Nobody tells you about the cost
On the noonday demon, Rilke, and the tools no film school teaches
This week I hit a wall.
You know that moment in a marathon when a runner’s legs go uneven, the body tilts, and they look like a deer just born, all trembling instinct. Making a film is that moment just extended over months.
This wasn’t a practical problem. There was nothing in the edit I could point to and fix. Just a sudden, complete loss of faith, in the film, in myself, in the idea that any of this was worth doing.
It came without warning. No trigger, no reason. Just bad weather moving in.
This feeling has a pattern, it arrives the same way each time, convincing, total, and strangely impersonal. It tells you the work is pointless, that you’ve misjudged it, that stopping would be the most sensible thing you could do.
What’s deceptive is how reasonable it sounds.
The desert monks of the fourth century called it the noonday demon. It arrived like an intermittent fever, at the same hour, every day. A sadness about the things that matter most. It typically struck around midday, when the heat was oppressive, time felt frozen, prayer felt empty, and the mind started to pickle.
So over time I’ve stopped treating it as a conclusion. It isn’t a verdict on the work, but a phase of it.
A sort of “ghost” appearing in the diaries of many artists who had loved work, who had loved words, who had loved life enough to be haunted by it.
In 1903, a young poet wrote to Rilke in exactly this kind of despair. He wrote back:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers. Live the questions now. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The poet didn’t need fixing, he needed to know the feeling was real, that it was ancient, and that it had been survived before, and sometimes that is enough.
Film schools, art schools, all schools teach us everything except the hardest things. You can learn to light a face, to shape a performance, to solve the problems that have names. What no one prepares you for is the problem that has no name, the morning you sit down and find that nothing is broken and nothing is working and you cannot explain why to anyone.
Over the years I've learned that what gets me through is not solving the doubt but redirecting it. The shock of cold water, long walks, talking to strangers, anything that pulls me back into the world. Curiosity, it turns out, is its own kind of medicine, because it moves you to begin again.
Because that’s the real risk in these moments, not the feeling itself, but what you do inside it. The loss of faith makes you want to act, to change everything.
Every act of creation is a kind of haunting.
You don’t get rid of the ghost, you learn to keep working while it’s sitting in the room, reminding you that this is part of a creative life, ie. all our lives.
The difficulty is the process, the resistance, the doubt, the cost that’s where the meaning gets made.
This time around I’ve been reading OLGA TOKARCZUK’S House of Day House of Night as the medicine - and this passage made my gasp.
"I saw myself as a jewel-encrusted casket. I opened the lid, and inside was another casket of pure coral, and inside it yet another, of pure mother of pearl. Impatiently I kept on opening myself, not knowing what it would lead to, until in the smallest casket, in the tiniest little box, at the very bottom of all the others, I saw Your image, vivid and bright with colour. And straightaway I snapped all the clasps shut, for fear of losing You from inside myself. And ever since I have been in harmony with myself, and I have come to love myself, because I bear You within me. Nothing that bears You within itself can be in vain, so I too am not in vain."
Until next time
love Annika