it was really important to you that you showed up and you did this work. And I think the reason this is so important is you wanna wire your brain to really internally

Speaker 2: 14:51

Get that dopamine hit. If I did this thing, it was hard and I'm really proud of myself because so much of any career is built on doing things that make you proud and that's how you have the best sense of staying true to yourself and honoring your values and your alignment and your creativity is knowing how to be proud of yourself. And we have to wire ourselves for that cuz we are built to look externally for pride, to look externally for validation, especially when we're artists, right? So practicing that in small ways, practicing, celebrating the hard work that doesn't necessarily produce the final product, but god needs to happen so you can get to the final product. That's what I'm here for. So if any of you stickers, trophies, an app , I would love to see and celebrate with you. Thank you for joining me today. Take care guys.