Hey!

So I guess this blogging every day thing didn't really work out.

That's alright — I have my actual journal that I think is more useful for me for everyday writing, so I'm shifting back to that, hopefully. The pressure to keep things clean and polished and not quite so personal when writing here I think has kept be from being able to write consistently (because I'm not consistently clean & polished in my real life, if you know what I mean).

This summer has been hard in a lot of ways but I'm still pushing through it, trying to take things one day at a time and make positive changes going forward. I'll still be posting on this blog, but only in full post format when I feel like I have a piece of writing to share with the world.

Onwards and upwards into August, one month left until I'm back in Montreal and moving in to my new apartment. Big changes on the horizon, a whole lot of waiting in the meantime.

Here goes nothing!

— Ella

Stress that isn't mine

You can feel the presence of stress in a room like some kind of heavy fog.

My place at the very bottom rung of the ladder in terms of authority at my current job  means I have no reason to be stressed 99% of the time. I'm a tech assistant, stage hand, front of house assistant, answerer of voicemails, runner of errands. In a lot of ways I'm essentially a glorified lackey - anything anyone needs done, they can delegate it to me and I'll do it. This affords me a strange vantage point from which to look at the goings-on of a professional company.  I'm not stressed because I have no real responsibility. Everyone else on the other hand, well...

Sitting backstage watching actors run back and forth freaking out about lines missed or cues skipped; the stress of things going wrong with tech — all normal and reasonable things to be expected at any point in a run, but basically inevitable on opening night when we've only had one preview (there's usually at least a week of previews before opening). It's strange to see it happening outside of me, especially seeing as I'm someone who very easily gets stressed or anxious for basically no reason.

Anyway, my break is almost over now so I've gotta get back to that but I figured this was something to write about for today.

Thoughts from the road

A long and full day again today, but things should be settling down starting tomorrow I think, since I don't have to start til 3 instead of 1:30 like I did today.

Anyway, thought of the day comes from riding the uhaul truck back from the site this evening — I'd never been in a truck before, and it was so strange to see the view of the city from so much higher up than I'd ever seen it before. It was really pretty (I have a thing for skylines, I know), but also weird to think about how much I don't see on a regular basis. Talked about that in a conversation on the way there today as well, about how there's so much to learn and see and experience in the world but it's so hard to actually get to even a tiny fraction of it.

I will never read every book, or listen to every piece of music, or go to every place, or talk to every person, and the world in which I live will always be so small. That's just part of what it means to be alive. But still, compared to even a couple decades ago, or to other parts of the world, I have access to so much more than people could have even imagined. Huge systems of privilege afford me the luxury of choice in what I spend my time exposing myself to, and I guess in the grand scheme of things it's a pretty nice problem to have. It just means I have a certain amount of responsibility, I think, to consider what choices I'm making and why.

You'll never see the whole sky, that shouldn't mean you have to point your telescope at only one constellation forever.

So many long days

I'm very tired now and about to go to sleep but nonetheless, still here, writing every day.

Since I lack the energy to have any real coherent thoughts, here's the song I've had on repeat for the past three days. I fucking love Mal Blum.

Tired!!!!

Worked 9am to 9pm today, tomorrow's 10-9, and then tech week is over and we're officially on tour with the show! So then I won't be starting work til like 2pm, but getting home late at night. Hopefully that'll be slightly more conducive to writing? 

I'm EXHAUSTED and I'm definitely gonna be in pain tomorrow, but one thing I can say for sure is by the end of this summer I'll be in shape again from all the time spent lugging set pieces and tech equipment around. Also — lifting with your knees? I always vaguely knew of that as a thing I should do, but only today did I truly realize how important and useful it is. Drop a squat before you pick up heavy things!! It makes it so much easier and you have much fewer regrets.

Wish me luck not dying when I have to do this again tomorrow,

- Ella

Walking up a big hill

It's tech week, so lots of long days!

