that frightening indifference

There’s this incredible passage from James Baldwin’s Notes from a Native Son:

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next – one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

The phrase “frightening indifference” is really striking. It’s tough not to feel that way sometimes. Baldwin’s able to take that frustration with perspective, though, which is so helpful to keep in mind. That outside shrug of indifference that I’m sure many of us feel has forced me to learn how to revise and reimagine, to create stuff with limited resources – a skill that I wouldn’t trade for anything (except more resources).

I do think that everyone who’s not listening to you is giving you a gift. They’re forcing you to decide if that idea is worth pursuing, if you care enough to make it better, if you’ll continue to hone it through a dozen no’s, if you’ll find a way to get it over the line. If you decide that your thing matters to you, and you’ll keep working on it, those people who are indifferent are playing just as huge a role in the creation as those who support you.

Someone asked me recently if anything excites me. I don’t think this person knows me too well. They know me in a certain context, where I’m a little closed off, so it’s possible I’m just more excited when I’m not speaking to them. I think and hope anyone who actually knows me knows how much I care.

I’ll sometimes say, “I don’t care” about things. It’s really a lie, a defense mechanism because I care so much. I care a lot about the creative work I do. That’s what excites me. If I write a script, I’m so committed to bringing it to life somehow. If I have an idea or concept in a notebook or a Google doc more than once, I care so much about getting to figure out what’s interesting to me about it, figuring out what it could look like, how to make it.

I care about the work I do so much, to such an extent that it sometimes makes me sad that I haven’t produced more. By some standards, I have. There’s just a folder full of scripts and concepts that I’d want to make exist if I had the resources. Some day.

It seems like such a thin line, to take the indifference or lack of help or lack of support or discouragement that others are providing and to use it as fuel, without swallowing it as a bitter pill. There’s a Maya Angelou line: “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.” I feel fortunate to be in a less bitter air than I have been in the past. I hope my air stays unpolluted. It’s hard, though.

There’s this movie I saw when I was a kid, Mission to Mars. I think it was a bad movie; I don’t remember anything about it, aside from the first scene. But I think about that opening scene all the time. NASA has an unmanned satellite on Mars and they’re looking for a rock. They stop on the rock, then they cut to NASA headquarters and the scientists are celebrating. ‘We did it! We found the rock!’ They’re all high-fiving each other. ‘Bring ‘er home!’ The satellite turns around and goes home, but then our camera pushes forward a few feet. We see that if they’d just gone five feet further, they would’ve discovered this whole civilization of flying cars, saucers, alien life.

I think of that scene all the time in creative work. So often, our instinct is just to stop at the boring rock, the preconceived notion of what the thing should look like when we first have an idea. But if we just push a little forward, there’s this whole world potentially there. Yet I do think we have to be pushed to bring ourselves there. That’s one thing the no’s do. Something that ‘frightening indifference’ provides. The need to continue and push further and hope that you keep getting better. Maybe people will see that and hear that. Even if they don’t, you’ll get better and you’ll have cultivated something more interesting than what you thought you’d find.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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