My favorite way to spend the day is normally via escapism.

I know that my most serene times have been sitting alone with a computer or console, discovering the story os a captivating video game, or movie, or sometimes book. I don’t have the reverence that others do for reading. I feel smarter, I guess, when I’m reading with my spare time, rather than indulging in what are perceived as lesser forms of entertainment or art. Still, I think people underestimate the power of multi-sense stimulation and agency that is possible through video games. Maybe if they were called multi-sense entertainment or something. The word “games” seems to carry with it a sense of frivolity, but much like the Tai Chi definition of “play,” it is perhaps this very thing which makes them closer to the more complete version of self. Certainly my self.

I suppose I would also love to be making theater as a favorite way to spend the day, but I can no longer find the same weightlessness it once carried for me. I am always fraught, and never free in the theater. I get the sense that people respect me without the confirmation that it is true. On the more passive acting or stage combat side of things, I find myself more interested in a single pursuit than in the contributions of others, which puts me solidly in the camp of artists I myself would avoid.

Is there some truth then to the feeling I have that some people assume about me? That is, do I only enlist in my productions those people who I feel I can adequately control? Is my resistance to casting those who are talented at the cost of compassion a fear grounded entirely in my inability to assert myself? Is art better with better people or with assholes who have translated their insecurities into powerful personality disorders which is the seeming birthplace of great art?

Because I cannot decide between the two, do I choose the “easier” path, and then justify it with lofty speeches about principle? Would I rather have a troupe of talented people who challenge me often, or nice people who act as the instruments for my own art? I am not, at heart, a collaborator, I suppose, even if I am capable of accepting criticism and feedback.

The pen, then. Always the pen. But writing is a place with zero external validation unless one becomes famous. Indeed, if I wrote the greatest novel of the century, my friends would only appreciate it after I was on Oprah. So, where can I find validation within myself? Is that actually the only validation? And if so, why do we bar the egotistical and the mad, when they answer only to the truth within themselves? Does society mean homogeny necessarily? If so, why do we only seem to value the rule-breakers, especially if within us, that’s what we all long to be? Rebellion, revolution… they are the only reality which fits this model, but there must be a norm to rebel against, and that is us. All of us vs. all of us. How is this expressible to the greater mass of people?