I wanted to turn to something more elemental this week. Which is that we are biologically programmed to feel fear. Isn’t that wild? And it’s not a bad thing.

The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure located in the temporal lobes of the brain. It plays a key role in processing and regulating emotions, especially fear.

The amygdala is made up of several nuclei, each with its own unique functions and connections to other parts of the brain. One of the primary functions of the amygdala is to process and interpret sensory information, such as what we hear, see, and smell, and determine whether they are threatening or not.

When the amygdala detects a potential threat, it activates the body’s “fight or flight” response, which triggers a rollout of physiological changes designed to help us respond to danger. This response is biologically engrained and it’s essential for our survival, to protect ourselves from danger.

However, it doesn’t always get triggered by actual danger. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night because of a strange sound? Your heart rate and breathing increase, your pupils dilate, and your muscles tense up, all in preparation to defend yourself if needed. That’s your amygdala at work – getting you ready. Only you find out it was just the heat turning on and you soothe yourself back to sleep.

When the amygdala is triggered by non-threatening stimuli, such as social cues or past traumatic experiences, it leads to excessive or inappropriate fear and anxiety. This can majorly influence how we experience conversations or circumstances and plays a key role in social behavior and interpersonal relationships.

I believe learning to regulate and manage the activity of the amygdala is an essential life skill. It’s said that one of the most effective methods is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which helps individuals identify and challenge negative thoughts and beliefs that may be triggering the amygdala and to develop new coping strategies.

I’ve personally worked with CBT for years to help me manage my diagnosed OCD, and it’s had a tremendous impact on me. In case you don’t know, OCD is connected to fear because it is often characterized by persistent, intrusive thoughts or images that lead to anxiety (fear) and trigger compulsive behaviors aimed at reducing that anxiety. With CBT you can start to get a handle on that and interrupt the intrusive thought-anxiety-compulsion pattern.

Somatic therapy is also incredibly powerful to help us recognize when we’re triggered and then explore and heal that connection as much as we can.

Mindfulness meditation, which involves focusing on the present moment without judgment, has also been shown to reduce amygdala activation and improve emotional regulation. I’ve been a more intermittent meditator than a regular practitioner but I’m keen to catch that train too.

It seems clear that the more we understand our amygdala the more we can understand fear as natural and just a part of experience. And the more able we’ll be, in most circumstances, to allow that fear to rip through our body and not take direct action on it because it’s not warranted at the moment.

When we checked into the hotel in Spokane WA, the lady at the front desk said, “this was our last room” almost apologetically. However, our room, it turns out, had a quote on the wall from A River Runs Through It – which was filmed in Montana and features a church that Rob’s great grandfather helped build and that is also in Rob’s movie The Year of the Dog. What?!

Magical moments like this keep happening on this journey we’ve been on for his beautiful film. He wrote, produced, acted in, and co-directed the movie and it’s in the midst of a theatrical release. We’ve been hopping from state to state and time zone to time zone to join audiences from Canada to Montana to Sedona Arizona and then South Carolina and now Washington State.

The film is a beautifully acted and skillfully written story about a recovering alcoholic finding connection with a stray dog. And I’ve witnessed some incredibly moving moments where drug and alcohol counselors and courageous people in recovery have come up to Rob after the movie and been so moved to see the realistic portrayal of the struggle on screen.

It’s inspiring to see the alchemy of empathy at work. And an excellent reminder to me about why we create in the first place.

Yesterday our car had a mild mechanical situation and we drove off the Interstate into Snoqualmie for a repair. The mechanical shop looked closed but I called out “hello?” And someone was there. He came and helped us and turns out he’s also a screenwriter and has written 5 screenplays and is not sure how to get his writing connected with people who will produce it. He shared a script plot he had with us that was interesting. He seems like a kind soul with a creative mind. Rob and he exchanged info and it felt like another one of these magical moments.

I’m thinking about how connected we all are. How brave it is to write and produce our own work. Wherever we are and whatever we do with our time. To dare to create even when Hollywood isn’t knocking down your door. To witness the other doors that exist around us and to declare what we want for our art and then make it happen.

I’m prepping for a staged reading of my new feature-length documentary play Primordial happening next week. I cannot tell you how excited I am to share it with a limited audience for the first time.

More about the reading soon…

For now, as I get ready to fly back to NYC, I’m feeling really really proud of Rob and very very inspired. Grateful to be experiencing this daring creative ride alongside him.

I just finished watching NOPE a science fiction horror film by Jordan Peele. I don’t normally watch horror films but I loved Peele’s Get Out and so I was excited to watch NOPE. Woah, was it good!

It follows a brother and sister who discover something frightening living in the skies above their California horse ranch. It swoops down from the clouds at the same time every day.

