This blog exists for me to find my bearings, as a writer and filmmaker. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to put in here, but what I do know is that I won’t get better at the things I want to excel at without more practice, more risk, and more exposure.
I recently learned I have ADHD, and it immediately explained so many things about not only my behaviors, but my character. I suddenly realized that what I thought were personality quirks that made me special, where the deterministic inevitabilities of someone that lived my life with these neurodivergent attributes. What does that mean? It means brain chemistry lends itself to the idea that we have a genetic destiny, that a majority of our decisions were made before we were born simply because of the chemical synthesis of two other equally fated beings.
It takes a lot of people and a lot of money to make a movie. Even if I were only a screenwriter, it would take a lot of time and a lot of critical thinking and effort to create something worthwhile. Why start? Why me? How am I important enough to warrant that the massive economic levers be pulled to create something that is essentially an imaginative exercise?
The thing I had to learn was that the singular differentiating factor in any work of art is the artist’s voice. Which is easy to intellectually understand, but to truly believe that my own voice has just as much of a right to be heard as everyone else’s? That requires something of an emotional surrender. That required me to fake-it, it being my self-confidence, till I made it. Unfortunately you don’t get the self-confidence to make the thing first, you get it after you’ve made the thing. Not ideal.
Which brings us here, to yet another attempt to write a blog. Though these days, I have a better grasp of what impedes my ability to write, I understand the destined patterns that my discovered neuodivergence creates, as well as some ways to try to bend its curve. And I think, for the first time in a long time, I have friends that are genuinely invested in my success.
Never go it alone. Alone is ego. Together is how you get it done. Which is why I’m glad you’re here.
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