Reality Check

I’m not sure what it is, but I was feeling a little down when the week started and it just seems to be escalating. Circus has a particular blend of anxiety, fear and doubt unlike that found anywhere else.

Oh sure, there’s the whole ‘I just left my home, family, lover, and everything I’ve ever known thousands of kilometers away’ burden to bear. That, on it’s own, is pretty standard. But if you combine it with the stress of mastering new skills on a new apparatus, meeting your own ridiculously high standards, feeling like you’re not good enough (or at all), and the overall fight to find your place in the show, you get a pretty noxious emotional cocktail.

The worst part is that I have no idea how to get out of it. I have ‘tools’ to work through creative blocks and creative doubt, but mostly I feel like I’m blanketed by an overall sense of malaise and have no idea how I can even begin to deconstruct it.

I want to be alone

I want to be with people.

I want to forget.

I want to remember.

I want to go home.

Shit.

This is home now...

I titled this post ‘Reality Check’ for a reason. My first thought being that the reality of my situation, starting this new life and leaving home, has finally hit. Almost immediately afterward I was struck by a considerably more relevant reality check. That these things that are eating away at my happiness are mostly things I can control. They’re parasites that have plagued me since high school… waning confidence, doubt, timidity… even I describe my standards as ridiculous!

So, yeah, the reality is that things aren’t really as bad as they seem. I just need to figure out how to get over the part where things do, in fact, seem bad. Quel vie de cirque…