I Wish I Liked My Work As Much As James Gunn Likes His
This weekend I had my tarot cards read.
Now hold on a second, don’t leave just yet. I’m a skeptic when it comes to stuff like tarot (and a basic non-believer when it comes to astrology) but I’m an open minded skeptic. It costs me nothing to get my cards read, especially if I have a friend who is a witchy goth and wants to give me a reading. I’m open to all modalities, more or less, and I believe that truth is accessible in many ways, even ways that seem unlikely at first.
After all, a tarot reading isn’t just a straight-forward description of the cards, it’s an interpretation of the cards and the order in which they are uncovered. It speaks in generalities, but those generalities are filtered first through the reader and then through the person having the reading - you see if any of this resonate with you, if it brings anything up. Remove all thoughts of the supernatural and consider the reading of tarot cards as an exercise to bypass the upper levels of the mind and see if what’s lurking below begins to take the bait. As you shuffle the deck you focus on an intention, and that focus gives the mind permission to make connections it might otherwise not make.
The gist of my reading was pretty consistent - I need to focus on self-love and discipline, and these things will break down creative blocks that have been impeding me. And you know what? That felt really true to me. The last decade has been challenging for me in many ways, from hitting bottom and losing my career to the death of my wife, and one of the responses I’ve had has been to shrink, to make myself smaller. What’s more, it’s easy to fall into negative self-talk, and while my meditation practice and sobriety had made my self-talk less scathing before I met Brittany, after her death it came roaring back. A big piece of it was my depression following her passing - it was hard for me to get out of bed for months and months, and I relentlessly shit talked myself for it. “You lazy fuck,” I’d say. “Look how fat you’re getting. You’re disgusting. The only person who will ever truly love you is gone and you’re on your own now.”Even worse was the negative self-talk about my work. It’s been a problem for years, and where I was once able to churn out a dozen short pieces in a day I now struggle to finish one medium length piece. Nothing I write seems good enough to publish, and often fears of raising people’s ire besets me. One of the scariest things imaginable is me publishing a piece that goes kind of viral and gets a lot of attention, which when you’re trying to get more subscribers on your Patreon is kind of a problem!
This fear, and my Gen X dislike of self-promotion and a deep belief that being proud of my work is boasting has made that goal of getting more subscribers really hard. The truth is that people who might enjoy this site and its community don’t even know it exists, because I rarely blast to the world that we’re here, and I’m loath to make noise. So here I sit at my desk, constantly second guessing my writing and my opinions and also fearful of attempting to get any attention on that writing and those opinions because to do so would feel like braggadocio.
So this reading happens, and what I hear sounds a lot like recognition of all this mixed with an admonition to make changes and how those changes will improve my writing and my life. Which, to be fair, I knew was the next step, but knowing and doing are two different things. We all know we should eat better, exercise more, etc etc etc, but actually doing those things… well, that’s a whole different set of skills. Like, the self-love and self-care part, that I know how to do. But what about getting over the deeply ingrained sense that self-promotion is gross and off-putting? How to get there?
The day after the reading I was doing the dishes and making lunch and, as one does, I put on a podcast to keep my mind from thinking too many thoughts. The podcast was the latest episode of the official Peacemaker recap show hosted by James Gunn. We’re going to be covering Peacemaker on Marvelvision starting this month, and it feels like a good idea to do a little bit of research before then. Plus, the show is funny and informative and enjoyable, so I look forward to each new episode.
Listening to this one with the tarot reading fresh in mind, I realized something: James Gunn fucking loves his own work. On the show he will cackle about the jokes he wrote for characters, he’ll talk about how great a particular scene was, he’ll be incredibly complimentary of what he did with the show. But what’s interesting is that none of this comes off as boasting but almost like a fan watching the thing and reacting to it. He is just absolutely in love with every episode of this TV show he created, wrote and sometimes directed. It’s a wholesome love, and it’s kind of infectious. It was honestly uplifting to hear him like his own stuff so much.
In that moment it struck me - this is the way to be. As a writer I have always been super critical of my writing; sometimes I’ll read an old piece that I don’t even remember writing and will be horrified. It’s like hearing your own voice but a million times worse because at least hearing your own voice doesn’t prove that you’re incredibly dumb and bad at what you do best. Yet even when being horrified by these old pieces they still often contain a little gem or two that I can appreciate even fifteen years later. A clever turn of phrase, an insight that I haven’t thought about in a decade, an outlier opinion that later became consensus. There is good in these, but it’s hard to see that through the bad.
It’s all a perspective thing, isn’t it? Recently Gunn talked about the creative regrets he’s had in his role as the head of the DCU, and it shows that he’s not a self-flagellating pollyanna. He posted this on Threads, the awful social media site he has for some reason decided is his new home:
And in February he gave an interview to ComicBook.com where he said:“I mean, life is complicated. There’s always little things,” Gunn said. “Like I wish I did that differently. I wish I asked David (Corenswet) to do that take differently, it’s just like little things. There’s writers that we put on projects that I wish we didn’t, but overall, I feel just so lucky.”
I’m always hesitant to call myself an artist (that negative self-talk and fear of being boastful rises again!) but I know that there is no artist who has ever completed a work and felt that it matched what was in their head. It’s impossible; what you have in your head is perfect because it has never made contact with the real world and with the artist’s own limitations. The perfect idea has to be mutilated and rearranged in order to be born into reality, and while those approaching it fresh may be amazed at it, the artist will always know what it was supposed to be. The artist will always see the failure to reach the vision.
With many, myself included, that occludes any ability to appreciate the work as it is. But Gunn can get past that by something as simple, it seems, as a gratitude practice. He reminds himself how lucky he is to be where he is and that even if things aren’t turning out exactly as he wanted them, he’s grateful that he got to make those things or work on those things. This perspective shift to the positive - “How great it is that I did this!” versus “Why did I do it this way?” - allows space to appreciate the work. Gunn isn’t ignoring that there’s stuff he would have done differently, or that perhaps he doesn’t even like so much, but he’s able to engage with the stuff that he does like and do it in a way that connects him to the enthusiasm he had when he writing or directing the work initially.
When Gunn talks and laughs about how much he likes Peacemaker it doesn’t sound boastful. Gunn has gotten a bit of a backlash lately over his omnipresence in nerd culture and the way it seems everything in the DCU is about him (being in the opening credits of Creature Commandos did not help), but the truth is that the backlash is not based on anything he’s actually done or said, it’s based on people getting tired of hearing his name. Gunn isn’t out there praising himself, saying how brilliant he is or how he’s the best at what he does, he’s just… enjoying the work. He’s proud of the work, but not in some kind of insufferable, full of himself way.
That’s how I want to be. I want to finish a review and focus on what’s good in the piece, not nitpick every apostrophe I might have done differently. I want to release a podcast and understand why people might want to listen to it, and not be baffled that anyone wants to sit through an episode. But more than that I want to be able to share what I’ve created with pride, without feeling like I’m blowing smoke up my ass, without worrying that I’m self-aggrandizing. Without thinking that people are going to be annoyed as hell at me promoting my own work.
Tarot might not be “real,” but the reading put my brain in a place where I was listening to the Peacemaker podcast with different ears. I was hearing the conversation in a new way. It allowed me to realize that there was something to personally take away from the show, and it’s the fact that I want to love my finished work as much as James Gunn loves his, and that there’s nothing egocentric or self-glorifying about it. In fact it might be, dare I say, healthy.
