This has been sort of a weird week for me. Friday would have been my mom’s 79th birthday and for the past 14 years, not a day has gone by that I don’t think about her. Sometimes only a little, other times, I think about her a lot. I miss our Sunday brunches at Molly’s, though Molly sold the place years ago. I miss her smile, which I can no longer remember without looking at a photograph. Mostly, I miss her optimism and her goodness. I miss her advice and her belief in me and her unwavering faith in something greater than all of us that allowed her to see that people were basically good if we could just get out of our own ways and accept one another for the brilliant beings that she believed us to be. I need that right now.
If you play video games or maybe have a child who does, you’ve probably heard the term “open world game.” Think of games like Grand Theft Auto, Skyrim, or the latest Zelda games. The premise is fairly simple: there’s a game world that you are dropped into and although there’s a main storyline, there are dozens or sometimes hundreds of side quests that you can follow without ever even touching the main story. As a gamer myself, open world games are and have always been my least favorite kind of game. I’ve played a bunch of them over the years but rarely if ever do I finish them because the sheer number of choices, especially in modern open world games, creates too much anxiety for me. For example, I love westerns, so when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out I knew I wanted to play it. But the game is so enormous and there are so many things to do that I wind up riding my horse around the map for hours looking at the environments, ignoring the side quests and the main mission because I just can’t decide what to do.
In many ways, my life has become like an open world game in which I feel like I’ve lost the main story and have instead spent 20-odd years just doing side quests that don’t really do much to advance the main narrative of my life. And to be clear, the side quests are important. The side quests are how you build up your character with new skills, new items, and more experience, so that you can make it through the harder levels in the game. But if all you do are side quests, you run the risk of missing out on the main story. I think that’s what happened to me.
Let me back up for a minute. Most of the skills I have started with me being curious and many of the things that I got really good at is because I loved doing them and kept doing them, regardless of whether or not money was involved. Or it was because I had to. I’ve gotten several jobs on the back of saying that I could do whatever it was that they were looking for. For example, when I got hired as a prop person and a milliner at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, I only had one summer of actual work experience under my belt. I went from being a technical theatre student at Cal State Long Beach to a Prop Master for the Summer season at Texas Shakespeare Festival. I worked my ass off and when the interviewer for ASF asked whether I knew how to do x, y, and z, I said absolutely, not because I had, but because I knew that I could. And I did. And for the next 15 or so years I kept learning—expanding and refining my skillset—sometimes on the job, but often on my own.
When my mom died in 2009, I shut down for about a year. I stopped doing client work and I rarely left the house. It was by far the darkest period in my life. I had lost not only my best friend but my biggest supporter. Without any real structure or urgency to do anything, one year became two, two became three, and about the time I started coming back to life and taking on new projects, my dad died, and in some ways, the cycle started all over again. Part of my “why” up to that point was still to live up to my mom’s belief in me and to prove to my dad that I had value and that it was okay that my path was different than his. When I lost them, that part of my why disappeared. I was doing On Taking Pictures and the occasional client job, but none of what I was doing felt like it had any real purpose or direction. I was in motion, but I wasn’t really going anywhere, if that makes sense.
Fast forward to today and I think one of my biggest challenges is the feeling that I’ve lost track of what the main story of my life is. Part of what I’m missing now is that structure of a job or a client that provided bumpers or guardrails where I could learn and play and accomplish. And if I did it well, I got rewards and recognition, either money or praise or both. I haven’t had a “real job” as the context for learning new skills or refining existing ones since about 2004. I’ve chosen to learn new things, but there’s been no real structure to speak of.
So what now? Where do I put the bow to wrap all of this up? Honestly, I don’t know. I sometimes think the structure of a job might be good again, but I’ve been terrible about keeping any evidence of the work that I’ve done and nobody is just going to take me at my word. And honestly, I can’t blame them. Maybe not a job per se, but some sort of collaboration where there are expectations put on me by someone other than me. I’ve started thinking about what building a new portfolio might look like. I’ve even been diving back into 3D to help realize some of the things I have and continue to design, not because I think that they’ll lead somewhere—although they could—but just because I want to see them as something other than sketches in my notebook. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get a 3D printer. I think reflecting on what my why is now will allow me to start writing a new narrative. I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet, but I do know that I want to serve something bigger and I can’t get there continuing to just do side quests.
Thanks so much for reading.
QUESTIONS
Are you living the main story in your life?
Hit reply or leave me a message in the comments.
I totally get that. The urge to serve something bigger as you call it. Before I became an artist I was a social worker. A job where you have a purpose. You help people, your work is important and needed. At least it feels that way. Being an artist I sometimes miss the feeling of being needed and having an impact on people and society. Yes, I know art is important for our culture and society, but it is on a less obvious level. Especially during the pandemic the feeling of not being helpful to society was very real.
I said it before, I really enjoy your iterations. They are honest, deep and personal, but they also make you think about your own situation. Whatever you decide to change in your life, I hope you keep doing these iterations.
To continue the analogy, I think a lot of us don't have a main storyline. We have about 7 games going on at one time, each with their own storylines: the Career game, the Family game, the Life Experiences game, etc. And these games get serious overhauls with new DLC every 7 years or so. It's all a bit too much to contextualize from only one perspective.
There's so much to juggle in each game, new DLC to adapt to, that we can only do what we can do. My only question for myself is, am I neglecting any of these games, or am I at least chipping away on getting better so I can level up? That way, there's less pressure to follow any one narrative because they're all important in their own way.