Who I am, what I did (or didn’t do), is it justifiable, or is it not as bad as what you did (or didn’t do) are all irrelevant and immaterial. This isn’t an America’s Got Guilt contest, and if it were, what would we win anyway? This is not a public trial either, it is a study of self-forgiveness.

In any case, let me put your mind at ease: I am no murderer, I have not stolen anything or kidnapped anyone, neither have I broken any laws that I am aware of. I have kicked a guy once, but I assure you, he deserved worse.

Yet, I feel guilt and shame, and they are as ordinary as they are remarkable and all-permeating. Perhaps, you do too. I started accumulating them at a young age and have meticulously nurtured my collection over the years. Sometimes I feel like I inherited some of it, a heavy chest lovingly passed on by my grandparents, as if it were a gift to welcome me into our beautifully dysfunctional family. Welcome, little one, take this wherever you go.

Until 30, I diligently dragged this chest with me, filling it with copious amount of fresh guilt and shame, whether it was earned or stolen. But here’s the truth: my back hurts, I dream of monsters I’ve never met, I am anxious on a beautiful Parisian summer afternoon, and unfortunately for myself, age has made me conclude that the relief of short-term amnesia is not worth the throbbing hangover.

And so, I decided to finally forgive myself for these self-declared crimes I repent for in my subconscious.

I thought sitting down by myself, meditating upon it and bawling my eyes out would do the job, but apparently forgiveness is not a 30 minute one-pot recipe.

I am still on my journey, but here are a few things that I have learnt.

Don’t hide behind Guilt

I will be the first to admit. It is so easy to give in to guilt. It takes absolutely no effort, and the more time you spend in rumination, the easier it is to hide behind it like a helpless rag doll. I had to face the honest truth that blaming myself was me taking the easy way out. Why put in the effort to do better when you can just pity yourself?

What I needed to do instead was look within and find the source, the reason behind this feeling, and watch it. Unbiased, unemotional, totally detached. Like an observer. Slowly but surely, you start gaining perspective.

Some crimes are so small that the guilt is blown out of proportion. Others are not, but don’t slip back into the quicksand of guilt again. Find whatever courage you can muster and admit that the past is beyond your control. Sure, if you knew better you could’ve done things differently and yes, maybe there was a different way, but all this post-rationalisation is just another escape. All you can do now is admit that you are human and learn the lesson.

Remove yourself from the equation

I did this…
I should’ve done this…
I let someone down…
I should’ve known better…

I, I, I…

Sometimes you are just playing out the part you were biologically programmed for. Sometimes you are not ready, not mature enough, not smart enough, not wise enough. Sometimes you pass on the hurt someone else gave you. And sometimes, you are just plain wrong.

I am not a psychologist but here’s what I have begun to think: focusing too much on yourself in any situation is a sign of unhealthy narcissism which completely disregards the larger context, players and forces in play.

Step away from your ego for a second. Maybe you don’t have such resounding impact as you think. Maybe you’re not as capable of pulling off a major screw-up all by yourself. Maybe you aren’t perfect. Maybe you don’t know it all. Maybe you get scared and do stupid things.

You cannot know yesterday the lesson of today.

And that’s okay.

Unconditional Acceptance

If you only love yourself when you’re perfect, then you actually love perfection.

It took me a long, long time to realise that trying to “fix” myself (often in the name of self-care) to be the perfect daughter/sister/partner/friend/employee/human in order to feel deserving enough to exist in this world was a terrible way to live life. I am the entirety of who I am. I cannot pick-and-choose the pretty parts of me and lock up parts of me I am ashamed of. One does not exist without the other.

Accepting myself unconditionally has been a liberating practice. On some days, I can hear the voices in my head point fingers again, but the observer in me intervenes gently to remind myself to ditch the ego and carry on with the day.

I’ll leave you here with an excerpt from Verse 2, Tao Te Ching:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty,

only because there is ugliness.

All can know good as good only because there is evil.

There is a duality within us. Focusing on the dark snuffs out the light. If you too drag around a chest of your own wherever you go, I hope some of this helps.

Until next time.

