the place where I put stuff I don't have anywhere else to put

Next week is the last week of my online class and tomorrow, I have a test, an essay, and a discussion post and response all due, which is way more than we typically have for this class. It's still a stupidly easy class, though, so what I'm complaining about isn't the workload but rather my own brain's repeated habit of seemingly shutting down right as soon as I need it to kick into full gear.

All day today I've known that I need to write my essay, and my plan has always been to write it tonight so that I don't have to worry about it tomorrow night when it's due and be working up until the last second. And yet for some reason, I have been unable to concentrate on anything at all today, and right now is no exception. Even writing this blog post is taking a lot out of me, but it's literally the only thing I can bring myself to write right now. I hate this feeling so much. It's different than the burnout I was once describing—it's the feeling of rotting in bed all day (a term which I try not to use but that's what it feels like) and then trying to concentrate on something else, but always ending up on social media again, or checking the same apps dozens of times, or obsessing/worrying about little things in my life right now that I have no control over.

What really sucks is that this is nowhere close to the first time this has happened (it might be the worst case of it though). I feel like every time I have to complete a big project that isn't surrounded by many other big projects with months of lead-up and conditioning me to academia (i.e. the end of a busy semester with many things happening at once), this same situation happens. I've said so many times that my mind thrives in chaos when I have too many things to fit into my schedule, and this just further proves that. I really wish there were an easy fix for it, but from what I have found, the only way to get through it is to painfully brute-force my way through until I have something mediocre at best.

It would be so nice to take all this energy out on writing a song or a scene or maybe even drawing or something, but I have actual work that needs to be done first and I've been procrastinating all day so I don't want to keep procrastinating until it is the last minute. But then as soon as I am ready to do something creative, all that angst I have that I want to put towards a creative project is gone, and I'm stuck feeling uninspired and burnt out like I was feeling a month ago.

Every time this happens, I hope that it's the one time that will finally change how I approach situations like this, but the deeper I dig myself into this hole, the more it looks like that definitely won't be the case. So brute-force it I will, until I physically cannot anymore, and then I will go to bed and hope that tomorrow will be better and I will be at least a bit more willing to give it a try again. This sucks, but hey, at least my online class will be over next week.

All day today, I've been in another one of my creative funks. All I want to do is create something, anything, and yet when I sit down and try to do just that, nothing comes out. I thought this is what going to New York was supposed to fix!

Realistically, I knew that visiting New York City, or any location for that matter, would not actually have that much of an effect on my creative drive. My two songs last summer were a perfect storm of inspiration and circumstances hitting at just the right time, but New York wasn't the magical secret to creating what I created. It also didn't help that this was a school trip, and even though I had fun, I much prefer to be in control of my own trips to the city so I can control exactly where I go and when. Sometimes inspiration would hit me at the wrong time and I wanted to go sit down and write something but instead I had to be somewhere in 20 minutes and I was 21 minutes away. Okay, that exact scenario never happened but I liked the way it sounded to write so I wrote it. That's sometimes what I do, after all I like to think I'm a writer. Or sometimes I wanted to stay up all night writing but we had to meet somewhere at 9:00 the next morning. That actually did happen.

The good news is that I have sat with my feelings for long enough now, and I think I have an idea about what might be causing this long-term burnout. And I know it's barely been over a month, but it's longer-term than I'm used to.

Rat Race is kind of at a standstill right now. Sure, it needs a lot of revisions and it's certainly not at a point to send anywhere yet, but those are something that I'm actually okay with admitting will take a while longer to come up with, and I've known that since before this burnout hit. The problem is that I used to be at various stages of completing a bunch of different parts of the musical at once, so when I found myself wanting to create something, there was always something I was in the mood for. Maybe some sheet music, maybe some lyrics, maybe some script, maybe some plot—there was always something to be done that I could successfully work on in that moment. As I began to complete each thing one by one, those options dwindled, but by that point it was a race to the finish line to get the workshop done so I was able to brute-force my way through everything pretty well even if I didn't want to 100% of the time. Now that all the "fun" stuff is done, it takes a lot more effort to sit down and actually do the hard work of cutting, rearranging, and rewriting things to make the musical work better. Usually when I'm in a creative mood, I just want to write a song or work on a piano vocal part for something. And I know I have this long-term goal of producing an album, but currently it's much harder for me to write songs for that because I don't have a solid theme or anything in mind really. Part of the reason musicals are so fun to write is because all the songs work together to tell a specific story. Albums can certainly work in the same way, but I haven't quite figured that story out yet.

