Inexplicable optimism

As of yesterday I am now officially, and gainfully, unemployed. By choice mind you. After four years of working as an on-site Avid support tech, which was stable and paid well, I have finally made the leap into the uncertain world of freelance writing. The beginning of this new phase in my life comes on the heels of a whirlwind month and a half, which has included a move into a new apartment, a mind-trip high school reunion, and two back-to-back away jobs that paid a boatload of money but kept me away from my family for nearly three weeks straight. I’m still in the process of decompressing from this marathon run and am just really starting to ponder the implications and future of this leap.

I honestly have no idea what or who I’m going to write for, where my paychecks will be coming from or what I’m even going to write about. Fiction? Non-fiction? I’ve got several ideas, which will keep me busy for awhile, but I really haven’t thought too deeply on the subject up until now. In fact I’m still not thinking about it very much, except in the abstract. And the thoughts I am having, amazingly, involve not even a modicum of fear or apprehension. Right now all I feel is excitement. In fact, I haven’t felt this excited about my future in a very long time.

It all washed over me this evening. I was standing in the kitchen of our new apartment just washing dishes. First of all, side note here, our new apartment is awesome. This place is actually an old renovated hay barn and is much more “us”, with a thousand times more character, than our old generic apartment in our old generic development ever was. Just being in this new place is exciting and invigorating. As I stood at the sink this evening, the windows over the sink were open and I could hear the rain falling on our yard and the wind chimes chiming on our porch. I had the Sirius coffeehouse station on playing artsy acoustic music and a pot of freshly ground Kona beans percolating next to me. Lauren was putting Allison to bed in the next room and for one perfect moment I was completely at peace. But it wasn’t just the peace that comes from easing down after a long hectic month. It was an even better kind of peace; the kind that is laced with unencumbered optimism about the future.

The last time I can remember feeling this way was the summer of 1999. I had returned to Los Angeles after a month shooting a movie with a group of friends, and was just beginning the process of sending out resume after resume to any company that was hiring. Talent agencies, TV shows, production companies – I applied to pretty much every nook and cranny of the entertainment industry. And with every resume I faxed, my excitement grew and grew as realized that I could end up working for any one of these companies. My whole future was ahead of me and the possibilities truly seemed endless. But that feeling quickly passed as soon as I actually started going out on interviews and realized that I would eventually have to pick one of these positions. All of a sudden the waves of possibilities collapsed to a single decision. And ever since then, for the past seven years, even as my path through life has meandered this way and that, my future has still been a veritable connect-the-dots of single decisions. Not that that’s a bad thing. With very few exceptions, those decisions have been wonderful and exciting in their own rite: leaving L.A., asking Lauren to marry me, moving to Philadelphia, becoming an Avid tech, having our first child…

But now, for the first time since that first summer in Los Angeles, the immediate future ahead of me is wide open. At that time, I had just come out of the four-year comfort zone of college and leapt into the unknown territory of “the real world”. This time I am coming out of the four-year comfort zone of a steady job into the unknown territory of… something. I don’t even know what this territory is – “making things happen for myself” perhaps? But just like the summer of ’99, I’m not scared. Not even a little. I know I probably should be, just like I probably should have been then. And I know that as the abstractness of my future gradually solidifies into the concreteness of reality it will start to sink in. But for now all I can feel is excitement and optimism at the seemingly limitless possibilities ahead of me.

And it didn’t occur to me until just now, but this time it’s actually different than it was seven years ago. The possibilities truly are endless because this time I’m going into it a freelancer. The last time I was in this place, one decision collapsed my possibilities to a single reality. But now taking one job or trying one path won’t close off all those other possibilities. This time, the future truly is limitless.

All I have left to do now is make it happen. All I can hope is that I ride this wave of excitement into an actual lucrative career. I hold no illusions that this is going to be easy, or that it will happen quickly, but right now none of that matters. Right now all there is is possibility.