I have this week off for Passover. The whole week. Add last Friday, that's a whole ten days off work. Ten! An aspiring writer like myself should be thrilled to have this much free time. I would say I mostly am. But I'm also terrified. I've been in this situation before. I've actually written about this situation before (See: "Perfect Week." And the next post: "Perfect Week? No such thing.")
I know how it feels to drop the ball with this sort of potential. It's a crappy feeling. A lot of the time it'll happen because I think too big. If I take two minutes to dream about the possibilities I suddenly have 40,000 YouTube subscribers, 35 agents fighting over me and a Netflix special. This is all in my head, of course. In reality, forty extra hours to work on my craft is amazing and terrifying and everything and nothing. There's no guide here. All I have to go off is my own experience, which is jack shit. That's not true, exactly. I've gotten in a groove before. But now is different. Because it's now.
What the hell is this rambling, you might ask? It's exactly what I'm up against. This upcoming week is free form, it's improvised, it's a magnificent void. It's what I've been hoping to create as my life, really. I want to have the whole day to have to myself, to wrap myself in a cocoon of half-baked ideas and tolerable anxiety until I've created something that people may or may not like. Side note: This is a terrible pitch to be an artist.
I've taken a vow to stop telling people what projects I'm working on until it's done. So far, it's so-so by far. I will say that I have tons of ideas, but very few actual project ideas. I have a few in the works. I might need to finish those before moving on to other things. "Obviously!" Everyone reading this says at the same time. I say it to myself too. But I feel like I need to move forward with everything simultaneously.
Do I come off as a mess yet? I probably should. I don't want to come off like I'm miserable, or lost, or like I'm spiraling. In reality I'm having a pretty solid day. But nothing will fill this time-void perfectly. I can say without a doubt that I will never use my time perfectly ever for the rest of my life. Still feels pessimistic, huh? I'm really not trying to go there. It's just a technicality that makes me feel better. Nobody is perfect, nobody can be perfect, and nothing ever will be perfect. Read that again and take a deep breath. It makes me feel good. It might send you into a panic.
I probably should have set a thesis for this post. Or at least a tone. None of that, no, I don't care if anyone likes this. The reality is, I have a lot more free time this week and I'm trying to use it wisely. I want to look back on Sunday night and feel like I did a lot. Not that I was perfect. But that I used my time off in a way that fast forwarded my progress. I feel like I'm playing Mario kart and I have a golden mushroom this week instead of a red one. I can use that golden sucker as many times as I want, and get a speed boost every time. Or I can use it twice, get complacent, and eventually have it disappear while I'm still in 3rd. I lost my older audience. Sorry Mom. And sorry again for saying you're part of my older audience.
I'm not going to say that I'm gonna write in this blog a lot this week, (See: two paragraphs before) but I feel like I'll end up doing just that. Who knows, I enjoy this a lot, maybe I can start considering this whole thing as a possible side-gig. God, there really is no thesis to this. I gotta start doing those.
Thanks for hanging in there if you kept on reading. If you're a fan of these posts, send me 500 dollars a week and I can start doing them full time. Otherwise, you're dead to me.
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