Tonight’s the night when the VFS sketch show with my skit in it happens. I’m kind of nervous about it.
Not that I am really worried it will suck and everyone will hate it. I know it’s a decent skit. I know it’s a tad wordy and I wish I could have rewritten it before it was too late, but it’s funny and weird and definitely not the sort of skit one normally sees, so… it will do.
No, what makes me nervous is that I know I will be struggling hard with my own issues. A lot of emotions are gonna come up when I am watching the skit. I will undoubtedly have to fight me way through waves of crippling self-doubt and anxiety, and that won’t be fun.
But that’s the price we pay for being artists. I was hanging out in the writer’s lounge last week, and one of the new students was talking about something he had submitted and how he didn’t like it and thought it sucked and wished he could take it back.
And I said “And now you know the price of being a good writer : gnawing self doubt!”
In retrospect, that was a tad cynical. That’s not the sort of trip I should be laying on the young ones. I don’t want to rain on their parade. I couldn’t lie to him and say the self-doubt goes away, because I don’t think it does. But it is what drives us to greatness. It goads us into trying fanatically hard to get it right.
And that means we are destined to forever walk the razor’s edge between overconfidence making us poor artists and self-doubt overcoming us and making us unable to be artists at all. It’s a tricky ride and one of the reasons why writers tend to drink.
It helps us relax enough to believe we can write something worth reading.
I don’t have that problem, obviously. I have never made liquor a part of my life. All my drinking has been social, and I am not very social, so not much drinking. I would never take that fatal first step by starting to drink alone.
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Still, I understand why it happens. The internal pressures that lead to my writing are extremely intense. I sometimes feel like I live in a steel mill with very little regard for safety measures. So everywhere around me, molten steel flows, enormous presses flatten red-hot steel into flat sheets, and enormous dump trucks dump thousands of tons of slag without any regard for the safety of those below.
None of this shows on the outside, of course, except possibly to those who know me well. As far as the outside world is concerned, this steel mill of mine is a pleasant, harmless looking park with green grass and comfy benches and a fountain or two.
The only giveaway that something’s not quite right is the humming high tension wires nearby that gives you a feeling of power and danger when you get too close.
But in the deep dark factory below, mighty forces are tamed to produce the products that I desperately want people to buy and like, despite how unusual they are.
Now if only I had a marketing department….
Vast elaborate metaphors aside, today is going to be quite the day. Felicity is very worried that we are going to run into nightmare traffic on the way there (it has happened before) and so we will likely be leaving Richmond at 3:30 pm in order to make it to VFS by 7:30, which is when the doors open for the show.
That’s a four hour gap, but part of that will be taken up by us going out to eat.
This puts me under a significant amount of unexpected time pressure. I figured we would be leaving at 5, not 3:30, so I didn’t have lunch till 1 pm, and now she is gonna want to eat at maybe 4 o’clock.
Oh well, what must be, must be. I just hate feeling rushed.
Honesty, what I could use right now is a nap. I have not been getting enough sleep during the week, and I would really like to be able to snooze enough to catch up.
And I am lucky in that I am feeling healthy enough to experience healthy sleepiness. A lot of the time, I am too messed up for that and that means I only get the sort of weak, sick sleepiness which is like the kind that comes when you have the flu.
I like the healthy kind a lot more. It’s soothing.
But no, no more sleep for me! When I finish blogging, I have to shower, then get dressed and ready, then wait for Felicty to message me.
After that, I might, if I am lucky, have half an hour to do with as I please.
(When you read this, Felicity, know that I am not blaming you for or accusing you of anything. I am just bitching about the situation in general. )
I am kinda worried about the shower. I can get sleepy after a shower, and I am already sleepy right now, so I am worried that the shower will make me SUPER sleepy.
Why am I always sleepy at the worst possible time? I went to bed at 2 am last night and had all the time I wanted to sleep after that.
Instead, I wake up at 10 am, go bacl to sleep at 11 am, wake up at 1 pm, eat lunch, and then sit down to blog, STILL sleepy after like ten hours or sleep.
I guess when you’re in sleep debt deep enough, all that deferred sleepiness grabs you at the first possible opportunity and wants payment in full, NOW.
It’s like owing money to the mob.
Makes me wish someone would invent the Instant Shower. Some kind of high tech gizmo that completely washes and sanitizes you in one second.
Like, with a fine tune energy beam that just vaporizes everything within a millimeter of your skin, including bacteria, viruses, loose skin cells, sweat, and pore goblins.
Oh wait, you’re not supposed to know about those. Forget I told you.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.