I feel like being the first to respond here, I should tread lightly. I can already sense there is a solemn stillness about this particular place in the forum, one we've seldom encountered in the past, one akin to the learning of Mike's accident, or Invid's passing. One that transcends this forum, and binds us all together for our future, whatever it may be. This place should statistically have been dead for years but it goes on, never quite sure what it is and not caring one bit about it. It's just here. In a little more than a month I'll be celebrating my ten years of first registering here. I've marked it in my agenda, with a notification. Anyway, I'll be writing more about what this community keeps meaning to me on December 5th. This is not about me right now.

I'm writing all this because I need you to know that I love you deeply and while I would never have asked anything, because it's an unspoken contract of true friendship that one needn't explain themselves about disappearing for months on end, and saying hi whenever the stars have aligned enough for one to feel good enough about saying hi is sufficient, I for one feel humbled and privileged that you would tell us your story.

Whatever amount of detail is in it, whatever omission you feel you need to do to say what it is you need to say, it doesn't matter, because this is your story, and we, as friends, will be happy as long as you give us what you need to give us. Should it have been nothing more than your typical "hi, I'm still here", again, I would have been perfectly okay. But here comes something else. And there's nothing egomaniacal about it; it means you trust us enough to share it with us. I feel loved and cared about just from you doing this, even if it's a tool for your therapy. Especially if it's a tool for your therapy. That this place can be a tool for your therapy, even if it's one amongst others, has a special meaning, and I can't stress enough how strongly I feel that meaning.

I'm excited too.

--

And just think about it: you can totally have a kickass TEAGUE'S HORSESHIT banner at the top of the forum.

Last edited by Saniss (2021-10-24 19:51:11)

"Where could so many parts of a life go," might be a good question open this.

It's honest. It's probably the better question for the beginning of this story, which will predominantly be about ways in which your protagonist makes their life worse. Or, perhaps, "How could so many things appear to be functional when they actually weren't?" That's honest, too, and it's one of the centerpience coincidences in my life. If I were looking for a contrived question to open the story with, that might be the very best one.

A writerly contrivance is not necessary, because my unwriterly life story provides a jumping-off question that's directly pertinent to our purposes. One hundred times a day (this is an honest approximation), I ask myself the same blistered thing. Call it The Big Question:

"What am I supposed to be doing?"

Sometimes, more rarely these days, it's asked existentially. Back around the time I had to move back in with my parents (over a year ago, at the age of 33), I was wracked with huge existential strains of that question for hours on end, every day, walking in circles, working the problem, re-asking the question. Answering The Big Question seemed extraordinarily urgent. Urgent like an emergency — or, rather, urgent like a disemergence. In those cases, the Bigness will be felt as bigness.

Usually, it's asked in such an innocent little mental voice that it breaks my heart. I'll be miserable, I'll have just "finished" "digesting" some new moment of shame or depression or panic about my future, and I'll look up — precisely as if there was something productive I was just doing; as if I'm snapping out of it — and I'll say, "what am I supposed be doing?" In these cases, the Bigness is experienced as a physical ache, from the pure priority of it.

A hundred times a day, in disordered, neurotic fashion. It needs answering.

An innocent voice has forgotten, for one last moment, that there is no answer.

Depending on which version of me doing the answering — for instance, if you asked a version of Teague who was not spiralling into said question at the moment — there would be all different sorts of answers I was capable of coming up with, big or small, creative or prosaic; alas, in the real world, the version of me doing the asking-part is always the same minimized Teague with watery eyes, fixing to dump an emotional fireplane onto pronounself.

(Just kidding. We can go with 'he' or 'they' [singular] or 'them' [plural].)

If The Sanest Version Of Myself were to answer The Big Question, you'd get an answer you'd recognize from the Teague you're most-familiar with, about the life said-Teague was leading. The Sanest Version Of Myself is basically a proxy for the version of me I knew, who existed... say, on my 30th birthday. As of September 5th, 2017, The Sanest Version Of Myself knows what it's supposed to be doing.

It just... can't.

Ha!

I don't think I have anything constructive to add. But I'm here; I'm listening. Thank you for sharing when, as Saniss said, a simple "hi" would have sufficed.

I count myself fortunate that I'm managed to avoid (largely though not completely) trauma and drama; but I hope that that makes me a solid thing to hold onto for those around me who are Going Through It. Teague, it sounds like you most certainly Went Through It, but maybe are Still Going; whatever the case, I'm here, and I'm listening, and I hope that helps.

Sorry you've had a time of it, but it's really good to have you back.

