cowardice and consequence

I have a growing concern about my future.

There’s the obvious stuff – maintaining my GPA, graduating with the degrees I want, getting a job. But pertinent to all of that—and so much more—is a trend I have noticed about how I confront life. And that’s, sadly enough, the problem—I don’t confront life at all.

This semester abroad was difficult. It was wonderful, and was the most academically satisfying experience I have ever had, but it also made me realize how incredibly scared I am of the world. I’m not talking about walking down the street at night scared (half the time I wish I had an excuse to kick some creep’s ass), I mean walking into a restaurant and ordering a meal on my own scared. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s nearly paralyzing for me to do anything on my own, or to try and be assertive in any way. On a personal level, it’s just sort of embarrassing. On a professional level, it’s practically suicidal.

I remember working on Jay and coming across a variety of production issues. And my non-confrontational nature would say, “Okay, that’s not gonna work, let’s go to plan B.” As a director, it’s good to be able to concede, to be flexible. To a point. But in a way, it’s a very bad habit. Because the director is supposed to direct things. When we learned that the actress we wanted to play the character of Jay had a schedule from hell, I said, “Okay, if we can’t book her, we can’t book her.” It was Ford who fought and figured out a way to make her schedule work with ours. When it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to afford to go to Oxford, it was Kelly Grenfall and a lady in the financial aid office who fought on my behalf and pulled extra money out of thin air. When I was sick in England and was too frustrated to figure out how to scrape together enough money to see the doctor, it was our academic advisor, Mark Eaton, who paid out of pocket for me to go and took care of the paperwork for the school insurance to reimburse me.

The conclusion that I’m coming to, that saddens me so much, is that my personality is going to be my downfall. I am more concerned that people are happy, that they get along, that they like me and like each other and like life, than I am with getting things done. I hate rocking the boat. I hate being the cause, or caught in the middle, of any sort of conflict. I have conviction about certain things—in concepts and ideas and morals—but I do not have confidence in myself. I constantly look to others for approval, whether that be in my physical appearance or in my writing or in directorial choices. I had someone tell me on set, “Y’know, it’s not very good when you say, ‘I want this,’ but you make it a question.”

I don’t care how many pairs of boots I buy or how many knives I own or how many times I go to the gun range with my dad—at heart, I am one of the least aggressive people I know. I’m a suppressor—if I get mad, I shove it down, if I get offended, I shove it down, if I’m challenged by a superior force, I back down.

How the hell do I think I’m going to survive in a place like L.A.?

That’s what makes me sad. Is that part of me believes I’d be really, really good at this. I’d make a good writer. I could have a great career and be happy with my work and my life and my accomplishments. But a big part of me knows that if I want that, I’m going to have to fight for it. And if I can’t fight for my decisions on a student-run film set, how the hell am I going to fight for a job, or an interview, or a script idea? There’s no way I could be a show-runner. They have to make decisions. And they have to back up those decisions with plans, with results. They have to have balls of steel. I’m just not that girl.

And I hate that I’m not that girl. I really want to be that girl. I want to be able to walk into an interview with full confidence and say, “You’re going to hire me because I am the best person for this job.” Half the time people can’t hear me because I’m muttering or stuttering or my heart is racing so bad my voice gets drowned in adrenaline and I can’t say anything at all in my defense.

Maybe that’s why I liked Oxford so much. Just me and a professor in an office drinking tea and talking about the Voluspa or Piers Plowman. No pressure. Just hundreds of thousands of pounds of words and paper and silence.

I feel like I used to be so outgoing. When I was a kid, I used to ask my parents if I could have the seat on the plane that wasn’t sitting next to them, so I could engage strangers in conversation. I would chat up adults for two hours and write short stories in my little spiral-bound notebook with whoever had the seat next to me. I was so happy and fearless and knew I could do anything I wanted to. When I was eleven, I wrote a screenplay and checked out books from the library on how to be an independent filmmaker, and called businesses and wrote letters asking for funding. It didn’t work, but it didn’t matter, because I knew that someday, I would be a filmmaker, and I would be great at it.

Here I am, ten years later, embarrassed on behalf of my eleven-year-old-self. I feel like if the kid I was could see me now, she wouldn’t recognize me.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know when I started being such a coward about everything. I don’t understand why I would rather sit in my room for hours on end instead of go outside and do something. I don’t know why confrontation nearly makes me hyperventilate. I don’t understand how I can get so mad sometimes, and say so little.

In addition to the cowardice is the guilt.

Hollywood is all about selling yourself. You have to be able to market yourself as a product in order to get a job. You have to prove that you, as a commodity, are better than all the other products out there. I cannot do that. I cannot look someone in the face and tell them that I am better than everyone out there. I cannot say why I deserve this job (whatever the job may be), because the truth is, I don’t feel like I deserve this job. I don’t feel like I deserve much of anything.

It’s incapacitating. I feel so angry at myself for being this pathetic. And so mad that I can’t predict a better future. I make minimum wage. I have no concept of making more than minimum wage. In LA, you need a car. Buying a car requires “having money.” It also requires insurance, and gas, and maintenance, and repairs for flat tires and busted mufflers and air conditioning that fritzes out. And an apartment. After college, how am I supposed to afford an apartment? How am I supposed to afford one now?

Everything feeds into everything. And I feel like if I don’t do something incredible with my life, there are so many people I am going to let down. I cried on my 20^th birthday because I hadn’t done anything yet. I hadn’t become some sort of prodigy. And that may sound narcissistic, and it is, but I feel like I’ve already been waiting so long to start paying people back. I mean, you just take and take and take from your family and your teachers and your friends until you can support yourself, but it doesn’t ever seem like I’m going to be able to do that. And I hate that it feels like I was being selfish by choosing to major in something that I cared about instead of something that could have made me money right off the bat. What am I going to do with an English major, or a Cinema major? You can’t do anything with those degrees. You don’t get hired in Hollywood because you made a couple student films, and you don’t sell novels because you took a couple writing courses. I hate that I feel like I’ve been wasting my time on things that aren’t going to make a difference, no matter how much I enjoyed the learning.

So many of my friends are graduating in two weeks. And they all seem to have some sort of plan. And I have a plan, of sorts, but they actually seem capable of achieving theirs. They seem incredibly competent. They have spines. They are equipped to tackle Hollywood head-on. I keep waiting for inspiration to strike, for some A-ha! moment to hit me and make me super-confidant in myself and my abilities, but I only get more and more frightened as time passes. I came to college not necessarily bursting with conviction, but at least optimistic. Now I just feel defeated.

Because I don’t know how to be a writer. And I don’t know how to magically make myself everything I need to be to survive. And I don’t know what it means to be a Christian or an artist or a friend or even an academic. As much as I loved Oxford, the main thing it taught me is how stupid I truly am. Every time I turn I around, I see something else about myself that is entirely insufficient. Even all the praise that Jay is getting for its festival success is completely misdirected—Ford is the one who did everything festival-related while working three jobs and producing another film. I may have written and directed the film, but I was a very small part of the reason the film turned out the way it did, and I know, I know I could have done so much better as a director.

This is the first time I’ve had to admit that I’m probably not cut out for this, and that just…it’s crushing.