This is not a picture of me. I allowed no pictures of me as a clown to survive.

I was hired to be a clown at a small-town festival. Yup, you read that right. My agent had booked the gig over the phone with very clear instructions.“Sean is a roaming entertainer. He doesn’t have a show.”

In my imagination, the festival organizer was a balding man with a unibrow and a cigar hanging from his mouth. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem. How much is he? That’s all? We’ll take him!”

I arrived and the parking attendant directed me over to the stage area.

The. Main. Stage.

I felt a cold trickle start to work its way down my neck and the beginning of a migraine as I stepped out of my car. I was probably worrying about nothing. This was just where they had the performers park. And then I saw the large sign by the stage: “Blanko. 1pm”

(Yes, my clown name was Blanko. I thought I could slide that little piece of trivia right past ya. And no, I won’t explain where the name came from.)

I stared into the back seat of my car in growing horror. I had a unicycle, my juggling clubs and a rubber chicken. How was I going to do a 45 minute show?

The only routine I knew was as a juggling team and our shtick required a minimum of two jugglers, flaming torches and a volunteer from the audience with a carrot stuck in his or her lips. There was NOTHING from our show that I could use here.

I heard the audience laughing at the performer currently on the stage. I was likely in shock. I remember my vision narrowing as darkness removed everything from my peripheral vision. I had less than an hour before I was on. My brain kept repeating two questions over and over. Should I drive away? Should I bail?

I stayed.

It was the worst 45 minutes of my life. There’s something that happens when a show REALLY bombs. People start to stand up and leave, but that’s not what hurts. It’s the people that won’t leave.

There were at least a dozen left in their seats. They could no longer escape without drawing undo attention to their departure. And so they sat there, praying that I would somehow pull it together and NOT SUCK. Their pity became so palpable that speech became difficult, and let’s not mention what was left of my juggling ability.

And because they wouldn’t leave, I had to keep going, to truly cement my fall from grace with a full face plant from 12,000 feet onto a hard stage.

This wasn’t just embarrassing or a bad failure, this was bathing in shame and humiliation in front of a live audience. I crawled off the stage fully intent on burning my clown gear. In fact, this was the last time I was ever seen as a clown.

What is Shame?

There are many kinds of shame.

There’s the shame of high school where we make someone feel horrible because insecurity.

There’s the shame that society uses to call out aberrant behaviours. The judge who releases a list of “johns”. Or a public register for sex offenders.

And then there’s the shame of failing so spectacularly and publicly that you want to crawl under a rock and never come out again. I call this capital “S” Shame.

This shame is one part humiliation, two parts imposter syndrome and a dash of anxious foreboding. Season with questionable judgement and you have a potent Shame cocktail ready for any occasion.

The clowning example is just one in a long list of moments where I took a risk and ended up with an overtly public and even vulgar display of my ineptitude.

This form of Shame sucks the marrow out of our bones and melts us into a ball of quivering nerves. But here’s the thing: I believe that this particular type of Shame is actually a positive force.

It reminds us just how bad we are at calculating risk. It tells us when we have more than overstepped our capabilities.

And it shows us that we are still taking risks. We are alive. We are pushing the boundaries. We saw that warning sign, the fence and the frantically waving guard and just leaped over the edge of the cliff anyway.

But there is a darker version of shame that sticks to the shadows and back alleys of our mind. It feeds on our fears and self-doubt, focusing our mind on risks that don’t actually exist.

There is NOTHING redeeming in this form of shame.

It tricks us into believing that we should be feeling shame even though we have not taken a risk, nor have we failed spectacularly. It uses illusions and the potential for failure in the future to mire us in so much anxiety that we are unable to take risks or move forward on our dreams.

This form of shame is often characterized by our feeling immobilized by fearand doubt. It starts us such a small thing but can quickly smother us with a heart racing sense of anxiety and dread.

And it does this is by creating a compounding loop of shame. Every day we don’t move forward is another validation of the need for us to feel more shame.

What To Do When Facing Shame

If we take a risk and it blows up in our face, then there’s nothing to do but ride it out. I tell myself to straighten my shoulders and take it like a man.

(I often wonder about that phrase, “take it like a man.” I can see Shame riding me like a bitch, slapping my ass and laughing at my tears. Fitting for a gay man, but perhaps not for most people. But I digress.)

