I mean, it's not a surprise that it is but yet they keep surprising me somehow anyway.
I lost track of the number of moments that reached into my heart, to the part of my brain that cannot stop wanting to create, even as the rest of my brain seems determined to stop me ...
I've attempted to be an essayist in multiple media because there is a part of my mind that is drawn to the form in perhaps the same way that I'm drawn to social media itself. A part of it just seems to be this combination of narcissism and blarney where I just like to talk and when I don't know what to talk about I talk about myself, in this naive hope that someone out there will relate and I won't feel alone in the world, and maybe I can even help them feel the same.
I also can't ever seem to stop reflecting on everything and nothing; my therapists have all to nearly a one seemed stymied as to what to do with me, because I can sit there and talk myself through a "breakthrough" without them getting a word in edgewise ... and yet it never helps because I'm only in dialogue with myself, so I don't have any other perspective to bounce off of and see my way out of the maze of my own mind.
The temptation then of the essay is that same thing: I have to structure it to be read and understood by others, and that at least gives me a thread to lead me through the maze of my own thoughts. Whether it was blogs or standup or video, in as much as I want to be true to what I'm feeling and what I experienced and what I'm attempting to recount ... there's this pressure of the medium itself to tell a "story", or at least enough of a structure for an audience to hang their attention on.
But therein is the lie.
Real life doesn't have narrative structure, it doesn't make neat arguments. It's messy and ugly and sometimes there's just no answer and no point to any of it. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.
In trying to package up my divorce or my depression or my transition into a discrete unit of "content" for a viewing audience who, let's be honest, I'm always a tiny bit hoping will get big enough to actually pay my rent someday so I can escape the endless monotony of life in the tech industry, I kept finding myself at odds with myself.
None of my stories have happy endings. Nor do they have sad endings, necessarily. And so that tension inevitably gets the better of me, and my work inevitably goes through a cycle of becoming increasingly intense, then increasingly meta, and finally just falling off altogether as the fatigue of dredging up my pain and then wrestling with myself to shape it into something anyone else will want to read finally gets the better of me.
And so I find myself today, unemployed, with an unlimited amount of free time, my brain gnawing at me to create something, anything, and yet completely out of mediums in which to create or ideas that feel worth creating enough to push past the fear of failure and the overwhelming sense that everything is just so much work for no reward other than my own disappointment.
Shit sux man.