3 things that helped me forgive myself was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you are just starting out in advertising or marketing, the subjectivity of what counts as a “good campaign” may be confusing you about how to go about yours. Our line of work is unfortunately filled with a lot of jargon, wise quips and philosophical a-ha tweets — making it that much more difficult to separate the wisdom from academic-sounding bullshit.

After having spent some time in the industry, here is my number one of improving lateral “creative” thinking:

Steal your inspiration, then make it your own.

Yes, that’s right. All great art is borrowed. Or maybe it’s not, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are some pieces of work out there, some campaigns that make make you snap your fingers and say THIS! This is what I want to make! Tap into that inspiration and take the time to study the work that went into it.

Find them. Study them. Then, write the briefs in reverse.

I know, a strategist’s dream.

Trace back the steps to that ad film, or activation, or social media campaign to figure out the thinking that might have gone into that work.

The process

1. Start with the insight. What is the central consumer motivation? What is the barrier? What is the key message they are trying to deliver? Write that down.
2. Fine tune it. Make it fun, different, new, a little out of the ordinary. Remember, it’s not just about what you say. It’s about how you say it.
3. How did they build on this insight? What was the perspective that was added to it? How did they incorporate the brand and the product? Why is it a good message? Write that down.
4. Then do it again. Instead this time, see if you can use the same insight and think of something different. Is there a different way to convince this consumer who has this particular behaviour? Is there a better way? You may not find it right there and then, but that’s the fun part: there are many ways of persuading someone.

Do this for as many campaigns as you’d like and I am sure it will get your brain juices flowing in no time — and who knows, maybe one day someone will be doing this with one of your campaigns :)

Good luck!

first of all, ADHD and sleep are toxic exes.

you can try to make things work, but it is all in vain. every night, i naively get ready for bed around 11 and then play the waiting game until 1. i have ADHD (yes, fully functional adults do suffer this “bees in my fucking head” disorder) so if i am doing nothing, my thoughts are racing like they’re being chased by Lewis Hamilton in the last lap, and if i am on my phone, it is suddenly 2 am and i have no idea how that happened.

i spoke to my therapist who gave me a range of solutions — including changing my bedsheets every night (therapists of the world, please validate me when i say that is a sure way to lose your snooze). as someone with executive dysfunction, knowing that i would have to do 1–2–3–4 things before i could sleep only made things worse. i would instead be locked in a scroll paralysis, procrastinating.

my fellow ADHD family, what is the miracle cure and please can i have it by tonight?

secondly, does our hearing have an extra alert night setting?

i get that us ADHD folk are too sensitive to external stimuli but it is honestly barbaric that this happens even when we’re “unconscious”. can a girl get a small break, maybe a few hours?

when i do fall asleep — hallelujah — my catlike reflexes kick in. i wake up multiple times a night, and often it is because of something ridiculous like my neighbour laughing on this phone 3 houses from mine. this same brain is able to be entirely oblivious to quite a number of things during the day, but she seems to make up for it at night.

i have an addictive personality, so i have steered away from sleep medicines so far. after having tried many non-medicated options like meditation and an embarrassing amount of sleep ASMR & guided meditations to the best of my ability (which isn’t much, if i am being honest), i have decided that the pressure of having a good night’s sleep was just not worth it.

frustrated, defeated and having marinated in the pandemic nihilism for a while, i am now forced to ask: is sleep really that important?

it’s okay to have bad sleep.

yay, we’ve reached the “normalise XYZ” section of this post. basically, i have learnt that this vicious cycle of me chasing sleep unsuccessfully for years and me just trying harder the next night be the problem. everyone, especially in the mental health space, places such importance on figuring out your sleep hygiene that making someone fix their sleep is a no-brainer. however, if you are someone like me, whether ADHDer or not, this pressure of not having sorted out your sleep can make it worse for us to relax, calm down our anxieties and actually fall asleep.

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.” — — Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

here are a few things i do and tell myself to make it easier instead:

• 5 hours are actually pretty okay. lot of people run on this.
• i feel tired today, but that doesn’t mean i will not have a good day.
• my night does not govern my next day, no matter what everyone else says. i can actually focus, i can actually go for that walk, i can actually be productive.
• if i do wake up in the middle of the night, i sit up. the counterintuitive act of resisting sleep makes it easier for me to fall asleep.

if you do have sleep troubles and would like to share your rambling thoughts with me, i would be glad.

