It's been over a year since I graduated from university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies. Tomorrow I'm going to make my return to post-secondary school to take a one year pre-trade program. This is not where I thought I would end up.
Five years ago, if you asked me to tell you about my career goals, my plan probably would have looked something like this:
- Graduate film school
- Join the local film union and start getting jobs on sets as a grip
- Continue pursuing my passion projects on the side
- Make connections through my new film jobs
- Use those connections to turn my projects into a reality
- Bask in the glory of complete success
That was my "realistic" plan. My dream plan looked more like this:
- Make a thesis film that blows everybody out of the water
- Get said thesis film into a bunch of high-profile festivals
- Win all the awards
- Wait for the job offers to start rolling in
You can guess how that went right? Actually, you don't have to guess. I told you already that I'm about to go back to school for something completely unrelated to my dream. Obviously things didn't work out.
How Did I Get Here?
I poured my heart and my soul, every hour of every day into creating my animated thesis film. I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life. And guess what? It was... just okay.
Long story short, it was not a success. I was able to get it into a few small-time festivals. But that's it. My producer and I submitted the film to over 100 festivals. We played in maybe 10. We got into just as many festivals with our previous film Cautionary Tales for Children even though we only submitted to abut 30.
My "dream" plan failed. But what about my "realistic" plan?
I Got Married
This isn't a regret. Far from it, this is the best thing I've done. I haven't regretted it once. But living with another person changes things.
If I was single, I would be fine living on my own in Toronto as a starving artist getting sporadic work on sets while I plug away on my animations at home. Things would pick up eventually. These jobs are often offered based on seniority so maybe in a few years I would be making good money.
But as one half of a couple, I knew it wouldn't be soon enough. My wife and I want to be able to have a family. I had to lay part of my dream aside in order to provide for another.
Yea, it kind of sucks but I'm not going to let my feelings turn me into a socialist like most artists I know and say that society should be forced to pay me and value the things that I do. That idea is repugnant. The market may not be doing me many favours at the moment, but it isn't a market of individuals freely trading with one another that's oppressive; nature is oppressive. That's the brutal truth of the world. Let me say it again:
Nature is Oppressive
That's reality. If I don't work, I die. I need to create shelter, hunt and gather or farm in order to survive. Conversely I could trade with others to do these things for me. But in order to trade with them I must have work or resources that they consider valuable.
And that leads to the next brutal truth: My art has almost no value. I value it very highly, but that doesn't help me when I'm trying to put food on the table. I need others to consider it valuable. But they don't. Not yet at least.
It's nobody's fault. It's just the way it is.
So here I am, facing the reality of my life, my needs, my choices and my desires and realizing that I can't have everything I want.
What Do I Really Want?
That's the question I had to ask myself? What dreams are more important to me?
Did I want to pursue a career in the field I had studied for?
OR
Did I want to pursue this woman that I had fallen totally in love with and start a family?
When I put it that way, the choice was simple. I knew that these two dreams were incompatible (at the moment at least) and I knew which one was more important. The choice was simple...
But...
Giving Up Isn't Easy
In my head I knew exactly why I was doing this. My mind was in the right place but sometimes my emotions have their own agenda.
I'm gonna get real here.
Giving up a dream sucks. There's no way around that. And it made me miserable.
For a very long time I couldn't shake the feeling that I was worthless, that I was a failure, that I would be miserable for the rest of my life. I'm going to share something very personal here that nobody has ever seen before: some excerpts from my journal taken from some of my darkest times.
Soon enough we'll be leaving this town. All of her dreams will get to come true and I won't have anything. Whatever. I don't want to write about this now. Today has been an odd day in that I'm not depressed. I don't want to make myself upset by thinking about how unsatisfying my life is.
That wasn't the only day I felt that way. Not even close.
I felt like shit last night. I was stuck again in this rut of believing that nothing will ever change. I'll never get to have what I want. I'm just a piece of fucking garbage.
Things got worse from there.
Maybe I should kill myself. Wow... I know I would never do it but I have been thinking about it more and more seriously and more and more often in recent months. I don't want to die. But I'm so tired of being sad.
This is me at my lowest point.
I just hate my fucking life.
But even through all this, I maintained some self awareness:
Sometimes my emotions spiral out of control, especially in the last year. And in those moments it feels as if my whole life is miserable. But in reality I'm very blessed. And I have this crazy-beautiful wife who loves me and I love too. Life is good.
That last entry is the only true thing I wrote. Everything else reflected how I felt in some really intense moments of emotional turmoil, but once I calmed down I knew none of it was true. I was a mess, but that's just me. Like I said in the journal, sometimes I spiral. But everything was going to be okay. I knew I could do this.
But I'm not going to lie or sugarcoat it. I felt pretty rough for a while. But that isn't the end...
The Happy Truth
Honestly, I haven't given up anything. Now that I've finally come to terms with my new reality I know this.
I love making films and that's the only "job" I'll ever really want. But I'm not losing the thing that I love, it's just taking a different place in my life than I expected. And I'm doing this to hold on to a dream that I love far more than art - my wife and our future family.
Maybe one day things will change. Maybe one day these two dreams will coexist. Maybe one day the world will reward me by valuing my films highly enough to sustain my livelihood. But I'm not there yet. I have the thing I want most and I still get to do the other thing on the side.
And that's okay.
~Seth
P.S. Thank you Steemit for giving me a new way to see some tangible returns for the work that I love doing. Maybe this dream will work out eventually!
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