They Aren't Watching
EPISODE 048: THEY AREN’T WATCHING
Worried about others watching (and judging us), many of us become self-conscious about how we present ourselves and our art to the world. Understanding that this imaginary audience is, in fact not watching us, but dwelling instead on their own concerns, gives us the freedom to make work that's not only less self-conscious and more authentic, but to be more empathetic and make work with greater impact. What this got to do with those dreams in which we have no pants? Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I had another dream last night about being back in high-school. It’s always the same. I can’t find the classroom I’m meant to be in because the school hallways have become a maze of lockers and when I finally find it I have to take an exam for a course I haven’t taken, all of which would be easier if I were wearing pants, which of course I’m not.
Over the last 7 months my dream-life has been more active than usual, and the dreams have felt more frustrating. Sometimes I’m back on stage as a comedian, completely unable to remember my lines, the audience looking at me expectantly. Other times I’m sitting at a piano in front of a huge audience and only then remembering I have no idea how to play the piano, and hoping desperately that something comes to me, while the audience shifts awkardly in their seats. A couple weeks ago I dreamed I was juggling for the Queen and just couldn’t get it right, the balls falling everywhere as if I’d never done this before, the Queen and I both wondering what business I had on that stage to begin with, and also: why wasn't I wasn’t wearing any pants?
These are not my only dreams. I also have that one where you’re trying to run away from something but you just…can’t…run…and it’s like you’re up to your hips in butterscotch pudding. I also have one where I can fly; no planes, no wings, just by the power of my mind, until I really need to and then I try to take off and I just land on my face. So these days when you ask me how I’m doing and I say “I’m living the dream!” it might not mean what you think it means. What do my dreams have to do with your creative life? I’m David duChemin, and this is Episode 48 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
So, the first take-away from this episode may already be apparent to you, though what that is, specifically, might be different from one person to the next. Some of you might be newly questioning your judgement in looking to me for anything resembling insight and wisdom. ("I thought this guy was meant to be a voice of sanity...He’s a lunatic!”) But others of you are suddenly feeling a whole lot more normal. Or at least feeling a little less alone. This morning I just Googled the sentence, “I dreamed I had no pants” and the first thing that came back to me was an article from the NY Times suggesting the dreams I have are actually pretty run of the mill, even common-place, so there’s a good chance if I have them you have them too.
What I don’t need the NY Times to tell me, grateful as I am for their normalization of my fears of being found pantsless, is that many of these dreams share a common theme and tie into a common fear, namely the fear of failing, and specifically: failing while others watch. And they are, aren’t they? Watching, I mean.
Absurd as the dreams can be, the fears are real and they go back a long ways. When we were kids, so long as we kept to the usual arc of childhood development, pretty much all of us would have gone through an imaginary audience stage in which we imagined that those around us were watching us closely, paying attention to our every move, noticing every blemish, catching our every mistake. It’s a stage we’re meant to grow out of as our awareness of others becomes more nuanced and we start to notice that–like us–what others are paying attention to is, well, themselves. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I don’t mean we’re all doomed to narcissism. It’s just that others are generally too preoccupied with their own daily lives to be as relentlessly concerned with what we’re doing as we believed they were when we were teenagers.
Believing otherwise, that everyone is watching, evaluating, judging, or even - frankly - just noticing what we’re doing can affect how we present ourselves to the world, from what we’re willing to wear to how willing we are just to be ourselves, state a contrary opinion, or take risks in social settings. It will affect what we are thinking about, the kind of art we make, and the way we make it.
Having gone several minutes now without yet bringing up Facebook or Instagram, and being sensitive to the fact that in the last episode I said I had no specific axe to grind with social media and still somehow kind of overstated my case, I wonder to what extent these platforms, or specifically our use of them, are nurturing this imagined audience and giving us a false sense of who is looking. And perhaps not only encouraging this fantasy, but placing a value on it, as if it’s a good thing that others are watching and caring about our every move. I wonder too, how good it is for us to believe we are under such scrutiny, to be constantly told people are watching?
Social media aside, do we not need the mental space in which to be ourselves, think our thoughts, lives our lives, and create things without the gaze of others? I think we do. Furthermore, and–look–you know I’m getting serious when I whip out a “furthermore", I think one of the great freedoms of becoming an adult is the realization that people aren’t watching as closely as we think, that the whole world isn’t paying us as much attention as we once thought, and this gives us the room to simply be–and to become–ourselves. If it's true that observing a thing changes the nature of the thing itself, surely there’s something healthy and freeing about not always being, or believing ourselves to be, in the spotlight.
