A Move to New York, or, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Hey.
It's been a while.
I'm at this again, a little bit.

They say when you want to start a diet you should never tell people, because then your brain will experience the reward of getting the approval of others for dieting, which'll short circuit your motivation to actually diet and lose weight. As long as you feel the short-term reward of approval, you'll feel, subconsciously or consciously, that you've already won, which, tragically, shoots you in the foot in terms of actually winning. You actually lose, which reinforces the negative thinking that might've gotten you in that state-of-needing-to-diet-which-you-'re-just-now-climbing-back-out-of-by-deciding-to-diet, and you're back at the beginning of the whole torrid self-hate affair.

So, basically, the whole counting chickens before they hatch thing bears phenomenal, actual subconscious weight.
Beware.

//

It's a rare gift to notice when you're being changed.
Not a gift as in a talent, like, "look at me I've noticed I've changed," but more that it actually is a literal gift, a present, to be present enough to notice your quality of daily life is different, and in my case, is graciously improved.
From over here, now, New York Mark can look back at Philly Mark, and even further back at Walla Walla Mark, and see just how far he's come. In terms of my day-to-day wellness, it's quite far, though there's a lot still to do.
As there always is, I imagine.

So let me start my saying that there were basically two powerful and interconnected forces that allowed me to recognize that I was no longer over there in the worse place,
that let me see where I'd been, and where I am.
The first, of course, is the physical move to New York.

And that move came about very suddenly, though I'd been looking to move and preparing to move for a while, working like a dog really to be able to afford it, but I didn't really need to move until the end of June, when I was done at my Philly apartment. Jess, my girlfriend, was moving at the beginning of June, and I was going to help her, but if we needed to be in two separate cities for one more month, that would be okay.
Instead, on an off-chance job app, a response to a Playbill ad for a telesales assistant manager, on a day after I was already in New York watching Jess act in a reading of a friend's new play, I went and interviewed before jumping on a bus back to NYC after what felt like my 15th rejection just the week before.
I was in a state of supreme "fuck it"ness.
I had built up the last three big interviews I'd gotten, which were all directly involving artistic fields I aspired to be in, directing, literary, dramaturgy, in a way that I now see as incredibly insecure. I went in to these interviews quivering, terribly desperate to be approved.

I should throw a quick bone to those of us (all of us, I'd say, at some point) who have the need to be approved. It is a deeply human thing, especially when you're younger. Especially when you don't quite have the "fuck it" sense you might need to achieve, in spite of people not caring, or not connecting, or just not hearing what you need them to hear, or care, or connect to. And I will say that giving your approval and receiving someone else's approval is a wonderfully loving thing to do, and when you can, I implore you to do it. We're all quite busy privately tearing ourselves down, and building each other up is perhaps more important than we're comfortable with culturally.

Anyway, for some reason, I banished the usually overactive part of my personality that doubts everything I do, and I interviewed, and I was hired on the spot. I sold him, my boss would later say. It was an incredible and accidental event of self-confidence, but it triggered my boss holding me to that sense of self-confidence, which, after a painful first week of work, I began to learn I could summon quite regularly, and I've been improving on that point ever since.

Moving to New York and working in sales, in this particular way of doing sales which is both more effective and more difficult than the way I was doing sales in Philly, has woken up a part of me I'd desperately needed to wake up -- the desire to work, and work hard. I'd gotten shamefully lazy, focusing my energy only on my relationship, and spending most of the time I was apart from her bored and unmotivated at work, or anxious and depressed over not creating anything, but doing very little to create.

The second thing I did to kickstart this internal shift was actually just read a book. A biography of David Foster Wallace called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max. I picked it up as a hunch, following finishing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which I read a few months after finishing Infinite Jest after an actor friend of mine in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar told me Wallace put himself metafictionally in Pale King. Wallace never finished Pale King, he killed himself after working on it for ten years, and still being nowhere close to finishing it. He arranged what he had of the novel very carefully in his garage, chapters in neat piles, disks and computer harddrives beside them, along with notebooks of notes, etc., before hanging himself on the back porch. He did this only maybe 2-3 years after his incredible 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, fan-titled This Is Water, which is still a huge source of inspiration for me whenever I'm succumbing to the negative thought-spirals of depression. Wallace had gone off his medication, and never quite found his balance again. He fought with depression and addiction his whole life. All of his works and his life story speak so deeply and keenly to me, and I think he has a lot to say on stage, which I want to craft for him.

The description of his college years, particularly where he first began to really struggle with his anxiety and depression, put me back into my own college days, in a very personal, horrible way. Being in a much healthier, happier place now, it was almost overwhelming to recognize how tortured I'd been, all four years really, not just senior year, and I only was now able to do that by hearing about how someone else handled his own disease in his own way.

To be completely clear and fair, I was never suicidal, and while I had some dark moments, I didn't suffer to the same degree that he did. For anyone who reads the book, I am definitely identifying by proxy, not by specifically what he went through. I'm not claiming I'm a genius writer, either.

But recognizing the pain I was in was a function of me not being in that pain now. Recognizing now how bad it had been then was only possible because I wasn't there anymore. Perhaps I am quite a bit happier and healthier than I realized.

But the major thing the book did for me was reawaken an awareness of a part of my identity I think I've long kept hidden, embarrassed, insecure, unsure of how to claim, desperate to discount. I tell people all the time that I'm a director, a performer, a self-producer, a theatre-maker, and then I sneak in at the end a little bit that I'm a writer. Like, you know, when it calls for it. And even then I'm not terribly assertive about it.

The book reminded me that actually, fully, truly, I am a writer. I love to write, I love to create worlds, I love to create language, I love to be in charge of crafting moments, and while I've had a love for directing that grew out of college (I recently reminded my college roommate Graham about the moment we were walking home from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was so furious at the time about how the production was done, on a dramaturgical level, and he, frustrated with my fury, in a moment of now-self-historic import, asked "WHY do you CARE so much?!?!" and I answered before thinking "I JUST DO!!!") I have also had a love of writing, a love I only furtively engaged with in college, never to the serious extent of study I needed to in order to really grow.

So now that I'm in a new city, with a whole new schedule that affords me quite a bit of down time, at least for now, and I have a chance to rebrand myself a bit, I'm going to take back a part of myself I've long felt too insecure to hold onto. I regret not thinking of myself more actively, more fully, a WRITER while I was in Philly, of course because I did actually write and create. And many of my friends might be looking at me like WHY IS THIS A SURPRISE TO YOU? OF COURSE YOU WRITE but I have to say, I honestly just never allowed myself to admit it fully. Those of you who do, I love and respect you. And I acknowledge I've been more than a little silly.

So those are some of the things that've been going on within me recently, that I'm just now able to process, a little bit. I've internally made some decisions to help me explore, expand, and work fucking hard, on this new acceptance of what I truly want to do, as a creator. But like the whole admitting-the-diet-to-get-the-approval thing, I'm going to keep the specifics to myself. I do want to share my happiness over this self-realization, though, and I welcome your well-wishes as I extend my own to you. I hope you are peeking over the edge at something new within yourself, too.