For about a week now, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I lie down with one or both of my kids as they fall asleep every night, which means I often fall asleep once or even twice before I make it to my own bed. As a result, I sometimes find myself wandering around the house at midnight wide awake and feeling fully refreshed.
After my accidental nap, my body thinks it’s ready to keep going. This past week, however, the problem is not the interrupted bedtime, but the sheer terror of what lies ahead.
I’ve already written at length about The Grass Widow, the folk opera I’ve been composing over the last few years. More recently, I’ve written about the birthday camper that I planned to use as a set for our first staged production of the folk opera.
Now the time has come for those ideas to move from theory to action. We leave tomorrow for the two days of rehearsal and then the first run of shows. As is often the case when my big dreams leave the realm of my imagination to start living in the “real” world, I am full of regret. This was meant to be fun, but now I am anxiously wondering: What if this is all, in fact, a TERRIBLE idea?
There are a number of reasons why this happens to me every time a big creative endeavor comes to fruition. The IDEA of staging a folk opera — the costumes, the props, the literal stage itself — is exciting and interesting to think and strategize about when anything and everything is possible. But once you start to build the stage and make the props (especially when your theater company doesn’t have any money to speak of …) and you realize that elaborate raccoon costume you’ve been envisioning will have to be a cardboard silhouette of a raccoon instead …well, it all gets a lot scarier.
It’s more than that, though, because honestly, the stakes are very low. The three places we will perform the opera for on this tour are laid back, rural settings, filled with kind folks who I know won’t judge us too harshly. It’s not like these are high-dollar ticketed shows filled with critics planning to write lengthy public assessments.
So what is keeping me up at night? The innermost onion layer of fear seems to be simply of the unknown. I don’t know how any of this is going to go. I don’t know if I have the right kind of shims for propping up the portable stage if the ground is uneven. I don’t know what will happen if the wind comes up and blows a piece of the set off. How is it going to feel when I finally stand on the stage and speak aloud the lines I’ve been toiling over for the last few years?
My body is reacting to all these unknowns the same way it would to meeting a bear in the forest, and that’s why I can’t sleep. Right now, there’s a big part of me that would like to climb up a tree, hide there for a week, and pretend I’ve never had an interesting idea in my life.
Last night, I went outside to work on painting the sign that will sit next to our stage. There were sections where the bare plywood still showed through, and suddenly I decided to leave it just as it was: beautifully unfinished. After battling perfectionism for most of my youth, I now know from experience that great is often the enemy of good — if we fixate too much on making things great (especially in creative pursuits), we run the risk of being paralyzed into making nothing at all. We are all, always, a work-in-progress, full of big ideas and well-laid plans that don’t work out the way we thought they would. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and if it all ends up a mess, we have another great story. So even though I’m very scared, I’m even more excited.
