10:37 am - Sun 7/21/02
Bull's-eye

(Happily, there seemed to be a higher-than-usual number of paying opportunities, both onstage and on-camera.)

That seemed to put me in a good frame of mind the rest of the evening. And it made me feel like the "research" part of my acting career might not be so overwhelming; It took me an hour to go through the listings--I was a little distracted--but that's done for the week, so now I have an additional four hours worth of lunch breaks to read The Hollywood Reporter or Variety, or whatever else might be helpful.

A couple of things I wrote in my "pocket journal" during the course of a rather dull evening:

If I get myself going in one direction as much as possible, if I quit worrying about obstacles and inner conflicts, I'm going to be fine.

I have to just admit to myself that I'm special, with all that entails...

There's no point in stopping till something actually stops me. And I hate to say it, because I kind of like my big brain, but I really need to stop thinking so much (Or more accurately, I need to stop thinking so negatively).

Nothing terribly profound there, but "profound" is not really the point. The point is just to realize that there really isn't that much between me and my goals. There are things I haven't figured out yet, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to figure them out. It's like I'm "here", my goals are "there", and my job is to figure out how to negotiate the space in between.

And till now, that's where I've come up short. I've allowed my fear of "the space in between" to rule the day.

But I don't want to be that guy anymore. I don't want to say that I'm a loser, because I'm not, but I will say that I've been acting like one, and thinking in certain "loser-ish" ways, for a very long time now.

Instead of setting up mental roadblocks, imagining problems that may never come up and letting them stop me, imagining myself as some small, overwhelmed, poor guy, I have to tap into another guy, the guy that's always known he was meant for big things. The guy that has proven over and over and over again that he's got talent, and that he has a passion for the work.

And I don't want to overemphasize this next bit, because it's not as if it's been put to a vote or anything like that, but enough people have commented on my "charisma", "panache", "stage presence", whatever you want to call it, that I think it's clear I'm built for more than the life I've created for myself. It's not just a little fantasy I've set up to make life more palatable. Other people see it, and when I can see through the fog of doubts and fears, I can see it too.

I don't know if there's a God, I don't know if there's such a thing as "Fate", but I seem to have been pointed in one direction for a long time now.

It's time to let that arrow fly...

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