A Quote by John Grant
I realized that a lot of the things I had been telling myself about not being good enough just weren't true, and 'Queen of Denmark' gave me the chance to prove to myself that I could do something real.
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If someone gave me the chance to create something, I put myself into it. I just want to try to do something that will last forever and that won't leave people saying, 'Gee, it could have been better, it could've been this, it could've been that.'
You could analyze me and say that my father leaving and being absent was a motivator for early ambition, trying to prove myself to this apparition who had vanished. You could argue that me being a mixed kid in a place where there weren't a lot of black kids around might have spurred on my ambitions. You could go through a whole litany of things that sparked me wanting to do something important.
I didn't finish college, and I was very sad about that because I don't think I gave myself a chance to learn, to prove to myself that I could learn.
I was always telling myself I could handle a more complex role, I could handle something bigger and more interesting than the work I was doing. But I wasn't demanding that of myself. At a certain point, I realized it was never going to come my way unless I started taking more control of it. That's what I realized I had to do.
I had to do things to myself on the page that had been done to me in real life. I had to try and drown myself in the bath. You have to do that. And the impulse is to rescue yourself and to spare the reader, but I can't rescue myself. And why should I spare the reader when nobody spared me? It's telling people what happened.
The freedom of saying anything to him, telling all, relieved a burden I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying. In my relentless push to keep moving forward, there had been so many emotions I hadn't let myself inhabit fully, so many things I hadn't talked about. Now I couldn't quite catch up to myself.
I was my own Peeping Tom. Because of the absence of people I could do anything, and if it wasn't good I could destroy it without damaging myself in the presence of others. In that sense I was my own clay. I formulated myself, I mated with myself, and I gave birth to myself. And my real self was the product - the polaroids.
I parody myself every chance I get. I try to make fun of myself and let people know that I'm a human being, and these things that have happened to me are real. I'm not just some cartoon who exists and suddenly doesn't exist.
With all the movies I've made about history, it's not really fun because you're trying to get it right. You've got history telling how it was, and then my imagination is telling me how I wish it had been, but I can't go there, so I have to censor myself. I'm very good about stopping myself from creating history that never occurred, but it's frustrating.
Being away from home gave me the chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide, and I came home glad to start in here again with a love for Europe that I am afraid will never leave me.
I'm passionate about coaching and being able to mentor young men in a lot of different ways. I think it's good to be able to do what you love to do. It's been in me since the beginning. I was telling my college coach what to do and he trusted me. When I got into the NBA, I started having conversations with coaches. Coach Gregg Popp(avich) brought a lot out in me. Coach Don Nelson gave me an incredible opportunity to spend some time with him and he molded me but at the same time allowed me to be myself.
As a youth, I hated myself for not being good enough. All my inadequacies and failures, not being kind enough, generous or understanding enough, would assail me at night. It became a habit to be guilty and self castigating, not liking myself because I was unworthy... I really tortured myself.
Two things were falling apart, my personal life, my professional life. And I realized that all those things were supposed to make me happy, but nothing could fill me up except myself. So I went into analysis. I went to see a doctor, to talk about my lack of self-esteem. I don't know how to say it better: my lack of self-esteem, my insecurity, and how these things were not going to fill me up. And I'd better fix myself and then find out what I liked. For me, therapy was the greatest gift I could ever give myself. There's nothing I could have done for myself that would've been better.
Wenger gave me the opportunity to be where I am today. He's a coach that helped me a lot, who gave me a chance, who's always been there for me in the bad moments. He called me, consoled me, gave me good advice, told me what I had to do to become a great player. I can only thank him.
I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn't terrified--really genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn't want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
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