Insanely Gifted. Jamie Catto
much shame and embarrassment we feel for the uniquely beautiful, eccentric and wounded individuals we are.
And here is the big clue about our suffering. If it weren’t for the heinous panic attacks I suffered in my late teens and the suicidal state I got myself into, I would never have sought out information and techniques to pull myself out of the misery. The survival tools I have learned have taught me to be a skilful and empathic helper for those who are experiencing similar things. I notice that the hardest times of my life have acted as a kind of superhero training, sculpting me and giving me gifts which are useful for others in need. It is almost as if, in our suffering, we are sent down into the darkest mines alone, but when we return to the surface we notice that we have in our hand a jewel that is of use to the next person down the line struggling as we have been.
In order to survive, I discovered that I had to be willing to feel my pain if I was ever going to release it, I had to be willing to stop hiding so much of myself that I judged as unattractive or inappropriate. If I was ever going to feel connected to the world around me I had to be willing to feel vulnerable, to go to the edge, come what may, and stop worrying so much about what might happen when I got there.
When they asked Michelangelo about his epic David sculpture, he said that as soon as they brought him the huge slab of rock he could already see the figure of David standing there within it. His job was just to chip away the excess marble, and that’s what we’re doing here with our innate genius. I want to invite you to slowly come out of hiding in all your raw glory and begin to dissolve that massive knot of emotional, painful gunk inside. I want you to tear up the complicit agreement that tells us all to say we’re fine when anyone asks. We so rarely feel safe enough to say what is really going on. So I have entered the rock-dissolving business, and the many exercises throughout this book are designed to help you dissolve your own rocks and make a Masterpiece of yourself.
It has dawned on me that we are all functioning, relating and creating from such an insanely limited version of our true potential that our brief seventy or so years of human experience are as good as wasted while we scurry around worrying and controlling and battling our way through our limited, self-cherishing lives. I want every aspect of my life and yours to be a Masterpiece, I want my work to be a Masterpiece, I want my parenting to be a Masterpiece, I want my sex life and all my relationships to be Masterpieces. I want us to explore the edges, gently, to laugh at our foolishness, gently, and see ourselves for everything that we are.
I want to live in a world where we stop settling for operating at this drastically reduced capacity and un-edit ourselves back to the juicy, unapologetic, uniquely gifted humans we really are. This is what I feel passionate about, what I am an activist for, because if you’re going to rebel against anything, best to start with our own considerable bondage. We are enslaved by our approval addictions, our fear of what people might think, our competitiveness, our shame of who we really are, and all this is death to intimacy and death to our Masterpieces. If you want to engage fully with your passion and innate genius, this is where to start . . .
Bob Geldof maintains that he never felt saintly about his work to end poverty in Africa; it just really annoyed him that such a solvable situation was going on unsorted. This is how I feel about the way we’re all going through our lives as these violently edited-down potential versions of ourselves. It irritates me in the worst way to see most of us humans living so dishonestly with ourselves and others and, in our quest for safety and comfort, missing out. It isn’t complicated, but just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is easy. When we dare to be visible, when we stop hiding, when we commit to staying present with our feelings instead of numbing them and escaping them, suddenly our lives turn from black and white into colour.
I’m on a mission, through my films and music, through my workshops, and now this book, to create an army of ‘walking permission slips’, a legion of like-minded souls who, just by being themselves, present, authentic, often vulnerable, become catalysts for everyone who comes into contact with them. When we meet people like this, who are comfortable to be seen and heard just as they are without hiding behind roles or being an ‘appropriate’ version of themselves, we ourselves become more relaxed and more authentic. Our freedom to be seen in our mess, in our eccentricity, in our fallibility, creates a permission in everyone we meet to lighten up around all the sides of ourselves that we believe aren’t welcome, and when that happens, intimacy and creativity levels shoot through the roof.
THE MANIFESTO
• We want to put our own full, unedited, unabbreviated selves into the work.
• We want to create a movement of introspection and self-enquiry where the viewer becomes the subject of the piece. It’s about you.
• We want to dare to show ourselves in all our raw glory, really express what’s going on in the chaos and the shadows, then give ourselves the chance to connect to something real in our audience. Because when I talk about me, you’ll hear about you.
• We need to collectively admit that we’re not fine, we’re not confident and balanced and good.
• We turn up to work every day pretending we’re not neurotic and obsessed and insatiable and full of doubt, and we waste so much energy keeping up this mutual pretence for each other because we think if people saw the truth, if people really knew what was going on in our heads, all the crazy truth of our dark appetites and self-loathing, then we’d be rejected. But in fact, the opposite is true. It is when we dare to reveal the truth that we unwittingly give everyone else permission to do the same.
• We need to stop holding our breath for a moment and actually come into the room. Be here, present, vulnerable and authentic.
• If we can all collectively acknowledge our insanity, the amount of energy we’ll inherit that has been wasted on the mask will be enough to creatively solve any global crisis. We are on a mission to make self-reflection hip for just a moment, just long enough to save us.
CHAPTER 1
How We All Became Approval Addicts
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Imagine for a moment if everyone could hear the running commentary in your head – your colleagues, your friends, your lover. What’s really going on beneath the surface you present to the world? Do you find yourself constantly placating and saying what you think others wish to hear? Do you ever get the feeling you are a fraud and one day you are going to get found out?
When we’re born into this world we are totally helpless. Unlike horses and other creatures who are almost immediately up on their feet the moment they are born, because of our lovely, large human brain, a baby’s head would be too big to make it through its mother’s birth canal if it was fully gestated, so the last chapter of ‘pregnancy’ has to happen outside the womb. Consequently the human baby, when it first emerges, is in need of total care and education from day one: how to eat, how to walk, how to hold and manipulate objects, how to communicate, all the basic functions of a person. These skills need to be taught to the new child by parents and carers, and the most common and seemingly efficient way we’ve found to teach our children is to give them loads of gushing approval and love when they ‘get it right’ or obey us, and when they don’t, give them less, or none. Children’s main source of safety and survival is the love from their parents and carers, so the discomfort or even trauma for that source of nourishment to be turned on and off is very impactful. Each of us, when we were being brought up and ‘taught how to be a person’ had the experience of this on/off approval and love. When we give something great but then withhold it, and then give something great but then withhold it, what that creates in the human is an addiction. We have all been unwittingly turned into little approval addicts throughout our childhoods, with a deeply ingrained fear of criticism or failure because we equate that with ‘less love’ or even ‘rejection’.
This value system is backed up all the way through school, too. If you’re first in the class, or win the race, you get