Nicolas effortlessly slides down the railing of the tastefully extravagant staircase on the 43rd and 2nd, and as the only grown man who could do so without looking like a tiny brat from some Wall St family. His shoes reflect his enthusiasm, shiny to the point of justifying the poor sartorial choice of the fopdoodle behind me who is still in his Ray Bans. Or is he blind? I am terribly sorry in both cases, perhaps more so in the first. I digress, but is there not something terribly unholy about wearing sunglasses indoors? That, and playing loud, distasteful music out in a public place. I get so vicariously embarrassed.

Anyway, Nicolas, my dear boy, who today is in a white suit and a black bowtie. He has always looked dapper in his pressed white suits but I believe my favourite look of his is the faded salmon shirt paired with a palatinate blue tie. That combination should objectively look hideous, and it does, everywhere but on him. He glides through the spaces between the tables; tall, strong and confident. Everyone looks up to see him at one point or another. He nods, he smiles, he asks how they’re doing — and just as they’re longing for him to join them for a meal, he excuses himself and move along to the next table, ready to take their order.

He sees me at my usual spot; the one towards the back of the restaurant but not its very end, next to the full-paned windows overlooking the busy hustle on the street outside. I smile and with a quick wave, he is already pulling the chair opposite mine and pouring me a glass of water as he sits down. I ask him how he has been, and he in return asks me of my work and latest travels, which aren’t mutually exclusive. I tell him how I almost caught pneumonia on my sixth day on the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, and how this wonderful Gurung family there took me in and nursed me back to health. His eyes glisten with wonder and fascination as he tells me that he is wonderfully envious of my adventures. I tell him he’s living his own. He flashes a grin as quick as lightning to cover his involuntary sigh, and asks me what I would like to drink.

“What’s a gal my age supposed to drink, kid?”

The house special, he says, with a hint of mischief in his eyes.

He swiftly returns with the drink himself, and finds his seat opposite mine again. I don’t want to intrude but I also need to know that he is doing alright here alone, so far away from home. I know that he would never let that mask slip twice in front of me, not on the same day at least, so I begin to tell him stories from my long lost youth. You know, I tell him, when I graduated from university in 1965, I was one of the only 8 women in my journalism class. People thought I was joking when I appeared for interviews, and when I finally did land a job, I got paid half as much as Daniel the copywriter. But I did it anyway because I wanted to, and things did get better, as they tend to. He smiles and nods his head in awareness. I know what you’re trying to do, he says. I take a deep breath and tell him that I just want to know if he is really doing alright, and that it is okay to occasionally acknowledge one’s feelings. He assures me that he is, indeed, doing alright, and in a moment of heady but silent frustration I ask him if he never gets tired of putting on an act.

He takes my hand in his and places a gentle kiss. Nana, how will I ever be Dean Martin if I get tired of putting on an act, he asks.

As my young Nicolas leaves the table to answer to someone’s beckoning, I am left with not concern, but all the pride and joy in this world.

25 December, 2017.

Kid,

Let me just get this over with.

If you want to become a writer, don’t try to become a writer. You are 23, what will you even write about? Instead, go live a life! Do things that you’ve always wanted to do, but also do things you have to do to get there. Work hard, let life kick you around! And for God’s sake, don’t chase happiness. Happiness is in those transient, fleeting moments; start looking for it and it will escape you. You know what you should do, rather? Chase your dreams like someone is shooting straight at you, chase things that give your life meaning like your life has none, and you’ll realise that even though in those moments you were writhing in agony — and you will because they will be hard to chase — those are the very things that will make your life worth it.

Someone once told me that everything we see now is a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s true! You know why? Because that is all they have experienced via the television, that is all they can imagine, so that is all they can write. There is no substitute for your first kiss with the one you love, that feeling of tender nervousness and the chaos in your stomach, or the pain in your overworked back and the feeling of being stuck in a loop of your own creation, because there is no other way to make you truly feel something as your own singular emotion. You cannot claim to have experienced it by listening to someone else talk about it, that is what the audience is there for! And I know, I know, that you’re protesting right now, that you truly believe you can make it, and I honestly believe in you, too — but I don’t believe in this world. There is just so much out there to consume that they’ll walk right past genius not once or twice, but as a matter of habit.

