I’d stare out of the window: stare from Kingston where the urban clot dissipates, all the way to deepest Surrey. The night stretched up and out. It wasn’t just that I was figuring out constellations- “How did they get a Ram and two Fish out of THOSE?”-as I learned more about the Solar System and space, I also started to think about Time. I was in the back seat of the Volvo and there were the stars; fixed points apparently. They had been fixed long enough to paint the same pictures for Neolithic visionaries and Spanish conquistadors; fixed through the trudging of the Glaciers and Continental Drift. I found out later that of course, they weren’t steady at all, but moving, living and dying. Travellers all in Time and Space we were: me, the Volvo, and those stars.

As a teenager, I was caught up by this idea that I was staring into their past, or even witnessing their death. The light from some of them had taken so long to travel to my eye, that the information it carried was like the most latent and tenuous pun. All upward gazers realise their smallness. The vastness of the sky is a shrink-ray that delivers context to us at times when we need to step away from the fray. Stargazing also compels us to Make Plans. Looking up, I’m reassured that however stumbling and cack-handed or however momentous and beautiful my achievements, nothing I could ever do would make those spheres chime differently. I still find this a comfort when I’ve lost perspective. The very best that could happen would be that my life, my star if you want to get Shakespearean- might somehow echo out a good story for longer than I would physically exist.

Perspective is essential for satisfaction. I’ve learned this only from spending long periods without either. First, perspective sorts out the terminal Perfectionist in us who’s the enemy of satisfaction. Some people wear their Perfectionism like a badge of recommendation, hoping that it will make us all stand in awe that they have ‘standards’. Don’t be fooled. Perfectionists are blocked and fearful and they need all the help they can get. Perfectionism wants to bludgeon creative endeavor but it’s disguised itself as the washboard- stomached Yummy Mummy of Doing Things Properly. Perfectionists hold the pillow over the face of their sleeping intrepid selves and whisper: “ if we can’t do it brilliantly, we’re not going to try. If we fail, we’re nobody”. That’s the clanging fatalism that Perfectionists live with: that being wrong is the worst thing that can happen to a person; that failure is the end. They can’t tolerate ‘works in progress’. It’s being all about the wedding day and never working on the marriage. It’s treating yourself and others like biological machines that will never ever break down, if you just tinkered, controlled and fixed them enough. Perfectionism tricks you into thinking that it’s all up to you and everybody’s watching. Don’t worry, it’s not and they aren’t.

A friend recently went to a talk on perfectionism in children at her daughter’s school and it prompted her to put herself into therapy. She realized how much and how insidiously her own chronic perfectionism had blocked her from investing in her talents. Satisfaction seems to be found on a journey inwards. It dwells in the personal bests, not the camera flash of public approval, or even peer recognition. With satisfaction, it really seems to hold true that it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts. There’s so much pleasure in bothering to take ourselves on a journey, the ending is only part of the prize. I mean, have you ever read a good book?

On the Graham Norton Show, Matt Damon spoke about the night he won an Oscar for ‘Good Will Hunting’. He talks about that night after all the partying was done, being back home, alone with the Oscar: “I remember looking at that award and thinking “thank God I didn’t fuck anybody over for this!” Imagine chasing that and not getting it and then finally getting it in your 80s or 90s with all of life behind you- what an unbelievable waste of your…y’know what I mean?…It can never fill you up. It can never fill you up and I felt so blessed to have learned that at 27 cos I wouldn’t have known it otherwise.”

I’ve found Satisfaction very difficult to write about because I didn’t want to come across as diminishing the role ambition plays in achieving our dreams. But if winning an Oscar is supposed to be the dream of every actor, and winning one doesn’t “fill you up”, then what will?

Just doing the work, that’s all.

What comes after the stars and the night?

Another day, and then another.

Consider for moment that this story- your story might not have a beginning, a middle and an end. The interplay between beginnings and endings fascinates poets, philosophers and physicists alike, because they seem like they’re opposites, but often you realise how very quickly one can turn into the other and how alike they can be. I went out for a run with my son last week. I thought I’d go easy on him, I’m the adult and he’s the kid right? But I forgot that he’s nearly 13 now. He spent the whole time at least 10m ahead of me and I couldn’t catch him. Then I saw him round a corner and disappear. I felt a splash of worry, then embarrassment then so very happy because I thought, “well that’s just right! You should be faster and stronger and off you should go.” Remember those stars? He’s a part of my story echoing out when I have become just a story myself.

I think satisfaction is joy in perspective: you see there’s more to come, and you know what’s passed by and gone out of view. It’s a kind of wholeness. I don’t think that satisfaction has to mean stasis either- we don’t stop when we’re happy, it’s just that the path changed.

The post Pri Burford’s questioning #3: Satisfaction appeared first on The Quarter Club.

“It’s hard to have a tough skin and a vulnerable heart…it’s kind of…it’s a delicate balance…”

I would say this is true for anyone attempting to navigate a creative career. Without the vulnerable open heart forget being a good creative. Without the tough skin forget surviving in the creative industries.

