After all my big talk, I still haven’t even started on my Secret Informant script.
It is slightly a matter of time management, but not really, because I have still been playing video games for hours and hours. I could have spent some of those hours getting my god damned work done. But no.
I really feel like this is something that will make or break me. Either I will get the thing done and redeem myself, or I will flame out and end up hating myself hard.
Everyone’s been so nice to me. I would hate to let them down.
But that’s not really what this is about, is it? It’s about self-discipline. It’s about doing that which frightens and challenges me. It’s about shutting down the part of my mind that procrastinates and prevaricates, dawdles and foot-drags, comes up with bullshit excuses as to why I can’t do it right now and then makes even more specious plans to do it later.
I don’t know what I am so afraid of. I know I can do a decent enough job. I don’t know why I can write an entirely original animation script every day yet this is freaking me out. I don’t know why this thing became such a… thing.
Perhaps it’s the uncertainty. I don’t get a lot of input as to what the script should be. That, plus the whole “so many people are depending on me” pressure bullshit.
That’s something I did not learn about in school – what to do when you are left entirely on your own to come up with whatever you can. I always assumed that I would be struggling to meet a certain standard as defined by my employer, even if that standards was simply “This is not good enough yet. ”
But no. In both SI and the animation gig, I am on my own. Nobody else involved really “gets” writing and that means that whatever I write, that’s what will be made.
I really thought there would be people to filter me.
But that’s the story of my life, really. No guidance. No advice. No input. No structure. Just me, on my own, doing what I can and hoping I am doing it right. But never sure.
This is what happens when a child is left to raise themselves. When you have an eerily silent childhood, with nobody else’s voice but your own to guide you.
I would go to school by myself, do the work by myself, eat lunch by myself, walk home by myself, watch TV by myself, then put myself to bed.
And so I grew up with this intense feeling of abandonment. True, I had not been physically abandoned or neglected. I had more than enough to eat, a place to sleep, an allowance to use for discretionary spending, clothes, school supplies, you name it.
But emotionally, I was utterly abandoned. Nobody looked after me. It was do it myself or it doesn’t get done.
That’s not how elementary school is supposed to go.
Meanwhile, after going back to sleep, waking up feeling awful, eating lunch, taking a pee, and finally getting back to the computer 45 minutes later…
Enough self-pity. It serves a purpose when I write it down because it helps me mourn for myself, so to speak. It sounds crazy but that’s an important step in recovery.
You’re not exactly mourning the person you might have been without all the damage and pain. That’s almost it, but not quite. It’s more like you are mourning for the pain and humiliation itself, because as they have become a part of you, so must they be mourned as they go away.
Still pretty sleepy. I hope this sleepy shit doesn’t last too much longer. I feel so frustrated. There’s things I need to get done but I end up sleeping instead.
Hmmm. Disturbing thought. What if my subconscious mind is surreptitiously generating this sleepiness in order to keep me from dealing with my problems? I sure hope that is not it. I have been the victim of my own psychosomatic delusions before, so it is not entirely out of the question.
Well whatever the source, I wish I could just shake it off and get on with things. But it enforces itself quite effectively. It’s hard to just “get it done” when you are so tired and dizzy that you can barely focus on the screen and keep falling asleep at the keys.
Then you have no chance but the surrender and go back to fucking bed, and hope that you will be more coherent and focused the next time.
Aaand I just fell asleep for a couple of seconds. Oy.
Sooner or later, ill write that script for SI. And when I do, I bet I will end up wondering what all the fuss was about.
That’s too narrow a view, however. It will only seem like there was too much of a fuss if I do the emotional work to get myself to that point. Ergo, it would be an egregious fallacy to imagine that I could have skipped the whole thing and gone straight to the end result. That’s just plain not how things work.
Crossing the finish line after a marathon does not imply that you could have gone straight to the finish line and saved yourself a lot of wear and tear.
That’s a pathetic fantasy of the ego, that if you know the answer you get to skip the hard or boring parts of life.
Slept a bit again.
I still have a lot of growing up to do. And like someone once said, “growing up is like the German measles – the older you are when it happens, the more painful it is. ”
And the less sympathetic people are to your struggles.
They’s not sympathetic because you’re so pathetic… and that’s the bottom line.
Oh well, back to the sandman’s sand mine. I still have my episode to write today, so I hope I will not sleep for too long.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.