They go through various stages of reckoning with the situation.

First, they’re scared cause it’s really weird. Then they get excited – especially Keke Palmer’s character who sees it as an opportunity to capture the phenomenon on camera and possibly make a lot of money. She calls up a famous filmmaker to gauge his interest, but he brushes them off. Daniel Kaluuya’s character is more resistant to the idea anyway and wants them to just stay safe – which makes complete sense cause in the first scene of the movie he witnesses their father being killed by the excrement of this sky beast.

Giving a spoiler alert warning here! There’s a subplot involving an entrepreneurial guy who seems to own an amusement-type park in this mid-west town. He witnessed an incredibly traumatic event as a child actor – an on-set monkey actor murdered a whole cast of people right in front of him. For some reason the monkey spared him and it’s given him a belief that he’s chosen or special.

He tries to make money off almost everything and so it’s no surprise that he tries to make this alien-in-the-sky’s daily appearances into a sideshow of sorts. He thinks he’s immune from harm, or he has a death wish of some kind, but (spoiler alert) he is not spared from this beast’s feast and neither are his 40 guests.

Then Palmer and Kaluuya’s characters get a call from that filmmaker who now wants to capture this phenomenon after hearing about the 40+ people’s disappearance. Game on!

They get a few different cameras ready and set up, and they seem to get some amazing footage of the beast consuming a TMZ reporter – hah. But as their film shoot goes on – and the beast gets closer and closer to eating each one of them, the life and death struggle they’re engaged in overshadows any attempts at cinema.

I kept having this dizzying experience watching the film. I was in awe of the special effects that created this alien monster, admiring it even as I was terrified of it. (They have a particularly disturbing scene of what it looks like when you get eaten by the thing.) I was in awe of the thing, and so I also wanted the characters in the movie I was watching to get a great shot of this incredible monster for their movie. Hoping they’d capture it to share with other people. While also simultaneously not wanting them to die. And also realizing that I was watching a movie and the beast wasn’t even real. It was a trip.

If I’m searching for a deeper meaning in all of this I would say, real life is pretty freaky and the grit and effort required to face our fears, survive and do something of consequence is so great, and all this capturing of it for social media and movies is not the point. As evidenced by the TMZ reporter losing his life in the film because he’s more concerned with getting a photo than being saved.

Yet we continue to write, make movies, and tell stories like Peele has done here because it’s entertaining and unifying and we crave that as a species. Something the aliens may not ever understand. 😉

“I’m always terrified, let me just say that.” – Viola Davis

I’ve been watching Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ interview with Viola Davis and Jennifer Lawrence from this past December, and I was excited by a few minutes of a very frank conversation they had about fear.

They’re both such powerhouses in the industry and often play strong women who literally kick ass in their acting roles. But in this interview, Viola models the power of vulnerability as she begins a frank conversation about fear with Jennifer. I’m including the interview below, beginning at the moment the fear conversation really kicks off.

It’s a revealing exchange about how fear impacts a creative career.

Fear & Art

In spite of all their experience and accolades, Viola and Jennifer feel fear during those days and moments before the first ‘action’ is called on set or when a director comes up to give them notes.

Viola also talks about how she feels ‘the scrutiny’ when she’s on set. She feels pressure and asks herself if she should try and live up to other people’s hype about her. When she actually feels like she doesn’t know what she’s doing and feels the same as everyone else on set.

Artists who are established feel pressure to perform to a certain level again and again, while artists who aren’t yet established often feel pressure to prove themselves.

That pressure isn’t an inherent part of the actual creative process though. It’s kind of a byproduct of pursuing creativity as a profession. But do we also have an innate human need to feel that the art we’re sharing is accepted and approved of by other people?

What happens if we don’t care about that? Is it even possible to genuinely not care? Let’s assume it isn’t possible, that we’ll always be a little afraid of how our art might be perceived.

It really doesn’t need to practically influence anything other than our lived experience in a moment. We feel the emotion of fear, and then we still create.

I recently heard the famous writer Elizabeth Gilbert say in an interview that it’s not her responsibility to make sure the books she writes are ‘good’. She’s just going to write them. What a cool way to relate to our art.

Fear & Age

In the interview, Jennifer also talks about how she was less afraid when she was younger, and how it changes as she gets older.

She used to train wild horses in Kentucky. Jump up and go for it. Then a few years ago she jumped on a horse, thinking nothing of it, and moments later froze in fear and fell off. She was suddenly so aware of how dangerous it was, and how hurt she could get, and that wasn’t something she’d considered when she was younger.

When we get older, but also as we experience more, no matter what age we are, we realize how much pain and potential for hurt there is.

