I’m feeling anxious again. I feel lonely. I feel incomplete. I feel insufficient. I’m afraid of not living up to my own expectations.
All I really want, deep down, is to be loved. I want a partner, I want a friend group, I want an audience. I’m deeply afraid that I’m a narcissist and that I’ll never be truly happy because nothing will ever be able to satisfy my massive ego.
When I was a teenager, I wrote an essay that said all I really wanted was just to hang out with friends and laugh our assess off. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this for periods of time throughout my life, but every time it withered. Like watching a sitcom that slowly loses the essence that makes it funny over time. A character leaves the show and nothing is ever the same.
I guess that’s life. People come and go. But I feel like I’m in limbo, like my show got cancelled and I’m just hopelessly waiting for a network to pick it up again.
I feel like I need to do something big to get noticed by people, for people to like me and admire me and want to be my friend and work with me. But that still hasn’t happened. I’m still alone.
It’s difficult to avoid catastrophizing, but let me give it a shot. I have some friends who like me, even if I don’t see them often. I have a few people who would probably work with me if I asked them to. I can meet a girl and fall in love again.
I’m in the wrong studies though. I don’t really care about directing. It was a way to assert my control over others. What I really want is to play and laugh and move and do silly things. I want to act. I want to do comedy. I want to do stupid shit on YouTube. I want to laugh a lot. Part of me does want to be a director and make movies and be revered as a great artist, but if I’m honest, I don’t want to put in the work to get there. I want to put in work, but I don’t think I want to put in work as much as the next wannabe director.
Maybe ADHD medication could help me, but maybe I just have to accept that my brain just doesn’t want to do certain things, and I could force myself to do those things with drugs, but is that the answer?
When I started YouTube I knew that my end goal was to have an editor and a cinematographer and an entourage. I would be the one coming up with ideas and loosely defined plans, and we would improvise as we went along, doing some crazy shit, and figuring out how to extract the story from it afterwards. Making sure it looked good would be the cinematographer’s problem, and making sure it all flowed together the editor’s. I just needed to make sure shit happened.
I still feel like that’s my end goal. To just be able to live life doing some stupid shit. But I know that getting there would require immense sustained effort that I’m not capable of. So I think I need to surrender. Not surrender to life and go back to being a corporate monkey, but surrender control to other people who are able to propel themselves forward. I need to let go of my ego and be a vessel for someone else’s creativity, and hope this unlocks my own creativity in the process.
We’ll see if that works out.