I was looking for it but I couldn’t see it and worse, I couldn’t feel it. I wanted it, badly. It felt like it was close but I couldn’t quite reach it and I didn’t know why. I’d done everything I did the last time and it was a high that I’d never experienced before. I wanted to feel it again.

It was only months later that I realized the reason why I didn’t feel it this time. It was because I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t worried if it would be okay. I wasn’t unsure of whether I could do it or not. That fear that comes with doing something new for the first time was gone. But let me digress.

I was on the set of the second feature film I directed and I was searching for that feeling. Sometimes you may not even notice it is there or you misinterpret it as something else. There’s definitely a little bit of fear mixed into it. A little excitement too. It’s like this energy that makes your fingertips tingle.

You know what I mean. It’s that moment you feel just before you do something that scares the crap out of you. You felt it before the first day of your first real job. The moment right before your first kiss. The seconds before you jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

It’s exhilaration. It’s not knowing what’s going to happen next. Why is it that nothing makes you feel quite so alive as a near brush with death or even a metaphorical death?

I had it throughout the entire experience of making my first film. I’d never directed a feature length movie, only a few shorts and I was worried I’d screw it up. What the Hell was I thinking trying to direct a 90-minute movie. Who does that? Why wasn’t I working some safe cubicle job with mediocre benefits?

“A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.” ~UNKNOWN

I remember how nervous I was the morning of the first day of filming. It got worse when my lead actor told me he’d let an intern in the hair and make-up department “trim” his hair the night before. Then he showed it to me and it looked like a two-year-old cut his hair. We got through that only to have our camera truck get into an accident on the way to the second location later that day. We got through that too. Man was that stressful.

When I realized we didn’t have enough money to get our film footage developed, we just sent it to the lab to be dealt with later. When we actually ran out of film with five days of filming to go, I ordered enough film to last for one day on my credit card each night. When locations would fall through, we would scramble and find new ones. When an actor would cancel at the last second, someone else would step in.

Whatever could go wrong on that first film went wrong. My fears were justified. It was a series of emotional, technical and psychological issues throughout the production of the film but somehow, we would just work through it. When I say everything that could go wrong, I could not be more serious. I think when you’re in the middle of doing something like that, you just roll with it because you have no choice, you have to.

Even after the production, we had all kinds of issues. Money would run out and then we’d go out and raise some more. It took six months to raise enough money to get the footage developed. Can you believe that it took me six months to even see a frame of my first feature film? It seems crazy to think about it now, but it was a grind. When it was all said and done, it took over two years to complete the movie.

And then, there I was on the set of my second movie, waiting for that tingle to come back, but it didn’t. The difference was that I knew it would be fine. I knew I could tell a compelling story in 90 minutes. I knew my crew was amazing and would kill themselves to make this film work. I knew that no matter what went wrong, we would deal with it and keep on rolling. And we did.

In a weird way, I missed that feeling. I missed the uncertainty. I missed the fear of the unknown. Like I said earlier, it made me feel alive. I was in my comfort zone on the second film and that was great but in order to grow as an artist, I think I have to keep reaching outside of my comfort zone.

At the end of the day, it’s about being the best you can be. You have to continue to learn and evolve and in order to do that, you must get out of your comfort zone. You must push the boundaries that you have surrounded yourself with and reach for that tingle of fear. It is the beacon of your evolution.