My final year at Drama School was a cacophony of jealousy, self-doubt, FOMO and crying out “why though?!” about everything…oh and sympathy cheesy chips. This was the late 90s, when grown women were still allowed to have pubic hair and we openly ate pasta.

Even though we were a close-knit year, we lost our footing. Our world got very small and in the midst of our fierce loyalties to each other, there crept in a kind of cold reductive scrutiny. We’d become aware that’s how The World was considering us; we were at the very start of becoming Products. It felt necessary and wrong at the same time.

I’ve noticed it’s what happens at the tension point when a process is subjugated to the product it generates. The end work becomes more of a focus than how you got there and qualitative and quantitative measures clash. It’s an intriguing and deeply challenging development phase that creative business ventures go through- but they must go through it because no professional creative can avoid addressing the marketplace-‘bums on seats’. At some point, you’re saying “this hand-crafted artisan 3 malt Heritage outdoor-reared organic actor is incredible, but how can we maximize her net worth?”

Suddenly, game change. We all fall down. We have a crisis of confidence, of identity. For a time confusion reigns and we lose ourselves- doing crazy shit like watching ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’ and eating actual crisps made of Kale. In my experience, when we lose our sense of balance, it means the centre has shifted and we don’t know where zero is anymore. To have some concept of equilibrium, there has to be a pivot point, a fulcrum. In short, you have to hold on to your values. If you don’t know what your values are, I’d like to gently but firmly suggest you think about getting some. Knowing your values =knowing your worth.

At Drama School, for 3 years we’d been artists and that alone. We were judged by artistic criteria, not bankability. Like it or not, the growth in influence of marketing departments within creative organisations like publishing houses has got to be the weirdest development in the already obstacle-strewn route to being a creative professional. It doesn’t matter how riveting your story is, if they don’t think they can sell it, they won’t make it, they’ll make ‘Terminator12: What Happened Before The Last Stuff Happened The Time Before That Before Time Itself’ instead.

That’s the thing now, you can’t just be good at what you do, you have to be good at selling the thing you’re good at. If you don’t have some values, you’ll make the terrible mistake of doing what I did, which is let other people tell you what kind of artist you should be. The balancing act in this respect is to keep the kernel, the heart of what you hold to be excellence in your field whilst making it float happily in a sea of mediocrity.

By the way, people WILL get jealous. They just will. The more dismal end of the press will tell you that most of the jealousy will come from other women, but actually it could be anyone. I think jealousy is fine, by the way. Like Anger, it’s part of the human emotional spectrum and it serves an important purpose: it’s an alarm. Julia Cameron in her wonderful book ‘The Artist’s Way’ explains it like this when she writes about Anger:

“Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand…Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves. Anger is not the action itself. It is action’s invitation.”

I feel jealousy is similar. It’s the part of ourselves that we at some point allowed to be cowed. The bit we didn’t let out to play. When we’ve spent a lot of time and energy denying ourselves, or being people pleasers, seeing somebody who is free and who has the audacity to be themselves without shame is almost unbearable. They remind us of everything we could have done and had if we just let ourselves. Jealousy is a heart’s cry from something inside that needs to be addressed in a mature and gentle way or it festers into bitterness and aggression. Trying to find balance (and peace) of mind whilst leaving feelings of jealousy unexplored? Then it’s you on one side of the see-saw and you with all your demons at the other.

The post Pri Burford’s Questionings #2: Jealousy appeared first on The Quarter Club.

I was 17 before I set foot in a theatre. It wasn’t something our family did. We didn’t have many books at home either-not novels or poetry anyway- mostly, as I remember it- there were my dad’s journals from The British Dental Association and Oral medicine textbooks. They were full of terrifying photographs of pustule-ridden jaws and cracked molars. As an 8 year old, I could tell you about Gingivitis, but not about The Cheshire Cat.
Don’t feel sorry for me though. What my family lacked in literary resources, we made up for with imagination. I was not read bedtime stories as a child, instead my dad made up stories on the hop, sitting beside me on the covers while I, tucked up underneath, was the best crowd ever.

“What do you want it to be about?”
“…of when you were a little boy.”

And there, a love for storytelling, listening and improvisation was born. I drifted off to sleep in the cocoa plantation behind my dad’s childhood home where he used to hide himself to bunk off school; or being chased by angry little monkeys whose mangoes he’d stolen. These things I’d never seen or experienced, but nevertheless I lived out vividly in those moments through those stories. So I should possible correct my opening statement:
As a child I was taken to the theatre every night.

Back to 17 year old me. That night, at the first public theatre I’d ever been in, my heart staged a coup on my rational mind. We were at The National Theatre, watching Hamlet.

I’d never read a Shakespeare play apart from bits of enforced Romeo and Juliet in English at school. Hamlet, as far as I knew, was a brand of mild cigar. Drama was officially labeled ‘A Hobby’. Where I was coming from actors were white, posh and having drunk sex with any random passer-by. Also, I was the stranger at the party that night- this was the A-Level English trip and I was studying Physics, Chemistry and Biology- shaping up to take over my dad’s dental practice, as planned. It was to be a life of regular holidays, regular paychecks just…regularity. Not a bad life, in fact a good life. Just that it was somebody else’s life, not mine.

