10:58 AM - Weds 2.22.23
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Just finished with therapy...

(I worried when my previous therapist left - I don't like that kind of change - but things have been going well with the new person...who isn't really "new" at this point, but you get what I mean).

Today's session felt very good, but I'm having some trouble wrangling my thoughts on it into some coherent order...

Since acting is my big "thing", a lot of our sessions center around that (How I feel about where I'm at, my concerns about my career moving forward, etc).

And since that has some crossover with my worries about having enough money in the future, a lot of our sessions center around that.

And there was time spent on those subjects today. But the bulk of the time centered around what to do with myself while I'm waiting for acting to happen.

Or basically, "What can I do to make myself feel better?".

In the past couple of years, the one thing I've had is time. But contrary to what Mick Jagger might say, time has not been on my side - "killing time", mostly by cycling around and around, endlessly, on the Internet, while I wait for the auditions that don't happen nearly often enough, turns out to be a lousy recipe for a satisfying existence.

So I need to make friends with all the time I have these days. This involves, in large part, cutting down on all the time I spend on the Internet, and upping the time spent in more actively physical/mental/creative pursuits.

It'll be a challenge - I like things easy, and the one thing the Internet is, is "easy" - but if spending almost all my time on the Internet were going to make me happy, it would have done so by now.

I liked the picture my Therapist created during our session - That, instead of basically "waiting by the phone" for auditions, having texts or emails about auditions, whenever they happen, be interrupting me while I'm drawing, or playing guitar, or out on a walk, or writing in here, or whatever.

That vision immediately feels better than imagining constantly checking my phone or using the Internet as a distraction from my anxiety and boredom.

Another thing we discussed was my desire for a "legacy".

That goes back a really long time. It ties into my childhood effort to "cope" with my life, by imagining that great things were waiting for me in the future.

Again, if that were going to happen, it likely would have happened by now. That's not to say nothing good is going to happen between now and...whenever, just not anything I'm going to be remembered for in generations to come.

I didn't say it to my therapist, but when we were talking about this, a line from Angel popped into my head - "If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do".

I don't know about you, but I find that line pretty profound - Most of us are just "ordinary folks". We're not going to "make a mark" in the grand scheme of things.

So that being the case, I'd be better off just thinking about the here-and-now, doing what I can to live a decent life and maybe make the immediate world around me a slightly better place.

I just want to get a little more out of life.

And that's up to me.

(One more line I think of often because, in the past number of years, I've struggled with the issue of mortality, comes from comedian Jim Jeffries - "I'm not afraid of being dead. You know why? Because I'll be fucking dead!")

Till next time...

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