Fat butt space ship is courtesy tonight of Robert McCall.
Change is hard. Like…way harder than we ever thought it was when we were younger. When things seemed like they changed all the time, including ourselves. They may be truth to that, we may have changed easier back then…but I don’t think so. Like pretty much *everything* with childhood, it’s the perspective that’s problematic. The lack of frame of reference. The dilation of time and perception. We gain those things as we grow older, and we begin to see the world the way that it really is…and in reality, change is very, very hard. It’s why so few of us really do in meaningful ways.
I am currently trying to change. Not wholesale, mind you…but significantly enough that it’s scary, and it’s manifesting itself in at-times-unanticipated ways. Like today when an email exchange regarding apartment business led to a tearful hour-long conversation with my wife in our living room, dogs looking on in embarassed horror. The last part of that sentence is a total lie. They couldn’t have given a single shit between the two of them; slept the whole time, probably dreaming about food and squeaky toys.
See…I know what I need to do. I do. I know I can knock down this door. It’s just…fucking nerve wracking, and scary, and completely confronting an issue that I’ve always carried around with me, which is shying away from full, balls deep, straight at it attacking getting myself behind the Hollywood curtain. I guess. I’m not sure as I write those words that it’s *really* what it is that scares me so much…but it’s at least related to that. I’ve never laser focused on one single thing, everything else be damned…
…and that’s what I need to do if I’m ever going to actually follow through with what it is that I say that I want.
Honestly, the life of a novelist working from home really appeals to me. It does. It might end up being my life, to be frank. BUT…stepping into the world of TV-making and THEN deciding to go do something like that, or teach, or whatever…well, that’s *completely* different from never following through with the “dream” of working in television. One is trying something and making an informed choice…the other is taking the easier road out. And, the thing is, I don’t think I can take the easy road out. I think I would have already, instead of treading water and fighting to stay here all this time…
I suppose there’s an argument that can be made that it really doesn’t matter which “road” one takes, as long as it leads to where one wants to go. But, I can see myself being very, very happy writing for television. A naive image since I’ve never been there…but one that sticks with me nonetheless. And the only way to find out if it’s true is to get there and try it.
The fact that I’m *not* there and trying it right now was weighing on my much more than I realized, at least until today. So…tomorrow, a flurry of emails will go out, or the very least I promise the process will begin of reaching out to the people I know directly that might be able to get me my first gig. If that fails (at least in the immediate future, which it almost certainly will – jobs don’t grow on trees, after all), then I start expanding my list of targets, and finally cold-call like a motherfucker if I have to. Somebody out there needs someone to bring them coffee, yo. I just need to find them.
It would bring me great, great joy to be sitting at this keyboard some years hence with a body of work that I helped create…THAT’S the dream…I want it so badly.