So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. I'm prefacing this post with that statement so everyone reading this blog has fair warning that I'm about to be totally self-analytical and narcissistic. It's not entertaining, folks, but can you blame me? It's tough to be as entertaining as I am on a day-to-day basis without some kind of valve to let off a little of the existential steam now and again.
So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Ever since I returned to Toronto a few months ago, I've been trying to come to terms with the grand and sweeping and somewhat less-than-graceful forty-five degree segue the span of my recorded life took over the course of the last eleven months. Approaching the end of what qualifies, without a doubt, as the strangest year I've experienced in all twenty-four I've been breathing, I find myself reflecting on the spectrum of choices historically laid before me -- the ones I made consciously and the ones forced upon me -- and how they've led me to where I am, at 10:51 a.m. on 24 November, 2008.
Brief overview: this time last year I was dealing, poorly, with my move back to the home of my childhood, medicating my intense depression with too much alcohol and, contrarily, the promise of a move to warmer climes, a graduate education and -- ostensibly -- a happy marriage. I was working a comfortable job as the evening front-desk manager (read: receptionist) at a successful car dealership; my responsibilities were limited and the paycheques were sizable, particularly given the comparatively tiny sum my parents requested in the way of rent payments in exchange for food and shelter. Leaving aside the deep isolation I felt from my close friends and my fiancee (in Toronto and Texas, respectively), I had it pretty good.
But I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied with "pretty good" (in fact, I don't really know a lot of people who are). Therein lay my first choice: I could either a) take advantage of the time and relative fiscal freedom afforded me by my living arrangement and use it to create works of unimaginable brilliance, or b) drink myself into a foolish stupor at every opportunity and lament the molasses-like passage of time I felt all the more keenly due to my separation issues. So suffice to say I fumbled that ball something fierce by choosing option "b".
Fast forward to January. Relationship falls through, blah blah, I've covered this. Shortly after this revelation I discover I have not been accepted to either graduate program to which I applied. And I'm still at home, still fancying myself a receptionist, and still living most of my life in largely self-imposed artistic dearth. Relations with my family are reaching an all-time low as they see me, fucking up on a supremely grand scale, and doing little if anything to slow my descent. Their responses to my increasingly erratic and self-abusive behaviour span the gamut from concern to confusion to anger as they struggle to come to terms with the selfish, irresponsible, and ultimately pathetic choices I have begun making with reckless abandon. My family is, in a word, a saintly group of people who did their very best to support me, and deserve far better than what I handed out in those months.
Fast forward again to July. My contract at the car dealership is about to expire, and I have no employment lined up. Every ounce of my energy is invested in finding accommodations in Toronto, because somewhere in my vodka-soaked brain, one of the last neurons standing has fired, prompting me to decide that all my problems would be solved by a return to the city I have always considered on some level my home. There is no plan -- there is no forethought. There is only this overriding desire to get out: out of my ancestral home, out of the mind-numbing sameness of the cultural wasteland in which my family has established that home, and out of the artistic abstinence and emotional time-release safe into which I had placed the core of whatever constitutes me. The only way out, I reasoned, was via a Budget rental truck and a one-bedroom somewhere in the urban spread.
Of course, that line of thinking was a shining example of the kind of Grade A, not-from-concentrate, 100% farm-fresh bullshit I was feeding myself at that time. Because geography has far less to do with your state of mind than the kind of on-the-pedestal importance I was placing on my big move south. It's ridiculous to assume that if you can't be happy in one place, you'll be happy in another. I'm not downplaying the importance of having your own space -- not at all. I am a very private person (believe it or not) and I really needed personal space in which to breathe -- space I necessarily couldn't be afforded living with three other people whose schedules coincided with mine to the point that I was never really alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. But the point is, I was unhappy in my own head -- and I could have been moving into the Penthouse Mansion and it wouldn't have made me any happier. What was required was a reboot of my personality, a ground-up rebuild of what was going to be the New Direction, now that the Old Direction had detoured, Earnhardt-style, rather spectacularly into a brick wall.
Fast forward to August. I receive a call from my best friend, with whom I'd been cohabitating prior to my big move back home. Turns out the surrogate roommate I'd provided when I had to leave him holding the back at the end of August '07 was unexpectedly moving out, giving him little notice and less time to find new digs for himself. It wasn't without some trepidation that I agreed to move back in; I had made a promise to myself that I would never live with another person again. But with my finances significantly depleted by the months of self-pity to which I'd subjected myself, the chances of finding affordable accommodations on the timeline I'd set out were slim to none. So I bit the bullet and made the move. It was exactly three hundred and sixty-five days to the day that I'd moved out when I came back to the same neighbourhood, the same apartment -- even the same room I'd left a year prior when I set out to pursue the Old Direction.
