Get Out

adventures in the swirly darkness

“Get out of there!” she shouted from across the gym. I snapped back to earth, unaware that I had drifted off to an elsewhere. We made eye contact and just laughed. It was synchronicity. My mind had slipped down into the swirly darkness. I didn’t even realized it happened. The suction and inertia  pulled me further into myself. She saw it though. Sonya sees pretty much everything. There I was in a nearly empty gym, sitting behind the desk having just coached my last class of the day, staring into the void. Those four words were like a lifeline pulling me to safety, away from myself.

I’ve been spending more time in the swirly place than I’d prefer the last few weeks. Life has been a disorienting combination of overwhelming and underwhelming. Apartment hunting and the ensuing applicant scrutiny have been a stressful and dominant theme. Managing debt and finances has left me feeling pathetically inadequate and fearful of the future. It’s like treading water and fighting to keep my nostrils above the surface. After a very long hiatus, I’ve started dating seriously again and every single emotion has been kicked up in my face. There have been some tears already. Earlier this month I paid for a professional evaluation of my pilot script (a $100 investment just be to able to submit to a competition) and the results were disappointing, maybe not a full punch to the gut but a quick jab to the neck certainly.

The underwhelm has been equally weighty. My acting career has left me hollowed out and uninspired. There are very few film and TV jobs right now because the industry is exceptionally slow (this piece from the Los Angeles Times paints an accurate portrait). This leaves commercials and, while I’m grateful to have those at least, one can only audition for the Georgia Lottery and PNC Bank so many times without getting a callback before going actually insane. It’s been 15 months since I’ve been on a set of any kind. My pilot, the thing I worked years on and spent tens of thousands of dollars on, feels dead in the water. If it even made it into water in the first place.

My multiple day jobs leave me with not enough to do, huge swathes of unstructured time, and tasks I could do in my sleep. I’m unchallenged, underutilized, and stuck. Even writing, that trusted source of purpose and inspiration, has felt stagnant. Book writing has been painfully slow. Even my weekly PDW posts are lacking. Swirl brain turns out to be a cumbersome obstacle for writer brain. My focus is shot, robbed by a million pixels snatching at my attention every single minute, and I can’t seem to access flow in just about any area of my life.

In order to jumpstart a tiny spark of creativity and release the pressure valve on this angst, I wrote some sad boy poetry the other day. I just wanted to get words down. Any words. Poetry is a low pressure medium for me because I’m not particularly experienced or knowledgable in it. It feels like finger painting with words. Not even macaroni art. What came out was half of a cringe-tastic poem that will never see the light of day. It was about getting older and the difference between 25 and 35. According to this poem being 25 was “explosive wonderment/Possibility stretching out as far as the eye could see/Life laid itself out like a tantalizing meal on the silverest platter.” While being 35 is more like "a funnel from what could be to what is/The echo of countless closed doors builds to a deafening roar.”

Like I said…cringe.

In spite of that, I do think there are kernels of truth in there. Being young is all about living in endless possibility. It should be. Getting older is a process of closing doors and having doors get closed. The idea being that behind those doors are different lives you’re not meant to be living. There’s grief in that even if the result is a net positive.

And that just might be the root of my swirl brain. It’s grief in disguise - grief of what is and grief of what isn’t. It’s getting older. And that’s okay. It could be all the Buddhist reading I’ve done (which is minimal but not nothing) but I think sadness is as neutral as happiness. They’re all the same. Sadness and pain can certainly teach us just as much, if not more, than happiness so long as we’re open to its lessons.

And the lesson for me the other day in the gym, as Sonya shouted at me to get out of my head, out of the swirl, was that darkness is meant to be felt. We’re meant to pass through it and grab what we need along the way. But it doesn’t make for a good sitting room. It’s not a great parlor or nook. It shouldn’t be a cozy den one snuggles up and stews in. But on the occasion you find yourself wrapped in a blanket steeping in the swirly darkness and picking at not-healed wounds, hopefully someone can break through enough to tell you to get out. Even if that person is you.