At least that's how I'm explaining to myself why I never have enough time to write anything considerable lately...

So instead of much writing, you get this photo I took when I had to stop and take a breather while walking my big up the huge hill that's on my way home from work. Like... I consider myself a pretty out-of-shape person, but honestly this hill huge. The exhaustion is justifiable. Also the sun was setting and it was pretty and I'm a sucker for skylines.

I've also found this coconut-based yogurt that's SO good and I've been eating it with strawberries as a dessert-y thing lately, and I dunno I got home after a long day today and listened to a podcast and ate that, and I know it's cheesy but I guess it's true that sometime you've just gotta keep going for the small things.

<3

- Ella

Things to listen to

Shortest post yet! I've gotta get on writing these things earlier in the day...

1. Found out that the podcast Invisibilia has a third season that I was previously unaware of?? Started listening today, I already know I'll be speeding right through all of the episodes - fantastic stuff. 

2. Can't stop listening to this song by Mitski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovFVapCtMHo

Writing

Keepin it up! I said I'd write on here every day but I never promised they'd be long posts.

Saw two more fringe shows today, the second one specifically was fantastic, definitely recommended. I might write about it tomorrow...

Stumbled across this short film online today as well — also a good watch if you've got 15 minutes to spare.

Some vague thoughts for today:

I think the energy that drives me to be scared or sad or self-destructive is the same energy that I put towards writing/art-making. I'm not super great at talking about my feelings to other people, and I think I'm also not so great at directly defining them for myself in a way that makes sense to me. Creating things has always been how I funnel that energy into something positive (or at least somewhat productive), and I think it's also the only way I'm able expel certain things from myself without having to have them perfectly understood or articulated first. Playwriting, for example, is this weird thing where I'm able to explore stuff I'm feeling or thinking about without really knowing what I'm doing. I'm not sure if any of that makes sense, but often I'll go back and read something I'd written months ago and realize only in retrospect what it was that I was working through at the time. It's not like I sit down beforehand and go "I'm gonna write this thing about Theme A". I just start writing, and only afterwards am I able to look at it and go "hey, looks like I was writing about Theme A".

I often have difficulty (as with most things, to be honest) explaining this to other people, but it all has something to do with how I write because I have to. I write because if I didn't I'm pretty sure I'd explode.

Time

Feeling good about the fact that I've actually kept up with writing every day for 3 days in a row now. Apparently it takes 66 days to fully integrate a habit though so I make no guarantees.

This isn't meant to be a diary so I'm not gonna do "day summaries" unless I don't have time or can't think of anything else to write about, but today was the end of my first official week at my new job, so that's cool! Next week things really ramp up and then we have our first show on Friday, so looking forward to all of that.

Not too much on my mind today — or, I guess, lots on my mind but nothing coherent enough to write about. Also I procrastinated writing this for so long I'm too tired now to be interesting or intelligent.

Trying to take small steps to move myself forward instead of trying to force myself into big changes that just end up overwhelming me. Committing to writing every day is one step. There's a lot I want to get to but I know I can't get to all of it right away. Everything takes time.

Time time time, I'm never sure what to do with it. Half of me is terrified of wasting it or losing it or it passing by too quickly, and the other half wants to do away with it entirely. I guess the things you want to be over right away always seem to take forever, and the things you want to last forever seem to be over right away.

Hopefully learning to be ok with where I am in whatever moment I'm in, no matter what (or when) the moment is.

— Ella

Burritos and Friendship

Requisite low-quality snapchat photo

A quick post today, cause I should go to bed soon.

Spent the day with a friend of mine from university. We got burritos, went to see a fringe show (a silly sketch comedy revue, all good fun), and then spent like 4 hours in a board game cafe playing scrabble, ghost blitz, and concept. A++ recommended.

Talking over our burrito lunch, we decided that doing pretty much anything in life is ridiculous and unreasonable for one reason or another, but nonetheless we all find things that we think are justifiable. The task, it seems, is to find other people for whom those things are also not ridiculous.