Today was pretty fun and I ended up doing quite a bit. This is my 7th time visiting New York, and I’m starting to realize that being in the city for an entire week means I don’t have to pack a ton of stuff into my schedule every day to feel like I’m making the most out of this trip. Part of me feels guilty for not doing that, but I’m pretty sure that’s also the part of me that feels bad for losing my spark after working myself to death at the end of the semester. I’m slowly learning to be okay with relaxing, and I’m also learning that it can be nice.

We had two workshops/discussions today, both at Pearl Studios: the first was with Nick Wyman, a performer who has had a pretty prolific career all across the board. I didn’t really contribute to the discussion much since it was geared slightly more towards performers, but it was still super cool to see his thoughts on everything and I definitely like hearing from as many perspectives as possible about the industry I’m going into. (How I feel about myself as a performer vs. designer/technician is a whole other can of worms I won’t get into rn.)

Then we took a break for lunch on the Bustronome, described by its own website as a “gourmet restaurant aboard a double-decker bus”. I’d recommend watching McKinley’s vlog for my thoughts on the food, but overall here are my ratings:

Appetizer: 6.5/10, pasta was a little above average (especially for being gluten-free) but pretty basic

Salmon: 4/10: not downright bad, but still below-average compared to the other salmon I’ve eaten. Dare I say the NMU dining hall salmon is better.

Chicken: 5/10: not good, not bad, right in the middle. Pretty basic for chicken and mashed potatoes but still quite enjoyable.

Dessert: 7/10: for someone who doesn’t really like chocolate, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this dessert. Everyone else got mango cheesecake but I got this chocolate cheesecake/ice cream thing that was actually delicious. I think it would be a 10/10 if I actually enjoyed eating chocolate more but I’m forced to rate it 7/10 due to my own preferences. Actually no, fuck that. I’m not forced to do anything. 10/10.

Celiac friendliness: 10/10. They had gluten-free alternatives for every course that were 100% comparable to what everyone else had. I had absolutely no reaction afterwards so it definitely felt safe to me.

Overall experience: 6.5/10: it did take forever (probably because there were so many people on the bus) but it also made us 50 minutes late to the next workshop. I started to get hot and a little stir-crazy towards the end, though. Still, it was cool to be driven to some parts of the city I’d only seen for myself once or twice (like downtown near the High Line and that area).

Then we went to our next discussion at Pearl Studios with two people from House Lumina, a design company based in New York. This one was definitely geared more towards designers and technicians like myself so I made sure to pay attention. My main takeaway from this discussion was how crazy this career path can be. Not only is it possible, but it’s common to have upwards of three but sometimes dozens of various paychecks coming in from various hustles and gigs at the same time. After the discussion, Bill approached me and said, “You should work for them. I think your level of chaos is perfect for that job.” I kind of shrugged and laughed and told him “maybe,” but him telling me that did make me think about my future with a little more detail than I’m used to. Not that I don’t want to think about life after college, but I keep telling myself that I’ll know what I want to do by the time it comes around to that point, because that’s how it’s always been up until now in my life. And I’ve still got a year! A lot can happen in a year.

To circle back around to the beginning of what I wrote, I think if there’s anything to learn from this brief period of trying to take a break, it’s to stop and smell the roses a little bit. I have my whole life ahead of me, so part of me isn’t inclined to immediately move to New York and get a dozen jobs and dive into the industry headfirst. (Not that immediately moving to New York was ever in the cards for me, but honestly entering anywhere headfirst immediately doesn’t sound super appealing to me either.) Maybe, if I’ve made it this far in my life by just going slowly and seeing where the next step in my life naturally leads me, then there’s no reason to think that where I am now is any different. Maybe going slowly isn’t so bad after all.

Today is my first (official) day of this field studies trip to New York and therefore my first entry in this blog series. I arrived yesterday but was dealing with travel-brain and honestly blogging was the last thing on my mind so this is what we get. I also figured I’d post this to Tumblr because why not.

