Backed into a Corner

It’s a mild wet Thursday morning and the sun is streaming through the clouds. It’s the kind of day that reminds me of spring. A sharp wind. The smell of wet earth. The sound of birds and squirrels chittering in the trees above me. Crows and pigeons fighting over food debris. I’m hoping the natural world helps crack me open a bit. I’m feeling oddly angry and melancholy today. Going introverted and back into a dark corner in my head. Stuck and frustrated with things. I get that I have the power to change my current situation. * head in hands * Things feel a bit more impossible today. Too much self-doubt coloring my perspective. Strange how just the other day I was talking to someone about some of my past experiences, that conversation reminded me of some of my finished projects and just for a moment I felt proud over the things that I have accomplished in my life. Today, I’m having a major backslide in the other direction.

All I see right now is the half dozen unfinished projects…plays yet to be written, my novel still a mangled mess (on hiatus for three weeks), and scraps of poetry littering the bottom of my purse on pieces of scrap paper and post it notes. I need to finish something or I may just lose my damn mind. I just feel static and stagnating from lack of movement (both physically as well as with the creative work). Spring is coming and it’s a good time to have something in a more finished state to put work out to a larger audience. The brain is on fire with impatience with myself. Yesterday I had a crappy day at work, I went home, stared at my ceiling and listened to Pearl and the Beard. I didn’t have anything left to try to put something down on paper.

One of my exes told me once that she was working some admin job, it paid just enough for rent and food and not much more. Anyway, during this time she was invited to perform one of her pieces at Lincoln Center for one of those up-and-coming play festivals. It was a weekend event, so she had three nights of putting her piece up in Lincoln Center. When Monday rolled around, she had to go back to her cubicle and her admin job, she sat at her desk, stared at her grey walls and did absolutely no work. She told me it was so depressing to have a write-up in the NY Times and to get to do her creative work full on at Lincoln Center of all places and then to have to go back to that cubicle. After a week her boss pulled her in and asked her is she was going to do any work. She was too depressed to really answer and she just nodded at her manager and went back to her desk. She took all the manila folders that were stacked on her desk and pushed them into a drawer, collected her things and walked out of that job. She’s gone on to teach theater and filmmaking in various venues much happier at leaving the cubicle behind, married to a woman she crushed on in high school and living her creative life.

My pragmatic side is having a hard time taking that kind of leap of faith. I want some sort of guarantee that it will all work out. Even as I write that last sentence I have to laugh, I’ve been a creative person since I could string a sentence together and I know to live the creative life means living on faith and perseverance. There are just days when the faith is wearing thin and perseverance is something I used to have when I was much younger. I’m going to chalk this up as winter blues and remind myself that spring will be here shortly.

Anyway, on the music front: Tegan and Sara concert was cancelled on Monday due to illness. Blah!! Rescheduled to play in a couple of weeks.

I’m putting up another Ben Howard video – Diamonds …’cause I can’t get enough of his music.

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