[…] It was so much easier to be protective of my Disordered web series project when it lived on my hard drive.  Now that it was interfacing with other people, all my inexperience felt wildly exposed along with it.  Imposter syndrome wreaked havoc with my ability to openly admit I was new to the film industry and there would be some definitive learning curves encountered.  Some people live by the “fake it till you make it” mentality.  But that part of my brain is clearly hardwired to another part that signals a little pee when publicly asked a question it doesn’t have an answer to.  I felt genuine guilt for ghosting well-meaning people, but all my anxious thinking had me convinced it was the only thing I could do.  Lest the world find out I was faking it, or worse: unfunny.

The project sat on a password-protected Vimeo page, with almost all the views coming from me or the few people I trusted to share it with.  Once completely edited and finalized, I entered the trailer into a few competitions, and it was shot down immediately.  Slowly, blunderingly, my dreams deferred. 

And time moved on.  I moved on. 

[…] I settled, both in the sense that I found a steady way to support myself and in that I stopped trying to make my dreams happen.  During much of my 30’s, I barely did any creative writing at all.  For several years, I channeled much of what I had to say into therapy sessions and tweeting.  

With time, I have accepted that my creative journey looks nothing like the clear-cut, well-lit, linear path I had hoped it would.  I needed to stop and reset for a while before regaining momentum and I acknowledge that could very well happen again.  I have accepted that the nirvana of creative self-expression, which I chased so fervently in my 20’s, might be more fleeting than I ever imagined.  I have accepted that creative self-expression is anything but linear–and it bucks uncontrollably, hysterically even at the idea that it should be.  I accepted that it is entirely possible to get lost on the path to self-discovery and that no, life would not be providing many overt roadmaps along the way, coming or going.  I also learned that, on the path to self-actualization, it helps to be hyper aware of the mini destinations we reach along the way as they may contain lessons far greater than would ever be expected.  Maybe, even, the journey is the destination, and the catch is accepting the parts of yourself you have already found.  

And I am proud that, through therapeutic intervention, I’ve accepted that entering my 40’s next year is not another death sentence.  Having a “checkered” past makes my creative journey still feel mysteriously open-ended, in a way that gives me hope and makes me want to keep pushing myself to create more.  

[…] I believe so strongly in the power of storytelling as a means to self-discovery.  The stories I started weaving together on my sofa in screenplay format back in 2010 essentially saved my life, at a point where reality and surreality blurred daily and I wanted zero parts of it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was actually finding out more about who I was through championing the fictitious characters I had created.  As unempowered as I felt and still often feel between the imposter syndrome, anxiety, depressive episodes, mania, etc., I now see I claimed a piece of my power in the pages of that initial Disordered script.

And while writing the web series and filming the trailer were both incredible technical learning experiences for me, the lesson I hold most closely to those experiences is to enjoy the journey:  My creative path isn’t meant to be linear, there are turns and dips and loops, and so I will embrace the scenic route I am being taken on and create for the sake of creating, not for the sake of getting to the next point faster[…]