If you’ve been reading, it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that Jena and I often feel between worlds. Our bodies may have left LA, but after spending 3 years there, a piece of us remains. My sister from another mister, who lived for about as long in Scotland, told me that her transatlantic life made her feel as though her soul was split, with each successive new place taking another cut.
Life in New York is different. It’s more… immediate. I have priorities and obligations, where in LA I had a to-do list and goals. I miss what LA had to offer between the sights, the tastes, and the people I had the pleasure of meeting. I don’t miss the industry much, though I still wouldn’t mind being called and asked to have something of mine turned into a movie or video game or… hell, I’ll take a gif. Seriously. Call me.
I like where I am, and I suppose working requires a certain turning your brain to this “mode”. And I like what I’m doing in this mode. I like who I’m engaging with and I feel better about myself more than when I sat in the dark on a beautiful day and recoiled at the thought that my art wasn’t good enough. But I still feel split, except that the dissonance now is between my two selves: the professional and the artist.
In fact, lately it feels like the professional is winning. I’ve felt incredibly burnt out on writing, more so than I have in a while. I’m writing these blogs to try and combat the atrophy, but clearing the pipes has proven to require more than Draino. This blog is the third one I’ve attempted to write tonight, and I feel like I’m stumbling over myself. In LA, of course I went through phases, but this is more fatigue than I’ve ever had to wrestle with. In LA, I told myself I did it because I wanted to, knowing that I had to continue the hustle, the cultivation of this muscle if I wanted to succeed. But it isn’t about the industry anymore. It’s about the art, which I’m still head over heels for. I’ve just never had this much trouble getting back into the fray.
I really wrote a lot, between these blogs and my job and Unlife. I was firing on all cylinders. And it feels like something broke. Something isn’t clicking, still. I’m able to write this, but I feel cut off from that spirit, that wave, that allowed me to access my emotions and give them form. I feel split from my writer self, like it separated itself from me because it was just so damn tired. And even just the idea of pursuing that thing I love the most is too hard to give words. It’s a nightmare, feeling like a piece of yourself has been split off, separated. That piece that pursued what I love most. So what keeps me from giving up?
I don’t know. But I finished this blog. Maybe it wasn’t a clean break after all.