In Limbo

Currently feeling like I am standing on a cliff deciding whether to turn around or jump off.

In a good way.

I’m going to borrow a phrase one of my college friends said to me the other day. We were catching up (both our lives had changed a ton since we last saw each other) and she said “If you asked how I am, all I can say is I’m fucking weird. It’s weird right now.”

I am fucking weird right now.

I still don’t have a job or any prospects. I haven’t been hard core looking in the past week but after two weird interviews, I feel discouraged but also I’m doing great? It’s all very confusing. There’s an energy shift happening within me that is fresh and invigorating.

I am actually really happy in spite of it all. My second draft is several paragraphs away from the official ending (though I already plan to change it). I’m getting headshots done for the first time in years on Tuesday. The excitement of both is propelling forward with a lot of chaotic energy that I am not entirely in control of. I am standing on the cliff, vibrating with anticipation and waiting for a sign of what to do but part me just wants to jump and see what happens.

It feels like being in limbo.

New, crisp, pretty headshots will help with submissions and auditioning. While I am not relying on them to be a band aid for my acting muscle which is slightly atrophied at professional auditioning, I know there will be a confidence boost to walk in with a picture of what my face looks like now. I’m slowly spreading my desire to be more involved and act again. I am also realizing many people didn’t realize I HADN’T been acting actively for a minute and that is comforting in a way. I keep mentioning I am getting back into acting to no reaction and when I expressed that to my husband saying “I don’t get why no one is excited for me!”, he sighed heavily as he always does in my moments of childish whining (bless him) and replied “Because I don’t think anyone knows you stopped.” It isn’t that I quit; I merely took a step back for the first year we were back in the city. And he is probably right; no one even noticed because I am not the center of the universe, much to my dismay.

I let my father and husband read my novel draft. I hate it and I love it. I can’t wait to hear what they think but I am also dreading it. It is a complicated place to be.

So, here I am, on a cliff, waiting for a few things to kick into gear. I’m doing all the things I love and yet I know I have to find a job to sustain all the things I love and part of me hates that. I feel guilty that I hate that necessary evil and I worry I’ll make the wrong choice and loose all the things I love again. I also know I have to have a job right now because nothing I am doing of the things I love makes me enough money to live.

So, therefore, I am fucking weird. What do I want to do? Where do I want my career to go? My therapist asks me what it is I see my career looking like if it could be anything and I kind of froze. I have so many ideas and dreams of what it could look like. My answer in the end after some thought was that I would like to live on the things I love. I’d like my creative endeavors to sustain my life in whatever form that is.

There’s a lot happening and not a ton happening because it can’t happen yet. I can not make time move faster so that I have headshots and can hit the ground running as I’d like to. I can’t make the perfect job appear and have me nail the interview and be happy forever. I may be witchy but I am not that powerful.

I am not good at having patience and this is an extreme lesson in it. I feel I am working hard and not working at all. It is all back and forth and I feel I am being tugged in every direction possible. I love it and I hate it all at once.

It can be very frustrating to pursue a creative life in a million different ways. Currently, for me, it is that all my hard work has not produced a result where I can say “LOOK! I DID IT! See! It all worked out and paid off and now I have this thing to show you all!” It’s a strange place to be, this limbo. In between everything and anything, waiting for something to stick or to make a choice and see where it goes.

Here’s to being weird. We are all doing our best in a world that is quite literally being infected with a virus during an election year while the planet slowly dies. However, as the stories say, there is always hope. We will make wrong choices and we will make right ones. For now, I’m standing on a cliff waiting to see what happens when I make my own choice, to jump or fly.