Text and Hubris

In between the chaos of this week, I’ve been working on a presentation for a performance class. The class itself is amazing and I am glad I risked taking it. In retrospect, I took the class for a lot of reasons. I want to write and perform my work. I see myself primarily as a storyteller, not just a writer. There is an energy in the spoken word that can’t be denied. It extends well beyond the written page and connects us in a much more direct manner.

This something that any poet should already know. In fact, a lot of my problems with certain experimental forms of poetry is that they don’t lend themselves to spoken performance. I see that as a failing. A poem’s, or for that matter, a story’s value is multiplied in its telling. When we tell a story we infuse a part of who we are into it and that is something I’ve always found fascinating.

A long time ago, I used to be able to stand up in front of crowd and speak. I used to be comfortable performing. I don’t know what happened, but now I find myself all tangled up in weird anxieties. I can still give a presentation in a work setting and I can prattle on endlessly in social functions but performance has suddenly filled me with doubts I’ve never had before. It’s weird and I don’t like it. So I decided to face it. In this class, I have to perform. I have to get up and do my piece. I may hate it. I may not feel prepared, but I just have to do it. I hope that this will help me overcome whatever that hangup is and move past it.

Today, I gave a draft performance. I was visibly nervous but I made my way through the whole thing. It wasn’t rote but it was close. I wish I recorded it. I would have loved to hear how I retold it just to get a feel for how some things should change. Then I turned in what was the roughest, rough draft of my life mainly because I didn’t know what to do with the script. For me it was merely a memorization sheet and I am sure my grammar was absolutely atrocious. Ah well, it was a very rough draft. At least the performance went okay. I liked the criticisms afterward. They were spot on and I appreciate finding ways to tweak a work. It will be interesting to see how this class progresses throughout the spring and what I learn about myself while I am in it.

I have more to post on this and more to talk about today but for now I digress. I been on a personal kick as of late (a blizzard does that) but it is time to return to more transmedia topics or at least some transmedia topics. Otherwise, this is all hubris and, well, we can’t have that!

Excuse my heavy breathing and the audio. That wind was brutal! Playing in the snow is always fun, though.
[jwplayer mediaid="828"]

One of the more challenging issues about returning to school for me is that it has, in some ways, actually led me to feel a bit more incompetent. After all, when one is starting over it’s hard to feel prepared and able no matter how nice that GPA looks. In many ways this can be a good thing. It helps to diminish that desire to coast through class and it pushes me to continuously work as hard as I can. In a professional sense, though, it does breed a sense of inexperience and lack even when that lack shouldn’t be there.

It’s something we all have to deal with from time to time. The danger comes when that sense gets internalized and we start to actually believe our lack. I know that is how it works for me. I find myself deliberately holding back and I don’t quite know why. All I know is that it reflects poorly on me and it has to stop.

Quite honestly, the worst thing any of us can do is give in to that feeling and accept it as truth.

There has been a lot to discuss over these past few weeks, but I haven’t really figured out a way to discuss things without getting a bit melodramatic. Now that things have settled, I think I can post without letting the drama overwhelm the message.

The biggest news is that I have decided to put off grad school for a year. The reasoning behind this is primarily financial but other factors did weigh in my decision. I need time to pull a real portfolio of work together and I want to make sure I know what my options are instead of leaping to hit a deadline. I also need time to develop my work and my style outside of the University. I do love academia and I think that writing and teaching are a big part of my future but without time to explore, I fear becoming little more than a cookie-cutter writing trying to imitate rather than truly create on my own.

This has, of course, opened up a whole slew of panicked thoughts in my head. The truth is that I don’t know what to do about a job. I know the tech industry and I know how to land jobs there. I don’t know how to even pursue a job in my field, right now. Worse yet, I am not even sure what my field is. I tried to apply to a job last semester that was part-time and for an organization that I respect and admire. I wanted to simply be an assistant digital librarian. I wanted to research and collate because that is what I had time to do, and it was something that truly interested me. I ended up being dropped into a coding position which meant a lot more hours and I had to quit because I wasn’t able to commit that much time to the project while still meeting my other obligations.

I’m really worried about that happening again. While I won’t have the obligations, I don’t want to end up where I was before I started this whole venture. I don’t want to end up falling back into my tech job simply because it is easy. I chose this path because I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t progressing. That sense of growth is important to me, but I also accept that I need money. That’s something I am becoming more and more aware of every day. Things are getting tight and I am feeling the pressure. I graduate in four months and I need to find something to stay on track.

This is the scary part. I knew it would be. You don’t decide to make a change this drastic without some stress involved. I also know that getting past it won’t be easy, but it is part of the journey. It is part of what I accepted when I chose this path. I know this was the right choice, though. I know that English is where I was meant to be and that the merging of tech and literature is the most interesting thing in the world to me. If you read this as merely my log of my journey then there isn’t much more to say. If you read this and you’re thinking about how terrifying it must be to make the change then I am here to tell you that it is. I still wouldn’t change it, though, not for anything.

I am officially back from my holiday reprieve; although, reprieve may not be exactly the right word to describe my winter “break.”. I am still in the midst of a winter term class in order to ensure that I hit my dates for graduation this spring. That’s made what is usually a quiet time something a bit more intense.

I am working on examining personal narratives in modern social networks. Specifically, I am looking at the definition of self. This is something I have written about earlier and I won’t go into too much detail as the class itself is still somewhat in progress, but I find myself returning to this idea and it intrigues me. I think I’ll be spending a bit of time examining this topic more intensely over the coming year.

As for this new year, what can I say? What has been left behind, for me, is a complete chapter of a life. My job, a direction that I followed intensely for nearly a decade and a half, now lies a half-year behind me. I miss the stability, but I love the opportunity. I’ve been able to work on projects and help people in ways that I never could and I have been actually excited and happy about the prospect of the future. In 2011, the stage is set but where does that take us? Graduate school, new directions into publishing and digital media, and even the idea of self-employment all loom as serious possibilities. I’m not entirely sure where any of that is going to end up. What I do know is that this is what life is about. It’s about exploring opportunities, learning how to communicate and teach, and discovering what it is that truly add value to the world around us. If I can come to the end of 2011 and feel that what I do and what I have done has added value, then I will have had a tremendous year.

I can only hope that for all of us!