Aaaaand...ACTION!

A couple weeks ago I started doing a government funded self management course for people who suffer from chronic health conditions. If you've known me for any period of time you would know that I have fibromyalgia plus have been struggling with PTSD for the past few years which comes with anxiety and depression. I'm not going to be going into that in this post though. What I do want to share is how doing this self management program is impacting my creative life. In this program we learn and practice a variety of strategies that help us positively manage our health conditions.

This post week we covered making an "action plan." According to the several health professionals who wrote this program action planning is probably the most important self-management tool. So what is an action plan? An action plan is an action you can take that is short term, doable and sets you on the road towards achieving a goal. In my program we set goals to enhance our quality of life.

Unsurprisingly, working on creative projects enhances my quality of life. So, while I do set goals that are specific to my physical condition, feeding my mental, emotional and spiritual health is equally important and very much complementary to managing my physical condition. A lot of why I've been creatively dormant for the past year as far as Borg Queen goes is that the goals I wish to accomplish within this project are rather lofty. It's not that I've had a creative block or lost inspiration, it's just that I've been battling the physical effects of my chronic illness which has left me with no energy to work on anything...or so I thought.

 What I've learned is that the secret of an effective action plan is to not try to do everything at once. Inside my head I imagine everything all at once, but the problem is that in the physical world I am not capable of doing everything at once, so I've just had to accept that I'm limited and have to work within those limitations. What I've been learning to do is look at what I can realistically accomplish within the next week and base my action plan on what I can realistically achieve.

 Another crucial point about the action plan is that it should be about something I want to do, not something that will please anyone else. So when making my first action plan in this course I asked myself, "Jenny, what do YOU want to do?" The reply was, "I really want to write the screenplay for 'A Bionic Holiday Ballad.'"

Of course with me being an obsessive workaholic and wanting to get it done as fast as possible, my initial action plan was pretty unrealistic. At first I wanted to get the whole thing written within a week, but that would have required me to write 20 pages a day. It's totally doable if I push myself and don't have any other distractions, but the likelihood of accomplishing it was 50/50. They say you need to be at least 70% sure that you can complete your action plan, so I asked myself, "what is a number of pages you KNOW you can write in a day?"

I settled on 5 pages a day because I wanted to feel like I was succeeding and not having to stress out about it. Man! What a difference it makes to set up a plan that is easily accomplished! It's encouraging. It fosters hope and builds confidence. Everyday I was able to exceed my goal of 5 pages and that made me feel pretty damn good about myself. I was able to get the screenplay done in 10 days! Getting it done in a week would have put unnecessary pressure on myself, and for what? It's not like I'm working for anyone but myself.

 So now that I've written the screenplay I've decided to turn "A Bionic Holiday Ballad" into a musical. I'm gonna be honest that the inspiration to turn this story into a musical is totally coming from my love of "A Muppet Christmas Carol." My version obviously is going to be darker and have a very distinct "Borg Queen" sound to it. My "Bionic Holiday Ballad" action plan for the week is to sift through the screenplay again and determine at which points a song would fit.

Old Jenny would have written an action plan for this week that would have included the aforementioned plan, plus coming up with song titles, plus writing all the lyrics in one week. Old Jenny would have set themselves up for a stressful week and would be motivated to complete their action plan out of a fear of failure.

 Fear can be an effective motivator, but it's not a sustainable one and the cost is too high. Fear is something that has motivated me a lot in my life. It's also cost me my mental and physical health. One of the things I've been practicing over that past year is to not allow myself to take action as the result of fear. I'm learning to take action because I want to, not because I'm afraid of the consequences of inaction.

 The protagonist in "A Bionic Holiday Ballad" is Elanor Sharp a parallel to Ebenezar Scrooge. Scrooge is a character that if you really start examining their motives for their heinous behavior, you start to realize that their primary motivator is fear. Fear is going to be a major theme that is explored in the character of Elanor Sharp and I'm going to incorporate my own experience with being a workaholic motivated by fear into that character. However, getting to know Elanor Sharp is another blog post for another day.

For now I'm just going to work on my action plan for this week and enjoy the process. If you enjoyed reading this blog, and want to stay updated with what's going on with my project, then sign up for the mailing list at the top of the page. I love hearing feedback from you, so feel free to leave a comment or if you have any questions about what I've written just shoot me an email at borgqueenmusic@gmail.com

Caught The Bug

I don't know if you know this about me, but Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation is my childhood hero, so naturally I'm super stoked for his return to the small screen in the upcoming spin off series Star Trek: Picard. Sir Patrick Stewart's brilliant performance is what made the character so beloved and influential to many people of my generation.

