What a wonderful thing it is to travel! It makes me think on my feet, takes me away from routine, engages parts of my brain that atrophy in normal life, and reminds me of life beyond the bubble of day job, trains, yoga, and sleep.
Years ago, I left Marvel for MariesWorldTour after too many years spent toiling away for 8-11 months in order to facilitate those few months abroad.
"I've got this backwards," I thought. "The formula is amiss." The majority of my life was for work. The precious leftover weeks were for me.
"I'm going to create lasting change," I decided.
In the end, real change eluded me. Coming home ultimately produced valiant efforts at lifestyle change devolving into... the exact same thing I left behind years ago. Traveling alone around the entire world on buses and ships, living in Australia, renting in Uganda, roaming the streets of Barcelona and Berlin devolved into chasing someone else's dreams again.
I make comics, kids.
Still.
Traveling transcends real time. Days feel like weeks. Weeks feel like months. Months feel like years. And coming home, it all catches up and time gleefully has its vengeance. Days of sitting at a desk blur together, as weeks race by into months, months to years. There's no time for anything of my own.
Somehow, after all this practice, the Reluctant Editor still doesn't have it right.
4 comments:
Oh, stop beating yourself up. It's harder and harder to sell writing these days, and very few people I know can actually do it, myself included. You're accumulating experience that'll do you a world of good, and eventually something will come of it. At least you have a job, whether you like it much or not. And that's nothing to sneeze at.
I know it's hard to get work, and that's scary. Writing pays pretty badly, especially when I see what other freelance jobs pay my friends.
And then there are moments like this morning. I was dragging after being at work until 8:30 last night and then trying to fit too many things in before I went to sleep.
I got off the train and stopped at the cart-jail where an enclosed man smiles and sells me tea.
"Two sugars--no, one."
"Bag?"
"No."
And for some reason, waltzing through my forties through midtown with a "We're happy to serve you" cup made me feel like I was Mary Tyler Moore.
I'll take that as a sign to go buy new clothes and embrace the life I stumbled back into.
I mean, until I don't. Until another 8:30 night makes me whiny again.
Sounds like the "forty-something post-holiday blues" to me. You could try a new hairstyle?
D'oh! Did that last week. You caught me.
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