I think over the last few weeks, my priorities for what I’m hoping to get out of this trip have slightly changed. The reason for that is that I am currently suffering from some of the worst creative burnout I’ve ever dealt with. Here is a list of everything I have done within literally the last two months:

Written, filmed, scored, and produced three short films, one of which was over 20 minutes long and had only an 11-day period between the final draft and the final cut

Finished my first ever full-length musical and had a staged reading of it starring my insanely talented friends

Co-wrote two original songs for the James Awards and somehow fit in a couple rehearsals for them

Finished my sixth semester in college still somehow with a 4.0 GPA and did well on all my final exams/projects

Took a trip downstate to see a concert with my amazing boyfriend and had the best time ever

Had a pretty damn good jury (except for the part where they read me harder than I've ever been read before about trying to take on too much, which is probably due to everything above.)

And yet somehow, for some reason, that's still not enough for me. Because as soon as I got home for the summer I tried to start doing even more. More music, more revisions to Rat Race, more ideas that may or may not ever come to fruition but it doesn’t hurt to try, right? Yet nothing was coming. I successfully revised Rat Race for about 30 minutes with a strange burst of energy I did end up having, and brute-forced my way through a song I’ve been sitting on for years now, but other than that I have really no other avenues of approach to solving the problem. I know that being burnt out is to be expected after everything I listed above, but I still hate that it’s happening. Which is where this trip comes in.

Corny title I know. Also I know that I haven't posted on here in months. Anyway, that's not what I want to write about.

In just over an hour, I will be sitting in a theater witnessing the conclusion to the biggest television show of my generation. There have been so many thoughts, theories, ideas, and emotions swirling around in my head and on my social media feeds for the past week, months, and years, and I've been going through more of an emotional roller coaster than I ever thought was possible for a TV show. This final episode might be great. It might be terrible. And it might take me a little while to figure out what I think of it, let alone what my opinion on the series as a whole will be once I can finally zoom out and look at the big picture.

What I mostly want to say is how grateful I am to be a fan of this show while all of this is happening. Not only the release of the final season and final episode, but to be living through this weird release schedule, where for a month or for a week people are debating and making theories and whatever, but are unable to do so with the entire show in the picture because it isn't out yet. Even though reading all these theories, wondering if Will will ever find love, and wondering if the Duffers are geniuses or idiots has put me through it mentally, I will look back on this time in my life as something that I wouldn't trade for anything. Going through all this with my family and friends has been so enjoyable, especially for someone who doesn't really watch any other shows, and I feel so lucky to have discovered this show while it was still being made.

This morning I got up before 8:00 to go secure my spot for a field trip to Wisconsin, but since I didn't have to work until noon I went back to bed for about two more hours after that. I have this weird thing (I'm sure other people have it too) where if I take a nap during the day, my dreams are super vivid and realistic but also super weird. Apparently that applies to getting up for half an hour and immediately going back to bed too, because the next two and a half hours felt like I was tripping like mad (but of course it all made perfect sense while it was happening in my dream.) I'm talking multiple levels of dreams inside of dreams, reality from the 30 minutes I'd been awake merged with whatever I was dreaming about, things from my real life yesterday coming back into my head, songs I've never heard before, legit one of the most interesting dream sequences I've ever had. I wish I could record my dreams and watch it back because I'm sure I'd love to see it (and might be able to figure out something about myself too). I do try to keep a dream journal but usually I'm too tired to bother and sit up and write stuff down when I have the chance.

This morning the main thing that stuck with me (well, didn't exactly stick with me) was this song I heard in my dream. I often hear songs in my dream that I've never heard before, and I've actually used those melodies and lyrics to come up with some kind of fire songs once I flesh them out in my fully-awake state. It kind of feels like a cheat since I'm not actually writing it consciously, but if Paul McCartney can do it I can to. (I am often concerned that it's not actually my own work and I'm subconsciously plagiarizing something I've heard before, which especially worried me when a song I thought I'd made up shared an uncanny melodic resemblance to a section of "The Entertainer," but I think that was a one-off coincidence.)

