Brainwashing By Elites
Today is the kind of day where I find it extremely hard to want to work. The anxiety around work, money, productivity, scrutiny, and all of that, is on fire. In fact, it threatened to swallow me whole today as I listed off the bills that I will have to take over with my sister since my dad died.
Now would be a great time for the Ohio Family Jobs Services to stop playing around and give me the money they keep denying me for… reasons?
The title of this blog is related to the fact that I recently had a discussion with a fellow college graduate (he got his MFA though) about whether or not we had felt brainwashed into thinking the only thing that matters is the prestige job. Do you have an agent? Do you have a book published? A TV or film credit? I’m now in that stage of life where I personally know a classmate who won an Emmy, a classmate who is staffed on a show that might get an Emmy for an episode he wrote, a Grammy nominated recording artist, and several folks who work on SNL. I also have a dear friend who has published four books, and more is in the pipeline. He’s also nominated for a Nebula.
Meanwhile, today my life consisted of contemplating which project to give my attention, writing exactly five lines of dialogue in a TV script that I believe the producer who asked for it is either going to steal the idea, or fail to secure the alleged Netflix deal, and then driving my niece to gymnastics practice. My niece reminds me of me when it comes my career: she’s goofing off on the beam, has zero upper body strength for bars, and collapses anytime she manages to complete a roundoff. She’s flexible though.
I have a fear of mediocrity. I fear that I am mediocre.
I started writing an erotica novel again yesterday with some falsely renewed vigor to try to do things on my own terms. But I have no faith in myself. I also spent so much of my life thinking that self-published isn’t valid. Or it’s not prestige enough. And yet, EL James is a millionaire from bad fanfiction, and something tells me she doesn’t care if people thought 50 Shades of Grey was good as much as they bought thousands of copies of it.
I’m a fake activist on tiktok now, and I like a lot of videos about communism and entertain the idea of starting a community center with my sister. I also drafted a whole ass YouTube essay about things I wish I could explain to Black youth today. My Kpop podcast has over 5000 downloads.
And all of this feels like when my niece can do the splits with ease, but if you ask her to put together the motions for a back handspring you’re lost.
The elites have absolutely convinced me of what was possible to step into while I remain chained to the floor, unable to get to the front of the stage. 40 feet from stardom. Flopping around with all these ideas and no way to execute them.