I am not trying to discourage you. I would honestly be very disappointed if you dimmed that light of yours. I just pray that you’ll see that if you focus on making a life instead of making a living — I am stealing lines here — you’ll be able to write stories that will make all of us feel like there’s something to live for, forget that we are all going to die one day, and make us want to step beyond our little bubbles for a little while. There’s beauty in pain, and there’s unmistakable grounding in struggle, and I pray that you’ll make all of us believe, even in our darkest days, that we are not alone through it all. I know you will.

Before I forget. Merry Christmas, kid. 2017 will be fun, but not nearly as fun as 2018.

Don’t forget to turn off the heater.

You should give up if you have worked so hard that there is nothing more you can do, if you have given it your full shot, with your full heart, and now you can rest knowing that you did your best.

Or you should give up if what you do does not make sense to you at all, if the work you put out there serves nobody, and yet, it takes your soul, and you know, deep down, that you belong somewhere else.

Or you should give up when you’re hurting, a lot, and for nothing, and you know that you deserve better.

But I hope you do not give up because you’re afraid.

I hope you do not give up without really trying.

And I hope you do not give up because you are ashamed of your dreams.

Because…
“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”

Written for a friend.

Or you should give up if what you do does not make sense to you at all, if the work you put out there serves nobody, and yet, it takes your soul, and you know, deep down, that you belong somewhere else.

Or you should give up when you’re hurting, a lot, and for nothing, and you know that you deserve better.

But I hope you do not give up because you’re afraid.

I hope you do not give up without really trying.

And I hope you do not give up because you are ashamed of your dreams.

Because…
“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”

Confidence — whether it is genetic or not, whether there is a serious nature versus nurture divide in its development, whether men really have more of it than women — it didn’t really matter to me. I was always a good girl — good grades, good at sports, didn’t cause any trouble — and I did mostly well throughout school, so I never thought I was an unconfident girl. I did have my own share of doubts and insecurities, but so did everyone else, and I just took those things that caused me such doubt and insecurities to be things that weren’t mine. So, I would take part in all sporting events, but I would convince people that I absolutely hated dancing. I would love reading all the plays, but I would never audition for the role. I would sing all the time in my room, but I seldom took it to the stage.

A decade later, when I look back at most of these actions and decisions, or lack thereof, I can tell that I never really hated dancing, and that I would have actually loved acting and performing in general. Instead, I ignored so many things that I would have liked to do as things I was just “not good at” simply because I was too scared to suck at them.

It wasn’t until I read The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman that I identified some of my deep-rooted fears of failure, my incessant perfectionism, and a zillion other feelings and traits which then suddenly became clear. There they were, systematically laid down before me. Each with an explanation. I began to meet, and challenge, my own ideas and assumptions about myself, one by one. After I started to understand my own self and my issues more closely, I started consciously trying to change the way I thought about myself and what I could do.

Here is what was wrong with me, what I learnt from that book, and how I fixed it. I hope this helps you in your journey to a more confident, fulfilled life.

MY UNDERSTANDING OF CONFIDENCE WAS TOO MACHO

Picture a confident person.

Do you see someone in a suit, walking so that everyone moves aside, strongly making his point heard over everyone else’s, walking out in style? Or something of that sort?

I was always told that confidence was something similar to assertiveness, almost like aggression, something you could see when in someone who is sticking to their guns. While I admired a lot of men who exhibited these qualities, and thought they were highly driven, extremely intelligent and born leaders, following those footsteps didn’t make a lot of sense to me because I liked staying quiet and listening to everyone’s opinions on a subject before speaking up, I genuinely enjoyed collaborations and I, perhaps as a result of my lack of complete confidence, usually assumed that others could be better qualified for a certain task. However, I didn’t just stop there. I also just kept on listening to others instead of contributing, I relied entirely on collaborations instead of spearheading my own projects, and I was always unsure of what I was doing.

