There are these bits and pieces of things--creations: pieces of beautiful music, sculpture, gorgeous writing--that make me cry to hear or see or read them, they inspire me so, but I am unable to do anything productive with that inspiration. It just becomes buried very deeply within my chest, a lump that hardens around my heart, and breaks it.
Maybe this is really the root of my problem: I don't usually put too much stock in these online quizzes, and yes, they are for entertainment purposes only, but this is the result of a "What should I Major in in College?" Quiz:
You scored as Journalism. You are an aspiring journalist, and you should major in journalism! Like me, you are passionate about writing and expressing yourself, and you want the world to understand your beliefs through writing.
What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com |
If you look at it, you can see that I scored equally high in six different fields: Journalism, Theatre, Art, Linguistics, Philosophy, and English. My passions are not singular, my aspirations are unfocussed. I have zero focus, and as such, very little actual motivation. And every now and then, I feel so burned out by freelancing in the theatre world that I really seriously consider leaving it; I am still relatively young, I could have a very productive and fulfilling career in some other field. I could go to law school and go work for the ACLU, I could get a Master's in journalism and bring other people's stories to the world, I could write that novel (if only I had a story to tell), I could stop loafing around the house in my pajamas every Monday. I could. But I don't. Looking at it in this manner, I feel like a failure all over again, because even though I have had a decent amount of success in finding and keeping good gigs as a freelancer, I don't know that I'll ever feel like I've done enough.
A couple of years ago, while I was still living in Boston, before everything turned weird there, I tried to keep a regimen where I wrote a little everyday. Little pieces of stories, things that more often than not had a total lack of narrative, and a weak, contrived voice. I took a class in creative writing in college, and had a moderate amount of success writing short stories that were not total crap. Once, I had totally misunderstood the assignment entirely and instead of writing a piece that was dialogue-driven, I wrote a narrative that, while nearly dialogue-free, still garnered me an A because the professor really liked it in spite of itself. I'm sure that--5 and a half years later--if I were to go back and reread what I had written then, I would find it angst-ridden and tragic, and really there's no way I could: I wrote every assignment for the class on my ex's computer because he had a printer that worked, and I am pretty sure that when we broke up the file was promptly deleted. I guess that the above run-on tangent is a roundabout way of saying that I wonder if all of my inspiration then was maybe used up, or has since dissipated into the ether, along with my religious beliefs, my motivation to do pretty much anything, and my actual ability to do anything beyond theatre. Because while I could, in the abstract, do any number of things not theatre related, the reality is that my resumé these days is theatre. I haven't (with the exception of 7 total weeks of temping) done anything else but theatre in nearly 2 years. There's not even a day job that I can fall back on. There's only this path that I have stubbornly carved for myself, little more really, than a rut in the road, and now I can't go beyond the boundaries of this cart track, there's no room for more development, just more freelancing, more theatre all the way to the horizon. I just wonder if I should have taken the other part of the fork in road.
I guess the greater reflection that I am seeing is a fear that there are no real big ideas happening, that nothing can connect with them anymore. Can I rise above my own mediocrity? Can I release this story boiling up under the surface of my being, or do I keep it inside because without it I am an empty husk? Perhaps this is the real root of my sudden obsession with This American Life and Ira Glass: I love the idea of stories in all of their various forms. There is music like this: a narrative without words or pictures, a story. What a beautiful idea...
I am going to do my damndest to take a road trip this summer with a very distinct purpose: I want to sit down with my grandparents and record their stories. My surviving grandparents are octogenarians, and their health is starting to suffer. I don't want all of their stories--their oral tradition--to die with them. I want to be able to keep this alive, to preserve it for future generations. This is something that I've wanted to do for a really long time, and I need to do it soon. I'd love to spend a few days with my mom's parents and a few with my dad's mom, setting it all down. And at the same time, I am scared shitless... this is not even in the realm of anything that I have experience with. Perhaps once I've got it all down, I can edit it into something cohesive, but I know myself, and these grand ideas are probably just that. For now, it's enough that I am going to get the tape.
That is all.
