Hey, you. Did I ever tell you about my love/hate relationship with math? Now, I know that i’m not alone in this. Math is a subject that a lot of people struggle with. I hear people say things like, “Oh, I’m not good at Math,” or “Math was my least favorite subject,” or some variation thereof. I don’t believe that’s true. I think that Math is made up of several numeric languages and some you get right away and some are more difficult to understand. Whenever I understood an aspect of Math, I felt like I’d conquered the world! I felt like Tom Hanks in “Castaway’ when he makes fire. It would give me a grandiose impression of myself, the kind that would have me believe if there was an apocalypse, I would know how to survive it. You know what I mean? However, that understanding was always just a ruse. It was a siren song tempting me to take on more challenging ways to interact with numbers and when that challenge ended in failure it would make me question my entire existence.
Welcome to my life. My life has been nothing more than sequences of numbers, shapes, patterns, points on an axis just fucking with me. Every time I think I’ve understood something, suddenly a new rule would pop up forcing me to look at things differently. Now that you know addition/subtraction let’s do the same thing by multiplying and dividing. Nailed it! Now do all of them, only you have to do them in a certain order or it won’t work, so we are going to throw a parenthesis around these numbers so you kind of know to work inwards/outwards….whatever that means. You like puzzles and mysteries, right? Great, now we are going to mix letters and numbers together only the letters are really numbers in disguise. It’s an oh-so-fun whodunnit. You know what, screw that. Let’s measure shapes in weird ways for no reason so you can suck at shop class later. Don’t quit now. We still have to look at distance and coordinates so you can be made fun of during a game of ‘Battleship.’
I want to be good at all the intricacies in each aspect of my life from the beginning. I don’t want to grasp something over here only to discover that it won’t work for this thing I’m doing over there. I want so much to have one formula that rules them all, but I just don’t think that’s how life works. My life has been a series of starts and stops, or more like starts and explosions, that have consistently disrupted any kind of momentum or flow. I am so desperate for flow. I don’t mean a life without bumps or kinks in it. I’m not naive, I know that’s a part of the deal. I mean I’m desperate for a longer period of time to bask in success, in abundance, in bloom and not just financially speaking. I recently got a crash course in the difference between growing a business vs. scaling one and I am very clear I have been in the growth phase of life for an exhausting amount of time. I want to scale.
But the brutal and ugly fucking truth is I want to scale without a challenge. I love the idea of a challenge but coming up against one just makes me feel like a failure, which the perfectionist in me cannot cope with. A challenge may require me to look outside myself for help and if I do that then I’m just a burden to someone else. I’m an intelligent person who can’t figure out how to do something that so many people in my life seem to have figured out how to do. Economics, race, gender, equality don’t matter, I should be able to figure it out on my own..period.
It’s funny to me that my brain really perceives things that way. If Math has taught me anything is that many factors can change a problems outcome. As much as I want to believe, well really society would have me believe, that economics, race, gender and equality don’t matter, they absolutely fucking matter. I have spent more time putting out fires in my life than being able to focus on creating what I want from life. That doesn’t make me less smart than someone it means I’m more resourceful in different ways, and that’s okay.
This weighs so heavily on my mind because of a recent conversation I had with my daughter. Based on her success in a math class last year, her teacher highly recommended she take AP Calculus this year. She was intimidated and excited at the idea, both/and, right? The first day of class her teacher put it all out there for the students. Most of them would not pass the AP exam. Most of them would find the class extremely difficult but if they stuck it out they would be better for it. You can imagine that my daughter came home even more intimidated but still excited. Day 3 they had a quiz. She texted me that she got 100% and in the same text told me that she thought she should switch classes. My body instantly recognized that feeling. Holding success and fear of failing at the same time. I calmly texted her off the ledge and helped her see that there was insufficient data pointing to her needing to pivot this early in the game. She agreed and continued to prep for the next quiz the following week. She also recognized that she had close friends in her class who could help her too, so she wasn’t in this alone.
