The Post Where My Brain Explodes

So- I just wrote an email to a friend, trying to give him an update on my life here. What resulted was a mess of internal dialogue with myself, more of a venting process than a true "update," or a stream-of-consciousness update, or something like that. One of the things that I spilled out in this email was, "I think I'm getting tangled up in my safety nets." Which is exactly what I'm doing. I'm completely and utterly overwhelmed by my day jobs. By my four day jobs. I wake up and spend at least half of my day brainstorming ways to sell more copies at the copy shop where I work, often sneaking away to write emails to the producer of the promo video that I'm managing for the scholarship program on the east coast that I work for, and I feel guilty for taking days off from the print shop to travel to places like San Diego and Idaho to do high school recruitment, also for the scholarship program. On the East Coast. And all the while, I've been trying to "start my own tutoring business," which has fallen by the wayside as I've been trying to make a good impression at the print shop, because it's my most consistent paycheck and trying to keep up with my scholarship jobs because I have a personal connection there and a desire to please.

So, my initial financial safety net plan, the tutoring, is being pushed aside by my second safety net, the print job, which is being jeopardized by my first safety net, the scholarship work.
And then sometimes I'll run into people who are acting or writing, and I'll look at them like their from this foreign world and say something like, "Man, I wish I could do that."
Wait-- is that not why I drove my car 3,000 miles through Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and some other states I'm forgetting? I wake up feeling old, I get in my car and drive to a job where I'm surrounded by people who have resigned themselves to their lives, who have been doing the same thing for 10 to 40 years, and I try to relate to them, but I feel like I'm suffocating.

For my print job, I've been interviewing all of the employees to write bios of them for our website. Nobody pretends to be excited. Everyone has a couple of hobbies, and goes to work for the paycheck. And here I am, totally wracked with anxiety, trying to extract "fun memories" my boss has had in the past 40 years that she's had this job, and she can't think of anything, nobody can think of anything. I'm working in a time warp, trying desperately to move forward, but I'm in my own timewarp that I've created. I can't let go of anything. I can't let go of my old job from last year, which was an extension of my college scholarship, which was in some ways an extension of my over-achieving high school identity. My life is a cluttered apartment of ceramic cats that I bought at gas stations and pictures drawn by children only vaguely related to me. Nothing goes. I managed to leave a lot of my favorite clothing behind during my trek to the West Coast, but I was unable to leave any of my jobs, any of my anxious attachments, any of the classes that I took or the desires I had behind. I crave expulsion, just to purge myself of so much of this heavy, banal, cargo. I guess this is what people mean by baggage, huh? But it's not so much baggage as it is junk. Junk stuffed into the same bag, until the zipper breaks and you're dragging a half-empty suitcase around the airport, and you're always nervous about losing something when you roll over a bump, leaving something in the overhead compartment.

I feel like I'm slowly going crazy. I feel like I'm forcing myself further into irrelevance. I feel like I'm living in a pocket of Kansas in the middle of the most industry-saturated city in the world. I feel like an aspiring writing tutor in the middle of a city of actors. I feel incredibly isolated, like I'm running out of my potential, like I'm turning into every character that Philip Seymour Hoffman has played in recent distopic movies.

By the way-- I'm not even succeeding at being a writing tutor. I've missed my window-- the first round of college applications is over. I've worked on a couple of people's essays, contacted a couple of counselors, and I have contacts hanging in the wind now, waiting for me to fulfill them. I'm not in any way putting even 50 percent of my time into "building this business." I'm putting more than 50% of my time into the job that I told myself was the least important thing I'm doing here. And I spend more than 50% of my copious anxious energy worrying about doing insufficiently in that job.

I suppose the thing to do would be to quit that job. Of course, I'm nervous that I won't get another one that pays that well. I'm nervous that the tutoring won't pan out enough to pay my rent, and I won't get the print job back when I go broke and need it. I'm nervous that I don't know where to start with this acting thing, because that's the truth also:
I have NO idea what I'm doing.

I met with an agent a couple of weeks ago, and she told me that I literally wasn't in Los Angeles yet. Until I had my look down, until I knew how to sell myself, knew what I wanted, I wasn't even here. I took that to heart. So now I live nowhere. I'm not here. I'm not in LA. I'm in North Carolina, I'm in my room that I rent, I'm in the print shop where I work, I'm in the living room of one of the two students that I tutor. Those are safe places. Those are places where I'm not afraid to fail because I didn't risk anything to get here. I care a lot about what happens when I arrive in LA. And I've literally driven across the entire country, and I'm STILL putting it off.

And so we return to the beginning- I'm all tangled up in the many safety nets that I've laid for myself. I should have known this would happen.

I'll keep writing as I cut the strings.

Until next time,
The Kvetching Queen
*(Who, existential angst aside, is THRILLED to be part of this country while we move forward with a president that I am SO proud to be associated with.)