people gotta stop romanticizing college man AKA: being both in charge of the narrative and subject to its inclinations is some whimsical horseshit and i do not fuckin abide
aight so im in film school right. and like, people really gotta stop romanticizing college bro.
i don't even fuckin know if I actually like the thing I'm going to school for.
i chose to be here and every day i wonder if i even like filmmaking, which is ludicrous of course i do.
however, this is far more nuanced a question than just the simple "does this thing make me happy." my whole goddamn career depends upon the far more loaded question of "do this thing make me happy enough i could do it for conceivably the next 50+ years and not prefer to launch myself directly into the sun than get up for work one more day." which is significantly harder to answer.
especially considerin i am in no way ignorant to the fact that im more than certain that future me will look upon current me with the same wallowing acid bath of disgust i hold for past me.
therefore i am in a particularly stupid and unsolvable paradox. If i am to determine that my future lies with the complicated and frustrating art of filmmaking, i need to do some soul searching and finish my character arc. However in order to have said character arc, i need to have,my life pointed in a direction so that the metatextual narrative doesn't crash and burn
i wish i could put my whole life on pause, figure myself out, then go back into it with a newfound sense of purpose. its like my author wrote like,, half of my story and then said "im bored" and left me in the vast expansive wastelands of the tumblr draft section, where all good posts go to die, and never actually got around to figuring out the second half of my epic character arc.
like, it’s so weird to say this but I feel like I’m at that point in my narrative or I’m about to get some serious character development??? my identity is finally coming into being and i have a sense of who i am in the metatextual narrative of this story, or at least the many different versions of myself that simultaneously exist and do not exist within the narrative at any given moment. like, at i am able to hold an internal socratic dialog with the 6 other versions of myself i am consciously aware of, which has to stand for somethin in the ridiculous self examination im doing for you, correct?
but the thing about character development is that you cant exactly have the aforementioned internal socratic dialog of you have fuckin english homework due. so what ends up actually happening is you procrastinate your big enlightenment for a more convenient time in order to keep the trains running on time. because god fucking forbid the train stops and you have an identity crisis. like everything functions fine when you keep the train moving, but if your train is falling apart you cant exactly power through a broken axle.
like oh shit the wheels are falling off and we’re either going to keep moving forward or the train is going to careen off the cliff of mental illness, and then when you DO inevitably crash, you say oh fuck i could never have predicted this. i am irretrievably fucked. except you DID predict this, all the way when your worst situation was a loose screw. but no, nobody takes you seriously until you crash and the whole train car fuckin obliterates itself on the mental illness tree like a small child running face-first into a glass screen door and watching with abject horror as the glass spiders on impact and shatters dramatically, covering the child in the snowflakes of his own grievous error.
i was in a boat where i was honestly doing pretty okay, and my workload is just light enough my ADHD doesn’t ruin my life 24/7 but i have one(1) singular negative thing happen and im all out of whack
plus, it doesn’t help that like,, i suddenly now have all these passions for writing and drawing for my buddies and making shitty jpeg gifs for my blog but i dont have any energy for film?? reader i willingly started this blog, made most of these gifs myself, and wrote out this insane, self-indulgent dialog because i, personally had the passion to do so. (wait can writing self-indulgent rantblogs be a career. because i'd be so good at that dude. i can finally stop ranting in my friends dms at like 3am)
im fuckin terrified 24/7 that i actually dont wanna do film and i wish i had time to figure that out.
im one cool motherfucker, and being a cool motherfucker means i have like,,, a Lot of interests and talents that suit me in my role as said cool motherfucker.
in summary, i’m rad as shit.
the issue though is that my particular interests do not neatly fit themselves together in a way that a career path is easily laid out for me. i am such a jack of all trades that i could theoretically work in almost any department and become successful.
but, since i am only a man, my general quest is self-fulfillment, right? like the whole goddamn point of being on this stupid spinning rock of infinite horseshit is enlightenment. maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that shit.
so how, the fuck, am i supposed to figure out my particular position in life if i can conceivably find a career in like 6 different wildly divergent paths if i don't spend the next ten fuckin years trying each of them on like a little girl figuring out which disney princess halloween costume dress really says “me”
and i thought i was ahead of the game on this front. i had my first midlife crisis when i was 12 goddamnit. I've been staring at my own splintered identity since i started eating fuckin crayons, you'd think i'd have this shit sorted by now. i am a goddamn philosophical stable boy, mucking out the horseshit that is my psychological identity and self-actualization issues, except the horse in question is also in fact me, and he refuses to stop shitting. it is an endless stream of horse shit coated psyche turds, glittering in the beams of sunlight peaking through the wooden walls of the stables in question, which i guess within the context of this metaphor would be my skull.
and to add another layer to the layer cake of horseshit you and i are mucking out and subsequently baking together, our professors act as if on some level we have a full and in-depth understanding of who we are as people enough to like,,, make a fuckin decision about the career that will essentially define the rest of our lives
like, i can barely feed myself and put myself to bed. i am functionally at the same level of self-care as an overgrown infant, and im expected to have any understanding of how i wanna spend my life?
we’re both intelligent and deeply interesting people, you and i, reader
we’re goddamn genuinely thoughtful and fascinating individuals with a wide variety of interests.
we are, what The Adults would call “well rounded”
and yet we still cannot manage to figure out any of this shit in a way that makes logical sense
and seriously dude, like if they were actually going to prepare us for college i would have appreciated more philosophy on the nature of enlightenment and self-fulfillment, because like yeah i definitely still wouldn’t have figured any of it out, but at least i would know what all the professional question askers up top have to say
or any assistance on the whole “who am i and where do i fit in the world” question?
like surely we could fuckin squeeze that particular topic in between WW2 for the fifth time and analyzing another robert fucking frost poem like motherfucker i don't even understand how basic college shit works, and I'm expected to become the fucking buddha and then also turn in that ten-page paper on whatever the fuck?
no, of course not.
we're expected to casually figure out the existential quandary of the universe over gay brunch with the ladies and never fucking touch the topic again. case closed, book shut, the narrative is linear as shit and everyone is pleased, roll credits.
like seriously what in the authors cursed name is that about?
thats not how people work, author, you cant just expect them to hinge their entire identities off of a paragraph you haphazardly wrote down at 3am!
we need spiritual fulfillment! i need my character to be fleshed out man! i dont care if the author is dead, you get your corpse right back here and explain to me what all this nonsense you conjured up means!
i demand an answer for the existential question of my life's purpose, dammit! as an author it is your responsibility to give the audience a satisfying conclusion, and i, as both a character and audience member am demanding a goddamn explanation! But as both author and character, i am essentially demanding that ouroboros stop eating his own goddamn tail for a minute and explain the transitive property to me, except ouroboros is also me and he doesnt fuckin know what the transitive property is because he hasnt been in 7th grade math class in like 6 years and he is also a fuckin snake.