At the same time my baby girl is figuring out how to prep for something she’s unsure about, I was busy doing the same. I had been gifted an opportunity to pitch my show to a marketing holdings company. I’ve never had the opportunity to pitch any endeavor of my own so I didn’t have the first clue on what a pitch should even look like. I know you’re thinking, “Yeah but you’re an actor. don’t you have to pitch yourself all the time?” Yes and no. Sure if I’m in a meeting with an agent or manager there is a level of pitching myself but as an actor mostly the caliber of our work is front and center. If it were a matter of me showing my show to the company and having a conversation around that, then it wouldn’t have felt so foreign to me. What they were asking me to provide, the data they needed me to show was a different kind of math, if you will, one that was intimidating and exciting. Luckily my director stepped in to help me so I didn’t have to go out it completely alone, just like my daughter had her support system. Also the company provided a detailed packet to help us get really clear on what the heart of my show is about, what we’ve achieved thus far, and the potential for the show in the future. I was proud of the pitch my director and I created together. It was honest and authentic to the Beautiful Mess brand.
About a week later my husband and I had a meeting with the company to see what partnership could look like. We learned that Beautiful Mess the company wasn’t valuable enough to be considered from a holdings standpoint. The company could certainly provide services to help us as we continue to build but not really invest in a way that could provide value for them and really support us in moving the needle forward. On paper, all that totally made sense. Currently, I’m in the “fish out of water stage” with my show so I got it. The pitch was a great outline of where we want to go, a pathway we could take to get there, and confirmation of people who believe in what we are doing. Was that an accomplishment? Totally! Did I feel like a complete failure? 150%. After the meeting, my husband threw out a few ideas of what we could do next and proceeded to make himself breakfast. He had moved on faster than I could close out the Google Meet tab on my computer. I had a catch up date with one of my besties and cried the entire car ride to her house. I didn’t cry because I felt rejected. I cried because I haven’t figured out how to conquer the personal language of Math that governs a career I love so much. Over the years, I’ve watched so many of my friends essentially scale this part of their life where it’s a well oiled machine and I can’t seem to get out of the growth stage. My friends have worked hard. I’ve worked hard. My friends haven’t had it easy. I haven’t had it easy. One is equal to one, right? Wrong.
The day after the meeting my daughter took her second quiz. She texted me this:
“Well I think I failed my calculus exam but sounds like I wasn’t the only one by far. And my teacher said that it’s expected and it will only get better from here, so if we feel sad or like we did bad we are doing something right. It made me feel a lot better because he wants us to grow and he wants us to not be intimidated by failure and to just strive to understand.”
She told me she had cried and I replied, “ I’m loving all this. AND it’s totally okay to cry and be frustrated along the way. That’s often how growth happens. Metamorphosis is an atrocious process with a beautiful ending.”
“Ooo I like that. That’s a good quote,” she said.
“I’m right there with you, baby. I’m saying it to myself because yesterday, I cried too,” I texted back.
“At least we can struggle together,” she tenderly responded.
In that moment, I understood my assignment. My children see me try. They see me go after what I love regardless of the return on my investment. They see me give my all to everything I do especially if I think someone else can benefit from it. They see the frustration, the tears, the heartbreak, the exhaustion, the disgusting layers of metamorphosis that it sometimes takes to get to fly but at least they FUCKING see me FLY. And okay, sometimes things get tough enough where pivoting makes sense, and they see me do that too. They see me doing life out loud; all of it. Because what’s the point otherwise? Life is made up of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and when you add them all up it equals too short. That Math I’m super clear about.
**Everything I write comes from my personal insights and has all the drippings of my opinions, biases, and what-nots. Rather than come for me with facts or judgements to contradict my said opinions, biases and what-nots, I’d rather you find a different blog that makes you happy. If you find these posts therapeutic or helpful in any way that means we connected and it’s all I can ask for, however I’m not a therapist nor a coach. I’m just a writer floating words out there hoping they find the person they are intended for.
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