That the whole world isn’t watching is as comforting as waking from my pantsless dreams. But here’s something to think about: nowhere in the world is there anyone, I mean not a single soul, dreaming about me taking an exam without pants. The Queen is not waking up this morning trying to shake off yet another of her recurring dreams of an incompetent juggler with no trousers. You and I do not figure significantly in the dreams of others because the world is simply too concerned about their own failures, the possibilities of their own inadequacies, and the opinions of others. In short, they’re just too busy wondering where their own pants are to notice that we’re not wearing ours.
I’m not saying they (whomever they are) are oblivious. I’m just saying they’ve got problems of their own. The heroes of their own stories, as we all are of ours, they’ve got their own concerns and fears and hopes and dreams. And this frees me to be me, to do me, without fear of the constant judgement or evaluation I thought I was under when I was a teenager trying to get a sense of my place in this world and discovering to my great surprise, that it wasn’t all about me. It frees me to focus on my work and not my audience, real or imagined. It allows me to go deeper into myself without fear of others seeing what I might find there, before I’ve got a chance to come to grips with it myself.
Paradoxically, all of this also provides an important starting point to those of us who do want to be relevant to others, to create art that serves them, makes them think, instigates change, or otherwise brings value to their lives. Knowing that others aren’t watching allows us to create work that has the best chance of being honest, unaffected, and vulnerable. It allows us a sensitivity to the lives of others that isn’t possible when our first concern is some version of “so enough about me, let’s talk about you: what do YOU think of me?” which inevitably leads to art that can never be more than solipsistic, and self-referential.
Knowing, not only that people are not watching us that closely, but that there is a good chance they too have the same anxious dreams, and the same worries and fears about being vulnerable and exposed in front of others, and being conscious of this in our art-making is an act of courage and empathy, of solidarity too when what we do, or say, helps them to believe themselves a little less alone in these fears.
The question of audience, and the importance or influence of that audience in our work, is not one that most of us ask ourselves only once and then resolve forever. It’s not a problem to be solved so much as it might be territory to be constantly navigated. So, this is where I pivot, and for those of you waiting for me to split hairs on something, now’s your moment: I think there are two kinds of audience. The first is the one that, imagined or otherwise, we believe is always watching. We might believe they’re also scrutinizing or judging. But they are watching. I believe for most of us that this audience is smaller than we believe it be, and much less interested in us than we believe. And freedom from that audience is a necessary step forward in creating authentic work.
But I also think there’s another kind of audience. A true audience. An audience that listens. And I say a “true” audience because that’s what the word audience means: to hear, to listen. And I would argue that’s a very different kind of thing than being watched. There are those that hear us, that consider us or our ideas as we present them through what we make. In fact the best of what we make is probably that which is considered separate from us, and maybe that’s the real distinction I’m making here. The imaginary audience is watching us, but the real audience, at least the one with whom we have impact, is listening, not only to us (if at all) but to our work. Even there we just don’t figure as strongly in their imaginations as we believe we do, and that’s incredibly liberating.
As we get past our creative adolescence, and find the freedom that’s available in the idea that it’s just not about us, I think there’s an opportunity to change the question from a fear-driven concern about whether or not others are watching–and how they might be judging–us, to whether they are listening to and considering our work. When that becomes the question, and we begin to be concerned about what value that work is bringing to others, what gift is there for them in the experience of whatever it is we make, then our focus can be on other things, like making stronger art, like being more generous, honest, and even vulnerable with that art.
For those of us who make the things we make in the eventual hope that others will also experience it, there is a constant and necessary tension between being creative first for ourselves, and to do so as though no one at all is watching, and still in that act of creation, to be mindful of others, to be empathetic, to consider the audience that might eventually listen to and benefit from our work. That might not change our intentions about what we make or how we make it, but if it brings less self-consciousness and fear to our work, and greater empathy, I don’t see how it can’t, pant or no pants, inform what our work becomes and the kind of impact it might have.
Thanks so much for listening. If this podcast is important to you or contributes to your creative life in some way, would you do me a favour and share it with others you think might benefit? You can point them to iTunes or really anywhere podcasts are served up, or to ABeautifulAnarchy.com - they’ll find their way from there. And if you’re new to A Beautiful Anarchy, I publish new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but I’d be happy to send you a kick in the pants on those 4th weeks by email if you’ll just tell me where to send it and you can do that by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and subscribing to On the Make. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. Finally, if you’re looking to get in touch with questions, feedback or ideas you’d like to see me discuss in future episodes, you can reach me anytime by email at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. Thanks again for being part of this, we’ll talk soon. In the meantime, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0