Links!
Check out Jorge Aguirre! (Affiliate link if you want to go straight to buying his books!)
The Nap Ministry! (Affiliate link to purchase Rest is Resistance.)
Audio Transcript:
Hello. Welcome to the first audio edition of Dating for Shits and Giggles with Lateefah, a place for laughter and learning for grown ass women and a few enlightened others. I'm coming to you from my desk in lovely Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, looking over a sea of green trees and lower Manhattan rising in the distance.
I decided to go audio this week because I was having difficulty expressing everything that I've learned. Well, I can't download everything, but the key points of what I've learned in the last, say, six to eight weeks. When I came back from Marrakesh, I was in a terrible, terrible place mentally and feeling incredibly guilty about it.
Having had the privilege of taking my daughter to travel to Africa to stay in a riyad all by ourselves, well, I mean like renting an entire home to share with friends, just to have that special joy and then to come home and feel bad about it. As I wrote in the previous edition, you know, talking to a neighbor on the street really helped me get some perspective of that trip was not just for me, it was for all the black women before me who didn't have the opportunity.
And, you know, not having the opportunity is something that I want to talk about today.
Shortly after I got back from Marrakesh, so this is late mid April, I saw a Facebook post from Jorge Aguire who is the head writer on Alma's Way, a fantastic show on PBS Kids, which is produced by Fred Rogers Productions. Yes, the beloved Mr. Rogers. And it was a post about I guess a fellowship, a writing program to provide more opportunity for underrepresented writers, writers of, of color probably specifically.
And I was like wait a minute. I'm, I'm a writer of, of color and I've never written for kids. But when I was a kid, I felt so invisible when I watched tv. I would watch Romper Room and Miss Nancy would look through that mirror and she would see, Robin, and Jason, and Kristen. I really wanted her to see Jamal or Carlos.
I, I mean, honestly, let's be, I was a kid, so I really wanted her to see Lateefah and I didn't. no where kids' TV was made. Right? It never occurred to me to go into children's television, but I knew where movies were made, right? Like I saw Indiana Jones and I saw Alien, couldn't, I must have seen Alien. I don't. Well, whatever. I just knew that I wanted to be seen. And I considered writing. But that seemed like a lot of work and not nearly as glamorous as making movies. I'm just gonna be straight up honest. I actually had a therapist in my later years who asked me if I was wedded to the glamor of movie making, but that's an entirely separate podcast.
Anyway, I ended up going to UCLA because that's where movies were made, and I just so desperately wanted to make movies starring a beautiful, black, powerful Indiana Jones, or a black powerful Ripley. Okay, I'm totally obsessed. Well, not so much with Indiana Jones now because have you seen it lately? Problematic. But definitely Ripley. I mean, I absolutely really, really wanted to be Ripley.
And I did film in television for a while and it's, I'm just gonna be honest. It's a, it's a crap, crap industry. Someone warned me about Bill Cosby in 1992. You know, like we all knew. When #MeToo happened, I would text my girlfriends the list of all the guys that were going to come out, and I was pretty dead on because it was an open secret. But it was also generationally what we learned to live with.
So I got out of movies and TV because I wanted to have a family and the hours are ridiculous. The culture is trash. And I just didn't wanna do it anymore. I knew I wanted to have a kid, and at the time I didn't have the generational wealth or the structures. I couldn't afford a nanny to - I didn't have a wife.
Honestly, everyone I knew who was really successful was a man with a wife at home who took care of things. And I wish I could have said, I had the foresight to say, "I'm gonna do this differently." But I didn't. I didn't know how.
So fast forward to this post and it sort of hit me. I was like, "Wait a minute. If, if I wanna create media so that brown girls can see themselves, children's media is an option." And now that I'm older, in addition to wanting to see black and brown girls, I wanna see girls with disabilities.
I am super into facts and data. So I went to the Geena Davis Institute, because they do studies on how people are portrayed in media. And I was really dismayed, but not shocked, to see that there in the, in 2022, there wasn't a single children's television show with a lead character with a disability. And I thought, you know, we have to do better.
So I sat down and I sketched out an idea for an original script, which we call a pilot in the industry, for a story about a neurodiverse girl. Maybe that was based on my own experience, maybe based on my experience of raising a daughter with ADHD. And with some tools that I've learned as a peer support specialist, which I haven't talked about too much. But in my day job, I am trained to support people with serious mental health concerns on their journey to recovery.
And I sketch this script out and decided I was gonna go for it. Which I mean, I, I honestly can't believe I decided to do this. It was late April and the packet, including a script, a and a fellowship statement, I mean a resume, whatever, you can throw that together pretty fast, was due June 1st. Wait a minute. The deadline wasn't June 1st. The deadline was May 15th.
