Another Year at Home

I’ll probably delete this at some point because I hate being sincere online. The past couple of years have been quite mentally taxing, I’m sure that’s a sentiment many can relate to. 

Having a chronic medical condition that leaves me feeling sick almost every day, and having to take medication that suppress my immune system during a pandemic has left me living in a constant state of worry. I’m not on edge every moment of every day, that would make living life completely untenable. However the worry has become a part of the background noise of life, a dull hum barely audible, but ever present. I’ve been doing everything I can to ensure that my risk factors are limited. From staying at home as much as possible to getting vaccinated as soon as I was allowed. 

However nothing is guaranteed, no one can ever give me a good answer on how effective the vaccine is for immunocompromised people. Often times when someone who was vaccinated dies it is brushed off as “well they were immunocompromised” which fair enough, but being in the category makes the humming louder, something that can’t be as easily ignored. 

I also feel that everyone is so over the pandemic that returning to normal life seems inevitable, and the stress of not feeling personally comfortable with that, mixed with feeling like you’re letting people down by not being willing to return to normal life is tough to put it mildly. In the beginning I had hoped that we would rally as a collective to get through the worst of it, however that hasn’t been the case. With new variants on the horizon and people still after all this time refusing to get vaccinated and take precautions I just don’t see a light at the end of a tunnel. Instead just a perpetual groundhog day, as my ears fill with the ominous hum of apathy, something in which I can not afford to indulge. 

Ego

The life of an artist consists primarily of selfish pleas, sleepless nights and constant worry. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying at once. To be persuaded by the right side of the brain into releasing personal works for public consumption is an evolutionary trait that perplexes.

I’ve know this lifestyle all to well, true I’ve never been the starving artist stereotype, take one look at any of the videos I’ve produced and that’s clear. In the background however, on my free time from work or school I’ve always pursued my passions with varying levels of urgency. To date I’ve been involved in roughly 304 videos on three YouTube channels, 105 podcast episodes and countless status updates and tweets aimed to amuse.

None of these projects have brought me the success I’ve aimed for yet, there are outliers, a sketch about a business meeting tallied an at the time impressive number of views and just recently a video updating the status of the much beloved show “The Boondocks” blew up in a small way boosting our subscriber base. These brief brushes with internet notoriety gave me the feeling I’ve been longing for. The ego stroke if I’m being brutally honest and putting aside my compulsive need to be liked by everyone for a moment, I felt was long overdue.

That’s the balance of being an artist it seems, when does art for art’s sake give way to ego. Are you truly not an artist if you aren’t content with toiling in obscurity? That question follows me, poking at the very essence of my being. Am I an artist or just a guy starving for attention?

“Look at me, I’m making a joke, I’m reviewing a new movie, I’m talking about a tv show the majority of the people on Earth only have a vague recollection of, leave a thumbs up or subscribe so I can have this entire venture validated in some small way,”

In many ways I feel selfish as an artist, greedy even. True as of yet I’ve never asked for a dime, but I do ask for people’s time and social currency.

“Don’t forget to share this with your friends, it helps the channel out,”

The artist in me is content to create forever for a small circle of people who are interested. But as always my ego just wants more. The life of an artist is about balancing these two opposing forces. The life of an artist is my life.

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