Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

Be Afraid.  Be Very Afraid 

This should be a happy time, a wonderful life I’m living right now.  I’m finally on as the standby painter for several months on a Harrison Ford feature.   There are other big names, a good budget, a fine story, lots of hours, lots of overtime, no more self-paying my health insurance (which has skyrocketed by thousands of dollars a year and it makes me angry just thinking about the math), no more skirting along the limits of all my credit cards just to barely scrape by.

I know and like my painting crew and over half of the shooting and construction crew, thanks to the relatively tight-knit Oregon film scene.  The hideous, gray, cold darkness of winter is drifting away a bit more every day, and my seasonal affective disorder is retreating as the light gets longer and the sun climbs higher.

But folks, I am afraid.  I am very afraid.  Ever since I’ve been on this feature, I can’t sleep at night.  Last night I woke up in a cold sweat at 3:00 am by yelling out loud during a nightmare about work.  I feel like any minute I could be laid off, fired, or simply freak out and run from the stage screaming, “I’m clueless!  I don’t belong here!”  For this week I’m working as a regular set painter, and I feel like I can’t possibly get be ready for the standby part of my job in time.  All I have to do is pack my kit and buy a few new items—it’s not like I’m building a space station.  Yet I feel overwhelmed by the preparation ahead.  I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and that I have never have known what I’m doing.  Why?  Why do I feel like I don’t know the first thing about painting when I have painted for years?

It comes to me that on every job without fail, I feel like I will fail.  Got that?  I was once a psychologist, and although I worked with animals, graduate school still trained me to look at the reasons behind behavior, or in my case, the reasons behind the behavior of my thoughts.

In the 1970’s a team of psychologists did a study of women on the fast track at Cal Tech, and found that many of them had similar thoughts that ran along the lines of: “I am often afraid that others will find out how much knowledge I lack.”; “I was successful because I got lucky this time.”; and of their work if complimented: “It’s no big deal.”  They felt as if they were frauds who might be discovered at any time.  This set of feelings was dubbed the “Imposter Syndrome”.

For a few years psychologists believed that only women felt this way, especially if they were in high-powered or socially-oriented careers.  Now we know that men feel the Imposter Syndrome as well.  Actors, CEO’s and people in positions of decision-making tend to feel the Imposter Syndrome most.  One line of thought suggests that the syndrome occurs when a person “fails to internalize their successes”.  But I think that perhaps the syndrome is related to existential angst, at least in my psyche.

It may be unfair and wrong to believe I’m an imposter.  After all, I’ve been doing this job for almost twenty years, and there have been some spectacular failures, but they happened almost two decades ago, with a couple of minor exceptions which I won’t go into—ever.  Anyhow, I am fairly certain I can do this job well.  BUT—because I secretly suspect that I don’t really know as much as “they” seem to think I do, I try harder and work longer (and faster, if there’s a deadline), and I constantly try to learn new things and attempt to get better in whatever skills I can, all in the name of the Imposter Syndrome.  And also in the name of, as Bob, the founder of the Church of the Subgenius calls it: “Life-Saving Paranoia”.

Am I so wrong?  Yesterday on the long drive home, fretting about whether I had done neatly enough on the brush marks for the trim in Brendan Fraser’s living room, I was listening to an interview with a wildly successful man, Tony Gilroy, writer and director (talk about your overachievers) of Michael Clayton, and now Duplicity, and screenwriter of the Jason Bourne series.  He had been nominated for an Academy Award for Michael Clayton, and in fact, all the hoopla and politicking during that time of the red carpet treatment had delayed the start of Duplicity.  What an accomplished person, I thought.  I wonder if he ever feels like an imposter?

And then at the very end of the interview he said something I will file away and remember whenever I am balancing my imposterism against my self-confidence.  He said now that all the excitement was over, it was time to go back to writing, to go into “the humble room”.

So maybe Imposters feel the need to learn, and feel humbled in the face of The Thing That Must Be Done, whatever it is, whether it’s a landmark court case, an engineering problem or just coming up with a vinyl decal on the fly for an art director at the next location.  There is always a need, I think, to be humbled by the job ahead of you.  It is part of the creative process.  It is, at its best, paying respect to the creating of something good.

I think.  But don’t quote me on that, because I really don’t know anything about anything.  There!  Now it’s out in the open.  Maybe I can get some sleep tonight.