If we take a risk and miscalculate our abilities, there’s nothing wrong with experiencing a bit of capital “S” Shame. It will soon pass, lesson learned.

The clown incident was painful beyond measure, but I learned from it. I could have just stuck to what I was contracted for and let the organizers deal with correcting the stage signs. I also learned that I prefer a life without greasy makeup all over my body.

But what about the other side of shame? The dark side that lurks in the recesses of our minds and makes us contemplate leaving this world. The one that can debilitate us and prevent any action or momentum on our dreams and desires.

This shame is bullshit. As I said before, it is built entirely on illusions.

We have to recognize that its power comes from the stories we tell ourselves.And then shatter the illusion by telling new stories.

One way to do this is to take small steps that prove to ourselves that we are more than what the darkness whispers at us.

They should be TINY risks. Reaching out for help, going for a daily walk or even writing in a private journal are all examples of good first steps.

They should be things we can commit to daily or weekly.

• Take a new route to work. Get lost.
• Spend ten minutes every morning just writing madly in a book or private file on your computer or phone.
• Visit a new part of your town or city every week.
• Approach someone you don’t know and say, “Hi”.
• Follow someone online who takes lots of risks. Find their Instagram.
• Write to a pen pal.
• Join a writers group.

If there is ONE thing that I would urge us to do above all others, it is to surround ourselves with people who take risks.

And by all that is holy, drop the people who keep questioning you or who laugh at your aspirations. You don’t need them.

Find the crazies. If you don’t have any in your immediate circle of friends, there’s plenty of them on Medium.

Here are just a few somewhat randomly selected rebels to follow: Jules Alexainie Heath Houston Jason Theodor Todd Hannula 🤓 Leah Stella Stephens 🐀 Michelle Stone Meg Barclay Tremaine L. Loadholt Gemma Kennedy Gutbloom Classical Sass Sherry Caris

Time spent in contemplation is seen as odd, anti-productive and dangerous.

Joe was screaming and everyone in the boardroom was trying to look elsewhere. But it was hard to pretend you were checking Facebook when someone was turning purple and thumping the table with both of his hands.

I was the focus of this tirade. His spittle was striking the table in front of me. I watched as it formed into tiny pools and flowed towards the sunken power strip.

We didn’t have the paper ready. I wanted more time and contemplation from the team. This required us to get more context on the problem the client was facing. And I had made the mistake of asking my new boss for said context.

My boss couldn’t handle my questions.

He took them as an attack.

In a world gone berserk, anyone who wants to stop and contemplate is suddenly the crazy one.

We have to be busy, so busy we can’t even take the time to even explain why we are so busy.

Double booked is now for amateurs.

Status in companies is built by being triple and even quadruple booked. If one of those can be in a different city, you get triple points and a pass to scream at your assistant.

My mistake. Screaming at subordinates is always allowed.

The new white collar worker takes pride in being so stressed out that they are on medication and even seeing a counselor for their “problem”. Or rather, they would be if they didn’t keep cancelling because of their assistant quadruple-booking them as instructed.

So instead, they just fly off the handle and then write it up as battle wounds or some bizarre new form of PTSD they’ve invented. There was a rumour that my last boss was autistic. I’m pretty sure he started that rumour.

All of this is pretty much why I left the business world.

I was burnt out. Toasted. Done.

And worse, I had developed a negative association with contemplation.

The idea of taking a walk and doing nothing else caused me to break out into a sweat. I couldn’t even eat a meal without stopping to check my phone at least a dozen times.

It would take me years before I could begin to enjoy time spent in deep thought. Or the idea of going somewhere without my phone. Okay, I’m still struggling with that last one, but I’m working on it!

There are days where I don’t feel like I have time to take a morning walk and so I put it off. I focus on getting my work done. After all, that’s the responsible thing to do, right?

These are always the worst of days.

And then there are the days where I remember to get up thirty minutes early. Where I don’t take my phone with me and I spend an hour walking with my dog, just being present with my thoughts and emotions.

These are always the best of days.

My first attempt at an underwater levitation. Clearly, we had some issues to work through.

“Can someone please tell me what lenses we have for the Lekos?!”

A trickle of sweat is making its way down my lower back. I want to scratch at it, but everyone in the room is looking at me. They seem confused. Why won’t I answer such a simple question from the Hollywood-credited Director of Photography?