It took me a while to understand that perhaps confidence manifests itself in a slightly different form in women, and that I did not necessarily have to act in ways that I was not comfortable with just to make myself a more confident person. Research has shown that women who exhibit classic signs of confidence — such as being bold and assertive, the same qualities we admire in our male leaders — can actually be perceived as too bitchy, rough and lead to the woman being disliked, even by women. Basically, being “traditionally confident” as a woman can have a backlash effect, and that conundrum of trying to be confident only to cause a backlash makes the prospect of even merely emulating confidence punishing.

It took me a while to learn that perhaps that was not what true confidence was. Perhaps, being confident didn’t mean that I had to mirror my confident male role model. Perhaps, my confidence could be quiet. Perhaps, I didn’t need to speak first and loudest to make my voice heard, I could also listen to others’ opinions. Perhaps, gentle persuasion was a better way of dealing with a disagreement than direct assertiveness. Perhaps, my vulnerabilities weren’t my weaknesses that I had to hide, but strengths that could help me connect with my peers better. Perhaps, my whole understanding of confidence till now was entirely wrong.

As put by Kirsten Gillibrand,

You don’t want to turn women into men. You want to make women celebrate their own strong points. They just need to recognise they are not deficient in any way. They just need to know what it takes to be successful and define that in a way they fully understand.

To elaborate that point, let’s consider this. A Stanford Business School study shows that women who can switch between their traditionally feminine qualities, defined as collaboration, process orientation, persuasion and humility, and their traditionally masculine qualities, defined as aggressiveness, assertiveness and confidence, perform the best at work — better than their male counterparts, and their female counterparts who only exhibit either traditionally female or male qualities. This is a nice reminder for all the women who think their approach is too soft to be confident, because we’re going to need them as well.

On a side note, the study apparently didn’t show similar benefits for men embracing more traditionally feminine strengths, which, I think, is an unfortunate result of our society’s need to view men as the tough, independent warrior.

BEING A REBEL WITH A CAUSE

I mentioned that I was a good girl, but I was such a good girl that I picked my college majors based on what my family wanted me to pick. Sure, I was the one making the decision, but it was not an independent one at all. Law school was, needless to say, difficult, but it was difficult in an entirely different way for me. I did fine academically, but it was the burden of having followed someone else’s choices at such a crucial point in life that really made it hard for me. Unsurprisingly, it also made me feel like I was not really cut out for law school myself, but I wanted to continue being the golden child so I did what I was supposed to do. Sounds familiar?

Being a good girl and always staying in line has its own set of benefits and rewards, and research has shown that girls tends to pick up on these cues pretty early on in life, even when they’re really young. As someone with a younger brother, I can see this trait play out in real life. He has never been shy to say “no” or to get his way no matter what. While I agonise over weeks about what our parents might think, he just shrugs and gets back to whatever he wants to do.

This need to please adults forces us girls to continue making decisions that won’t upset our superiors, thus forcing us not only to never challenge authority, but also to want to be really good at whatever it is that we’re doing. When I looked at this never-ending pattern in my own life — from trying to excel in primary school, to not letting my emotions show at home, to picking out majors and sports, sometimes even friends, based on what others would think of me if I didn’t — I didn’t like what I saw in front of the mirror.

One particular chat with my brother when I was getting mad at our parents for not letting me go to film school brought along with it an epiphany. After hearing my constant bickering about how they were so unfair to stop me from going, and how much I had really wanted to at the time, and a few other things that I had not stopped repeating for years after I started law school, my brother simply said:

If you really wanted to go, why didn’t you?

Yeah, if I really wanted to go, why didn’t I? That level of defiance was never instilled in me. That ability to simply say “no” and stick to my opinion, to have a communicable, steadfast opinion at all, was all very foreign to me, despite the fact that my brother and I were brought up equally.

What helped me break out of this habit was to be more vocal about my emotions, choices and decisions, with everyone. If I didn’t feel like going somewhere, I said so. If I didn’t feel like eating something, I wouldn’t eat it. If I had to break a few conventions to get where I wanted to be, I broke them. It’s called being a rebel with a cause.

It’s important to know that this is not an easy process. Start really small. As you start noticing that people don’t take all your decisions personally, that they won’t turn on your for not liking pasta, that your parents will understand if you want to do something your own way, it will get easier. You can’t please everyone, but you can please yourself.

