A Day Late and An Update Short

This week was a wreck.

Comparatively, it wasn’t that bad, but I had some emotional beef with my soul that made being creative difficult. Needless to say, I didn’t get much done.

It’s hard to describe how depression works. Your brain wants you to get up and do things. But your body just doesn’t do it. You body wants to get up and do things. But your brain just won’t allow it. And the entire time, your soul feels like a puddle of mercury sliding back and forth on a skillet. I’ve asked myself numerous times this week, “am I really up to this?”

I could break down things like how I should talk to someone about it, how I identify why I’m feeling a particular way and try to change what I’m doing in hopes to feel different, or how my routine is personally designed to combat against the things that make me feel this way. But in all honesty, I just don’t fell like it.

It’s a feeling of inadequacy. No matter how hard I try to avoid it, it will always creep up and prevent me from getting anything done. And it’s something I’ve yet to figure out a way to deal with.

Sometimes, and I can’t really stress this enough, things just are the way they are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to accept things for what they are and keep moving forward.

So today, I’m working on recommitting myself. Things feel like they’ve fallen apart a bit. I’m going to dust off my boots, take a step back to get a better look, assess the situation, and try again.

I got through three pages of storyboarding before I realized I have no dialog. Like, I have the outline written out, but that doesn’t give me much detail. So the whole idea of skipping over that first script draft was… just stupid. What the hell was I thinking?

On top of that, I’m reconsidering the concept of being able to attach this story to other stories. I lost sight of something. The whole point of working on this was to show myself that I could accomplish one self-contained story. I completely forgot that, and made it something I ultimately am not sure I want.

Plus, I’m having some real trouble identifying the main protagonist’s motivation. Like, why the hell is he doing any of this? Did I just kind of throw him into an adventure where a bunch of stuff happens and he doesn’t really change or affect anything? Wtf, mate?

I’m disappointed in myself over these realizations, and I wonder to myself if it’s still even worth doing. IT means another re-write of the outline, as well as going back to the original idea of writing the thing out in script form before storyboarding. Which all adds up to a week’s worth of useless work. Just a bunch of wasted time. And that really stresses me out and bothers me.

So this week I sluggishly truck forward, hoping something more positive happens soon.