This is your home, Teague.
Let loose. We're all ears.

Last edited by Tomahawk (2021-10-26 17:34:58)

On my 30th birthday, I commute to an unmarked building in Santa Monica where the space shuttle from Armageddon hangs in the kitchen. When I glance up to assess it, the backdrop is a (large) screen-used Jolly Roger flag hanging in the rafters; this is from the first Pirates of the Caribbean.

Mr. Bruckheimer's not here yet.

It's a Tuesday. I'm the first person at his studio in the morning.

(Well, second. The property manager has to let me in. I'm a freelancer.)

I'm working for one of my favorite supervisors ever, and — ultimately, because my supervisor is cool — I'm operating out of Editorial for the feature I'm working on. This is incredibly odd. I'm a VFX artist, and typically a rather lowly one; I'm doing my normal job, while sharing space and meetings with the director, the editor, the VFX editor... and in this case, the executive producer, whose studio served as our home base.

At work, I work hard.

At home, my mind is elsewhere.

In recent years, having surpassed whatever career goals I'd ever envisioned in the first place (beyond working, I had envisioned none), I've made the mistake of becoming untethered from them. It's supremely untrue to say 'early success came easily' — more true, perhaps, might be to say that success kinda came for free with the person I was being. This is not meant to sound impressive — it's all just... flukes. Everything about me is a lucky coincidence. I was at the center of things that were happening, and so it looked like I must have been involved.

What's worse is, this illusion even fooled me. From the inside, such an illusion works like narcissistic rocket-sauce: "To make things work, one must merely already be worthy and then show up." It's a dumb heuristic, and nobody thinks they're really even thinking it — they're eschewing it — but, just like most heuristics, it never gets disproven until it's too late.

The magic was not in you. The magic was in the world. You were in the world.

Turns out, magic is transactional.

In this case, by magic, I mean 'success.'

That feels right.

• • •

And Drew's like "stop telling us you're gonna tell us and just tell us."

(Rightly.) Yeah. Sorry. I'm not being elliptical intentionally, it's just... there's a lot of themes and throughlines that all need setting up, because they're all involved, and they all come from different points in my life. Some big stories have multiple endings; this big story has no clear beginning. By the time the events are underway, the themes need to make sense; by the time the themes make sense, we're on introduction post forty-five. Yeah.

(This is gonna take a while. Heh.)

Broadly speaking, the point of this thread is to put into words the answer to the question "what the hell happened to Teague," because a large portion of why I've disappeared from... everything... is because I can't describe myself very well anymore, and (for one irrational reason or another), I feel like being describable is a pre-requisite for being a person. Which. Heh. No.

Ultimately, I'm stuck under the delusion that "who are you" is a question that requires an answer. I haven't been able to find it by myself, though I've spent a couple years trying to. I'm pretty sure I'm going to find it by writing these posts.

In the meantime, oh my god I know. I know. Elliptical. I know.

Most of the stuff we're breezing past at this point will be revisited.

• • •

There was also a freestanding rubber-band gatlin gun in the kitchen, but that's not from a movie.

See? Revisted.

"Of course you're in love with her, she's an //actress.//"

That's the punchline of an anecdote told by one of my theater mentors. Cassie's tale dealt with a backstage crush that was predictably undone after the show's run. It's hard to pretend to be in love on stage because the off-stage emotions are a also performance to help not-degrade the on-stage performance. It's her job to appear desirable, she's good at it, so of course you fell in love with her. It's what she does: she is good at making people like her.
She has Charisma, in addition to whatever multitudinous other talents.
What she's not good at is actually loving others, or even herself, because it's always a performance, she doesn't know how to make it 'real.' As brother Maynard sings it: "Fuck these dysfunctional, insecure actresses."
Self-confidence and poise that motivates others to like or follow or respect you is psychically draining and often dishonest; masks that a talk-show shrink could expound upon.

Is that on-topic? IDK, but that's a somewhat polished thought that bubbled up while re-reading the posts in the thread thus far.

This tangent has ruled. (EDIT: Thus far?)

See, this guy gets it.

Thanks for writing that, that was really lovely.

HELLO-O-o-o... ECHO-O-o-o.... I'm very much just throwing my voice into the echo chamber of what others have said, though, not as eloquently.  Hello.

1) Oh hell yeah. This is the inner turmoil thread now. Hell yeah. All in!

2) I was taken aback when you said you ailed the first round; I was briefly worried you must have gone off and done something else. Super cool that you kept at it. Feather in the ol' cap.

3) Man, thanks.