Dame Judi Dench is perhaps, the greatest living actor in my opinion. A woman with astonishing talent, winner of academy awards, SAG awards, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and dozens more spanning her sixty year career.

Judi says, that she lives as an artist in constant fear. “I have a fear of everything – of not fitting into that slot, of not fulfilling that piece you are asked to do. I get more frightened [the more I do]. The more you do, the more frightening it is anyway as you are much more aware.”

These comments, I first read almost two years ago, and they’ve stuck with me… resonated in a deep part of me as an artist.

Every book I sit down with, frightens me. Every time I push the little button that starts my microphone to life, click the record feature in my computer, I step through a wash of fear. Will it work? Will I hit the notes? Will I be boring? Will people like it?
…. Will I ever work again?

I’ve learned, much I think as Judi has done, to shake hands with my fear, offer it a glass of water, and then get down to business. The fear comes, every single time, but the fear cannot give the performance.

Much of the way I work is entirely solo… actually, I think that gives me a fine sense of empathy for our amazing author friends. I work, in my booth, in my studio, completely separated from the world. No engineer, no director, no other actors. Just me, and the text. All the decisions on character, pacing, voice, inflection, emotion, humor are interpretations I am left to make alone from the text. It’s exhilarating, freeing; terrifying.
With every book, I sometimes imagine myself, leaping from the top of an impossibly tall building and spreading the wings of my art. Catching the updrafts of story and subtext. Riding the turbulence of conflict, soaring through the narrative until I finally come to rest, tired and sore, far from where I started. Every time, I imagine the wings cracking. I imagine falling and failing and winding up a battered husk, lost in the story; and I make a conscious willful effort to leap anyway, to believe.

When I sit with a cup of coffee and look at the sky, or sit on a porch in the evening and ponder… I wonder. Is fear the heartbeat of life?
We dream of heights and creations, both of the hands and of the mind, and we set out to create them. We stretch ourselves, stretch our communities, our minds, our hearts. We dream bigger, love harder, sail farther. Commit our souls to paper and to string and to voice and lay them bare for the world to review.

Life is not safe. Life is not boring; and art is life writ across the skies.

I am constantly afraid.

Every work I do, every person I love, every day my child grows… my fear grows with it. Because I am alive, and the fear reminds me that I am neither dead in body, nor in soul.

My fear is not me, my fear does not do the things I do, it does not create, it does not heal or love or sing or dance. It is the heartbeat of my soul doing these things, it is the footprints I leave as I do them.

I wouldn’t be without my fear for anything.