You are Perfectly Thin Skinned.
When I was little I wanted to be an actress. A world famous, award winning Hollywood star. If my cousins were to assemble and discuss early childhood traumas, being sternly directed in family performance extravaganzas by their ambitious and bossy cousin (who had the starring role EVERY time) would no doubt feature. At about 8 my mum recognized the passion was not waning and I galloped joyfully off to drama classes and, as apparently actors needed to also dance and be musical, less joyfully to dance and flute lessons (flute lessons, now there’s a series of therapy sessions or maybe more cheaply a whole other blog.)
When the passion continued into my early teens (flute firmly quit and singing soon to be discovered), my mum, a drama teacher, began to worry. She knew that with my desire to start taking this path more seriously and continue to refine this passion, came a high level risk of soul destroying rejection for her highly sensitive and intuitive, creative daughter. To protect me from this she took the approach of tough love, warning me of the harsh realities, namely that I didn’t have “the look” that was popular at the time (blonde, petite and freckled vs me – mono-brow, gangly, half Italian) and I was not thick skinned enough for the inevitable rejection to come and the tumult of this kind of emotionally battering career. This was a story she shared with me because she wanted to spare me a life of anxiety and sensitivity.
I continued with my acting all through university and my sensitivity, the way life knocked me, became like a constant warning bell in my psyche sounding “not thick skinned enough” and enforcing that I didn’t have the emotional where with all to withstand this kind of career. Now, even as an adult who has been in the arts my whole life, the lead up to gigs, performances, exposing business activities (this blog included) sees me often an anxious mess. My partner who loves me and doesn’t want to see me suffer, asks if I wouldn’t be happier just creating for me and finding a less confronting career path, because surely if I feel like this all the time I’m not cut out for a creative career. He wants me to be happy and anxiety and fear don’t seem to equate to happiness no matter how heartfully I’m following my dreams. And do you know what, my mum was and my partner is 100% correct, I wasn’t and still am not thick skinned enough to be impervious to the emotional rollercoaster of creativity.
But the key concept they are both missing, is that almost all creatives are not thick skinned enough for this life they’ve been born into. Most creatives are an anxious mess at the thought of exposing themselves to public assessment of their most personal expression of the world around them. But in a cruel twist of fate, it’s this very ability to be soft and sensitive and intuitive that opens up creatives to the inspiration that fuels that creative drive and expression. One rarely exists without the other. Turn to the bravado of Hollywood for confirmation in the drug overdoses and suicides, that the absence of fear is not what separates those who succeed from those who don’t. What separates them is the willingness to take fear along for the ride.
When I’m working with artists I see the fear rise in almost all of them as we flesh out an action plan towards their ideal creative career. I see the struggle that they don’t have what it takes or that they are inherently too sensitive and fragile to create and then share with the world with authenticity and openness and worse still put a dollar value on it (but that’s a whole other blog too!). The thing is, pretty much all of us are “too sensitive” for this route. It’s the cruel irony that here in lies the road to inspiration, the openness to all that creativity generating beauty and suffering is within the ability to be thin skinned. So to those of you who believe it is your fear that differentiates you from those who succeed, those of you who feel you are too sensitive or too thin skinned to thrive as an artist, I want to say this –
Fear is a normal passenger on this creative road trip
and
You are perfectly sensitive and thin skinned.
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Check out Brene Bown’s inspiring talk for more on this topic.
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