The Black Laser

I’ve been feeling stuck. Professionally, emotionally, creatively stuck.

There are many factors.

I don’t love where we live and having moved here in the height of COVID while working from home and then having a couple sets of children, I’ve never developed a community or social life to speak of. We have no local family, which means no local relief. Down state, where we were living for the first few years, the area clears out in the colder months, leaving row after row of darkened vacation properties and empty developments with no one to talk to save the committee of turkey vultures holding court on a half-filled dumpster.

We’ve since moved upstate about halfway to a town that doesn’t empty out when beach season ends, yet I find myself in a similar situation. I spend the days at home working (or not). Then my afternoons and evenings are devoted to the children because Sarah works dinner shifts. Saturdays are likewise spent solo parenting with the children. Sundays in the offseason are time for all of us to spend together. The time to be social is blocked off. And even if I had time, I have no idea with whom to be social around here. There’s a bowling alley, but that’s not really my tempo.

So, no friends around.

Work has been incredibly spotty and unreliable. After I laid myself off from the greenhouse business in June of 2022, I went back to freelance video editing. It hasn’t been so easy as that, though. I allowed the network I’d been part of for so long to dwindle over five years of greenhouse building. Re-entering the workforce as a remote-only editor from the glorious land of Delaware made it difficult to reintroduce myself. In the years of my absence, the industry shifted toward further corporate consolidation and cost cutting, limiting opportunities for freelance work. Even edit houses I once considered stalwarts were struggling to keep the lights on. To further complicate the issue, my availability was limited with my dad responsibilities. And there just isn’t work locally. The closest hit I got was about a job to edit real estate videos for like 15 dollars an hour, which wouldn’t pay for the childcare required to do the job. Bleak!

It has been picking up a bit, year after year, but the volume of work—and the income—has not yet reached a sustainable level. I am forever grateful that my wife has a good, stable job, and that she doesn’t mind carrying the household finances for awhile. I’ve applied to too many jobs on LinkedIn and other places only to be lost in the sea of résumés.

So, insufficient work.

I feel a lot of emotional burnout. Three small children—4, 4, and 2—are a lot of work. A lot of emotional labor. I try very hard to be a levelheaded, authoritative, communicative parent. I want my children to feel safe asking me for help. I want them to feel safe asking me hard questions. I want them to feel safe engaging with me and the family and the household. These may seem like sort of unimportant things for such little kids, but laying that groundwork now is critical for when they are older and their problems are bigger, more complicated, more serious.

All of that, though, requires a whole lot of mental and emotional bandwidth when your primary interactions are with little people who have a lot of really big feelings and really big ideas without the tools to manage them. So, the onus falls on me, as the parent in the room, to help them process and resolve, but also to make sure that meals are on the table and baths are taken and clothes are clean and relative peace is maintained, no matter who originally started playing with the unicorn blanket. That’s exhausting! And the incessant whining and complaining? It takes a Herculean amount of control (that I don’t always possess) not to flip my lid. And sometimes I do, but I pride myself on rallying quickly and not letting myself spiral out of control.

By the end of the day, I am totally worn out. I barely have the energy to make dinner for myself. My capacity to engage in anything else is spent. There is no break from it, either. It’s day after day after day, with some brief moments of quiet scattered throughout. But there isn’t enough time to recover. There isn’t enough outside-the-nuclear-family connection to vent adequately. There is no recharge.

This is not to say that my wife is absent or anything; she’s not. She is an active, committed parent, and we make a strong team. I feel supported by her. I mean only to describe my experience when I am alone managing children who lose their absolute shit when I’ve had the audacity to sprinkle some salt on their avocado.

So, real deal burnout.

The grand effect of all this is that I don’t make anything for myself anymore. I make things for what little work I can scrounge up. I make dinner for the brood. I try to stay on top of the house’s chores. But the creative generation that makes me feel like myself isn’t present. I don’t write. I barely voice over. I don’t make. That makes me feel bad. Lost.

When I do have windows of creative juice, I overvalue the time because of its rarity, get stuck figuring out what to spend it on, and then just squander it, producing nothing. I’ve written about this before. It’s a stupid cycle, but it’s also meant that in the last many many years I’ve made very little that fills my cup.

None of this is to complain, though. I am not complaining. I am just explaining the funk I’ve found myself in these last years. I am laying the groundwork so we are all on the same aggravated page.

