So I think I kinda figured out why navigating being a productive creative person - for me - during *vague gesture* all this has been generally sludge-like, sometimes impossible and yeah stress + trauma and unrealistic expectations etc are a thing but the core is weirdly simple:

Maybe we've all heard this snarky voice in our head: "Welp you've got all this time now, that's what you've always wanted right? You rail against economic privilege giving others time & freedom to get a leg up & here you are with time and freedom. Maybe time isn't the problem."

And that sucks. Also what we've been "given" is the monkey's paw version of "time and freedom" that doesn't really feel like either of those things. Hence all the uplifting posts about self care, "you don't need to write Lear" all that. All valuable things.

But I'm realizing my problem with this "freedom" (I haven't been unemployed this long since high school) is... I'm used to stealing time for what I love. Hell, that goes back to high school. "Oo I have a story idea and science class is boring, let's think about that!"

This begets college: Go to these classes now, fun later; Begets being a working adult: Go to work, fun later. Fun later for writers is - believe it or not - writing. And I've been conditioned by actual decades of my life to have something simmering in the back of my mind.

Even when I was a working actor, I couldn't wait to get back to my dressing room or to get home so I could pick up my notebook. This was my first sign that maybe I was done being an actor. This writer software is always running in the background.

When I moved to the city, I opened a Starbucks at 5 am and I was working on Broadway, not getting home til midnight before getting up to do it again. I wrote in the holes between jobs, the train rides, the hours I was supposed to be sleeping.

So here I am, now, here many of us are & now this background software has to run in the foreground. I don't like the "be careful what you wish for" mentality or the cruelty of "welp, you think you'll do work when you have time but you won't so there." It's about routines, right?

And unwittingly, your writing routine has become the stolen time. So much of the background work happens while you're doing the business of paying the bills that you don't realize how much that actually was part of your groove. I'm not saying it's good or necessary, it just...is.

There's a sort of institutionalization to it. I hesitate to make the Shawkshank Redemption comparison: The inmates get out and they can't pee without permission. It's a really extreme comparison but it's apt.

I find myself excited to do a task that takes me away from writing just so I can be excited to have time to write. It's all perverse and frustrating. But it's been oddly reassuring to identify what has been tormenting me (and perhaps some/many of you) during all this.

I'm lucky in that I am and have been fairly stable and supported throughout this pandemic. Many do not have that privilege. So complaining "Writing is hard cuz I have too much time" sounds like something that pre-pandemic Jay would be infuriated by.

And as much as the "you don't need to write Lear with this unexpected dubious time gift" posts being shared by well-established artists made me want to laugh myself to tears, I can't deny the need for self-forgiveness. For assessing & understanding this bizarre reality.

I have some stories to tell. Too many, probably. I think I can tell them well. I have so many ways I want to tell them. I want to make things that'll mean something to people. That's all any of us want to do. And it is hard because the well you pull from to tell these stories...

... can be the same one you pull from to empathize, to endure stress, grief, any number of hardships and frustrations. I have no solutions other than not giving up. Reminds me of the Doctor Who where he has to slowly punch through a wall over centuries.

But knowing why a thing is a struggle helps to keep you from sinking into these idiotic sayings and tropes and ideas about "lazy artists" that so cruelly swirl around all our heads from a society that undervalues us. If you've felt the same way, you're not alone.