When do I give up?

OCTOBER 11TH, 2016 — POST 281

This is all pretty “Dear diary…” and really quite bad in a lot of ways. No love lost if you skip.

I watch a lot of Louis C.K. interviews. I couldn’t count how many hours were lost to watching the stand-up’s full appearances with Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, or David Letterman. Even though I get to about a minute in sometimes thinking “I’ve seen this one”, I have a hard time pulling out short of the around twenty minute runtime. As much as his stand-up, these appearances regularly contain moments C.K. seems uniquely able to deliver: excruciatingly funny and excruciatingly human. But unlike his stand-up which by this point is a purified syrup, his talk show appearances often dole out funny and human separately. On one Conan appearance in 2013, C.K. thanks the host for giving him a break in entertainment as one of the show’s first writers:

“I just want to thank you for giving me this shot. Because I was really desperate. I was literally hungry all the time. I had no trajectory that showed me- the day before you guys hired me, I was gonna quit, like comedy and everything.”

And whilst this bit gets a few laughs and applause at the end because of the current fact of C.K.’s success, last night when I watched it I wasn’t laughing.

It’s now less than a month before my status inside the U.S. will be illegitimate. I’ll be compelled to use my return flight back to Sydney in order to avoid accruing any black marks on my record that would prevent me from reentering the U.S. in the future. As you can probably assume, the “no trajectory that showed me-“, the “I was gonna quit” can’t help but ring true for me. I’ve spent what feels like so long pursuing dead-ends that I’m not only unsure if there even is a through-road but I’m wondering what vehicle I ought to be riding in.

I thought I had come here to make movies. I thought I had skills that were valuable, that were wanted. I thought I had a perspective — coming from another country — that would be useful. I thought my efforts were all that mattered. But now I think I came here to be wanted. Now I think my skills are undisciplined and based in intuition. Now I think my perspective is naïve and deluded. And now I know my efforts to count for so little when I’m essentially just asking people for the permission to stay here. And I have no home to go back to. I don’t have a bed back “home”. I don’t have a wardrobe back “home”. I sold off, gave away, put into some form of storage the residue of twenty-four years lived — traded for a plane ticket and some financial runway that I expected would allow me to “figure it out”.

I can’t see next steps. I can’t make a movie with just three weeks left here. I can’t finish scripts with just three weeks left here. I can’t get attention without the portfolio of work behind me. And then I turn to look at last year, when I worked just three days a week and wrote and interned and waited for a “Yes” on my short film to be accepted into a festival, all the while unaware that I was squandering the year-long visa I was entitled to as a recent graduate. For months, my November 1st return flight has felt like a curtain in front of a future I was unable yet to see. And the closer I get, the fact it still hasn’t so much as parted fills me with more and more anxiety.

So when do I quit? When do I turn away from that curtain and leave it forever unopened and pivot to a fundamentally different life? Upon what information ought I base a decision to move to some dirt-cheap South-East Asian city and grind out self-published science fiction novels or some other future that an online search for “What do I do with my life?” might return. When do I shed any sense that I deserve success and instead retreat?