I hate my ideas.
I'm so incredibly limited by my own brain. My stupid, unoriginal brain.
Whenever anyone else has an idea I think it is just the best thing ever and then I crap all over it with my stupid ideas about what could happen next. I love step two. If you come up with an idea, I will get really excited about it for you and tell you a million directions you could go with it. I just wish I had a single original idea myself.
I'm trying to let other people's ideas just be: keep my enthusiasm and be a supportive, silent friend who listens and asks instead of saying, 'LET'S SUBMIT IT FOR FRINGE! I LOVE THIS, I'LL BE THE SECRETARY!'. Maybe I just have genius friends. I really believe that people have to own their projects, that a dramaturge or feedback giver or whatever is there as a sounding board, instead of someone who has to 'fix' things. At least before the play gets up. At least when the play is struggling to just be what it is on its own terms, when it can't even walk yet. So I'm working on being excited in a quiet way. In a 'you be you' way.
It's difficult.
The other thing I'm learning about my own ideas is that when I have one, I want to give it to someone. I want someone to say, 'yes, this deserves to live'. But inevitably, they want to turn it into their own thing, or they don't get as excited about it as I am. I don't even know what I'm looking for when I tell someone an idea too early, I just feel a compulsion to do it. And it always ends up disappointing me. I just need too much encouragement, no one could ever give me enough. Plus, I'm so stubborn that the second someone says, 'Do you know what you should do?', I want to never do it ever, out of sheer obstinance. What a monster I am. Impossible to work with or even be around.
So I have an idea now that is so so so far removed from being anything. It's barely an idea. It's like half a thought. It's a 'thoug'. But it has a bit of a glimmer and a gleam to me so I'm trying to keep it to my damn self. See if I can bring something into being myself. Eventually it will need someone. Actually, I have one show that is now finished a second draft and so desperately needs someone, needs someone to come in and look at it and help me. But this idea isn't there yet. If I don't even know what it is, how can I ask someone to love it?
So sit on it, Jessica. Keep it to yourself. For just a minute. Incubate. Mother duck. Mother hen.
This need to share, this compulsion for validation is related, I think, to my original love of theatre, which was that it was how I met cool people. The theatre is the closest I have ever felt to having friends. I want other people to want to work with me and like my ideas. But I'm alone. I don't have a company, or partners. I work by myself. There are a million independent artists in Toronto, and they don't ask me to work with them. No one is interested in what I do. This is an endless sadness to me but is the way things are. And maybe the benefit to this is that I get to really form things myself and see what they are to me before I give them away. So I have to hold on to them for a bit.
It's difficult.
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