I’ve had a client for the last few years who has had me on retainer. The retainer was not nearly enough for the work I put in or for what I brought to the table with my skill level, but it was consistent money and sometimes the only money I saw for months and months. I felt beholden to them, but I also hated the work. They were difficult to work with (with a few bright lights). The work itself was poor, repetitive, and ineffective. I did good work for them, but the quality of the output can only be so great when the quality of the media provided as input is low. How do you edit video for someone for years and not produce a single piece you would put on a showreel? Not a single piece. I’ve cut everything for them.

This summer, I started seeing videos show up on their Youtube account that I didn’t put my hands on. That was a little distressing, but could be chalked up to their sourcing the videos elsewhere or whatever. Organization and metrics and thoroughness were never the group’s strength. Three weeks ago I saw they had someone else cut a video recap of their annual fundraising event, a video which I’ve cut yearly since 2020.

That hit me at exactly the wrong time. I fell into a complete panic about this little piece of income I’d been holding onto as the only consistently earning part of my professional life drying up. For a few days I was in a hole about it. Spun out. Just bad. Big bad. Woof.

But the work for them continued, and I kept plugging away, doing my best to meet my responsibilities to them. Then one of the ladies in charge emailed me. They had their budget meeting with the board coming up the next week and would I mind getting on the phone with them. Of course, I wrote, no problem, just let me know what time you want to talk and I’ll be there. There were thankful, and we set up a time. I didn’t worry too much about it.

The call went exactly like I thought it would. Oh thank you for all your hard work, we love the movies you made for us, you have been such an important part of the team, we couldn’t do it without you, blah blah blah, but donations are down and the money isn’t there and we need to cut costs and we cannot afford to have you on retainer anymore.

There it was.

Instead of my stomach dropping out or the panic button getting slapped, I just felt kind of blasé about it. Like, ok, that’s it then. I’d already had my panic about the prospect, dealt with those feelings, cooled off, and moved on. In what I guess was an effort to make themselves not feel bad about all this, they asked me how I felt, if I was ok.

I responded, “What does it matter how I feel? You have made your decision and I am powerless to affect it either way. So here we are. It’s done.”

They were stunned a little bit. I suppose they expected something else from me? Who knows. Who cares. It’s not important. It wasn’t my job to make them feel better. The thing here is that I just sort of felt nothing about losing them, and over the hours following the call I started to feel a little free. The long, dark, seething annoyance for chicken scratch was over. They told me they want me to come back in the future on a per-project basis. I told them that’s fine. They won’t like my rate, but that’s on their shoulders.

Now I am no longer under that thumb. I’d always just waved it away as a thing I did in my extra time, the extra (only) money was fine, the work was easy, rationalize, rationalize, rationalize. The truth of the matter is that I was always angry about them. Always. Sometimes a little, sometimes raging, but always angry. That’s not a nice way to live, especially in light of all the other burdens we manage. No, not good at all. They also ended up using what little creative time I did have, causing me to overvalue the time they didn’t use further, leading to feeling even more stuck at the intersection of decision making. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, but I didn’t take either of them and just sat down in the mud to make some crappy videos I didn’t care about.

The last days since the phone call have gotten my brain going again. I feel less blocked. I feel, dare I say it?, inspired. Inspired to make things again. Inspired to pour myself into creative projects and allow myself to make things for the sake of making things.

I need to figure out how to earn consistently, and I’ve been banging my head against the wall for ages to make no progress. I believe that diving into the act of creation without worrying about whether it’s contributing to some misconceived forward progress in life will give me the mental and emotional space to solve the problem. In the act of doing, I will find the thing that will lead me forward. In creation, there are answers. There is truth. Or, you know, at least guidance. It’s the thing that always steered me toward making, and I’d lost sight of it, but now I feel clear. This is the right thing for me. That is also a new tack.

I’ve been so stuck trying to ensure that I made the most out of my time that I made nothing out of it.

Instead of trying to force myself into one creative pursuit in my usable time, I want to cast a wide net. Just make stuff. Don’t worry about the big picture. Do the best I can with the time I have. Finished is better than perfect. Learning happens at every stage, even in failure. Devalue the time. Explore. Waste time. Feel things out. Start things. Finish things. Abandon things. Pick things back up. But never stop making, never stop doing.

Let this post stand as a statement of intent for what I want to be a new stage in my creative life and also the start of it. It is the foreword to something refreshed. Creativity is a core part of my identity. The act of creation—and through that act connecting with people across the void of space and time and experience—gives my life meaning. It is integral to everything I do and want and need. I have been missing it and my psyche has suffered for it.

Let’s make some things. Let’s figure it out.