A Happier Kind of Tired

  I am an author.  I am an actor. 

  I find myself having to repeat that several times a day.  They're not the typical answers that you give when someone asks you what you do for a living.  Especially not that second one. 

  But I filmed my first commercial on Sunday, with a cast of professionals, so that makes the second one official.  Men and women who've taken Theatre Studies and worked for years on stage and on film; who've wandered far distances away from home experiencing life from the perspective of art and spirit; whom I felt a kinship with on a professional level, for the first time in a long time.  And I have a credit to my name.  That's one commercial more than what the vast majority of the rest of the population has done or will do in their lives.  That doesn't make me better or superior, but it is something to be happy about. 

   This isn't all rainbows and sunshine, of course.  I've left my regular day job with the government, and so I'm on the hunt for something to pay the bills in the interim. I've been here before, but unlike the past few years, I'm no longer going to cite my stop-gap job when someone asks me what I do.  Make no mistake: I am an actor, and an author.

   "Author". "Actor".  Repeat as needed.

  A great bit of advice I can give younger guys and gals who are reading this is to never stay in a place that robs you of your spirit and confidence, because that starts to eat away at the other parts of your life that are not the business of the office or your boss.  That's what was happening to me.  With distance and time, I'll have a better perspective on the real nature of the misfit between myself at that job, but I think it had more to do with the people than I might have assumed. 

  On my last day of work, I received no cards, no lunches, no special acknowledgements or send-offs of any sort.  Instead, my now-former boss burst out of a meeting room with about an hour and a half left in my shift, put on her coat, grabbed her things, and rushed towards the exit.  She stopped briefly at my desk, saying "Sorry, Jody, I'm in a hurry."  Grabbed my hand in a quick handshake. "Best of luck to you!  Bye!", and then breezed out the door.  That was it.  I didn't want a parade - this isn't a question of satisfying my ego - but it is not a classy way to end a working relationship, especially not one that lasted a little over a year in an office of only five to six people. 

   Micromanager wasn't much better.  The convention in the modern workplace is that you can leave early from your last shift.  Technically, the employer can't do much except dock you for those minutes you didn't work.  It's not like they can fire you.  It's one of those unwritten rules that you let the guy go home early on his last day.  At least, that's how it is in good workplaces in the private sector, which is not where I was. When advising Micromanager that I had nothing else to do and was leaving early, she actually asked me, "Did you clear it with the boss?"  Definitely one of those WTF moments.  Coupled with a heads-up she gave me that she was "leaving a file on her desk for Monday", I wondered if it wasn't a case that she was deliberately obtuse, but rather that she might actually be off her gourd.  Hello?  Why would I care about the whereabouts of a file folder on Monday? I'm not going to be here on Monday. 

   That was the moment when it became clear to me that I wasn't batshit crazy or insane or otherwise stressed-out, that contrary to what my management had led me to believe, I wasn't doing a job I was unqualified for.  I was not incompetent or an imbecile.  The reality is that there is just never any way to satisfy the demands of people who have absolutely no interest in what you do, no self-awareness, and almost no sense of social decorum, except, of course, for people on the inside of their service branch, and who are, I'll repeat, just plain nuts.  Try to be the only sane person in an asylum run by the inmates, and see how long it takes for them to convince you that you're nuts.  You can clock it with an egg timer.

   No, those two moments completely dissolved any regret and anxiety I felt about abandoning a lucrative day job with nothing comparable to fall back on.  Not a smart move on paper, but the greater price was further damaging my sense of confidence and self-worth. No job is worth that.  Such wounds can be permanent. 

   So, what to do after you've made the leap of faith?  Keep flying.  It's all about the hustle from here on in.

   Finding a short-term stop gap job should be easy once I pare down my resume a tad.  Right now, I could serve coffee and lug boxes again and be happy, as long as I have some days free to audition and write.  For the first time in my life, I find myself overqualified for the jobs I want to work.  It's a challenge, but it's also a good feeling.


   I'm giving Convergence at least one more week in marination before I start editing.  Unlike The Quotable Breakup, I'm looking to publish my novel in the traditional sense - lit agent, publisher, book tour - so I'd rather wait until I can give more attention to the manuscript.

   And, of course, I'm still auditioning.  Got another one tomorrow, in fact.  At some point, I want to take a weekend retreat to study with acting coaches, but I'll need monies garnered from stop-gap wages before I can do that.  Until then, at each audition, I'm relying on my own instincts.

    I haven't been this tired, busy, or seen more of the great city of Toronto than in the past few weeks.  That's the thing about reinventing the self: it's a lot more work, but it doesn't feel like work.  When you're done for the day, it's a different, happier kind of tired. The kind you get when you come home from a wedding reception or a family picnic, or a long-expected party that's now finally come and gone.  One that makes you feel good waking up the next day, knowing you're going to do more.
 
   Creative career paths aren't for everyone, but neither is the corporate grind.  And I'm not going to rule out never going back to that grind: life may yet lead me back to it, albeit richer for the experience of walking the path of the artist for a time.  But I know and feel that what I'm doing now is right, even if the benefits aren't immediately evident, because I'm in the vibe, and when you're in the vibe, it doesn't matter what you do: wealth and joy will manifest when you need it. 

    I am an author.  I am an actor.  And I've never been happier.  Time for sleep!