That night, I found out how far I’d been alienated from my own heart, which was full of questions and curiosities. How diligently I’d been taught and learned to leave apple carts upright; stones unturned. How well I’d learned my lines, taught to me by the prevailing culture here at that time and still being recited by little girls and women everywhere: ”Remember, above all other things, to be pleasing ”.
At the end of 3.5 hours of Ian Charlesdon’s now legendary Hamlet (I had no idea who he was at the time) I was weeping, sitting on the edge of my seat, thinking, “Doing THAT is what the rest of my life has got to be about.”
My heart had come to get me. The courage I found, which is only one type of courage, was the courage to be honest with myself and give my heart some legitimacy and a voice in my life.

Courage. The word, has a Latin root: ‘cor-‘: ‘heart’. An early definition of courage was “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” I told everyone then that I planned to become an actor, and dealt with the series of life explosions that happened- the expectations I dashed, my reputation as a reliable, predictable person smashed: I was saying I’d give up my A-level studies with a year to go in a school which was fiercely academic. My parents have only just got up off the floor-it’s taken about two decades.

When I said I was going to be an actor, it was bad enough, but if I dared to describe myself as an artist, I noticed, the effect was off the scale. That phrase, “I’m an artist” was met with ridicule and embarrassment by so-called normal people – a sort of “oooh, get you!” attitude. It still is, sometimes. But that’s what I am. I create stuff: art, so I guess that makes me an artist (also known as a poncey-lay-about-workshy-fop).

By now, the labels don’t stick. Name-calling is the prime sport of cynics. Don’t listen to cynics, by the way. Cynicism is just fear in a suit with a couple of GCSEs. I remember one sitting me down in the young days of my ambitions and telling me that it didn’t matter how talented I was, English people didn’t want to see people like me on their screens and stages. They wanted Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn (who doesn’t?!).
“They’ll never want you. You’re not their idea of beautiful,” he said, “You can’t make a success of it-”
And then the classic passive-aggressive knockout punch:
“I’m saying this because I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself.”
Well he was partly right. My race has been an issue- but for other people, not me. So here I am and I don’t apologise either for being born female or brown or for being those things and daring to put myself ‘out there’. Those two things are how I was made to be. If either or both of them make somebody uncomfortable, then they need to ask themselves some hard questions. Just don’t ask me to disappear to make you feel better. I’m not going to do that.

That sounded convincing didn’t it? That list of defiances I just trotted out. But those statements don’t slide easily out of me. I’m not just ‘that type of person’- strong, strident whatever you want to call it. I don’t really buy into that- that one person is naturally brave while another will always be timid. I think people are more complex. If I’ve learned anything about character over the last 16 years as an actress, it’s that nobody in the world is just one thing all the time- they are on some level, choosing how to be to deal with the situation they find themselves in. Sometimes, you just have to be brave because a life depends on it, say. But often- you don’t. Courage of the kind I’m talking about isn’t an everyday imperative. You don’t have to listen to your heart. Nobody will make you follow your dreams. You don’t have to try and make the world a better, fairer place. There are others- who are probably getting paid to do it!

Courage, like this takes work; takes time. It’s seeing that there might be a choice and not ignoring that choice. You’re making that choice, not once and for all- but once and for all every day. Those brave, unapologetic statements I made before come out of standing on the brink of things and “yes”, but being very worried that I was doing the wrong thing and about to make my life worse rather than better. They come out of knowing what being laughed at feels like. They come out of being the cynic who’s raising a nasty eyebrow and then hating myself. They come out of experiences like getting taken to pieces by a theatre critic in a National newspaper and then having to get back on the stage the night after and do the whole thing again- without measuring myself by his pronouncements.

There’s that famous quote variously attributed to Mark Twain and Nelson Mandela about courage not being the absence of fear, but making the choice to do something despite the fear. In my experience, that’s true. Any bravery I’ve shown has come out of knowing how it feels to be weak, scared and rejected in the past and doing the thing anyway. The work of being courageous is in taking oneself through that choice:  “Come on, Me. Let’s just bloody do this!” Then getting through the stuff that’s on the other side of it: “Well, that was awful. Let’s do it again but better.” Or “-that was amazing! Let’s do it again and better.”

There’s another type of courage. ‘Encouragement’ has the word courage in it quite rightly. Anything brave I’ve done, I’ve done in company. You take your journey, your learning, the confidence you’ve built and you nourish other people with it. I think it would be revolutionary to work places and social spaces if we could find the courage to be kind rather than pointlessly competitive. What if we stopped comparing ourselves with others and sang our own, unique note- out loud, true and free and damn the Haters? Who are these Haters anyway? They’re you and me when we’re weak and frustrated. They’re not them; they’re us. Can we free them and ourselves too? That would be really brave and hopeful.

Courage and Hope: those two great intangibles that, along with Imagination, make humans illogical in such a magnificent way. So here, this is encouragement from me to you: begin!

The post Pri Burford’s Questionings #1: From Her Talk On Courage At Salon #1 [Courage] 20.04.15 appeared first on The Quarter Club.