THINK LESS, ACT MORE

When I say I ruminated over silly things for hours at a time, really picture a cow chewing that cud over and over again, like it gets paid for it.

It got to a point where I would stop before any exciting project just because I would start to explore all the possible possibilities that could happen, and I would be frozen on the spot because what if the topic was not relevant, and what if the source was not that credible in the first place, and what about that casual nod Abe gave when I mentioned it, maybe it is not that interesting, and oh my god, what if people laugh at me? This chatter, this needless need to be a perfectionist with every project of mine and to please everyone, stopped me from ever attempting anything, and that inaction in turn made me less confident about everything every passing day.

There is only one antidote to paralysis, and that is movement.

If confidence does not reside in you naturally, you have to cook it up. The confidence to do something can only come from doing that very thing. Here is an example.

When I was a child, I was not very good at math. Funnily, not many people tried to pass on that “girls suck at math” stereotype at me because many of my teachers and tutors were women. I developed that perception of myself all by myself. It was a fact, a trait of mine set in stone. Luckily for me, my parents believed in paying extra attention to our weaker areas, so instead of giving up, I had to attend extra tuition classes to make up for it. Letting it go was never a choice. In fact, I had to do it every single day, especially during vacations. I didn’t improve that same year. I was still pretty terrible. But I kept going. Fast forward to tenth grade, and I ended up scoring the highest grade. The kid who was about to flunk fourth grade math, the kid with a mental block, the kid who always treated math as a weakness made it — all because she kept at it.

Being a perfectionist is detrimental in many ways, but it is especially terrible because it negates the very existence of improvement and progress. You are not a terrible driver, you are a terrible driver today. You are not a bad public speaker, you are just one today. I am not a great writer, I am just not that great today. And that is okay. Tomorrow, we will be better than today, and day after? A month later? A year later? We will only know if we keep at it.

Confidence is borne out of trial and error, out of repeating an activity over and over again, out of the self-assurance that comes when you’ve done something and survived. Confidence is, in fact, also borne out of failure, because failing something signifies your trial, your ability to take criticism, and your survival. Confidence, above all, is the ability to say “fuck this shit” and turn a thought into action, regardless of the outcome. There is nothing worse than waiting or whining till you are perfect to begin something.

— — —

TLDR; Recognise your strengths. Think less. Act more.

How I became a more confident woman was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

November 11, 2016. Leonard Cohen passed away today. I am not even going to pretend like I was a huge fan of his music because truth be told, I have only heard two of his songs. Both are lovely, of course. What I did admire deeply about him — and ridiculously enough, despite not having come in much contact with his work — was his approach to leading a creative life and maintaining a certain type of work ethic.

I know a lot of people who do a lot of offbeat, if not vaguely creative, work for a living. Some of them are experimental film essayists, some anthropologists, and some of them are more conventional aspiring artists in their own respective fields. Some of them are so weird that I feel like I am looking at a personification of a Pollock piece when they describe what they do, so I just nod a few times and tell them it sounds fascinating, which is not entirely false. I also know a lot of people who do amazingly detailed, data and analysis heavy, often repetitive, work on a day-to-day basis. I used to be one of them, so that made it entirely appropriate for me to tease a fellow corporate whore about how that Versace blazer which was ordered online from the work laptop during an absolute moment of weakness past midnight in the deserted office would easily camouflage the missing soul and reinvigorate the sleep-deprived body.

UNDERSTAND CREATIVITY

Before talking about how best to transition to this profession of creativity, I would like to begin by saying this: despite what the world might have you believe, all professions have the capability of being creative in their own way. When I was working for a very brief period as a corporate lawyer — so brief, everyone thinks I made it up — I constantly yearned to be on the other side where the grass was greener. I would sit at my desk like a cow locked inside a room with an open window, and with an unacceptably bovine expression on my face for any human, I would dream of one day jumping out and running to that wonderfully lush meadow, mooing in ecstasy. However, after spending a few months doing that work, I realised that I was wrong to create such a segregation because the manifestation of creativity was just a little subtler in law. It isn’t colourful and emotionally stirring, it isn’t a product of inspiration seeded in your brain as you walk with and past all the others heading in some collective direction — and I swear to the higher power I selectively believe in that corporate law in particular is only capable of arousing frustration in people, especially those who practice it — but it is there. It is there in the critical thought and insights, in opening and closing loopholes, in finding a solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem in a very short amount of time. Granted, the work is often monotonous enough to almost literally bore you to death, but dismissing it altogether as bad work and ridiculing people who fall prey to its calling is, I feel, unfair.

