I’m back on contemplating the idea of just letting myself become all smug and cocky again.

I need some way of sealing the big hole in my self and my self-esteem. I have enough positive attributes to make for one heck of an amazing fellow if I let it happen. I have resisted this possibility for my whole love out of some admonition not to get a “swelled head” when I was a child. But more important, out of a desire not to become the sort of arrogant flippant smug asshole that seem to me to be attached to this potential version of myself.

I value being a nice person. It’s always been one of my best attributes as far as I am concerned. And it gives me great pleasure in the doing of it, too. It makes me feel very good to actively reduce the amount of hurt and pain in the world.

On the other hand…. I would kind of like to have a life, too. And it can be argued that with my nice-guy persona comes a lot of my passivity and timidity. Either way, it’s a bad deal.

And I have to ask myself a very harsh question : am I willing to live the rest of my life as a useless lump and a burden on others just to save the world for the awfulness in me? Is that a deal I am prepared to make with the world? For all I know, opening the floodgates would actually make me a much better person because I would finally be engaged in living instead of retreating into my mental isolation in order to cope. I might discover a whole new equilibrium, far superior to my current deathly doldrums.

I might finally get the sort of positive social input that I need to repair my ancient social damage and be whole again.

Surely that’s worth a certain amount of risk.

As to becoming a smug and callous asshole, I can handle that on a case by case basis. I know that this transformation may end up disrupting existing relationships. I don’t want that to happen, but I am no longer willing to stay in my tiny little box in order to prevent. I will work hard to minimize the damage, but this is something I need to do.

It definitely feels like this is the Next Thing. And the secret of life is to do the Next Thing, every time. That’s how you preserve momentum.

And that’s far more important than doing the best thing. Maybe you’ll make a huge mistake. Maybe it will be the best thing you ever did. Either way, you will keep going, and with your momentum preserved, it will be far easier to fix whatever you have done wrong.

Almost anything beats floundering in endless indecision because of your inability to connect with the powerful vital force which lies within all of us. Call it the id, call it the life force, call it whatever you want, but it’s as real and valid as any act of mentation and without it, we are toys without batteries.

Had therapy today, for the first time in two months. It felt good. One of the things that this past week and change of contemplation has revealed unto me is that I have been terribly isolated for a while. For this month, certainly. At some point, I lost that vital momentum and reverted to being very closed off to the world, and I feel like that cost me some of my current social progress. In between the distorting effect that social isolation has on what I say and do and the chilliness and fear I no doubt project, I was not getting on with my fellow students, and that is not good.

I am hoping that our experiences in the trenches of hardcore writing this term will forge tighter bonds. I already feel like we are slowly gelling as a group. We’re certainly pretty darn relaxed around one another. These are the people who are meant to be lifelong friends and contacts in “the biz”, so hopefully they will not hold my recent withdrawal and crankiness against me.

And after all, there’s four more terms to go, so there is plenty of time to repair whatever damage I might have done!

Tomorrow, I will throw myself into my writing. I am going to try to get to ten pages done on my movie and five pages done on my Bob’s Burgers episode before the day is done. I assume I will have to work on both of them at the same time, seeing as there will be pages due in both classes, so it’s not like I have the luxury to do one then the other.

And frankly, I am enjoying writing the Bob’s Burgers episode more. So I will use it as a kind of treat for myself. This is the first time in my life I have written sitcom dialogue and it’s loads of fun. I honestly feel like part of me has been doing it ever since I was a sitcom-loving kid trying, subconsciously, to live in a sitcom version of the world.

Writing the movie is way harder. So much more to think about. It will be easier once I am through the visual stuff at the beginning. It was really, really hard for me to write the opening montage. I could see it in my head, but writing it all down was hard in a way that is hard to quantify because the difficulty came not from the actual act but how hard it was to get myself thinking that way.

Guides to the previous sentence are available for purchase in the lobby.

I am sure I will learn to think visually (or at least, visually enough) in time. It’s just new territory for me. Dialogue is my natural environment. I am a conversationally biased critter.

I just realized, though…. I can try writing sight gags now! Wow!

I mean, not like Angie Tribeca sight gags… that would not be the style of Bob’s Burgers at all… but still.

I have so much fun ahead of me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.