It’s… Exactly the Same?
“Maintain your ambitions, release your expectations.” Since shortly after arriving in California, I’ve repeated the mantra to myself constantly. 2025 marks ten years living in this absurd juxtaposition - relentless sunshine beating down upon my cloudy soul. I don’t know if I’ll ever learn my lesson.
Sorry, I was watching a documentary about Joan Didion and just wanted to try writing seriously for a second. I’ll get back to being me now.
How far down a road can you go before you can’t change course? I think I may have passed the last exit. I’ll get specific. We’re six weeks into our new series on YouTube. It’s successful in the sense that we continue to show up, and we continue to release new episodes. That is the only success I have ever known. None of my life’s work has been enough to start a career. None of the pieces of ourselves (I won’t call it content) we share have fostered any significant growth. No opportunity has come from working to my wit’s end. In my delusion, I believed in the possibility that our latest effort would produce different results. I believed this because we are doing something different. We’ve changed the terms of our experiment. We’ve tried every idea that’s been thrown at us. To no avail. Why? I’m genuinely asking, why?
The worst part is the silence. No one has any answer, not that I expect someone to, but no one says it’s bad either. Sometimes Un and I will joke to ourselves and say “if it sucks, tell me that.” At this point, I’m finding myself feeling desperate for any response at all. I would love for someone to tell me we suck at this, because at least they had an opinion. That’d be much better than what I’m currently experience, which is essentially the equivalent of giving the performance of my life while unknowingly wearing the Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.
I know that in the grand scheme of my life, six weeks is no time at all. I could look back on this post in December or April or May or even ten years from now and laugh at how desperate I sound. Maybe I’ll look silly because the fulfillment I’ve been chasing is right around the corner. Unfortunately, time is of the essence for me. I’m out of money. Some days I feel like I’m out of ideas. To put it bluntly, I don’t know what to do. Here’s to hoping I will figure it out soon.
-J.P.