Friendship is essentially about finding the people whose specific brand of crazy is compatible with yours.

Work Work Work Work Work

So, it's been a while...

The last post I made here was almost exactly two months ago, and filled with self-described "verve". As you may have noticed, I haven't posted even once since then. I was at least little self-aware, mentioning that "transition-period energy is notoriously deceptive", but I think I definitely misjudged this whole thing.

Both a lot and not much at all has happened in the meantime. Summer break tends to be not an ideal time for me because without the consistency and structure of school I fall apart a bit, but I guess that's why I need to create outlets for myself that give me consistency. It's funny to think that I've already been off school for the amount of time I've always had off for summer break in the past — this whole four months for university thing is weird.

Actually, what all of this has really been hitting home for me is the fact that what I'm living now is "the real world". I know, I hate that phrase as much as the next guy (every "world" is a real one — there's no more or less reality to the experience of high school or university than there is working a full time job), but the part of it I'm dealing with is the realization that eventually I'm not going to be in school anymore. And honestly that's pretty terrifying to me. This of course is an immensely privileged dilemma to have — for some people, work (often at a job they hate) is a constant factor in their lives from a very young age. I've been lucky enough to have just worked various part-time jobs since I was about 15, but it's a whole 'nother ballgame to think about really truly committing to a full-time position over a long term. The way of the world now seems to be that there isn't really such a thing as a single forever career, but even spending as little as a year doing one thing every weekday is a lot to consider. Oddly enough, I think the fact that I've always really loved school ¹ is part of what's making this so difficult, because I spent most of my life excited to get up and go to class in the morning. I've never been much of an extroverted or overly social person, so whatever thing I spend most of the day doing (whether that's going to school or going to work) takes up all of my "being out with people" energy. So that's why it's so important for me that whatever I spend most of my day doing is something I enjoy, because I'm not really capable of coming home afterwards and using that time to do other things that expend my energy in that way. If that makes any sense? I can come home and do passive stuff like watching tv or reading, or more self-focused things like writing or journalling, but I can't really go out.

I'm really not sure how any of this will read — part of me thinks I'm just being whiny, but I know this is a legitimate discussion I've been having with myself for a while now and writing it out helps to make some sense of it, I think.

I know I keep going off on tangents here but another thing my experience of this summer so far has been making me think about is how relevant clichés are, and how learning things always seems to happen in cycles. Everything I'm going through — not knowing what I want out of my life, feeling lost and lonely, realizing how much more complicated the world is than I had been previously led to believe — is about as big a "19 year old in her first summer after university" cliché as you can get. I mean this is the shit they write indie movies about. Actually going through it is a lot less fun because unlike in an indie movie, I can't be sure it'll all work out in the end, and there aren't any nice clean plot-tropes to fall into that make sense. If anything, though, the structure I do seem to have is the way I almost always seem to learn things. First something comes up, usually as a cliché, like "do what you love". Then, after enough repetition, I think I understand it. Of course! "Do what you love"! Then I undergo some kind of real-life experience where the cliché applies, and it all falls apart. "Shit! You can't just do what you love, the world doesn't work that way!". And after rolling around in that for a while, I come out the other side with a more nuanced version of the original cliché. "You can't do what you love right away, you have to work to get to it, and even once you're there you'll have to make sacrifices and do things you don't love sometimes, but if you're doing the right thing, the sacrifices will feel justified".

The curveball comes in after that part. Because that part always feels like the end of it, but it never is, because this kind of learning never really seems to end. Inevitably, I end up internalizing whatever I've ended up with and I hold on to that until it, too, is challenged, and I have to angst about it for a while again before finding even more nuance and complication. Some kind of ouroboros of knowledge, infinitely eating its own tail.

For me, at least, it's often hard to get out of the looping of it. I want, desperately, to find an ending. An answer. But the only things that stay concrete like that are clichés. That's why they're so simple, they manage to be both true and untrue at the same time.