I was like, no way. There's no way I can work my job in social services, which is really fricking demanding. Be a 100% solo parent to a middle age middle, middle aged? That's a Freudian slip. To a middle-school kid. Write a newsletter and an entirely original television program, but I decided to do it anyway.
I needed to learn an entirely new act structure. For my drama nerds and story structure friends, I was raised - raised? I learned how to write a three act structure, and animated shows are written in a four act structure. I didn't even know a four act structure existed.
And I didn't make it. And honestly, when I got to the last push, I freaked out a little and said to myself, "You know, I've been working so hard to get away from working for other people. Do I wanna learn an entirely new way to work for other people?" I don't. I don't think so. So I shelved it, but felt good that I had tried. And then on May 15th, it was extended.
So I took the extension as a sign, combined with the fact that I'd had a really terrible week at work and I, I, I wanted to get out. So I doubled down. I asked for forgiveness and grace of my boyfriend and my daughter, and wrote an entirely original script for an 11 minute television show in a structure that I was completely unfamiliar with.
I watched shows. Oh, also, I had to analyze an episode of a competing television show, and I got it. I slid it in right under the deadline. Thank you to Pete for reviewing it. And I was shocked to discover that once I turned the entire packet in, I didn't care whether or not I was selected.
I was exhilarated from the act of doing something entirely new. And the exhilaration felt familiar, oddly. And I was like, "What? What is this feeling?" And I realized it was like being in my twenties again. When I was looking at the paths in front of me, and there were so many options. I didn't have a child to raise. I didn't have to choose the safe, responsible option. I could do whatever. And it was so refreshing to feel and to recognize that person who I was. And not the person who I was who was younger who didn't have aches and pains. But the person who was open to possibilities. It was amazing to visit that place and to think about ways that I can get to that place again.
And it was really great for like a week. And then I dipped because I wanted to stay in that place. I wanted to get back to that place. And for me, and I don't know, maybe for other people, that's not really sustainable and I recognize that as part of my maybe addictive personality, right? People look for highs in different ways. And maybe I could get that high from running. No, that's not gonna happen.
I still can't believe that I was happy just to have set a challenge and completed it, when so much of my validation and self worth comes from being told that I did a good job. Or always looking for someone to tell me that I'm good enough. I didn't submit this script to be told that I'm good enough.
I didn't submit this script to be invited to a new table. I did the script to stretch and try and
it took me back to a place in my twenties where there were so many different paths open to me, and I didn't realize that I had closed those doors. Am I going to go into children's television? I don't know.
After I completed this and I was riding this high, I dipped and because I catastrophized, I was completely convinced. Oh no, it's a perimenopausal mood swing. Stop this ride. I wanna get off. And I was so tired and I just wanted to rest. And it wasn't until I was telling a friend what I've been up to because I hadn't been in touch, because I had to focus all of my extra time on getting this fellowship packet done and naming all the things that I had done that I realized, oh wait, I'm allowed to be tired.
And I saw something from the Nap Ministry, click on the link and I was like, "I'm entitled to rest." So I rested
And resting for me is hard, and I think resting for many of us is hard. It is difficult to be quiet and non-productive. And not optimizing our time. And I feel a little ridiculous saying this after I just talked about the exhilaration I felt from optimizing my time to the most, but that also isn't sustainable.
When I took time to rest and allowed myself that space. I realized my dip wasn't from perimenopausal hormones. My dip was from worrying. "What am I gonna do next to get that feeling again?"
But worrying about finding it blocks me from being open to possibility. I had to get quiet and rest. I had to step away from the high to allow myself the space to be okay with the knowledge that I don't have to chase the high. I simply have to be open. And allow the next possibility to come to me.
The way this Facebook post came to me,
The not so nice, the not so nice voice in my head is saying, well, duh, isn't this why you do yoga? Isn't this why you meditate? And kind of. And I have found peace and an awareness of my body and some moments in those practices, but also there is some baggage in that right There is work. And what I have found that is new in this moment is the acceptance of doing.
Absolutely nothing, right? As Tricia from the Nap Ministry says, rest is resistance. And while I found this high from taking on, this for me, a pretty monumental task. The learning is also that I can be quiet. And rest and let the new thing come or maybe even accept that there doesn't have to be a new thing.
But I don't have to do one more thing to be worthy because like all of us, I was born worthy. You were born worthy, and if either one of us never does another single solitary thing for the rest of our lives, we are enough. Thanks for listening, and I hope to catch up with you soon.
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