Saturday, January 7, 2012

Creative Fulfillment

I finally figured out why my thoughts are stuck in Georgia (and not here in Arkansas, enjoying what I will be losing when I move in just under six months)...and it's not because it's Georgia. I mean, seriously, it's Georgia- I plan on staying there only as long as I have to.
Don't get me wrong; Atlanta is "MY" city, and I will always be a Georgia Girl. As long as I live, I will proudly profess that I grew up in Georgia for the first (almost) 22 years of my life. But thinking about what I'm doing, moving to a town 2 hours north of where I was born, and working in a financial company and/or a movie theater, scares me. It literally terrifies me. I don't want to be that person who, at her 20th Reunion, has to say "Oh, yeah, I'm still here, but it looks like I'm going to be promoted to Upper Management at Burger King, so that's exciting!" That's not what I went to school for. Technically, I went to school for theatre, and that is why I am in Arkansas now. I have a job with a professional theatre, doing exactly what I went to school for. BUT I NEED A BREAK. Hence the moving back to Georgia and working at a movie theater for a while, and hence the panic about my future.
But it's because I can feel myself slowly burning out, that I keep thinking about Georgia. I don't feel fulfilled in my current job, and because I am feeling that at a job which is exactly what I should have taken after I graduated, I am planning a future away from theatre. Maybe. I am not completely cutting theatre out of my life, because I have strayed before, and I almost immediately needed to get back into the shop and backstage. So I know there is some passion for the art in me; I remember it from school. But for now, I need to find something that is going to make me feel fulfilled, and theatre isn't doing that for me anymore.
I'm not saying working at a movie theater will do that either, though that is a bit closer to the industry I would like to have a future in. But working in a movie theater (and not in live theatre) will give me the time to work on projects which will fulfill me, even if they don't exactly pay me.
I already have a channel on YouTube with a corresponding Twitter account. I'm not able to do very much with these yet, because I don't have adequate equipment for filming videos, and even with the crappy camera I do have, my current job gives me almost zero time to work on editing a video. So once I move back to Georgia, I plan on dedicating more time to this project, because I would really like to see it grow.
But why Georgia? I want to travel - I want to live somewhere else, maybe North Carolina or Virginia, or somewhere in the Northeast. But my best friend and collaborator currently has a life set up in Georgia (she still lives in her hometown as well), and has resources already in place for my next fulfilling project; a webseries.
We are going to write and produce, as well as star in, a fanfic webseries. And she knows the people and the locations we need - all of which are in Georgia - and it would be much harder to film the webseries in a place we don't know as well. There are other, more mundane reasons for me to move back to Georgia having to do with future financial obligations that I'm not going to get into, but the reasons above are the main ones.
So, even though I have a very sweet setup at my current job, and I honestly could not have asked for a better First-Year-Out-Of-College, my brain is stuck back in Georgia (making me feel like I'm stuck in the past, though I am slowly realizing that's not actually the case) because that is my most likely chance of feeling fulfilled in my life.

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