I graduate on the 21st.

The very next day, the 22nd, I will begin my massive mission of getting myself some god damned work. I have decided that I will heretofore refer to that date as Launch Day.

And it is exactly two weeks from today… L minus 14.

I had my first little attempt this afternoon. One of the bits of business I still have to do for Career Launch class is enter something I wrote during my time at VFS to some kind of competition and send some kind of proof to Kat, my prof.

Usually, that only entails forwarding the email the contest sends to confirm your entry into the contest to Kat. So really, no big deal.

Except that there’s zillions of contests out there and I have to choose among them.

Not easy, and the fact that I have no money for contest entry fees doesn’t help either. So far, I have not figured out the magic combination of words to compel Google to show me only contests which a) have no entry fee, b) are open right now, and c) which are open to television scripts, not just screenplays.

So that’s something I will have to work out over time.

But the real roadblock today happened when I signed up for a kickass website called InkTip. It’s a site that allows writers to post scripts (with loglines)  to their site, and producers to find said scripts when they are looking for something to produce.

So I signed up, thinking that sounded pretty smart, and then I was faced with a  screen telling me to upload a script.

And I had a complete emotional breakdown. The idea of actually exposing my work to the public made me suddenly doubt that anything I had ever written was worth anyone’s attention and I had to stop right there and do something else while I worked through the emotions it brought up.

It was basically a social anxiety attack, but with virtual exposure instead of real world.

This was unexpected but not inexplicable. There’s a pretty good reason why I am one of those writers who has written a ton of stuff without submitting it to anyone, anywhere. Like my fellow introverted scribners, I have very deep issues with people judging me, and that ties directly into with my deep feeling of worthlessness and toxicity.

That’s what the socially anxious people like myself fear exposure. To us, being seen means people knowing what a worthless and pathetic piece of shit we are and thinking that people like us should stay out of sight for the public good.

And that’s what we do. We stay out of sight. Home. Alone.

It’s the only way we can calm down.

It’s the only way we can make it through the day.

It’s the only way we can feel safe.

And even then, the fear is always there, lurking, waiting to flare up at the slightest stimulus. It’s like a really painful sunburn. The slightest things hurt.

Luckily, therapy works.  Slowly but surely, the underlying traumas are unearthed, aired, and allowed to finally express themselves fully and then fade away.

Like Nietzsche said : Reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts you.

Thanks to therapy, I know that my breakdown this afternoon is not fatal. I will get through it and probably be a little stronger for having had it. These things pass, and you don’t need to panic because you’re not “happy”.

You’re not supposed to be happy all the time. Life is supposed to have a broader emotional range than that. Accepting that life is going to suck sometimes is one of the great gifts of age. Being unhappy isn’t an emergency. All it means is that you are experiencing the proper emotion for what is happening in your life, or perhaps you are getting signals from somewhere deep into your psyche telling you that you need to work through some old stuff. The best attitude is to simply let these things pass through you, unhindered.

So I will feel kinda down and rather verklempt for a while. Then I will reach the end of that emotion, and be done with it.  And my inner burden will get just a little bit lighter.

It’s emotional emesis – puking up your poisons.

Yesterday was more than a bummer. It was also intensely frustrating. Get this :

1. We’re on break during Adaptation class. I haven’t printed out my piece yet. I have ten minutes, that should be plenty of time. But I forgot one thing : the printer at school hates me. So when I try to print my thing, the print job would just disappear from the queue. Then when I finally got it through, the printer was out of paper. Then when that got solved, it printed out my document…. in landscape mode, and in a font so big the pages of my document didn’t fit on the paper. I checked all the relevant settings – I know a little about this kind of thing – and they were all correct. Paper 8.5 X 11. Portrait mode. Right printer tray. Right printing mode. Everything was perfect. So I tried it again. Still sideways! Argh! I finally had to go get Steve, the academic assistant and master of technology, on the case. He told me to forward the document to him and he’d print it. Fine, I thought to myself. But I had forgotten something else : the school’s email system is evilly stupid. So just to forward an email, I had to find the “block pop-ups” setting and turn it off. Then it finally let me send the document to Steve, who printed it out properly. By then, break had been over for fifteen minutes and I was a nervous wreck.
2. As you know from yesterday’s blog post, when I left school I was feeling really depressed. So I decided I would go to my fave sandwich shop and get myself some of the big ginger cookies they have there that I love so much. But they didn’t have any. I really hadn’t expected that, because they had been out of them the previous day and surely they would have gotten more by the next day. But no. I hate to say it, but that place is really going down the drain lately. I get a very strong sense that there is no competent leadership and that leaves the seeming never-ending parade of twentysomethings that work there on their own. Not good.
3. I had one more task, Pick up a couple of bottles of diet cola for the weekend. No problem, I would just stop into the little convenience store I pass every day when I am coming home from school. SURPRISE! They not only don’t have the Coke Zero I usually get from there, they have absolutely nothing diet at all. Not even in cans.

So society and/or the universe was really letting me down yesterday!

Oh, and here’s that thing I did for Adaptation.

Glengarry Glen Ross Redux

God, I hate that movie.

Today’s been…. okay, apart from the emotional meltdown. But seeing as I have no work I need to be doing now (I think…. god I hope I am right), I had the spend the afternoon in the existential void that was my life before I had a ton of work to do.

So I was bored. And frustrated. I played video games, but it didn’t really make me happy. It just made the time go by faster. I even caught myself looking at my watch and calculating how much longer it would be until suppertime. Because at least that’s an event.

That’s simply not acceptable any more. It’s time I leveled up and learned how to generate my own work. Tell the Jagoff to fuck off for good, remember that I am happier working, and reject the cult of death that is depression.

I don’t want to slip through life as easily as possible any more. That route leads to death because it requires you to stifle all that would stir you to action. In other words, you have to kill your passion. But that’s not good enough any more. I want to embrace life and live. To shake off the winter chill of icy reason and get my frozen ass out into the sun where it’s warm and dry and I can feel more alive.

It’s a slow and difficult journey…. but it gets warmer with every step I take,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.