Fly, My Friends (and Talk Like You're Falling)

Take an aural journey with me and click HERE to listen to Fly, by Zug Izland, on Spotify!

I love when I get high. The feeling of weightlessness, the authority to believe in myself, to feel deeper, to love clearer. To be better than my normal self, that's an experience every person should feel. To float, as above and beyond the reproach of someone who disapproves of the way you glide, or to be detached from the judgment of the world's standards, I want that. Yes, that sounds like the life for me. I love being high as a kite... on my own success. And, there's nothing wrong with that. I have a lot to offer my microcosmic rotation on this planet, being famous enough to be desired at friend's parties, and nothing enough to have never met my state governor.

I love having huge ideas. I love feeling more than adequate at the position I have in my business. I'm perfectly sated... until I crash because of personal or professional failure. Then, I might as well be having a bad mushroom trip. I see darkness in the sunset, overlooking the plethora of colors that shred their way through the clouds. The pain of failure is intense, searing unevenly, sometimes. It makes me miserable to stumble over my words when my brain works faster than my mouth, or when I don't land a big career move the first time it's offered to me. I have to reevaluate how I see the world I live in, because it so suddenly becomes more bleak, more realistic, more fleeting and spacious. The expanse of my darkness knows no limits. It finds its way into not being able to detach the gasoline pump handle, or when I'm trying to wake up and my dog is already loving the morning more than I could in a week of early rises.

Yet, only those who are closest to me ever see the ebb and flow of my successes and failures. Now, my personality is quite consistent to all I interact with. I write this not trying to leave an impression on you that I am heavily affected by mood swings that change my personality to the people I come into contact with. On the contrary, my smile, my hugs and perspective are for everyone, anytime they need it. I do grow tired of sharing sometimes, and that darkness I speak of often makes sharing myself more laborious than normal, but my attitude doesn't affect others simply because it affects me. Sure, I am grumpy sometimes, and I do separate myself from friends in long chunks of time. That is an issue I actively try to correct.

I love deeply, and my successes and failures in life don't intersect with my interactions with people. They are parallel, yes, in that I acknowledge how I'm feeling about something when I'm with friends, so they know those dips in my smile, or the spacing out that happens when I'm looking at my beer for too long. As a matter of fact, I just wrote the last sentence during one of my daydreams and somehow managed to write exactly what I was thinking without checking out completely and writing "beer, beer, beer". I got an image of a cold Boulevard Wheat when I typed "beer" up there. See, that's how my life flows in and out of how I'm feeling? Just like that, I am speaking (typing, in this case), the next moment, I'm seeing a light, heady foam crest the top of a pint glass, bar lights illuminating the liquid inside, and the corners of my mouth salivating slightly. That, my friends, is the life of a tired filmmaker: the visualizations never cease, not even during sabbatical to write.

I love my failures. But, let's be realistic? I only love them after I've succeeded again. Sure, I appreciate them during my lull, but in no way am I holding doors and pulling seats for my failure when she's present. I feel awful failing. I feel awfully good failing and learning, though. There's nothing quite like falling proverbially on your face, and then picking yourself up and finding a new normal, which, if combined with persistence and tenacity, makes way to a better normal than you started with. That was confusing for me to write. There's a point in language where I lose track of even my own perspective. Simile will rescue me: For every two steps I take backward to my goal, once I can take three steps, I feel like a million bucks.

When I see someone taking their social media to a place of self-aggrandizing status, my relationship with that person immediately sees a change in its psychology. Firstly, what has taken place in this person's life to make them believe listing all of their successes and displaying them publicly is something to tout? For me, personally, so you see as I see, I do not subscribe to making a list of my successes to show to people. In my perception, it shows a character flaw, be it narcissism; the idea this person wants their world to know how important they are; or, they are in need of a confidence boost to help them through stressful or hard times. I hope that by looking at a couple of options as to how I see this behavior doesn't strike you as condescending or petty. It is not. I am proud of the successes of others. Seeing their success can strengthen another person's resolve as much as it can discourage someone else to stop pursuing what they've held out hope to succeed.

It's not on me to make a judgment on why that person feels the need to display their successes with bullet points. I mean, I do, absolutely, make judgments on the inner motivations of people who seek that type of attention from their audience. And, to keep this balanced, I absolutely beg my audience to pay attention to me using my own series of tactics. My Facebook friends, by the time they figure out what I've typed in this sentence, know the number one tactic I use, and you damn well better believe I'm gonna keep making some fun declarations to my friends and audience to keep both their attention and put some air in their lungs for a good laugh.

I do want to know why it's important to let people know your successes. I personally see inadequacy in someone who brags about what they've done. It makes me immediately less impressed by whatever the thing is they're boasting. Now, there's a thin line between passion for your successes and being braggadocious. And, my "impassioned by his craft" attitude toward film making can easily come off as me being a braggart. It's not on me to hold back my successes and passions because I'm afraid of how I may be perceived, which I sometimes actively do, in spite of all my conversation about being myself and sticking to it. I'm confident I don't know enough about my future to make a list of all my previous accomplishments for the world to count. Feeling like you're on a roll and getting a flat tire happens. It has made and broken my resolve. I respect the hustle.

I constantly question my own motivations and how I am coming off to my audience. But, my love for film is undying. So undying, in fact, I've seen family and close friends gloss-over because I'm still talking about why a commercial was constructed poorly some 3 minutes later and how I might have done it differently. When your audience is spacing out, it's time to take stock in what needs to be said and what needs to be nixed from the bullet points of your life. And, again, it's not on me to make that decision for you. When you know, you know. You know?