Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Guy Holling. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Guy, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Asking how I developed my confidence implies I have any to begin with. But I don’t. And asking how I developed my self-esteem implies I had anything to do with it, but I didn’t. So let’s just say I am grateful to have it, and plenty at that. In fact, if I was my own audience, I’d sell out every night of the week, and it would be exceptional. But the pressure I place upon myself to be exceptional in the eyes of others shakes my confidence to the core, systematically dismantling my iron-clad self-esteem to the point of self-sabotage. I’m not quite sure just where or when these two inextricably conjoined constructs of the human psyche ever deviated from one another, but they have, and as I age, contrary to what one would believe, I do not grow more confident, but rather less, questioning my talent and validity more than ever, especially in the case of my acting career, a dream I have been cultivating for 40 years now. Perhaps it’s all due to my perplexing perfectionism, a philosophy built on the fear that my all the way is just someone else’s half way. Or maybe that I was never able to build much momentum, a necessity for the actor who wishes to hone his craft, or simply put, his confidence, having made the decision to stick around home to help my mother care for my disabled father. Or maybe that I lacked the support from my father, who was never able to grasp the idea that his son wanted to be an actor. It goes without saying that parents are the OG influencers, and as children, they’re often the first ones we tell our dreams to. It can be rather frightening for a parent, especially if those dreams are something they don’t know much about, to send their beloved children off into the vast unknown. By nature, they want them close. They want to protect them and keep them safe. They don’t want them to fail and get hurt. So instead of supporting their children, they attempt to redirect them toward something more practical and safe, and close to home, never realizing that even in their best intentions, all they did was take their child’s dream away, and worse, make them afraid to dream. And how can we ever begin to build our confidence in this life if all we ever are is afraid?
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
There is a quote by Emile Zola that goes something like this: “I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.”
I, too, am an artist, and I want so badly to live my life out loud, but I have yet to be able to raise my voice above much more than that of a whisper. You see, I was always taught it wasn’t polite to shout. “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself,” they’d say. Well, how can you possibly make anything spectacular if you don’t first make a spectacle? I want to be a spectacle! I want to be spectacular! I’m so tired of being quiet. Being compliant. Living under the oppression of my conscience. I often wonder what my art will look like when the statute of limitations runs out on my conscience and the pillars that support it come crumbling to the ground and along with it my stifling practicality, which, by the way, has been waiting impatiently for my coming of age, begging me to grow up so I may one day outgrow such frivolous creative escapades as if art was ever something we could outgrow. But I’m afraid such a shift may be years away. So until then, I will just have to be content living quietly behind my thin veil of satire. I am rather frightened by the idea of taking myself too seriously anyway, for if I do, I’m afraid someone might think I’m a joke. So I just cut out the middleman and go straight to the joke. And that’s okay, it’s safe there, no matter the whole “ship in the harbor” thing. I find comfort in it. It’s what I know. This thin veil of autobiographical satire has shrouded everything I have ever done creatively for as long as I can remember, from my early attempts at cartoon syndication, to my one-of-a-kind, contemporary, functional sculptures, to my Cindy Sherman-inspired photographic self-portraits, to my adventure poetry-turned cinepoems, to “The Aesthetics of Time and Memory” short film series, to the Down the Drain diatribes, and most recently, to FAME(less) A Podcast for the Rest of Us, a satirical examination of our curious human desire for fame, and frankly, everything else in-between. One way or another, it’s always there, like an old friend, one who never minds if you raise your voice or make a spectacle of yourself, for that’s how they prefer you to be.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Make art for yourself, embrace criticism, and never stop seeing things as if for the very first time.
Artists make art for themselves, yet we want the whole world to see it, such that we no sooner finish a new work of art than we place it on display for all the world to see. And as spectators arrive to see it, set there in that place where before it there was nothing, we sidle up next to them with the hope we may hear one of them say they like it, or maybe even love it as we love it. And as we mingle among these spectators, we can’t help from sharing anecdotes and details of the experience we had creating it so others, too, may know it as we know it, better than the back of our own hand, the very hand that created it. We want them to know every drop of blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. To live it as we have lived it. To be consumed by it in the way it consumed us, not only our every waking moment, but our dreams as well, all for no other reason than to relive something so worth living in the first place as to want to relive it again, and again, and again. And even though this moment may be rife with heart-shattering criticism, these spectators offer us a rare opportunity to experience something we know we could never experience on our own, that is, to see our work as though we, too, were seeing it for the very first time.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
In the process of making my childhood a dream, my mother taught me it was okay to be a dreamer. As I was growing up, I remember my mother playing the stereo from morning ‘til night. Music filled the house. Beautiful music. Even when no one was home. She always said she didn’t want the dog to be lonely. And when her husband went off to work and her children off to school, it served as far more than mere background noise to break the silence of long days spent alone; it served as the soundtrack for a spectacular cinematic dreamscape, one “where troubles melt like lemon drops” and “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” And because of it, my mother believed life could be a dream, and she wrapped us, and anyone lucky enough to know her, up in that dream, and before long, we believed it too, such that now anytime I hear a vocal jazz standard, a show tune, an MGM musical number, a traditional pre-rock pop song, or a soft rock hit, I am immediately transported to the living room of my childhood home, where I spent hours acting out scenes from The Lone Ranger with my miniature figurines in the potted soil of my mother’s rubber tree plant as songs like these poured out of the speakers of her stylish 1960’s entertainment cabinet, enticing me to stop my reenactment and listen, and dream, and even catch an occasional ride upon a dust particle floating like a tiny magic carpet in the sunbeams that shined through the diamond-gridded window panes bound for a romanticized world made perfect through such lyrical metaphoric trappings. And through it, I have come to realize something about myself. I am an amalgam of all the characters whose lives played out to romanticized perfection in the imaginatively genius lyrics of these songs that are so engrained in me, that sometimes I can hardly separate my reality from their dreamy lyrical fiction, and I find myself living in an alternate reality where I spend my days “way above the chimney tops” blissfully dreaming of all the things life will one day be because of songs like these. Thank you mother.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.guyholling.com
- Youtube: @guyholling and @afamelesspodcast
Image Credits
Guy Holling
