Soul sucking creativity, good bye!

It is my vacation and I want to get back to my happiness, to who I am, to my creative self.  

Once I am inhibited from creating in one area of my life, all other attempts at creation seem stifled – attempts to create peace, love, happiness.  Because, I think, creation is the opening of letting your energies flow.

At one time, I thought my art was storytelling on film.  I loved editing.  And there is still a kind of editing I love.  Random storytelling is not it.  Editing for the sake of editing is not it.  

My last visit to the desert was inspiring, as usual, but also offered a creative project – a musician with charisma, a video camera, the desert backdrop, and a friend itching to learn her final cut pro.  I just wanted to shoot some test footage with the camera for my class, but then we were at the café and Tim was playing (he rocks, check him out at www.timeaston.com), and shooting live music was more interesting than static landscapes (great for still photography).  Numbers and emails were exchanged.  "We're professionals," my friend bragged, possibly overstating my abilities at this point.  

Then, I came home ready to throw something together.  The footage is a bit crappy, without a tripod and good lighting.  Then, I discovered I still didn't have the right cable, but started logging the footage, which you apparently cannot do and save in FC Xpress.  I had a few flashbacks to digitizing days, long hours in a dark room alone in the middle of the night.

It was 1 a.m. and my hands and shoulders were tense.  I was exhausted and frustrated.  Another day passed without achieving much on my intentions list – no writing done, nothing creative produced, I didn't meditate or exercise.   

And it hit me.  I don't WANT to shoot footage for a video for some guy (even if a wonderful performer) in the desert and load it and edit just so he can have video for his CD (he didn't ask, fyi, but my friend offered when I asked if I could do some test footage -- I had a momentary lapse of memory of what I know about how much work that really takes).   I don't even care that much about my class to do this work. I can find test footage that I can load in to plan my lessons.  

And it hit me: I don't have to do this.  I can just write.  That is what I need to do.  My procrastination, my caving to my fears and disbelief that I might actually be able to write has risen to an all-new high (or sunk to a new low?).  
Regardless, it reached where it needed to as I was blinded a bit by my past, who I was, who I thought I wanted to be upon moving to LA, my history and that interrupted narrative (a Coehlo term) . . . I think I have closed that narrative, which may allow me to move on.  

There is a reason I left editing and the film business.  I don't really LOVE it, not with a passion.  It exhausts and in the end enriches my soul with doodly-squat (I'm reading Vonnegut now).  It sucks my soul, my creativity, actually.  I like story telling.  I loved editing short films, but those don't pay and working with indie/student directors I don't know always ends up with more soul/creativity sucking and I am left with nada (and I am studying Spanish).  At least writing is therapeutic for me, even if no one ever reads it.

So, maybe it will only be more blogging (a warning . . . I will work on brevity this time around).  Or, maybe, I will actually develop that short story or start that novel.

But I know even writing this I feel closer to myself, truer to myself, than I have in days.  Which is worth writing a novel that might never be read while working in a job that matters more and energizes more (really, this was the other revelation in all this, but couldn't work it in seamlessly) than my work as an editor ever did (except for two short films and a few choice projects I worked on that no one really cares about anymore).