One of the hardest decisions you’ll ever face in life
is choosing whether to walk away or try harder.
-Ziad K. Abdelnour
My natural instinct is to run. Over the years I have become really good at running away. Traveling to new places and making new friends doesn’t sound so bad until it’s put into perspective with the past I’ve left behind. A past strewn with fears and failures left behind in a frantic attempt to live a better life by actively ignoring them.
Yet the path would always come back full circle and I would be running off again. Three years ago I made the hardest decision of my life, deciding to run headlong into my problems rather than away from them. It sucked; I broke. In time I was able to rebuild. What arose from those ashes wasn’t some great bulwark of a man, but rather a man conscious of his faults and failures. A man who chooses to love himself despite himself. This isn’t an easy thing for me and gets tested constantly.
This is one of those times. Lately in my acting I’ve felt like running away. This past month has been difficult. I feel at arms length; disassociated with my work, with myself. Negative thoughts engulf me as doubt creeps in from all sides. There are so many things associated with this or at cause here. I don’t even know where to begin or how to decipher them. The only thing I do know is there is nowhere else to go.
The prime directive being to kill any inflated dream of myself and focus on the work at hand. I talk about this a lot and really it’s just a humbling thing. It’s a comfort but it’s also a reality check. I’m tired of fleetingly flying from dream to dream, chasing ghosts of myself. I’m tired of giving up. I want to give up so bad right now, which makes me want to try all the harder. I have to stop focusing on an end result and being upset that it’s not instantly achieved.
There is much work ahead to be done and that is my current focus. As well as enjoying this journey of trying harder in spite of how much I want to run away. This is not an easy task, but anything worth doing is not necessarily easy.