I want to write more. I want to watch more. I want to write about what I watch more. I also work a full-time job, and by full-time, I mean thirteen hours, including showering and my commute. That leaves me with eleven hours to do with whatever I please, right? Except I have a wife and two kids. And since I’m usually gone before they wake up and the kids have a bedtime, I see them for about an hour a day. Add on the obligatory six to eight hours of sleep a night, and I’m averaging around three hours a day to do with what I please. And after working all day at a computer, it’s tough to plop down in front of another screen and watch something or write something. After being creative at work all day, it’s hard to spin groundbreaking sentences when I put my fingers to the keyboard.
But that brings up another problem I face and have faced most of my life. As a kid, when I sat down to write something, whether it be for school or just for fun, the blank page intimidated me. For whatever reason, I felt like whatever got printed onto that paper had to be gold right out of the gate. I would buy these elegant notepads and barely touch them because I wanted whatever I wrote to be worth something. In those moments, my distinct voice was getting further and further out of reach. Then I got interested in film, bought a laptop, and it felt natural to write about what I watched. At the time, I had just moved to Los Angeles, and it was exciting. I would see every movie that came out in theaters because I had Moviepass (before it became a huge deal) and no obligations at the time (no wife or kids yet). I did more writing in four years than I did the previous twenty-five years of my life. And it felt good. Looking back at most of what I wrote back then, it wasn’t great, but at least I was recording my thoughts.
Then kids came, work got harder, and eventually, I just quit writing. I squeak out a thought piece on a movie every once and a while when something strikes me. But that lightning doesn’t hit nearly as much as I’d like it to and it’s because I’m not writing all the time.
There’s also this internal dialogue that is continually asking me why I think the world needs another opinion and why I think my voice deserves to be raised higher than someone else’s. This dialogue stopped me from following a music career back when that was important to me because I wondered what made me different from anyone else? Why would people want to listen to me? What about my music or singing or writing would stand apart from the millions who had come before me? If I couldn’t be the best, then I would wonder what the point was. And that’s sad.
There’s plenty of people in the world making a living who aren’t the best. Everyone has to start somewhere and even “the best” had a point in their lives where they wrote stream of consciousness posts pondering why they do what they do. No more will I let that blank page and blinking cursor and ticking clock stop me from finding my voice even if it has to come from blog posts like this one.
