It’s surprisingly tricky.

This is mostly due to my own particular hedge maze of psychological issues. On the one hand, I know that the most important thing for me to do right now, as well as the only thing I am “supposed” to be doing, is resting, relaxing, and recharging my batteries in anticipation of next term, when shit gets serious.

And I am doing that, more or less. I am trying to keep all thoughts about the future and what I am “supposed” to be doing right now out of my mind. I know that this is necessary because if I let a lot of pressure attach to things like getting a head start on writing my movie and my TV spec script and such, it will not lead to results.

It will, in face, lead to becoming avoidant about the whole thing, and that is definitely deeply counterproductive. I am, obviously, going to have to write the damn things sooner or later, and if I put too much pressure on myself about it and become avoidant, I will have a big bad psychological barrier to overcome just to get done what I need to get done.

And I don’t need THAT.

On the other hand, we have the problem of my coping with the idleness. I found myself slipping into depression this afternoon. My motivation was gone, I didn’t even want to get out of bed, I just wanted to escape into sleep for as long as I possibly could so that I wouldn’t have to deal with life and all those empty, meaningless hours of futility.

It was bad enough that I had to basically force myself to get up and play video games for a while. Think about that. I had to force myself to do a leisure activity I normally enjoy. But no, I approached it like it was painful physical therapy.

After playing video games for an hours or so, I gave into the temptation to go back to bed. But before I drifted back into my usual “zeroing out” near-sleep, I finally remembered what it I could do to get myself out of this situation : get dressed! I’d been hanging around naked up until that point, and that’s a big no-no for my mental health. When I do it, I end up in this twilight zone between waking and sleeping where I can’t really function because I’m not truly awake, and that is highly deleterious to my mood.

Maintaining a positive mood requires a certain amount of cognitive power, at least for me, at least for now. There are a lot of real-time corrections to negative thinking that needs to be done, and I can’t do that if I am not running on all cylinders.

So I promised myself I would get dressed when I got up again, and I did. And I feel way better now.

I’m still feeling restless though. Video games and the Internet can only keep me occupied for so long. Masturbation helps a little, but not much. I need more things to do. Humanity is not meant to be idle. We need purposeful action in order to be whole.

That means that I don’t have a choice as to whether I crawl through the minefield of anxiety, aversion, and depression in order to find something purposeful to do. Unless I want to be miserable for the next week, I will need want to find some kind of productive activity.

Right now, starting in on writing my movie seems very intimidating. I am intimidated by the challenge of writing an entire movie period. It just seems like so much substance to have to conjure. I am the sort of artist who puts a lot of themselves into their work, and that’s a heck of a lot of myself to invest in one thing.

So I think I will approach it like I did my novels. X amount a day, every day, and that’s it. Luckily, I won’t have to enter it with the idea that “I only have to know what happens next”, because I have all the major beats worked out, thanks to school.

Mostly, it will be writing the in-between stuff that happens between beats. And the jokes, of course. I have gone back and forth on whether my movie will be a comedy or not, but honestly, at this point, I can’t imagine writing anything else. I have proved to myself that one thing I can definitely do is write funny and charming dialogue, so it would be silly not to use that in my movie. My plan is to make my protagonist very likable. I want people to love Babs as much as I do. And of course, I love making people laugh.

So a comedy it shall be!

But it’s me, so it will be a comedy with pathos as well. Seeing as this is more or less just meant to show potential employers what I can do, I should try to display all my talents, and one thing I am good at is evoking emotion. So, expect a bit of a roller coaster ride.

My Bob’s Burgers episode won’t be nearly as strenuous. After all, I only have 22 minutes of time to fill, which should work out to something like thirty pages. I am looking forward to that. It’s a length I am way more comfortable with, and because all the characters and most of the locations are already established, I won’t have to do a huge amount of physical description.

I just have to do what I do best : comedy and emotion!

The most important thing, I think, is to keep things light and fun. That way I can approach the whole thing as a fun and exciting thing to do, instead of looking at it as this intimidating burden hanging over my head like the Sword of Democles.

So who knows. Maybe I will start one or the other soon. Maybe I won’t.

But one thing is for sure :

I ain’t gonna spend the whole time playing fucking video games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.