Right now, for example, I'm as close to "doing what I love" as I can be given my current status as a 19 year old with limited experience who's going back to Montreal for university in two months. I'm working as a production and front of house assistant for a touring Shakespeare theatre company. Hell fuckin' yeah amirite?? Right now that mostly means helping build set pieces, but it's great! I definitely enjoy it more than any job I've had previously (all of which were in some kind of food service capacity, and let me tell you I much prefer being alone in a room with a good podcast and an electric sander, even if my safety goggles keep fogging up). But at the same time it's certainly not an end-goal job. It's a little summer student position, working with a company I love, and a great place to make connections. I'm immensely grateful for it. I also still have no idea what I actually want to do with my life, and I'm not very good at just enjoying things for what they are unless I can make them fit into this ongoing narrative I can't seem to shake, where everything I do is somehow vital to getting me to where I need to be in the future. I know it's more than a little ridiculous (how do you plan for the future you want when you don't know what future you want?), but nevertheless, here I am.

There's an article by Elan Mastai that I read a few months ago and really loved, and I keep thinking about this one quote because it felt so true (and the kind of True that only exists in good writing — how something about the wording of it makes it truer).

"When I was twenty-five, I thought the most dishonest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people change. At twenty-five, I was positive that nobody ever changed. When I was twenty-six, I learned the most honest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people only change if absolutely forced to by circumstances; that nobody ever wants to change, and they’ll do whatever they can to stay the same, until there is no choice. At twenty-six, I understood that you never choose to change. You are changed." 

— Elan Mastai, The First Time I Got Paid to Write   

This truth is a hard one to reconcile when you want, desperately, to change. As with everything, I'm sure it isn't a hard and fast rule, but there definitely is a kind of real futility in trying to orchestrate the circumstances of your own personal transformation.

I think I'm trying to find a balance between writing as a way to find answers, and writing as a way to uncover questions you didn't know you had. There's a tone to a lot of my older writing, I think, that's based in me using it as a way to justify something to myself. To further secure a cliché that I'm too afraid to allow to just exist, amorphous and unanswered.

So, going forward, I'll be trying to strike a balance. The title of this blog is "some type of journal", so I guess this should at least be getting me closer to that than I have been before. As an aid to my own need for routine, the plan is to write every day. Not necessarily something long — although it can be. This one got away from me a bit but I guess I had a lot on my mind. Either life updates or talking about things that happened over the past two months, or just whatever I'm thinking about and trying to work through. I know it's healthy for me to do that in the kind of venue where I can't spiral out and get self-destructive in my thinking, because here I'm beholden to at least some semblance of coherence and readability.

Anyway, in the service of trying to live in the middle ground, some questions I don't have answers to:

• Is it actually possible to live in the middle ground, without having answers to everything? Or is it only possible to decide on a certain set of answers with which to order your life for the moment, all the while knowing that they are incomplete and must change given new experiences or information?
• Is there a certain kind of sad that just never goes away? Like, the knowledge that things cannot and will not always be good, and even when they're good for me, they're not good for someone else.
• What does it mean to be happy? For real happy, not just-for-a-minute-because-you're-thinking-about-something-else happy. What does it look like? How do you know when you're there? I think I'm talking about the type of happiness that affords a kind of security to existing because even when you're going through a hard time you still have something solid underneath it all. How do you find that? Where is it? Does it even exist or are the people (read: certain adults) in my life who seem to have that, just pretending? And if they are, is it possible to still live a good life? Is the purpose of life happiness, or something else? Everything always seems to point to happiness (or at least eudaemonia) as the purpose of life. Are there other ways of living if that's impossible? 

I don't know. Maybe I never will. In the meantime, here's to keepin' on keepin' on.

— Ella

---

1 And by that I mean I love attending classes. Don't get me wrong, I was exceptionally lucky in my high school experience, but there was also a lot of shit I'm glad I've left behind.