An Inspired Chat with Shelby Mayes of East Hollywood

We recently had the chance to connect with Shelby Mayes and have shared our conversation below.

Shelby, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. Have you ever been glad you didn’t act fast?
Not that I can remember! Most of my days are spent overthinking the simplest things which has been pretty debilitating the older I get. I used to think that the older and, therefore, wiser I got, the better I’d get at managing myself. Turns out, there’s more to it than that. If most of your life is spent turning the other cheek to things about yourself that you’d rather not face or acknowledge, those things will grow stronger in the dark and one day you’ll wake up wondering if the constant overthinking and anxiety will ever go away.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hi, I’m Shelby! I’m a writer, actress, and director (and plus size woman extraordinaire). Writing was really familiar to me when I was in high school and spent my free time in class writing short stories or reading but acting and, especially, directing came as a surprise. Acting started as a desire to tell stories but it eventually led to an unforeseen inevitability – if I wanted to be apart of projects that meant something to me (where I didn’t just play some “big girl” cliché), I’d have to make them myself. Screenwriting was a natural leap from, “Hey, I’m an actress,” to, “I guess I’ll do it myself,” but directing was really just a side effect of my control issues. It felt like my scripts were a part of me which meant I needed to see them through exactly how I imagined them. Ironically, I loved it so much, I started directing projects I didn’t write or act in.

Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I was unabashed. I was confident. I laughed easily and smiled broadly. I enjoyed life and enjoyed watching life happen in front of me. As a chronic over thinker, I receive all of my messages from the universe. I use to hold two truths about myself in my hands at all times: I’m perfectly fine the way I am and No one else seems to think that. So, to simplify the confusion, I looked for signs from the “universe” to confirm one or the other in the hopes of finding out exactly who I was. Before I essentially conditioned myself to live entirely inside my own head, I was someone, as far as I can remember, who reacted to the world around me – I smiled when you smiled, laughed when you found something so funny you forgot how to breathe, and I was overcome with immense sadness when you felt pain…in short, I was more sensitive to you, to everyone. I’m trying to get that back now. I hate that I spent so much of my time trying to be less – feel less, think simpler, reduce, reduce, reduce. Before the world told me that I was not, in fact, perfect the way I was, I had complex, hypocritical, contradictory thoughts and feelings that, yes, gave me headaches and sent me into tailspins, but were also perfectly indicative of the world around me. I can understand why I looked for a simpler way out and the world only ever seemed to confirm what I was looking for, but, now, I’d say that I’d rather go back to a time when I was just me and you were just you, as confusing and complicated as that might be.

What fear has held you back the most in your life?
Unfortunately, one of the earliest and strongest core belief systems that formed in me was the belief that I wasn’t really worth anything to anyone. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up that existed outside of school or clubs, I didn’t really experience anyone who had romantic feelings towards me, and I was surrounded by family members who seemed to always be asking me to change all the time. Even so, I kept moving along in life (even when that little voice inside my head told me stop and stop trying). This might sound bleak, but there were times when I would argue back and forth with myself for days about where I thought I was going and whether or not it would be worth it and I eventually just struck a deal with myself: if I was going to continue on in this life, I had to do something that made me happy…or else I didn’t want it. So, the biggest fear that’s sat on my shoulder, comfortably, for years, now, is the fear of proving to everyone around me that they were right about me – I’m not worth anything. I’ve chosen to go on, that choice contains risks, it involves me putting myself out there for people to judge, to hate, to laugh at, and I’m terrified that I’ll try my hardest and people will still look at me and wonder why the fuck I’m here.

So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Hyper-analyzing the world around you, is not giving you what you think it is. We’re in a time of intense hyper-intellectualizing, where it seems like there a lot of people who just sit around and scrutinize people all day long. They’re super plugged in to what’s going on politically, socially, globally, and they’re breaking it down, simplifying, and theorizing to their heat’s content. On the surface, this seems like good practice. It’s “good” to stay informed – to know what you’re government is doing, what you’re neighbor is doing, where society is trending, etc. and we think it brings us closer together. On the surface, it seems to be drawing people in and adding numbers to a movement or an end goal, whatever it may be. In reality, though, I think it causes an increase in anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and crippling identity crises. There’s so much noise and so much guilt and shame for disengaging with it all that when we do unplug, it’s only for a few days and then we plug right back in and doom scroll until we’ve caught up with the hypothetical masses, restarting everything all over again. The trend I’ve noticed in myself is that I isolate a lot more than I used to just to be in the quiet. I end up disengaging from actual people so I can engage online and it’s exhausting. Using that much mental energy in such an unproductive way makes me feel so much further from people. The “unproductive” reality is that whatever conclusion we draw from watching videos, watching interviews, even reading articles, is still a massively lop sided one. Everything we consume is on a spectrum of bias – even the most well intentioned, well researched, arguments. There’s inherent bias in everything that we do as humans, that’s kind of the trade off of having individual personalities and experiences. That being said, social media has kind of forced us to leave nuance out of the video because it isn’t succinct enough to include. As a consequence, opinions can feel a lot like facts these days and we forget that we actually need to experience things to draw a conclusion that’s true for us as individuals. Speak to real people, go to that actual place, spend time in that exact environment – or get as close to it as possible. But, honestly, I wish people would stop over analyzing the world and trying to reduce it down to something that they think is more palatable. The world is complicated, people are complicated. We contradict ourselves constantly, we’re hypocrites, we’re unreasonable and unfair – and even those judgements fail to be unbiased. I can only really say that because of an already existent expectation that humans be easier for me to understand, and, when they aren’t, I call it a fault on their part.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. If immortality were real, what would you build?
I wouldn’t build a goddamn thing. At least, not on purpose. As a person, I’ve always been more of an observer. I like to think of myself as someone on the sidelines, sitting in a lawn chair, watching the ball get kicked back and forth. This may not seem like high praise, but I’ve just always been more interested in what other people are doing – how they grow, what they’re learning, what they’re letting in and how that changes them. It’s amazing. If I could do that for the rest of my life, it would be a happy one. When I think about immortality, as any OG Twihard has over and over again, I always pictured myself sitting on some ledge somewhere with a great view. I think it’s inevitable that my time not be wasted entirely and that I would, presumably, do something with my immortal life. If that’s true, I think I’d like to contribute something small on an individual basis. If I had endless time, I’d spend years helping people get where they wanted to go. It would be super rewarding for me to watch humans “figure it out” – whatever that is – and I think that’s the best way to truly help anyone. I may not be able to help loads of people at one time the way creating some systemic institution would, but, to me, quality over quantity. I would rather help one person to the best of my ability than to stretch myself so thin I can barely give 1% of myself to anyone. Although, if we’re talking true immortality, I might be able to eventually figure out exactly how to give all of myself to everyone all at once.

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