Typical Dyslexic fool...

I may have been misunderstanding myself for all my life. I'd always thought I should try harder, be smarter, push longer, keep trying and on and on to build a career in film. I feared I was becoming a workaholic. And no matter what, always felt completely inadequate. But today I saw a video on Instagram that got me to wondering.

The guy making the video is an English rugby player who I used as the model for Barry Cowan in The Beast in the Nothing Room. Name's Keegan Hirst. He came out as gay after being in a marriage and having kids. He's retired from rugby and does personal fitness and empowerment coaching, and I enjoy listening to him because his enthusiasm is nice and his Yorkie accent is lovely.

But in this video he references a book called The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias, and it notes that gay men try to overcompensate in whatever they do for being gay. I don't do that. I never have. I get by. I do what I need to. I procrastinate until the last minute then use that as an excuse if what I do doesn't turn out great. I lose interest and beat myself up for not being better...and for not trying harder...even though I just plain do not really want to try very hard.

I whine. I bitch and gripe about myself. But reality is, I have to fight to make myself hunker down and do the work that is needed, and then do only what is absolutely necessary. It's like the opposite of that syndrome, even though for years I was convincing myself I was a workaholic in pursuit of writing a perfect screenplay to get things started. Only I really wasn't.

I now see that most of the trouble I had in writing A Place of Safety stemmed from my unwillingness to really do the work. I did what was necessary then I'd zone out or fade into something different and now I'm finally seeing just how hard I worked at doing nothing more than just getting by. The apathy I'd been fighting was just me falling back into my normal mindset of, "Why bother?"

I don't know quite what to make of this, yet; I'm still processing it. I don't think I'm being fatalistic or nihilistic or elegantly melancholy...but finally seeing what I'm not may have actually let me acknowledge what I really am. It's not lazy. It's not untalented. It's not apathy. It's an understanding that no matter what I do, it will not work out. So don't get too invested in whatever it is you're trying to achieve so you don't get too hurt when it falls apart.

It's a protective measure.