I mean, I’m not saying that I was capable of expressing myself creatively in that field, and this cow did happily jump out and sprint towards the lush green meadow, but I still firmly believe that.

CREATIVE WORK (also) SUCKS

On the other hand, creative work is often dismissed as not being work at all. This too is unfair — ask anyone who has tried taking a picture for Instagram, struggling for minutes to select just the perfect filter, toggling with the editing options for noobs who like to believe that taking a picture using the automatic setting on their DSLRs will suddenly make them all professional photographers, and finally, choosing the best #hashtags that will propel them to the fame they know they deserve (guilty as charged myself). This representation is as inaccurate as fivethirtyeight’s 2016 POTUS prediction, but this is what creative work is treated like. Sit, do something, look all cool while doing it, over.

This is not true. As much as it is necessary to dispel the myth in order to grant due to the hardworking, persevering artists in our community, it is also important so people who want to get into this line of work know exactly what they are signing up for — but very conveniently for myself, I cannot do this for the world. I have just started down this path, and I am as qualified to comment on the life and times of an artist as Trump is to be President (I know, I know. I am too far left and not even American but I am hoping we can all agree on this..hoping.). What I can do is help a fellow noob like myself to make this transition and hopefully build a certain work ethic that reveres practice and productivity over spontaneity. I say this because as much as I like the idea of a free-flowing creative who waits for the perfect moment for her labour and inspiration to collide and consummate, I also feel that if you are a creative person, then performing your craft is a way of life. As with other ways of life, this one too then needs to happen on a habitual, close to daily basis. I say this also because if I do not force myself to do what I love, I often forget just how much I love doing it. Of course, you might have better memory than me.

LET IT GO, ALL OF IT

First of all, before you even start working, I would suggest that you shed all your inhibitions about what you should be doing and whether you’re doing it right. I misguidedly sound like I am speaking from experience here, and to be entirely honest I am essentially talking to myself right now, but I think it is a universally acknowledged fact that there is no one way when it comes to any form of art. It is not a science — thank heavens, or I’d have to go back to being the cow in the room with a view — and the distinction in your work comes entirely because of your perspective.

HAVE A ROUTINE, YOU UNDISCIPLINED BRAT

Second, and this is important, set a schedule for yourself. Get a calendar, mark down your own deadlines and goals and try to stick with it. If you’re like me then you’ll also soon seen that there is no structure left in your life anymore, and you can choose to spend the whole day on Netflix (guilty as charged, again). Don’t do it. Let people know what you’re working on so they can hold you accountable and judge you till you delete all your social media accounts and go on a “detox”. This is not just the view from the brick jail anymore; it’s where you live. I realised that the best way for me to transition into this new line would be to maintain any semblance of routine that I could. If you write, try to do it everyday. Make versions. Keep your brain occupied. There is nothing special about an idea until it is executed.

COLLABORATE LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO WORK ALONE

Third, speak to people, collaborate! Feedback is so important because after a point of working on a project, you stop seeing the project at all. This is also difficult to do because it is not always easy to ask for help and then have people point out what is wrong with the project you’ve sweat blood on. And to be honest, I sometimes experience longstanding phases of overconfidence (usually right before I miserably crash down to realise who and where I am). I still find it very difficult, even more so to keep a straight face when someone is giving me an honest, constructive criticism, but I know it is absolutely crucial for the sake of my own work. For example, I had made a short film years ago with a few of my friends, and we’d uploaded it soon after we finished editing it. We did it just for fun and it was decent for the amount of time and skill spent on it, but we could have definitely improved a number of things had we only stopped to get a few feedbacks.

I am still trying to follow these myself, and I am so incredibly far away from being able to truthfully say that I work enough for anyone to call me a “filmmaker” that I just tell people I am in between jobs. Hopefully, we will both push through this and years later, we can act like it was so easy to get there, but we won’t do that today.

Today, we work.