Maybe a Drop of Hope

I need to be out of town next Christmas.

Meds are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

Foreign film dubs today.

Have not been drinking alone. Want escape.

Making myself listen to upbeat music just so I do not immediately drop dead.

Brother is joining us in Costa Rica in February. I think I must cancel my ticket, lest it be a horribly stressful two weeks. Plus, that is historically some of the busiest time in the acting business.

That has me brainstorming more realistically the possibility of a trip to LA for pilot season. And guess what? Now I am not so despondent. I texted my mom about it, and she reminded me that her car can fit a mattress in the back.

Ordered Medication

Well, after I had those depression symptoms for a couple weeks, I asked a friend to prescribe me antidepressants. And I gotta say, just knowing that those are about to ship has been enough to improve my mood. I have been wanting to be on antidepressants for years, not just for the occasional depressive episodes, but for the anxiety. The constant ever-present anxiety. It used to help with performances, still does, but over time, it has had more negative effects than positive.

One of the few things that I have been good about the past couple weeks is practicing guitar. Just as with learning foreign languages or anything else outside my usual wheelhouse, I find that I maintain motivation if I can use it to deliver jokes. In French class, I learned much more slowly because I wanted to write jokes in French. So I would learn just enough vocabulatory and conjugation to say silly things, and this of course did not lead to a broad level of comprehension. For the guitar, I have some jokes that I am writing specifically with the instrument in mind, not just for musical accompaniment, but to use the guitar itself as a prop. All the parts of the buffalo come into play.

Just after I started feeling the depression symptoms, my brother yelled at me. Why? Because I asked him to fix the internet. But now he is scared of wifi waves, so he does not want a strong signal. So he yelled at me about the part of a room that has been used for storage (so it is not clean and tidy), saying that I refuse to clean. I reiterated that I need internet access and that cleaning that up is not an urgent need. He kept yelling and throwing things and was in tears, and I told him I would not talk to him about it when he was acting like this. After that round of verbal abuse, he left, then came back a minute later and apologized, proposing a realistic solution. Then a week later, my other brother blew up the group chat by telling me off for not showing up to family holiday events, and shared that he had been telling people bewildering tales about why I was avoiding them. My narcissister responded with what she knew, about the deeply hurtful superiority and condescension my dad had shown to me when I was fresh with my doctorate. Brother responded with something like, "feelings blah blah blah" and I decided that yeah, I will skip every holiday event I can this season. Narcissister and I then talked about it and meds last night, which was nice!

Not Doing Great

I feel awful.

I need a social life, right? Work?

Every job with decent pay requires years of having already had the job. Entry level jobs pay remarkably little.

Internet at home gets "upgraded" and the signal does not reach upstairs where I work. Brother suddenly decides that he does not want wifi signals physically near him, also upstairs, so he has to throw a tantrum (which involves literally throwing things and yelling), then when I refuse to converse with him in this fashion, he storms out, then later apologizes and offers an actual solution, to which I can agree.

I am already miserable. I cannot find work. Months after I played the role, I finally got the paycheck for my hourly work on the set off this indie show. Will anything come of it? Will anything come of anything?

I want to fly out to LA just for the sake of opportunity, but what will I do there? Sit in a library or coffee shop like I am doing now? Sure I would likely perform a few live comedy shows, but that is it.

I keep trying to pivot. I am bad at screenwriting. Okay, I will work on standup with guitar. I am bad at guitar. Okay, maybe if we dumb down our goals for that. Still frustrated overall.

A cute girl is sitting at the next table over at the library. I used to conjure up a pretend one-sided fake romance with tiny stolen glances, but now? What is the point? My brain cannot handle dating even if I did have a job.

I watch this theologian on TikTok sometimes. Hell as a concept is barely even in the Bible, and largely undefined. Even when Jesus talked about sheol, it was an understanding of the place where everyone goes when they die. Genesis 2-3 is a specific account of creation that was later most likely corrected with Genesis 1. What frustrates me about these things is not the inconsistency. I knew early on that there were inconsistencies. What throws me is that we were taught as if there are basic firm aspects of the Christian faith based in scripture, but on the contrary, they are often based in culture and discussion from centuries after Jesus walked this planet. Give us full context! It is tough to be a Christian when basic aspects of what you were taught were based in nothing but Dante's Inferno. I read that book. As I recall, it is fictional poetry. Also, no such thing as the devil, lucifer, or satan, not as an individual evil entity.