Since then...since then, the New Direction has rapidly come to fruition. The tenets of the New Direction are as follows:
1) My goals are my own, and no one else's. I very nearly relocated my entire life to a foreign nation, pursued a degree in a field I had no real desire to achieve, and realized a life the dream of which was not my own. In my estimation, it was a bullet dodged, and I have no interest in revisiting such a self-debilitating course of action.
2) My art is the most important thing in my life. For too long I allowed the ambitions of other people to impede my creative outlets -- I neglected my music, my writing and my penchant for performance in favour of following a "responsible" lifestyle. I have never laboured under the misconception that my artistic endeavours will ever garner me anything resembling a secure future, I have decided unapologetically that the creation of art supercedes any desire I might have to live a life of comfortable mediocrity. It sounds painfully idealistic, but if I don't give this a fair shake I'll spend the rest of my life waking in the middle of the night with that familiar itch on the inside of my stomach wall -- the nervous insinuation of "what if".
3) I no longer make apologies for the man I have become. I have walked across coal pits of considerable distance in order to come to these realizations, and I'm not willing to compromise the wisdom I've gained through exercises of existential agony in order to placate the people around me.
4) In opposition to this, I no longer take for granted the people closest to me in my life. My close friends and my family stuck by me when people of lesser intestinal fortitude would have rightly closed the book and walked away. These are people of the highest integrity, and I am truly blessed to count these people in the number of those I can trust and on whom I can rely when times get tough, as they doubtless will again in the future.
5) Perhaps most importantly, I believe in myself and in the tenets of the New Direction. For too many years I clung to the trappings of modesty and self-deprecation in order to somehow validate my talent and my value as a person. And while I haven't necessarily walked away from that philosophy, I have come to realize that I have to look out for my own interests and sell myself on my own merits, because if left to their own devices, there are precious few people who will do it for me -- and it's not the job of those people that will. So my assumed confidence may border on the delusionally narcissistic -- but I can safely say I don't care.
My best friend nailed it the other night when I apologized for coming in late (again). I have spent considerable time out on the town, as it were, meeting new people and reacquainting myself with the city -- and, of course, getting up to all manner of hijinks that will serve to paint the silly, silly canvas of my day-to-day with engaging and entertaining material for songs and stories alike, and truth be told I'm happier than I've ever been whilst throwing myself into these situations, but I felt a degree of guilt that I have been living as I have -- in accordance with the tenets of the New Direction. My friend voiced it thus:
"Simply put, you have spent the last six or seven years living for everyone else. Relationships you tried to make work despite overwhelming odds, a university career you never enjoyed, trying to make everyone around you happy and comfortable and proud of you. This is the first time in your life that you haven't been accountable to anyone, and frankly I think you deserve the chance to live for yourself, for a change."
I had never thought of it that way, but upon reflection I think he makes a good point. I'm wired to associate my own needs and desires with some kind of weird guilt complex, like there are more valid opinions to which I should subscribe, like my time would be better served ensuring that I avoid stepping on any and all toes. Hearing my friend validate my desire to pursue self-exploration, regardless whether or not that movement lines up with what other people perceive to be the smart move, was exactly what I needed in order to finally start to feel good about myself and my day-to-day.
What the hell am I trying to say in all of this? I can't say, really. All I know is that for the first time I'm happy -- unequivocally and without the caveat of anyone else's happiness infringing on the simple, base enjoyment of waking up in the morning and doing what I love all day long.
The album is in pre-production. I'm writing new material for the page and the stage. I've even launched myself back into acting. If you'd told me a year ago this is where I'd end up I would have been shocked, dismayed that so much would fall apart in a scant twelve month span, in mortal fear of the kind of pain and self-recrimination that would be necessary to get here -- but maybe, if I'm honest, I'll admit that even a year ago I might have been just a tiny bit excited that I would get a shot at all the things I loved -- the things I was willing to give up for the sake of living into a role I would have been forced to play for the rest of my life.
I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Foremost among them is that I deserve things, things I had until now ascribed strictly to other people and never to myself. I've fucked up large in my life, over and over, but the more I think about it, the more I think I might have finally afforded myself a legitimate opportunity to make good on all those things I have always said I'm about.
They say everybody gets a second chance. At long last, I'm starting to think they're right.
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William Eaton - Music by William Eaton (1978)
3 years ago
