Author: Wil

I ran hard yesterday, and if a stupid cramp in my side hadn’t made me walk the last 800 or so meters, I would have done 5K in under 30 minutes. That’s probably not that big a deal for people who regularly run, but for a 44 year-old dude who spends most of his day sitting at a desk, it was pretty awesome.

So last night, I decided that I would sit in an epsom salt bath, to minimize the aches my legs would almost certainly be serving up today, on account of me being a middle-aged guy who ran really hard yesterday.

After soaking for about 30 minutes, I poured some of Anne’s bubbles into the tub, because bubbles. Then I sent her a picture of me, peeking up over the top of the bubble mountain, and I thought, hey, this is just like Space Madness…

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I have a private journal that I use to track stuff in my life. It really helps me maintain perspective and is super useful for those times my depression is a giant asshole about everything. Looking back over the last week and even a little bit farther, I see this pattern of feeling content, empowered, productive, and just generally happy.

I had a super productive week, and if I were grading myself just like I do at the end of the month, it’s A+ all the way across. I wrote almost 7000 words on a couple of different things, I ran nearly 5K four out of five days (and seem to have not only increased my endurance and improved my conditioning, but also reduced my recovery time!), I went out to a play last night, watched a bunch of Daredevil on Netflix (Anne and I are late to the party, but we’re 8 episodes in and loving it), a few classic (and terrible) movies, and I’m reading Cat’s Cradle every night. I’m finding inspiration all over the place, and I feel like I have found my way back to The Art, which is what I desperately needed to do. It’s been almost a year to the day that I realized exactly how distracted I was, and how far away I was from what I need to do, creatively, as an artist and as a person, to be happy and fulfilled. It’s taken a long time to get back here, and while I don’t regret any of the cool stuff I’ve been part of for the last couple years, I didn’t realize how much I missed being here until this week.

Yeah, I wrote a couple days ago about feeling frustrated in my on-camera acting career, (a big shoutout to everyone who minimized my feelings as ‘whining’! You’re neat!) but that’s one of those natural human emotions that people feel. The Internet can make me feel like I’m not allowed to feel frustrated or unhappy, because I have a really great life, but I remember talking to Chris Hardwick about how I was feeling really, really lousy about a whole bunch of things near the beginning of July, and he said to me, “You know, it’s okay to feel sad and frustrated from time to time, even when you’re generally happy and successful. That’s what being a person is about.”

My name is Wil, and I’m a person.

I was talking with a friend last night, who is a fantastically talented and successful actor. We are both in our 40s, and we can’t seem to get our careers — which were once exploding with work — back where we want them. We’re both having the same frustrations and hitting the same closed doors, even though he is way way way more successful than I am. During our conversation, I said, “I’ve been doing all this stuff for the last few years that is mostly transactional, or informational, instead of creative and artistic. I’ve had some great acting jobs, but none of them have translated into other acting opportunities.

“I love the stuff I’ve done online, and I’m super proud of Tabletop, but it isn’t artistically fulfilling. It isn’t creative like acting and writing is.”

He mentioned some big pictures that he had auditions for recently, and asked me if I’d read for them.

“Nope,” I said. “I couldn’t even get an audition. It’s really frustrating, and if I’m being honest, it’s depressing as fuck.”

We talked about creating projects that we can act in, and I had this epiphany. “I love acting, and I want to continue to be an on-camera actor, even if it’s just one last great job … but my heart is in writing, because I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to be a writer.”

I go back and forth between giving up entirely on having on-camera work, and focusing on writing and voice acting, and working as hard as I can to get back in front of the camera. or just isn’t interested in me, but I keep looking at people who did good work, seemed to disappear for awhile, and then came back to do even more good work. Somehow, I just have to convince the people who can give me permission to work in their movies to give me a chance.

But until that happens, I can keep writing, because nobody can tell me that I can’t do it.

I’m writing every day. I’ve pulled about 4000 words out of my brains this week, split between two different stories. They’ll both go into the short story collection that I’m writing, to be published later this year, and I don’t have to struggle to get permission to do that.

…I really want to do more on-camera acting work, though. I miss it. I wish there was some way to convince Hollywood to give me a chance, because everything I’ve been doing the last several years just isn’t working.