What do I even want anymore? I crave the time between action and cut. So really, what I want is to skip the holidays and go straight to when we shoot this short film next month. And lots of reddit posts said that they got their SXSW rejections last month, so I assume that the indie show I am in did not get its episodic premiere there. I would like a writing partner, to find "my people", but my little community remains quite little, and most within it are not wanting to collaborate more than we currently are.

Is this seasonal depression? Or just a long time between jobs? 

That street interview gig I did? I do not think that they will be using the footage. At least I now know that I can write funny questions.

Also, there is genocide actively happening.

I am so tired and trying to stop drinking (so much). There are people in far worse situations, so complaining feels stupid. But at the same time, someone else's situation being worse does not make mine any better.

I hate this.

A baby was crying at the library. A guy yelled at her to take the baby downstairs. That could have been handled better. There was also a book club that spent a good ten minutes talking loudly after they adjourned. One mentioned how they had hardly talked about the book. I was annoyed, but also jealous.

I am in better physical shape now than I have been for a couple months, but a big part of me wants to skip the gym today and flee somewhere where I can have a social life. My local friends do not invite me over anymore, in large part because I always declined when the pandemic was raging. But I also hesitate because most of them want to talk about normal boring things. Like life. I ALREADY HAVE TO LIVE MINE AND YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT?

Long-term isolation is bad for me. Yet interrupting that isolation costs money. What do I do? What do I do? What is there to do? Keep writing. Keep slowly draining my remaining funds. Keep missing opportunities because I lack representation and do not live in LA or NYC? Oh how I wish I could move to where my people are.

Angry

I was angry yesterday. And today.

Maybe it was that tiktok I saw the other day. Or the new year that threatens to rear its ugly head. But I was reminded of how, for years of hiding away during the height of the pandemic, I would wake up feeling absolutely miserable. And I would look in the mirror, only to be greeted by a bright, shining, youthful face. And I began to despise it. But over that year or two, I think I managed to age myself significantly through my drinking, because eventually, I looked in the mirror and felt like it matched better with how I felt. I no longer resented it.

How stupid and self-destructive. Now I resent the loss of my youth. There is no winning with this brain of mine.

Anger. Anger is what I continue to feel. I used to go out and yell at God when I felt this way. I guess I still can, but it feels kind of rude since I speak to Him so infrequently these days, years.

Years of working hard, investing in the ability to help the less fortunate in the future, tearful nights recognizing how my energy and talents could be so much better used in another context. And now what. Everything costs money. I have not found work, not beyond occasional small gigs.

After writing that, my mood is still sour, but buoyed by watching David Cross's new podcast (with guest Bob Odenkirk).

For the moment, I am able to make myself practice guitar regularly because I am still writing jokes that specifically incorporate the guitar.

Pilot Season?

True to form, I became frustrated with my writing of that screenplay, so I have pivoted back to writing standup. Part of my frustration grew from the fact that I had trouble suppressing my compulsion to add jokes and funny dialogue. In reading a little bit about Seinfeld, he admitted to having the same problem with his show, with figuring out plot and narrative arcs, but jumping at the dialogue and bits.

But now I am excited about getting to a tighter version of sets I have done before, in addition to one that I just started working on last night that I am trying to force into incorporating the guitar. Now I just have to, you know, get good enough at guitar to make it work.

That director I worked with last year got back to me to say that I got the part in his upcoming short film, and will be calling me up this weekend to confirm details.

My mom and I were talking about maybe sending me to LA for pilot season. Problems with this of course include the fact that I have no agent, I am cast in a feature film and an indie tv show, both of which are expected to film in Texas around the same time as pilot season, and that after this historic strike, I do not know if pilot season is falling into the same time period.

In any case, I plan to email my old manager again and maybe they will be more open to taking me on.