I’m panicking because I don’t know a Leko from a hole in the wall.

Two weeks prior, I had been the superstar gaffer of the no-budget, unpaid Canadian short that never saw the light of day. I was able to create almost acceptable lighting setups from one-hundred-year-old lighting gear. Then the producer fell into a crazy opportunity and her professional gaffer bailed on her.

So now I was on a paid gig with a big name DP, a full crew, two lighting trucks, and a giant studio space currently undergoing a full set build. And I was losing my shit fast. The two days of hell would end with one of my crew in tears, two 10k bulbs blown through incompetence, the DP ignoring me and my name on an industry blacklist. I was out of my depth and sinking fast.

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“If I looked like that, I would never leave the house.”

My client gasped, grabbed her face and uttered her horror aloud for everyone in the room.

I’d been taking portraits for a couple of years and had worked with a growing list of almost-household-names: artists, painters, dancers and actors. Each knew their likeness and some had even expressed concern about a certain feature or angle. But all had been comfortable with their portrait.

This was definitely a departure from my experiences to date. I think she may have started crying.

I had basically destroyed this woman’s self-esteem with my “skill” and “craftsmanship.” In front of my peers, no less.

I attempted to offer some Photoshop cleanup or a reshoot, but it was clearly over. There was no passing Go and no receiving $200. We were done. For all I know, this woman lived the rest of her days locked in her home with all the windows shuttered.

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Avoiding failure is a significant motivator in my life. It gets me up early to do yet another check of my gear. It makes sure I’ve got a backup for my backups and it helps me assess new opportunities to ensure I don’t take on something that is outside of my capabilities.

But it also pulls me away from anything risky. It stunts my growth by declining opportunities to grow as an artist.

Without fail, every piece of meaningful work I’ve created involved pushing the envelope and seriously risking failure.

So I’m torn. I want to improve my craft, but not at the risk of reliving those painful moments of abject failure.

I thought I had found the perfect solution.

I would minimize the risks I took in business and relegate risky endeavors to personal projects. I could build my business safely, meet client expectations and risk failure on my own time. It made sense and was the logical solution.

But life isn’t logical.

Removing risk from my work killed the joy and freedom that first drew me to photography. My art and craft stagnated. My work grew tired and boring and I hated it.

I stopped picking up the camera in my free time. My personal projects ground to a halt. Even my work projects began to slow.

Clearly this approach wasn’t working.

I needed a way to embrace failure and take some of the sting out of them, after the fact.

What if I could reframe and take pride in my most horrific failures — to see these moments as waypoints on a pretty epic journey?

I’ve had a ridiculous number of careers to date. I’ve been a military man, a professional juggler, a strategist, a salesman, a coach, an agency owner, a photographer, an artist, a dog trainer, a 3D animator, a film gaffer (albeit briefly), and much more.

I’ve even managed to achieve some level of success in many of these.

And there’s no way I could have done ANY of these without risking public failure and humiliation.

This constant rethinking of who I am and what I do for a living requires that I push my skills and abilities to their limits and then some.

As I reflected on this, I began to see that those moments of failure helped to inform who I have become. In some cases, it made me realize I was not on the right path. In others, I doubled down and worked that much harder.

In fact, how can I be so afraid of failure when I am even now considering changing careers yet again in my late 40s?

As always, it’s the stories we tell ourselves that prove the most challenging and damaging. Without even realizing it, I was using these failures to frame a story of endless failing, instead of seeing them as moments of growth on a pretty awesome journey.

I was focused on the man who fails so much instead of seeing the man who is capable and willing to reinvent himself, perhaps endlessly.

I’ll never get to the point where I want to fail. Failing sucks. But hopefully I can learn to be a little kinder to myself and to see the journey and not just the difficult moments along the way.

Thanks to Alexainie on Medium.

I totally bought into downsizing my life. I wanted to learn how to live within my means, get out of debt and get off the hamster wheel of the working stiff.

And my partner agreed. So we began to make a lot of changes. We moved into my studio and rented out our house. We cut up credit cards and stopped going out to eat. And it started to work. We were paying down debt, making our bill payments on time and even starting to plan our first month long vacation-like-thing.

And then my partner got laid off.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we did what we did. Him getting laid off would have ROYALLY sucked if we hadn’t made all these changes.