The song I heard in my dream this morning was a country song, and I specifically remember thinking it was the best country song I'd ever heard, and how I needed to wake up and write it down so I could use it for something. The song had something about Scottish Highland cows (called "coos") but that's pretty much all I can remember.

The crazy thing is that I remember waking up, telling my roommate I heard a song in my dream and needed to make a record of it, recording it into my voice memos, and going back to sleep, but when I woke up there was nothing new in my voice memos meaning that I'd dreamt that entire thing also.

I'm not a big crier. Not many men are, probably because of a combination of hormones and society drilling into our heads that men don't cry from a young age. Hell, I felt like I wasn't allowed to cry at my grandma's funeral because I didn't want to be perceived a certain way. Nowadays the only things that make me cry are emotional moments in movies or TV shows, and I strangely rarely cry at anything in my real life. Those moments are reserved for maybe once-a-year crashouts that are bound to happen at some point.

But I wish it could happen more often, because it would feel good to have that release at times like this. Right now I feel like things are piling up all around me faster than I can even begin to address them or even consider how to begin addressing them. Rehearsal on top of homework on top of personal projects on top of family matters on top of maintaining friendships... I could go on and on.

Today has been especially bad, and it sucks that I'm going to have to get up at 7:00 in the morning after barely an adequate night of sleep and do it all over again. Then same thing on Friday because I have a stupid unnecessary meeting that I need to be to at 9:00 in the morning. I won't really get to actually sleep in until Sunday, and even then I'm already considering what I'll have to be doing on that day besides relaxing because of all this shit piling up around me. All I need is a single day, even just a couple of hours, to relax and take hold of my thoughts, but when that day feels so far away I'm left with this pent up feeling of anxiety inside that I can't do anything about.

If it weren't after midnight I'd want to go on a bike ride to clear my mind. But even if it weren't midnight I might not do that because it's unproductive (i.e. it doesn't clear anything off my "to-do" list.) That's why I wish I could cry at times like these. I have so much energy built up inside me, a combination of stress, anger, worry, even some happiness, but mostly just unorganized chaos, that has nowhere to go. My last resort is writing it all down here which probably does something good but I still feel like I should be getting ready for bed instead of typing furiously.

It's always on to the next thing, no time to wait. And when two things start to overlap with one another and you don't even have any time to breathe in between them, it feels like you're the peanut butter in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if the two slices of bread were a bunch of cars crashing into each other and piling up along a highway.

I haven't posted anything here in a few days, I guess mainly because not much has changed. But if I'm treating this like my journal for the moment then I might as well write something anyway.

I've definitely felt my life evening out a little bit over the last week or so. (I just realized that "evening out" can have two very different meanings. In this case, I mean "even-ing" as in returning to normalcy. Lol.) By "evening out," I mean kind of moving past the honeymoon phase of being back at school and everything seemingly going right for once. It's not that things have started to be bad, because that's definitely not the case, but I'm certainly experiencing more of what I'm used to my life feeling like.

That may sound like a bad thing but I honestly am kind of relieved, since I'm no longer quite as much on the edge of my seat feeling like too many things are going right and waiting for something to go wrong. Nothing crazy has happened but I think that the number of minor inconveniences in my life going up has pushed me back into the mindset of "alright, this is still my life and you still have shit to do."

I'm at that point in the semester where the first wave of projects is kind of swelling up with deadlines approaching but I'm still mentally behind where I feel like I should be. I figured out how to manage my time successfully in seventh grade and have been doing so ever since, so I'm not worried about getting everything done, but that doesn't mean I can't be stressed about everything that's on my plate. I know I'll get it done somehow but I still have to do it. There have also been a couple of more dreary weather days which kind of dampens the mood too.

Despite all that, I almost want to say that I feel happier where I am now than where I was a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it's just because being in a semi-anxious state is what my mind is used to and I feel more comfortable finally returning to that. But I'm still more comfortable. I guess I either have the new constant anxiety that I'm too happy and that something's inevitably going to go wrong, or I have the type of anxiety that I'm already used to. So I might as well settle for what I'm used to.

"Violence is never the answer." I've seen that phrase so many times today. Then what is? What fucking is?? At what point are all peaceful methods of approach simply exhausted to the point of having nowhere else to turn? Because if you ask me, that point is long behind us.

