A Quote by Miguel Syjuco
The Miguel Syjuco character is not me. I wanted him to represent my own fears and frustrations and guilt, my own worst tendencies and my optimistic expectations. He's a cautionary tale for me. But he's also an examination of the darkest things that haunt me as a person.
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Even when I'm writing in character I'm normally still writing about things I know or things that have happened to me or using that character to start an exploration of my own consciousness. Really though, any character that you can examine is just an examination of a part of your own consciousness.
We have our own script. We have our own calendar. We represent the greatness of Africa's past. We also represent the worst of Africa's present, in terms of poverty. It is the best and the worst of African reality.
I must say Steven Spielberg was great to me, and I loved working with him. He called me up on the phone and was like, "I want you to be in this movie - 1941. There are a couple of parts. You can take whichever one you want. One of them is a main character who is involved in everything, and there's another character who has his own storyline and goes off on his own. He's probably the funnier, more unique character." I said, "Well let me do that second one."
One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people's expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.
The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.
These past years have been really transitional for me in every aspect - personally, emotionally and professionally. I was excited and nervous and anxious because I literally had nothing to fall back on. This is my own thing, it's all me. I spent a year working on the record and really wanted to spend time on what it was going to represent and how it was going to represent me in this time in my life.
Obviously, everybody has their own expectations of you, but you have to have your own expectations for yourself. For me, I'm right on track.
Musically, between me and my fans and also me and my team, who between management and record label have always just let me be me, it's fun to pave a path. It's fun to feel like you're doing things your own way. So in that regard I haven't had to worry about any bar but my own.
I also know that I have represented for us a certain kind of journalist and for me over the years when an older Black person comes and tells me how proud they are of me and the way I represent us on television, or when a younger person says to me, 'Hey Mr. Gordon, I watched you growing up and my parents made me watch you,'.
I can't be worrying about what other people think of me. I am my own person, and I have made it this far on my own. This is me - take me or leave me. I don't owe explanations to the rest of the world, only to my family.
This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, innefective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.
You feel guilt when you're not necessarily in the best mood and you say to your fans "No, I don't want to take a photo," or you're not as happy or bubbly as they probably thought you would be. I've had to remind myself that's okay. No one's forcing me or any other celebrity to take time out of their day to say hi to these fans or do these things. There is a sense of guilt that you can feel sometimes for not meeting their expectations, but that's kind of wrong for me to think that way, because I am a person.
However, he also trusted me to make my own decisions. Contradicting me or telling me what to do wasn't in his nature - even though he secretly may have wanted to.
Expectations always lead to frustrations. Expectations are the seeds, and frustration is the crop that sooner or later you will have to reap. It is your own doing.
I love my snaggle fangs. They give me character and character is sexy. People comment, but the only person who ever told me to fix them was my mom ... I just went my own way, like daughters do.
Every day, no matter what is happening around me, I consciously try to discipline my own feelings and my mind about what I have to be grateful for, because by any stretch of the imagination - even during the worst times when people are accusing me of things and doing all that they do - I'm a very lucky person.
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