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.