We learn so much from our environment, from what has happened to us, and from what we’ve seen. It can change the way we orient to the world, and increase our sense of fear or caution. We begin to manage fear with whatever coping mechanism we have adapted, fight/freeze/flight/fawn. This is why therapy is so powerful, so we can bring greater emotional intelligence to our choices in moments of fear.

I believe that the more awareness you have of fear, the greater your capacity to be brave. Cause fearlessness is not the same thing as bravery, it might mean you don’t know there’s anything to be afraid of, to begin with.

I don’t want to be fearless – I want to feel the grit of fear and then take action anyway.

Bravery & Art

Viola asks Jennifer, when they have producers on set with opinions, etc… the pressures of being ‘the cog in the machine’ as Jennifer says, how can they stay true to the bold acting choice they made in preparation. Especially when that important creative choice is made to share the truth of the character they’re playing. Knowing that compromise on that may affect the impact of the performance…

“How do you, as an actor, have the bravery of your choices so that when people come into the theater, they feel less alone.”

I love that thought, that the bravery of our choices isn’t even for us alone. There’s something bigger than that individual fear we feel, and that’s the people we seek to connect with, communicate with, and affect with our art.

It’s about being brave enough to create and commit to genuine artistic choices no matter our fear, no matter the pressure, so that someone who is feeling isolated in their life, can feel seen through art, and maybe even heal just a little bit.

These past couple of weeks I’ve been musing about fear in a different way. It’s a singular word but there’s so much meaning in it. You can be afraid of so many different things and to varying degrees.

A quick google search of ‘what is the true meaning of fear?’ defines fear as…
1a) an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. 1b) an instance of this emotion.
2a) a state marked by this emotion. 2b) anxious concern: solicitude.
3) profound reverence and awe especially toward God.

Isn’t that interesting? Playing with those words, to understand fear more deeply, I’ll shape a poem.

On Fear
Often strong
unpleasant
anticipating and aware
all in an instance
solicitude manifest – a caring
something of profound reverence
moving toward
an awe of God

So, fear, huh? Pretty damn special and powerful. Let’s go, 2022. Let’s see what FEAR brings and reveals, how it directs and strengthens.

I have a feeling that leaning into fear – directly experiencing it and not numbing out – making choices and moving forward through it, is what LIVING is all about.

I spent the first two hours of 2022 in an emergency room getting stitches on my toe. It was my first time ever needing stitches and my first time ever being treated for something in a hospital. Warning – some mildly graphic toe imagery follows.

Basically, here’s what went down. It was 2 minutes till midnight on New Years Eve in Montana, and I was walking through a dark hallway. There was a broken frame and a huge glass cover sitting in the hallway and as I rounded the corner I accidentally carved my index toe on the glass!

I initially thought I had just stubbed it bad, but after turning the light on I realized nope I have in fact sliced my toe a bit. It was more bloody than painful, and there was a bit of skin flap situation going on. It was unclear how deep and close to the bone it got. My boyfriend came over and immediately was in damage control mode – helping me stop the bleeding. I’m incredibly grateful that he was so supportive cause I was pretty rapidly going into a mild state of shock.

The way my body systemically reacted to the situation surprised me. I got extremely anxious and started to feel the beginnings of a panic attack. Then I threw up and felt better although was now pretty embarrassed. I would have thought cause I’m a woman and see blood monthly I would be less squeamish… but there we go.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend was on it (again) and made the call that a hospital would be best cause no Urgent Care was open and my toe had a deep enough cut that it was better to be safe and get it cared for professionally. Surprisingly, my toe really didn’t hurt that much. We wrapped my toe up in a bandaid and a clean sock and I wore a pair of his shoes since my toe couldn’t fit into my own without further damaging it. He drove me to the nearest hospital and since there was literally no other patient in the waiting area I got seen immediately. I’m super grateful for that and it occurred to me that if this had happened in NYC I would have likely needed to wait quite a bit longer.

They irrigated my toe – basically flushing it out with water. Then the doc came in checked it out and recommended stitches. The anesthetic was more painful than the actual stitches – which means it did its job well. I avoided looking at the procedure while it happened for the most part cause I was worried I was gonna be sick again.

After leaving the hospital I kept the toe clean and regularly applied a topical antibiotic ointment. 10 days later it was time to remove the stitches. You can opt to have a doctor or Urgent Care help you take it out – but the ER doc had assured me you can do it yourself too. I opted to do it myself cause it would be less expensive… But it was a freaky experience involving a tweezer, scissors, a lot of patience, and a little bit of nausea. I freaking did it though. And it’s healing up really well.

Learned quite a few lessons from this one but most importantly that THE BODY IS AMAZING. Seriously the way it can heal is nothing short of miraculous. We just need to give it a fighting chance.

Check out my IG for some footage of me removing the stitches from my toe… if you’re curious. But totally understand if you’d rather pass ;-).