soothes the soul and calms the pain
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.
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Loving this clarity!
Not allowed? Sure you are!!! People who read about your awesome self and respect you will give you the same response we'd give our friends. No matter how you feel right now, you'll feel different in a while. And we will try to help you get past the bad stuff that helps you enjoy the good stuff more :) and encourage you to stay where you feel good! With a side helping of "you can do it" when you need to leave your comfort zone. And, you CAN do it! Are you pushing at your the barriers on your comfort zone for your acting? If not, give it a shot when you are ready to be more committed to it. Just try please, to avoid stretching yourself to thin. I would hate to see you lose the great personal progress you've made! But you know you can do it any time you choose if you must give up your current routines to get an acting job done. I hope I get to see your next acting film!!! Thanks for being a geek :) you feed my inner geek good food!
Thank you for sharing -- makes a difference for all of us who feel cruddy even though things are generally going well. I'm in the middle of a career transition, and though it's going well, I spend many days saying "I suck!" because things aren't coming together as fast as I'd like sometimes. So, yes, absolutely, you're allowed to feel sad, even while appreciating all the great things going on in your life. That's what being a person and an adult is about.
You are awesome! Sorry to hear that some people called it whining. You are allowed to vent :)
Sounds like you're keeping busy being awesome and creating awesome. I've found that's the best way to feel awesome. Well done.
I'm not very good at giving myself space to be frustrated. This extends to those around me. I try to be Mr. Positive all the time. While I have generally considered this a strength in my life, this article definitely gives me some pause. I know that I tend to bottle up a lot and it definitely is not always to my advantage. I also know that it creates a space between me and those I love, especially when I discourage them from voicing their frustrations. Thanks Wil!
Read your blog a number of times now, and my mind keeps coming back to the first paragraph where you describe the rollercoaster ride you have with your emotions. It reminds me of something that happened to me about ten years ago. Although I only began publishing about three years ago I have been writing for nearer twenty. Never believing my work was good enough to publish, I just shoved it in a cupboard. A few I had typed up, and printed out into a large binder. A friend asked to read some of my work one day, and after an argument I relented. A few weeks later he almost took me by the throat. I had never seen him so angry, before or since. He accused me of using an event in his life, within my story. What he never realised at the time was, I had actually completed that novel five years before I met him. He took some convincing of the matter, I even had to show him the date the pages were first scanned into a computer and the file created. Of course I had been describing a dark part in my own life. I used that as a base for that part of the story, and blended in a few others I had heard along the way. It took him a while to truly grasp that, neither did he talk to me for about six months either. Now he is, a friend, one of my biggest fans, and also a great critique of my work; whom I listen intently to.
I got a number of things from that fateful day. It was the first time anyone had ever referred to me as a writer. It was the first time in my life I ever thought of myself as a writer. It was the first time my work had ever elicited an emotional response from someone, and the first time I ever felt that buzz.
Why am I writing this? You described your depression as a giant asshole. I took one of the bleakest moments in my life and turned it into a raging 18 stone mass of whoopass that almost did a dance of ‘die you bastard’ on my head. I still get a buzz when I think of that day, even if he had kicked the shit out of me, I would still get a buzz.
There are a lot of cliché’s out there’ ‘We are the sum of all our parts.’ ‘Every true artist has to suffer for their art’ and all that kind of crap. I found a way of turning a lot the bad shit I have been through in my life, into something positive. Don’t be frightened of the dark days, one day you may well find a way of turning them into light.
You are a person Wil Wheaton, have a nice day.