Clearly elections are not a suitable method, given how those in power have openly admitted to rigging them in their favor. And the worst is probably yet to come. If we continue down this road of "peacefully voting for what we want" then we will never have another fair election again.

Freedom of speech? Protesting? Forget about it. The current regime will send their ICE buddies to swoop in and arrest you and maybe send you to a concentration camp. Better hope you're not an immigrant, illegal or legal, because even if you're legal they'll find a way to revoke that legal status so they can prosecute you for being here illegally. They'll use military force against their own citizens for peacefully protesting and point fingers at minorities like me and the people I care about most, deflecting all blame, saying that we're the problem. That we're the radical ones. That we're the ones who hate America, when all we're trying to do is keep it from falling apart.

Today was kind of a drag. Maybe it was the lousy weather. Maybe it was because I was tired all day, even after my hour-long nap. I felt like I was in a funk all day, even at rehearsal which is usually my happy place. Whatever it was I'm glad it's over. Maybe I need more days like this, though, since I was just talking about how it doesn't feel right to keep getting used to good days all the time. It wasn't even a bad day, really. It was just so bland and tiring and tedious in comparison to other recent days that it felt bad. I'm sure tomorrow will be better, but if it's not, that's ok too.

I went on a nice bike ride last night to clear my mind for a bit. I was originally trying to make it to a random point I found on Randonautica, but before I was even halfway there I realized it was going to take me way too far on roads that I wasn't super familiar with and it was already getting dark, so I decided to pull off onto a side road that looked interesting. I've seen pictures of this place before but I've never actually been there and it was super cool. First I was looking through a huge graffiti-painted tube with a big ledge on the other side with a waterfall underneath.

Then I followed the tubes back farther until I found a spot I could squeeze underneath with my bike on its side (it was a tight fit though—the handlebars barely made it through.) That's when I found myself in the place in the picture below:

It was super cool. After I went under the second tube I kept biking and eventually came to this big quarry/sand dune thing that was huge. This picture doesn't really do it justice because it was truly massive. Probably 100 feet tall at least.

I came across this Peanuts comic yesterday and immediately reposted it because of how true it is for me, and I really can't think of a better way to describe what I'm going through right now. Ever since the beginning of August things have really been looking up, but since I haven't really felt truly happy for a few years I keep feeling like I shouldn't be happy, like something bad is about to happen, or like I don't deserve any of it. It's like I'm finally not depressed but my mind has been in some sort of depression for so long that it wants to find a reason to be depressed because that's what it's most comfortable with now. Another part of it is probably that a lot of what's been going right in my life is simply due to sheer luck, so none of it actually had to happen and it's more of a case of being in the right place at the right time than anything I actually did to deserve it.

I think it started in early August when I took a(nother) trip to New York which is by far the best city in the world. The trip just happened to coincide with Hamilton's 10-year anniversary, and I was able to see most of the original cast (including Lin) come back and do a block party, which I was right in the center of for almost 2 hours. The whole thing was amazing and I guess it kind of showed me that good things can still happen and maybe my luck hadn't run out entirely.

Then I came home and immediately wrote what I think is one of the best songs yet for my musical, which replaced a song I really didn't like and that had been worrying me for a while. A couple successes in a row and I already felt like I was pulling myself out of whatever funk I'd been in for most of the summer, and things only got better from there.

It was towards the end of the summer that I learned I was being promoted from an ensemble member and an understudy in the Rocky Horror Show to being the full-time Brad, due to the original actor leaving, and having that happen to me was an odd experience. I'd spent all summer coming to terms with the fact that I wouldn't be playing Brad in the fall, and I was taking dance lessons, trying to learn my lines for the other parts, so to all of a sudden have what I wanted all along just handed to me was a weird feeling. It wasn't the sudden wave of relief and excitement you get when you look at the cast list and see the part you wanted with your name next to it, or get a call from someone telling you you booked a role. It was a weird "well, I guess this is happening now" feeling. I was definitely happy but part of it didn't really feel real.

