Burdens

If you have been reading this, I have been one poor correspondent. Thanks to that handy dandy comments feature I have contributed much more to other people's blogs than to my own lately. Isn't it always easier to analyze and deal with other people's difficulties?

This entry on a sorrow-filled blog written by what appears to be a lovely woman with a smile that can warm an Arctic afternoon prompted me to comment:

How good did it feel to write all that stuff down and get it out of your head? I mean, it's still in your head but it's not stuck there, you know? You splayed it all out there in front of you where you can look at it, piece through it and try to make some sense of it, crazy and inexplicable as it may be.

Burdens you can unload, even if it's anonymously on the Internet, are ones you don't have to carry alone.

Of course this blog is not anonymous (except for the fact that almost no one knows it exists) and that makes me hesitant to write more honestly (or at least in more detail) about things that trouble me even as I sit amazed by how much personal detail some people will share writing in their own names.

But I should use this space more -- more often, more effectively and more frankly -- to help me sort out all the stuff that spins inside my head sometimes. You're welcome to help. I did some unbundling in a letter to a friend recently. I have felt depressed lately, which is not exactly foreign territory for me but it's never been anything some good news or a smile from a pretty girl has failed to cure.

She asked if I missed my former career as a full-time news reporter.

As I wrote to her, I don't miss news too much. I like the storytelling and the performing aspects of it and some of that I get to do with the freelance work I still do, though I wish it were more regular. I just sent in a couple of stories to a show I contribute to. In one I screwed up when I shot my standup and it turned out with no audio. Oops. So when I edited the piece, I re-recorded the audio lip-synching the words until I matched them. It took a few more takes than I thought it would but you CANNOT tell that I dubbed the audio in. That was fun.

Ideally, though, I'd work a regular job where the boss was flexible and freelance the TV stuff on the side. We'll see if the job I recently started will qualify. My best times in TV have always been when I've freelanced. You don't get involved in the politics of the newsroom and you never have to worry about whether the managment likes you. If they call to ask you to work, you know you're doing well enough. That's all I need.

But I also need to get into my own place. I need to meet people and build a circle of friends here. I know a few people from when I worked here the first time but it's hard for me to pop back into their lives these years later and expect them to make room for me. And, someday, as much as I appreciate my cat's company, I need to cuddle with a female human.

For more than a year now I've mostly been treading water. I haven't been aiming at anything and, thus, I haven't been reaching toward anything. I need to sit down, set some goals, then get off my rear end and go for them.

It's not TV I miss as much as having a career that impassioned me, challenged me and, if I may say so, was something that I was good at. Still am, actually.

It frustrates me too that I have so much going for me in many ways but I can't seem to figure out how to put it all together. I'm not loaded but I'll be able to pay cash for my house whenever they finally finish the thing. I'm not GQ gorgeous but I'm no flabby scuzzball, either. I'm occasionally witty and charming, usually reasonably intelligent. I can even play a little piano and guitar.

I've got to figure out how to surround myself with achievers whose lives I can enrich as they enrich mine.

If you have ideas, send them on!