Now, with it being 2020 and myself an avid Picard/Sir Patrick fan I follow both accounts on social media. The other day I followed a link to an article in Variety featuring Patrick Stewart. The article kicks off  with  mention of Patrick Stewart's one man theatrical adaption of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. 

Is it a coincidence that I've been formulating my own adaptation of the timeless tale as well? Up until this point, my version was only ideas loosely woven together and I had yet to put pen to paper or more accurately fingers to keys. However, as I continued to read the article, there were some points that began to spark the motivation to start actively working on it that I had been lacking.

The first one was Sir Patrick assertion that A Christmas Carol is more relevant in our present time than ever.

...'Stewart believes that makes the piece more timely than ever. He characterizes “A Christmas Carol” as a “profoundly angry attack” on a society that treats marginalized people as subhuman. “Forget about Tiny Tim and all that stuff,” he says. “It’s a political document.” ' 

I personally couldn't agree more, and that's the direction that I will be taking with my version. The setting will be a dystopian future in which human rights have been curtailed back to the level they were at in Victorian London as a result of an oppressive capitalist regime that decimated democracy, equality and labor laws, paving the way for the 1% to rule the masses.

The second thing Sir Patrick said that hit home in the most personal way was, he described the impact acting had on his young life.

“Nothing bad could happen to me for the two and a half hours that we were doing the play, because I became somebody else,”

From a very young age I've loved performing and creating characters and worlds through various mediums for the same reason. Artistic expression is a safe place. It's somewhere I can go to be myself by being someone else. I don't have to be Jenny Kirby the chronically ill, domestic violence and multiple sexual assault survivor who suffers from PTSD. I can shed those afflictions and be the White Witch of Narnia or Elanor Sharp the genius bionics engineer. 

Elanor Sharp incidentally is the main character of my version of A Christmas Carol which currently has the working title of A Bionic Holiday Ballad. This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but the magnitude of tackling a project like this has been daunting and too much to take on...until now. Working on this project will be the next phase in my recovery journey. Elanor is a workaholic with a privileged but traumatic childhood. There will be a lot of events that will mirror my own experiences as we take a trip with the Ghost of Holiday Past. 

I'm also going to be layering in some mental health metaphors particularly when it comes to what the ghosts symbolize. The Ghost of Holiday Past will represent depression. Holiday Present is will represent existing in a state of serenity and mindfulness and Holiday Future will represent anxiety.

This project is a huge undertaking that will be ongoing over the next few years, but it will spawn a whole bunch of new music(at least 2 albums) plus some new music videos, artwork and of course a film. While I do believe in coincidences, I'm taking the timing of  the Variety article and the words of Sir Pat Stew as a sign that it's time to allow myself to be infected by the bug again.

It's Lame AF And I Don't Like It

The mind is willing, not only willing but eager and bursting with ideas. However my body is uncooperative. I still have very limited energy reserves. Every day I tell myself, "today is the day I start working in something again," but to no avail. I run out of steam and can barely get through the bare minimum of things like feeding myself, making sure I go for a walk and go to my counselling appointment. 

Taking care of my most basic needs has to be the priority, so why is it so damn hard to have a shower and brush my teeth? It's unsatisfying existing like this, but on the plus side since I started doing things like taking walks, eating, cutting back my workload, sleeping and going to all my mental health appointments, I haven't thought about killing myself. 

I guess that's progress. I'm impatient though. I want to do more than just cope, but I'm not physically capable of it right now. It's a bummer to be sure because I thrive on achievement. While some are content to hang out and chill, I get antsy. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people, but then I wouldn't be me and I like me.

I keep telling myself to be patient and trust that the time will come for me to become a force of creative productivity again. Oh how I long for it! Creating is a driving force in my life. It's more fulfilling than any relationship and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I know I've driven some people away because of my extreme focus on my creative projects, and I do lament it on a very deep level. However, my drive to create runs deeper than any sadness I feel towards the loss of loved ones. 

That is just my nature, and I can't deny it. I refuse to moralize it too. Call me selfish if you want, but it's not selfish to know oneself and acknowledge one's needs. Just because I'm not fulfilled by family and relationships like a lot of people are, doesn't make me an uncompassionate monster. I just know who I am, and creating provides me with a sense of purpose like nothing else in the world.

Aside from the fact that the creative process fulfills me, what I love about it, is sharing it. I have a difficult time connecting with people in conventional social situations. I'm painfully shy unless I'm on stage, and I hate being touched(unless it's under a very specific set of circumstances). Talking and touching seem to be the most common ways people connect, but it's not my cup of tea, so I'm grateful that I have the option of sharing my art as a means of connection.

I guess I'm just feeling so frustrated and isolated right now because I don't have the physical capacity to do the things that give me a sense of purpose and connection. It's lame as fuck and I don't like it.