I did not expect that we all had to share our reflections at the end of the day on Friday. Usually, you can see me at the back of the room making myself look smaller than I am, but this time it wasn’t Randy the spinner who chose some lucky bastards. Marc pulled out the T- shirts we made, and with each T-shirt I expected a comment like “this is the last shirt I will pick out for a reflection today”, and I got a feeling of relief every time I saw T-shirts coming out of the hanger that were not my T-shirt. Who knew we had enough time to let everyone on stage. Dammit. It wasn’t as bad as I thought. But thinking about it right now, I do wonder what I actually said. I feel like I need to explain it a bit more.

So I will do a reflection on my reflection. I sat there thinking about what was left to contribute in front of the whole group about this week. A lot has been said. In my head, I sounded a lot smarter when I thought about what I wanted to say. But it didn’t quite come out as I would’ve wanted to. First I just wanted to do it in Dutch, that way I could say what I want and no one would understand it.

I told about how I would like to think that I am spontaneous and impulsive when it comes to creativity, but that’s far from who I actually am. Because I love being prepared, I love being able to think about something long enough before I have to share it. A lot of people said that they’ve learned to let that feeling go during the workshops. And I did too. To some extent. And that’s okay. We are here to learn things, and I learned that I can’t fully change my nature. The thing is that if you see where we ended up with our improv conversations if you let things go, it proves that it is useful though (koala’s with chlamydia, hotdogs at a funeral, and pickled heads at gay pride btw. They sound like song titles from a metal band).

That same feeling of wanting to be prepared is present when I’m talking to people. I always think that I won’t be able to contribute anything intellectual or important to the conversation. And the language barrier (reef (- that metaphor on day 1 is something I still don’t understand actually)) makes it even harder to really be able to say what I’m trying to say.

So what I will try to do differently next week is to not be so fucking tense about just talking to people. Which shouldn’t be that hard, cause everyone is really nice. And try not to be late (which means having to dance, on stage, like Gary), because that would be self-sabotage.

The best thing I learned this week is that in advertising, all good things (great things) end with a beer. Cheers.