But our life is anything but tidy, organized and full of joy.

If you are listening to the “experts” talk about how sexy and amazing their lives are after downsizing, I’m here to tell you that this is bullshit. Life is messy and it will take a ton of hard work, endless concessions and even new friends.

Sure, it has its advantages, but you can’t show up at the bar after work anymore. Nights out on the town happen at most once a month and are now at places where the food is cheap and salmonella rampant. And even if you do manage to get a friend to come over and visit you in your new 400 sq. ft. apartment, you won’t have anywhere for them to stand, let alone sit down.

And let’s talk about the heat.

Two days ago, a heat wave hit Southern Ontario with temperatures well over 34 degrees C (43 with humidity.) For those Fahrenheit fools out there, this means it is hot enough to melt cars left out in the sun.

Bring your cars inside, fools!

We’ve spent the past three days living out of our tiny pink bedroom. The $100 air conditioner in a losing battle to cool down the 100 sq. ft. room. Its death rattle drowning out anything we attempt to watch or listen to. Last night we sat in bed (with the dog) and ate pizza out of the delivery box.

I should point out that pizza was not in our budget. I blame heat stroke and those damn Domino’s coupons.

It was the coupon. Really. encyclopizzeria.com

 

This morning, I emerged from the room long enough to make coffee and take a cold shower. I noticed that my partner was valiantly attempting to use his iMac in the other room. I suppose you could say that we have four rooms: the bedroom, the kitchenette, the bathroomette and the sauna, otherwise known as the work/storage room with the giant greenhouse window.

My partner was perched, squatting and naked on his office chair, attempting to answer email while trying to not stick to the upholstery.

This left the dog and me to claim the bedroom, where I sat as I typed these words, sipping lukewarm coffee and praying for the heatwave to break so I could one day get back to editing photos in the sauna.

Or consider cooking again.

Please visit the project at:  medium.com/intercity-toronto

While I am an immigrant to Toronto, I am a white man and come with all the baggage and entitlement this endows. To write about poverty and discrimination was no easy decision and I fully acknowledge that some might question my right to do so.

That said, I’m done being silent. To be silent is to give support to those who continue to abuse their power and standing.

I struggled with what to name this project until I came across a quote by Shawn Micallef and John Lorinc. They were writing about a part of the city that used to be known of as The Ward. It was a place of desperate poverty and was right in the heart of what we now call the Eaton’s Centre, City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square.

“where is The Ward in 21st century Toronto? It is hidden in slab apartment towers, on the sides of ravines or in townhouse cul-de-sacs — the in-between spaces that lie well beyond City Hall’s locus of concern.

Now, as then, the city averts its eyes from inequality and the geographies of difference.”

This medium publication is for all the in-between spaces of Toronto — those communities lost to or ignored by politicians, developers and even city planners. I have started by speaking to artists in these neighborhoods, but I am totally open to other voices.

I have begun with a focus on three neighborhoods, but please note that the publication is not limited to these. It is simply where I started.
St. James Town
Regent Park
The Junction Triangle

An out of service pool in St. James Town

I was drawn to St. James Town because it seemed strange that the most densely populated community in Canada would also be entirely private property, with pretty much no public space or any of the services that would generally be found elsewhere in the city.

The dividing line of development in Regent Park

Regent Park is in the midst of tumultuous, and some argue, callous change. It will be the most ambitious redevelopment of a neighborhood in Toronto’s recent history. Almost overnight, this part of the city is being transformed into a shiny, new “utopia” with many of the residents having been migrated elsewhere, regardless of their wishes. I find it ironic that the Regent Park it replaces was once known as the “garden city” and was seen as a massive success in replacing the slums that existed on the site prior.

As you approach the Junction Triangle

Finally, I am drawn to the Junction Triangle because it remains one of the last vestiges for the struggling artist in our city. But no longer is this the case. Rents are skyrocketing and condos are going up at a crazy rate. We are losing the artists, the elderly and the working class people who made our city what it is.

I hope you will join me by visiting and following this publication on Medium.com or even by writing and submitting a piece on a part of the city that you see as in-between and lost to the majority.

If you have a piece about a community in Toronto that you believe is a fit for publication here, please send a link to the piece. You can email intercityproject@seanhoward.ca.