I guess maybe that's where this whole feeling really began. A lot of what began happening to me felt too good to be true, and I still can't quite come to terms with the fact that it is true. I keep asking myself what the catch is. When is everything going to turn to shit and when am I going to realize that this was all actually a dream? I so badly wish I could just live in the moment and enjoy it, but I feel like that's when I start letting my guard down and when something bad will inevitably happen. Hence the comic. I even had a dream in which a family member died and I had to go home for the funeral during the weekend Rocky Horror would be, which just goes to show where my mind has been lately. I'm so used to there being good followed by bad that my mind doesn't want to move on from that because that's what it knows too well.

I think I'm getting there slowly but surely. I've definitely settled into playing Brad a little bit more and I'm having a ton of fun with it. The impostor syndrome that came from originally being the understudy is slowly going away, but I still feel it occasionally. It's really helped to talk to my other friends involved in the show and find out that a lot of them are experiencing the exact same thing. And I'm finally finding peace in the fact that maybe I can just be happy with no caveats or stipulations. It's hard to believe that but I'm trying my best.

I used to take pride in always being happy and being able to bootstrap my way out of any downer fairly quickly. I'd always find a way to bounce back before any bad feelings stuck around for too long. Surprisingly, that all started back in 2020, and I remember exactly the reason why. As stupid as it sounds, I guess I'll write it anyway:

On December 14, 2020, I hit a stroke of luck with the YouTube channel I had been building with my sister since March, and successfully got a comment pinned by a pretty large creator on the platform, which briefly spiked the attention the channel got. It sounds pretty lame now looking back on it, but back then it was everything that 16-year-old me had dreamed about. As soon as I got the notification that my comment had been pinned, I put on my coat and boots and went for a run with my dog outside, listening to my favorite music at the time and feeling that the entire world was on my side.

Holy teenager. Anyway, despite being a story I cringe at looking back on, the unbridled joy that I felt that day certainly did something to me, because from that point forward I found it much easier to just smile and keep moving forward despite whatever setbacks I had in life. The biggest example of this I can think of was a few months later in March, when I returned home from school on my bike to discover that ~25% of all of my phone's camera roll had either been corrupted or deleted for some strange reason. I worked for hours and did everything I could to recover them with the resources I had available, but I was never able to fully get back what I had lost. However, despite similar situations having set me back much more in the past (I remember crying myself to sleep as a child when I accidentally formatted my point-and-shoot's memory card), I kind of just shrugged my shoulders and said "welp, there's not much I can do about it anyway."

It might have just been maturity finally kicking in, but I still attributed it all to my stroke of YouTube luck in 2020 and told myself that I would never have a bad day again no matter what. And that lasted a surprisingly long time. I had bad things happen to me, sure, but by the end of every day, I looked back on things and found a reason to be happy moving forward. That is why when things started to go downhill it became much harder for me to come to terms with it and finally admit that maybe, for the first time in years, I wasn't happy, or even really okay at all.

I suppose I shouldn't really have been surprised. Coming out of 2023, which was by all measures pretty much the best year of my life, I guess it makes sense that I could only go downhill from there. And downhill I did go. Starting in early 2024, my mental health began to struggle as a lot of negative personal factors came together at the same time, and slowly the number of truly bad days began to outweigh the good. I sort of felt stuck, half of me feeling like I should still be able to pull all the same strings to just stay happy like I'd been doing for years, but the other half of me refusing to budge no matter how hard I pulled. This only got worse as my sophomore year of college started, where I tried (and failed) to take 20 on credits, had to switch two of my classes within the first two weeks, had to audition, learn, and memorize a cello solo as well as a dance number as a non-dancer, and also wrap my head around the school's new audition process and what it meant for me as a stage manager. I also felt like my transition from home to school was rougher than it should've been and I kept feeling like I had severely underpacked. All that put together made me start the year on kind of a bad note that unfortunately never really went away.

Since the way I started the year felt kind of jumbled and disorderly, nothing that happened for the rest of the school year really felt that great either. I can't think of exactly how to phrase it, but the word "arbitrary" is probably the best way to put it—it felt like nothing I was doing really mattered and it was all half-thought-out and I didn't really have a good reason to do anything I was doing. It's tough to explain. The situation only got worse with DT becoming president and the harsh(er) winter we had, landing me in a not-so-great place by the end of the 24-25 school year. The transition back home was especially bad, since I really didn't want to leave all my friends when everything in the world felt so up in the air.