Fish out of water (part 2)

When you’ve just been in a shelter and especially right after being abused and bullied in more ways than you can count there is this feeling like you don’t have a right to anything. You have to take what you are given or you feel like you have to because what else can you do? It is not the way you used to live, it is abject poverty, and it feels degrading physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Going through all that made me scared of what might happen when I die or can’t handle life anymore especially without proper social resources to deal with things. It could be like that, with all the bullying and all the degradation of my humanness, except even so much worse, and I can’t imagine how much worse.

I started reading Larry Moss’s The Intent to Live: Achieving Your True Potential as an Actor, which is wuite inspiring in how he talks about how music, dance, film, theatre and literature had become his lifeblood and salvation: “I was all feeling, all desire, but with no concrete way to express all this drama within me.” This was before he went to acting school. If I had to do it again maybe I’d go to acting school but… I feel too old, it feels like too much of an investment in time and energy at this point in my life… yet the yearning feels the same for me as it must for actors who find salvation in these arts. Maybe there are more grassroots places to study acting… and I can study voice and dance for sure. These are things that I can do when it feels like my brain is trying to kill me, find a way to focus on my love of these arts, in one way ir another. Yesterday it was only reading this book and taking notes on it to think about from a screenwriting perspective and I felt like if I stopped I would get so depressed, like thinking about these things is keeping me going, helping me process rhe loneliness and all the painful feelings at least a bit, as I vaguely consider what stories I’d like to tell. it feels really helpful. How do I integrate all these interests of mine in a way that feels good and… integrated… though… and how do I spend more time with other artists?

I’ve been reading Robert McKee’s Story which is good but a bit dense at times as in way more information in certain areas than anscreenwriter who is just beginning might need. I think I’m just going to start writing dislogue, scenes, not really concerned about where it might fit in but just starting with something and seeing where the pieces eventually fit together. I’ve got the dictionary of action which is more for actors to help them make decisions on what action/intention they want to play over a script but I think writing screenplay dialogue with what actions the characters are taking with the dialogue will help deepen the dialogue and help me come up with dialogue ideas and and hopefully make it more readable and exciting for actors too, but we are a long way from anywhere at this point.

I am simply doing what feels like it will help me not lose my mind and I don’t know if it will work. Maybe it will backfire. And I need to find space to listen to other stories and be moved by them which is not coming easily right now.

I suggest to my host I could get $2500 for a transcription job and he says he’d still like me to go out and look for some kind of brick and mortar job. Go out and search for 20 hours a week if I have to, he said today. Such a search, honestly, would be basically futile, and if I have 20 hours imagine how many leads I could come up with in that time, as opposed to just looking for a job with career potential like I care about that but he doesn’t know me. If I’m able to pay him and do not become a dependent on him then is it his business to tell me, you might have this income, but I want you to go out and do this other really draining thing, too. He thinks getting a job will lift me back on my feet. It won’t though, it would most likely do nothing but hold me back, and take away the energy I need to build my life. I am trying not to feel like there is something wrong with me for being this way but it is like, I am just out of a shelter so peoe feel like they can tell me what I need to do even if it won’t be helpful and it makes no difference as far as the money they’re getting from me. Tell me what you want from me financially and tell me when you want me to move out and let me decide what to do with my own life, please. I am sure he doesn’t mean it but he has no idea that these things are not helpful to me. I feel like something must be weong with me that I can’t come out of this dilemma in this way. Like for so many reasons I am sooo gulnerable in a vulnerable situation because I am not a cookie cutter shape. I will pay him what I need to pay him and move out when he wants me to; or rather, when I want to, but to tell me he’d prefer I get another job even with perfectly adequate transceiption income coming in? Maybe it is not intentional but that feels too controlling of my life, and if I am paying him for rent and everything (he only asks $300 a month and this week he’s given me almost $100 of work to so at his place), why can’t I use my time i. a way that best serves me? It does hurt when someone says, get a job, rather than, invest in your business! It is like people think jobs are more reliable with upward mobility and career potential and all that… but they are not, not if you are me, and I am such a sad fish out of water. Is something wrong with me? If I have no choice I’ll do what I have to so but trust me to be able to make basic life decisions, please. He’ll get his money and has no need to worry but I really really do not need a job and that will not make me any more secure… it’ll just make me want to run away all the sooner.

That same wound was rubbed a little bit later when I called my mother and she said money that comes to me is supposed to support me to live, and I’m like, spending every bit of it every month on an apartment when I have no friends around that I’m excited to be around and have no idea what I want to do with my life is not living. And traveling is not wasting money: it is being frugal, there are plenty of places I can live for amazingly cheap, and places where I can feel alive, where I can live by the beach. That is living, and if I live that way for six months in Latin America (taking dancing lessons I’m sure?), the money that I save while I am there will give me more options as far as what to do when I am ready to leave Latin America. Not less. If I waste money now on an apartment, what do I get but a place to rest my head, no extra savings month by month, and fewer options down the line, not more. So it is like I am fighting against these other perspectives about how I am supposed to live my life and I just so wish someone saw me and could affirm that I am okay and the way I choose to do things is just fine… or at least better than everybody else’s ideas for me, though I could still use some major coaching from someone who understands me and that I don’t work the way everybody else seems to…

Maybe I am just not meant to do it everybody else’s way, and I am tired of the resistance to me doing my own thing… which works out better, because I know my own life…