Still Searching for Something
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The past 3 weeks have been mad. On Monday I went for a walk after work, and as pathetic as it will sound, I’ll be honest here, it was really hard to get out of the flat and get present. To take out my headphones, set all the plans spinning in my mind aside, but not only that, overstimulation. My brain was so overstimulated that it felt really daunting to become present. I walked to the park, I sent two of my friends scatterbrained voice messages. The walking and talking let me arrive where I was. I stopped at a copper beech tree an put the phone in my pocket and just stared at it. Touched the droplets of water that had collected on its leaves. And I did take some photos with my phone, but it wasn’t distraction, it was focus.I have structured my week to have more space for my art, but this is the real price of 10 hour laptop work days. I end up wired, fried brain, and often I don’t leave the house in the evening.
I got my motivation back this May and I dove into so many things, checked stuff off my to-do list. All those things were good, but this past weekend I started feeling burnout creep in.
Not again, not again. Overloading myself is an old old pattern of mine. Even as a small kid I wanted to carry more than I could, crates of water bottles half my size.
On my walk I thought ‘I’m trying to overwork my way into a life where I don’t need to work that hard’ and the irony wasn’t lost on me.
- Live the way now that you want to live in the future, the future is only a reflection of today, or what my friend would say is that the energy you put out is the energy you attract. -
It’s my first night back in my own bed after a very full week, full of people, laughter, work, great conversations, silly moments, friends, baby, and acting.
I love my London visits, packed, intense, like a whirlwind. And at the end of them I always look forward to returning to Scotland.
I love when the landscape slowly turns more rugged and hills appear, fields have stone walls, and gorse lends its bright yellow accents to the landscape.
This was two weeks ago, returning from London where we had our annual work retreat, I recorded a self tape, brought my poetry book to the first London bookshop that will now sell it (yay, The People’s Letters in Bethnal Green!), met friends, and shot my new showreel scene.
That’s also when I came up with this headline, still searching for something.
I felt the drive of working towards something again and it was great, the facets of a vibrant life, filled with people and projects and ideas and travel.
Every now and again I feel 20s me shine through again, passionate, ambitious, driven.
I can stay up till 3am hand-making poetry books, get up the next morning to bring them to the Zine Fair and then head on to catch the train and visit my friend in Hebden.
I love her, and she brings her own kind of creative chaos. She bounces about from place to place and task to task, and that can be a lot, but I might have found a new strategy of going with it and once those tasks are all done, refocussing, making sure I put good new goals on my list and going all over the place with those.
I’ve always found a restrictive discipline hard, long term routines for longer projects. I wrote my first full length screenplay over a week in Barcelona. I would sit at a coffee shop all day, going over budget to keep buying food, and write write write.
And I’d edit it later. If I had tried to write this by sitting down day by day over months, that wouldn’t have worked for me I’m quite sure (as I’ve since tried it).
The most important thing is to stay fully alive, a vibrant life.
Ideas and writing spring from life. So do character insights for acting.
In this 3 week mania I did not show up here for the aforementioned attempted regularity of posts, but I return. Sometimes more, sometimes less frequently. Hopefully with a new snippet of thought.
Tomorrow I’m heading out to Iceland.
I’ve not managed to plan an itinerary, and at this point I don’t think I will. I used to travel this way all the time in my 20s. Book a return flight, know a rough route and go explore. It’s not the most relaxing way to travel, but it’s a very alive way to travel. It’s open to ideas that come on the go, recommendations, pauses and excursions.
// Siris
