I spent a lot of time in my head this week. Granted, I am, technically, always in my own head, but the mind is a canyon with cavernous depths and crevices that resemble some alien planet, and sometimes my thoughts take me into the deep.
That’s what being an extreme introvert can be like. I haven’t really spent a lot of time being introverted, the last few months I’ve been pretending I’m an extrovert, if anything. I’ve even had myself fooled at times, but this week, I got back to my ways.
Having my thoughts take me to the darkest trenches of my mind made me realize something amazing.
I was really really fortunate to pick up filmmaking as a hobby and passion. Sometimes I get so locked into my own tiny mind that I barely realize there is a world around me. Furthermore, I usually have no concept of the person I am that everyone else in that world around me sees, hears, and experiences.
I started making stupid little movies with my neighbors when I was about 14 years old, and I realized this week that it might be the only reason I turned out ‘normal’. When I say normal, I mean able to function on a familiar enough level with most people that is bearable.
First off, being on camera means that we have to watch what we film at some point. It’s common for us to love the sound of our own voices, we yap and yap and yap and yap, but as soon as we hear our recorded voices for the first time, we HATE it. Unless you hear your voice recorded a lot, odds are it always stays that way. It’s probably more common to hear and see recorded versions of ourselves with this flood of technology we drown in every waking second, but in the year 2000, it was not nearly as common.
Now, when you are on camera, it is three times worse. Not only do you have to hear yourself, you have to see yourself– in motion.
“I don’t sound like that! I really look like that? I slouch like that? I move like that? I look stupid! Crap!”
Over time, you become familiar. You see the person that all the other billions of people will see. There is a lot of comfort in that after the initial feelings of disgust and shame. Middle school and early high school is an especially rough time for that, because it is all so awkward and pitiful, but I became really familiar with who was beyond just what my two eyes occasionally saw in a mirror. I understood enough to be able to kind of lean my personas to project myself in certain ways.
Of course, I think no matter how comfortable you are, unless you can always have an out of body experience, there will always be a disconnect between the person you experience yourself as, and the person the outside world experiences.
Secondly, beyond familiarity with your third person self, there is the greater element of being able to be someone else; exhibiting different personalities; creating characters with characteristics that you don’t possess. Or maybe you could call it stretching out into extreme versions of yourself.
I’ve never called myself an actor or referred to anything I do in any of the stuff I’ve been in that we’ve filmed, but acting on camera has always been one of the most liberating things I’ve done. Now that we are inactive these days, I find that it takes longer to settle back into it, and I am more tentative when we are filming something. The greatest thing that your teach yourself when you’re on camera and being someone other than your daily self is being able to shed that skin and how easily it is to molt.
Sometimes a character for me is merely a version of myself, but with sharper or more pronounces traits. Sometimes a character for me is someone who exhibits things that I have never been able to, but usually with personality pieces that I’ve always desired.
In essence, over all those years, I learned to be comfortable with myself by not being myself, but also being myself more than I’d ever allow myself otherwise. I think I was seen as more carefree and ‘me’ in high school than I was at any other time period of my life, and it is easy to see why– that is when I was doing the most filmmaking.
I mentioned in a couple of posts back how I spent a couple hours looking at myself with photo booth on my Mac, just rediscovering this exterior James Curtis that I had completely disconnected from. That’s exactly what video production did for me. If I could recommend any hobby to anyone, it would be exactly that, and, while there are endless reasons, that is the only one I’d need. Especially if you’re an introvert.
I guess the gist of all this is that I really just need to get my best friends, a camera, an idea, and get back to practicing shedding my own skin, lest I have more weeks like this week, and get permanently lost in the labyrinth of my mind.
Moral of the story: Sometimes I have to just get out of there and be ridiculous and stupid — case in point, this video. Hadn’t been on camera in a year, but we just acted stupid and had fun with this unfinished one.