Embracing Resilience & Fighting Hypocrisy

Last March all of our lives took a turn, and we found ourselves forced to change, to adapt, to rethink how we live, and what we are going to do moving forward.  I arrived in Guatemala on March 11th for my wedding which was to take place on the 14th.  On the 12th I had to make the decision to close my acting studio, and on the 14th Trish and I canceled our wedding less than 30 minutes before it was to begin, since a few American guests had been exposed to Covid on the flight over.  The country was locked down the next week and Trish and I found ourselves quarantined with her parents in Guatemala for three months.  As I was grappling with my own grief and shock, I had 100 students back in NYC who needed someone to guide them through the uncertainty.  

At first, I thought that in a few weeks we would resume our lives and get back into the classroom, that we needed patience.  But it became very clear that this was not a short-lived crisis.  I had students who were losing their survival jobs, overwhelmed with this unfolding catastrophe, not knowing how they could pay rent, let alone pay for classes.  All of us were scared, and eventually frustrated, angry, and resentful.  My first thought was, “Fuck this, I’m not taking the Meisner Technique online, it’s not possible.  The work needs to be done in person, and I am not going to sacrifice the integrity of the training.  So for the first two months of quarantine, my students and I held space for each other.  We used our class time to talk about movies, and plays, to discuss actors and performances, anything to keep us connected to each other and to our art.  And in between, I was spending hours online and on the phone applying for PPP loans, state and government grants for small businesses, anything I could find to help keep the studio alive.  All from a third world country. 

Eventually I knew that if the Maggie Flanigan Studio was to survive, if I was going to continue teaching the Meisner Technique, I needed to re-imagine what it meant to be in a classroom.  I had to take my acting classes online.  And yes, I was met with much resistance.  I had many students who were upset and angry with me, with my decision, with the sense of injustice they felt.  My job was to absorb that, but also push them to move forward.  And what I have found over these last 8 months is that the work continues, my students are learning, and that online Meisner training is completely possible with students who have the resilience to adapt.

So I kept challenging my students to be creative, to use the opportunity to rebirth their creative spirit. But I wasn’t applying that challenge to myself.  I realized I was the teacher who was all talk, but couldn’t back it up by personal example.  That hypocrisy embarrassed me.  I knew I had to lead through action.  So I thought to myself, “What’s something I have always thought about doing, but have avoided because of self-doubt or the voice of my inner-critic. A podcast.  I had been told for years that I should do one, but my usual response was to roll my eyes and dismiss it; I had nothing to say, didn’t understand anything about podcasting, and no one would listen anyway.  I knew this was thing I needed to do.  So I announced to my students and on social media that I was going to create a podcast.  Once I had said it out loud to others, I knew I had to make it happen.  God how I didn’t want to do it.  At all!  But everyday I started pouring over every how-to video and article.  I opened up GarageBand for the first time ever, and educated myself on how to use it.  I spent every spare moment learning how to podcast.  I found a graphic artist for the artwork, a former student to design the shows website, http://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com, created a recording room in my in-laws attic, bought a microphone, and recorded my first six episodes.  Creating Behavior was born out of the pandemic, and now, as I released my 29th episode, it has become one of the things I love doing the most.

I was inspired by an article that I read in The New York Times by Emily Esfahani Smith, and she was talking about tragic optimism. It was a term coined by Viktor Frankl, who was a survivor of Auschwitz, and wrote an incredible book called Man's Search for Meaning, which I highly recommend. He talked about tragic optimism, which is really your ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life, despite the pain and the suffering of your current conditions. When you look at periods of crisis on this planet, you have to ask yourself the question, why are some broken by it and others thrive? And I think that a lot of that has to do with resilience, the resilience to find the good in your current struggle. And I guess the question that I was posing to my students, I had to pose to myself. How is it possible to say yes to creativity in spite of the fact that life, as you know, has been completely upended? Some of the best art that this world has ever produced has come from their ability to turn suffering into creative expression. To see struggle as an opportunity to bear witness to their own experience in a time of crisis. Whether that is during war, during economic and financial collapse, suffering under a totalitarian, authoritarian regime, or a global pandemic. Great art has come from these periods of deep pain and suffering. Frankl says that you can't force optimism. You cannot mandate that of yourself. And I think part of what we struggle with as a culture, as an American culture, certainly, is we're just told “to be happy”. Just try to do things that make you happy, turn that frown into a smile. But this is what Frankl was talking about, that happiness cannot be something that you just try to do in the moment. It must result from doing something that has meaning to you. And if you do something that has meaning and you put your time, and your energy, and your heart into it, the happiness is going to follow. It is going to ensue. Putting meaning into your time is what is going to give you the ability to cope with your suffering. And if not, that's when you run the risk of trying to ease and dull that pain with other things like drugs, and alcohol.

I think you've got to find the heroism in confronting large obstacles. It is the obstacle that is going to define the way. And it is not easy. But we must take small steps in the right direction, forward. And sometimes that's all we have, and that's enough. And maybe in a week, in a month, in six months, you'll look back at all those small steps and you will have crossed a long distance. You need to forge a path for yourself. We are in a crisis of solitude and my wish and my hope for all of you is that you discover something on the other side of this pandemic about yourself, about your work, about your art that you didn't think was possible. The fact that right now you might not have the energy, or there might be a day, or two, or a week that goes by where your attention needs to be on saving your life, does not mean that you are not creative, that you are not an artist. And it can be very intimidating to go on Instagram, to go on YouTube and to see all of these artists and these influencers and these personalities that are playing their ukulele and doing their standup routine and offering all of these spurts of creativity. And you sit there and you go, "Well, fuck, I'm not doing a damn thing. I must not be an artist. I'm a fraud." And it's just not true. Especially if you are seriously engaged in just trying to keep yourself healthy, a roof over your head, and your bills paid.

Keep the compass pointing due north, and remember that you are not a victim, that you must summon the warrior inside of yourself, and find the grit, the determination and the resiliency of the underdog.

You can find Creating Behavior on ITunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, IHeart, where ever you get podcasts.  You can also follow me on Instagram at @maggieflaniganstudio and @creatingbehavior.