This is my first blog post in… [looks at the date on the post below] …literally three-and-a-half years. It’s a stream of consciousness ramble, so I apologize in advance if it seems a bit disjointed. Right now… I’m pretty disjointed myself.
I’m writing it to force myself to write SOMETHING; to expend mental energy on anything but despair. To remember that I’m a human with my own creativity and capabilities, and that my life cannot simply grind to a halt because my coping mechanisms are crumbling. And to remind myself that awful things in the world don’t need to change the fundamental nature of my contribution and, more importantly, that my contributions are not worthless.
I have been… absent, for quite some time. Absent from my blog, absent from my writing, absent from my creative pursuits. Much of that is due to some major life changes, primarily my wife and I uprooting our entire life to move to a small town near the ocean, but also my struggle two wrangle my mind and emotions into any sort of helpful configuration.
I am more mentally and emotionally stable than I was back in 2016… and have found that my mind wishes to give in to despair considerably easier now than it did back then. A feeling that frequently gets reinforced by, frankly, the way folks try to reassure each other in dark times. “Remember: There are things you can do!” they say, followed by a list of contributions and activities that I’ve found I have very little capacity to handle.
As much as some part of me may want to be… I am not an activist. And I understand that not being an activist is a privilege afforded to me by my race, gender, sexuality, and social and economic standing. I wholeheartedly acknowledge all of these privileges… but I also acknowledge my own fragility.
So what I’m trying to do, partially by writing this blog, but also through actions within my own life, is simply survive. And remind myself that my contributions must just take a different form than others. That when I barely have the emotional stability to drive myself to complete my own work, I have to concentrate on myself before I can help anyone else.
The sort of ubiquitous online narrative tends to be (at least from my perspective) “Take care of yourself. Then get to work fixing things.” And as much as I want to respond with a hearty “FUCK YEAH!”, I feel I’m going to be stuck in that “Take care of yourself” phase for longer than some folks would like. And, at the moment, all I can hope is that somewhere down the line something I make or film or write means a little something to someone.
But most of all, I have to internalize that that’s okay. I have to be content with what contributions I can actually offer to the world, and hope that when people say, “Even the smallest things matter”, they really mean it. I have to hope that what I’m capable of is… enough.
Because, in reality, the things I want to focus on – the things I HAVE to focus on for my own sanity – are split between taking care of my weird little family and my creative work. I know, intellectually, that art and creation are necessities even in – especially in – the bleakest of times. As someone who suffers the indignities of a saboteur brain, I find solace in art and writing and movies and games and all the creative works of the world.
But that same brain is the one telling me that my own contributions to the creative fields I’ve chosen don’t carry that same weight. That the only real contributions are ones that force me to give up my creativity to get my hands into the muck of trying to right a world turned upside-down, even if I’m sacrificing my own self-care in the process.
And that’s what I’m trying to reconcile within me. That’s why I’m writing these words. To understand myself just a little better, and to take one more baby step toward internalizing that even if I can’t handle being an activist or a politician, that the very nature of my personal creative work is intended to enrich someone else’s life. To internalize that my creativity lending to that enrichment IS my contribution.
And that my contributions matter.
