The Bear, Season 2: Overcoming Self Doubt As a Screenwriter

There's a scene in the very last episode of The Bear, Season 2 – the episode titled “The Bear” -- where Carmy is stuck inside of the walk-in refrigerator at the restaurant. Outside the walk-in refrigerator, all of Carmy’s dreams are actually coming true. His restaurant is actually a success. His team has actually come together against tremendous odds. Everybody has actually stepped up and bought in and everything is actually working. But inside of the fridge Carmy cannot see it. Carmy is only stuck with his self-doubt, with the mistakes that he's made. He is stuck inside his own ideas, and his history, and his past, and his patterns, and his problems and his imagination of what must be happening outside where he cannot see.  It occurs to me that the refrigerator scene in the finale of The Bear, Season 2 is a metaphor for how we as writers feel all the time during our writing process.  It is so hard to actually evaluate our own work. It's so hard to see if our writing is working, because in the process of building our dreams, we are going to make so many mistakes, we are going to fall short, we are going to grapple with our patterns, and our history, and our family history and our traumas. Because we're going to grapple with all that, we are so often actually inside the refrigerator where we cannot see the beauty in front of us, where we cannot actually allow the good to be good. So that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode. We’re going to be looking at the final season of The Bear. But what we're really going to be exploring is the process of writing, the process of rewriting, the process of turning something that doesn't work into something that does work.  And the most important part of that process is the process of dealing with our own self-doubt, our own self-criticism, our own self-blame, our own patterns, our own fears, our own spiraling, in order to actually get out of the refrigerator and be able to see the beauty of our own writing.  A warning, there are going to be some spoilers ahead. So if you haven't watched The Bear, Season 2 yet, you might want to do so; however, even if you haven't seen The Bear, a lot of the content of this podcast will still be very valuable for you. So let's talk briefly about how The Bear works as a series.  If you've listened to my episode on The Bear, Season 1, you already know some of this, but we're just going to do a quick recap. In Season 1 of The Bear, we meet this team trying to do the impossible – they are trying to run a restaurant. And we are caught in the heat and the emotions of a kitchen where nothing is working, where everyone is at cross-purposes, where everyone is fighting, where, emotionally, people don't know what they mean to each other yet.  We're going to watch a world of deeply dysfunctional but also beautiful people learn what they mean to each other, learn to show up for each other, learn to love each other. And just when everything seems like it’s finally coming together, we're going to watch “the bear” in Carmy come out. In the first season of The Bear, Carmy is a world-class chef who has come home to Chicago after his brother Michael’s suicide to take over Michael’s crappy, dying restaurant. Carmy’s decision doesn't make sense rationally. It only makes sense emotionally for him to do this. We don't know a lot of why. We don't know a lot of the past. We don't know a lot of the history. But we know that this place and the people in this place are a mess, and that they are all under so much intense pressure at every moment of every day that they just can't ...