One of the weird side effects of having a kid is getting to watch all of your psychoses and personality foibles present themselves all over again in a new less damaged person. Last night we had a pretty sizable meltdown over something equally silly and profound. (1/)
She's been playing piano for a few years now, and is pretty good -- especially considering how little time she has to practice. She's got a natural knack, and because of that, she can, well, cheat. But now she's at the point where she's stalled out progress wise. (2/)
So, her teacher put her foot down and gave her an assignment to force her to combat that laziness. She has to practice her recital song a) without singing it, b) slowly, and c) with a metronome. This forces her to work on the precision, the nuts and bolts, and technique. (3/)
Last night, while doing that, she completely lost it. Sobbing and yelling about how it's impossible to do and there's no conceivable way for her to play the song because it's so hard and playing it slow is making it worse and without singing she doesn't know where she is- (4/)
Everything that explains WHY SHE NEEDS TO DO IT THAT WAY. But. She was inconsolable. Just irrationally angry and upset. And entirely at herself. Because she wants to run. In everything she does, it comes easy to her, so, because of that, she skips over the 'learning' part. (5/)
And, for the most part, she's smart enough that it works. Fourth Grade is only so hard, after all. But because she's so advanced she never got that whole crawling to toddling to walking to running thing. The very idea of taking the time to explore and test herself is alien. (6/)
I look at my own journey and I realize just how much the same I am. I spent so long learning on the fly because that was the situation I found myself in. I rarely had time to learn other than during triage. Which is part of why I've been aggressive about taking 'breaks' now. (7/)
Since I wrapped off of my last show, I've been spending time writing and developing new stuff. Really getting inside not just how I work or how I want to work, but, how story works, and what I can look at differently. (8/)
Its been a year, not so much of reinventing, but of maybe the word is reinvigorating myself. Part of that triage life is that in the nearly twenty years that I've been a professional writer I've frankly never had more than a couple days where I wasn't terrified about money. (9/)
The time I've spent in TV has changed that (especially the past year) so that I got to spend almost half of this year just writing stuff that I was passionate about. Finding out what got me excited -- including walking down alleys that didn't pan out. (10/)
That was the hardest part. Like my kid, I'm trained to just make shit work. Even when something doesn't work you figure it out. You MAKE it work. For the first time in my life I got to the point on a project that I'd spent MONTHS on where I realized (11/)
I couldn't make it work. I wasn't where I needed to be creatively, psychologically, or emotionally, and instead of just banging my head against itI put it away. Knowing that it'll come back around one of these days. (12/)
All of which is to say -- sitting there with my kid telling her stories about being a kid and feeling exactly the same way she did was kind of a lie. I could've told her about how I STILL felt exactly how she felt, on a daily basis. (13/)
And hard as it is to admit, I probably will be for the rest of my life. But, knowing it -- accepting it -- and wanting to change it, I think is a pretty decent first step. (14/14)