Two Tribes

    The OLN show Departures is one of my favourites. 

http://www.departuresentertainment.com/about.html

Two ordinary twenty-and-thirtysomething guys from Ontario, Justin and Scott, along with their videographer buddy Andre, set out to travel the world for a year, to finally do what so many people say they want to do, but never do.  The first season was supposed to have been the only one, I think, but the show was such a success, the network picked it up, and now the trio makes a living from wandering the Earth.

    A recent episode featured a stop in Ethiopia, where their local guide took them to a part of the country, in the south, that remained largely untouched by development.  There, a traditional tribe was having a bull-jumping ceremony, as part of a celebration of an arranged marriage for one of the tribesmen.  It's not glamourous - the ritual involves flagellation and some animal sacrifice - but what always gets me about rituals like this is how insular and together everyone is.  The tribe moves as one, even though they all scatter separately in the day to day living.  The sheer harmony of the scene even brings Scott to tears at one point, and this is a guy who's charted more of the world and its plethora of experiences than most of us will ever see in a single lifetime. 

   A recollection from a broadcast of The Moth that I heard two years ago comes to mind.  The American storyteller recounted his work in Rwanda, and how he had a time when he was simply not feeling well. When one of the locals found out, he gathered the entire village together for a ceremony.  The storyteller, in mock humourous fashion, tells the tale of the ceremony.  Highlights: a goat was sacrificed, and he was made to strip naked and have the blood smeared on him. He was brought out into the sun at noon where everyone in the village engaged in a dance ritual that made him feel delerious and disoriented, and by the end of it, he felt elated and much better than how he was. 

   Later on, in another part of Africa, he recounted the experience to another tribesman, who said that his had something very similar to what he had experienced.  He told the American that it was far better than having the Western psychiatrists there.  When asked why, the tribesman responded that the ceremony had several holistic elements that would heal most disease: going out in the sun for the light and heat; moving around rhythmically to get exercise; but most importantly, getting the whole village out to show that whatever you were going through, you were not alone.

  By contrast, said the tribesman, Western psychiatrists brought people into a closed dark room indoors, sat them down at a cold table alone, and made remember all bad things that had happened to them.  "That's when we knew we had to get these people out of the country as soon as possible," said the tribesman.

  That day-to-day living here in the West lacks this harmony is old news, but the trend is changing. Aside from the Boomerang Generation of kids who move back in with their parents in their late twenties and thirties, friends cluster together in the same neighbourhoods, if not the same houses.  Blended families are practically the norm in most urban and suburban centres.  City planners now design neighbourhoods that facilitate closer social interactions, and hotspots like the Second Cup where I'm writing this in downtown Burlington are becoming more commonplace in new suburban housing developments: locales where you can gather and connect with human beings.

   People you meet and connect with eventually become part of your social networks, but really, what I feel we want is not a network, but a tribe.  That's what I want, anyway.  And it's what I have.

   I have two tribes: my family and my friends. Unfortunately, as I make the move home for a few months, I will lose proximity to one tribe in favour of the other.  I need them both, much more than I really appreciated until recent days.  Obviously, thanks to the advent of the internal combustion engine, the phone, and the Internet, we're always connected.  An hour's drive away, an instant by phone or email or Facebook. 

   And yet, that doesn't satisfy completely.  Having my two tribes separated by distance sucks, and neither of them will likely relocate anytime soon to one location or the other. 

  I have a dream archetype that I wrote about a year ago, in which everyone I know and love in the world lives in houses on the same street in the same city.  In that dream, there's nowhere I can walk- the market, the mall, the park, the cafe - where I don't run into someone I know or am related to.  I'd love to have that in real life.

Grandpa and me at  Mom's old house in Trinidad,
 Guessing something like 1982.

   Maybe this is genetic. Mom and Dad's families both lived within the same square kilometre in Trinidad, at a place called the Junction just outside of Princes Town.  Everyone knew everyone else around there, cradle to grave.  Unless soemone there was actually crazy or violent or deliberately anti-social, no one ever experienced the isolation I've felt in recent months.  I'd love to have that kind of community coupled with the diversity of life in Canada and the prosperity of the city in which I'm still residing for the next month.

   The common occupancy of the same shared physical space matters: for the time that we're together in the same place, that's home.  Here the West, we're so used to treating "home" as just the place where your stuff is, but I feel at home at Michael's house, at this 2Cup, at my soon-to-be-former apartment, at Mom and Dad's, out with my friends. Even that transitory space between each person when we're all walking to the bar or a movie or some other gathering place together is, for that time, our space, and feels like home while we're in it.

    Because as much as I may require an intervention for my Facebook habit, for all of my own lone wolf time, I never want to lose the daily real world contact with my tribe.  Never again.  I think next time, I'd much rather share a place with my own bedroom and a common area than an entire place to myself.  Some people are built like that or they're just plain used to it.  After a year of this, such a solitary lifestyle is no longer what I want or need.

 When I move back out, it'll either be with a bunch of buddies sharing a house or something, or my own place that I'll share with my next girlfriend in a city near enough to everyone I care about.  I needed this year to centre myself after my ex and I split, and it's done that, but everyone in transition reaches a point where you no longer want or need to be alone in order to discover yourself.

   Surround yourself with the people you love. Home is wherever you can all be together, the same shared space, even if the space itself changes. And when you're feeling dis-ease, your tribe will bring you out into the sun, they will lift you up, and they will restore your well-being, just by being there for you.

 Only there'll be no need for goat sacrifices. We'll just get pizza.  Pizza's good.