New Year (and Old Year) Musings
Goodbye 2023 and hello 2024
2023 was year two for me as a Substack blogger. I have no intentions to beg for money, and, rest assured that I have no pretensions about deserving your hard-earned nickels. Anyone is welcome to drop a dime at what I call my tip jar. It’s my Ko-Fi page, where you can donate any amount you’re comfortable with. Think of it like dropping your spare change in the tip jar at Starbucks, or a few dollars in the open guitar case of a street musician. Not that my writings have any discernible harmony; it’s just that I love getting pennies and dimes from my supporters. It makes me feel like Lucy van Pelt when Charlie Brown dropped a nickel in her donation can: “Boy, what a sound! How I love hearing that old money clank. That beautiful sound of cold hard cash. Nickels, nickels, nickels! That beautiful sound of clinking nickels!” Of course, it’s not exactly like that. I can’t hear the cash dropping in the can, but after all, isn’t that the beauty of the virtual reality of the present age? It’s the power of imagination, people!
All right, Ko-Fi page plugs aside, I want to briefly review the year so far. Then, I’ve got some big news for the year just around the corner. This past year was my first year doing interviews. When I opened this account with Substack in April 2022, I had already been doing some articles on Medium. After I wrote the review of Champ Clark’s one-man-show starring John Mese as Christian Brando, in June of that year, I started to seriously think about Substack as a writing platform. A lot of writers on Medium were making the switch. I’m sure other writers will have more elaborate things to say about why they ultimately did make the leap, but for me, it just felt right. I like the clean look and functionality of Substack. I think the structure of article URLs is vastly superior to those at Medium. That’s the long and the short of it, I’m afraid. So I dove in, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve done everything on this blog. I’ve done book reviews, a lot of film analysis, philosophical musings, spiritual ramblings, ancestral unveilings, a theatrical review, a Jane Austen adaptation review, TV reviews (Stranger Things, Obi-Wan, Severance.) But really, there are just too many articles to list here, and honestly, some of them are about multiple things. There are 82 in total, 65 of which were penned in the first year. I had no idea what I was doing. I just wrote. I watched things, I read things, I thought about things, and I tried to articulate my conclusions. I write for myself. That much has always been true of me. I can’t imagine my life without writing. It’s the one thing I know I must do no matter what, whether I get paid for it or not, whether anyone reads it or not. It’s so much more than just therapy, as some people say. “Writing is my therapy.” Well, yes, in a way it is. I do it for therapeutic reasons, for sure. I also just do it for fun. I do it because I just can’t not do it. I used to be very selfish about my creativity. I kept it locked in and never played with others. I was a lonely kid who hated sharing her toys. To call me an introvert would be to vastly understate the case. My antisocial behavior was actually the result of being somewhere on the spectrum and severe social anxiety, the latter probably at least a byproduct of the former. I never really ‘fit in’ anywhere, and the fact that I lost a parent at the age of three and was subsequently adopted by his cousin, who married my mother, and as a consequence of that, grew up split between two branches of what was, in effect, one large Cajun family, never really belonging to one or the other, and yet somehow alienated from both….but I digress. Suffice it to say, the concept of belonging, and its opposite (not belonging) is an intrinsic part of my story. Rejection is in there as well. There’s a fine line between an individual’s path and a communal one. We all want to be unique, but we also long for acceptance. There is only so far we can go in either direction. Some people lean heavily on the ‘unique’ side of things, others lean more toward conformity. A lot of us walk somewhere in between, or vacillate between the two streams. Overall, in the whole course of my life, I’ve been fairly inconsistent about it, but then 2022 happened and I began to really reflect deeply on my inability (up to that point) to reconcile the two streams. This blog has helped me to practice a balancing act, as it were, to find something like confidence in my own skin. I’ve got all these discordant strings inside me, and coming to terms with all that disharmony and chaos is a large part of what this blog is all about. I hate putting myself out there, and yet through this blog, I do just that. In 2023, I took the next step and actually did interviews with other creators—something I was never ready to do before. If you’re an artist, whether an actor or writer, or whatever, you have something inside you that must be expressed. It will come out, even if you try to suppress it. The trick is to become present and alert enough to open that channel by which that thing, whatever it is, takes flight.…goes free. That thing is always inside. It’s in you, and so you have to look in, not out, in order to find the right creative tune. I don’t even know if what I’m saying is conclusive (is anything conclusive?) but I do know that once you stop fighting what’s inside you and just go with the flow, it’s amazing what happens. On that note, I intend to add something else to my repertoire in 2024: autobiography. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this. By that, I only mean that I don’t have it entirely fleshed out. I do know that some of my articles may end up being autobiographical sketches, little bites of self-reflection, self-analysis…in short, little doses of my 46-year-old story—the ups and downs and crazy turns. That’s all I will say about it for now. I’ll wrap things up and just reiterate how much it means to me that anyone is interested in what I have to say. Even if I don’t do it for validation from others, that doesn’t mean I’m not heartened and grateful for it as it comes.
Happy New Year!
ACR