Creative Exile

I have had six months of jet lag.

That is my story and I am sticking to it. I know I should have started writing the minute my plane landed in Okinawa, but somehow, in all the kerfuffle of transplanting my life, I seemed to have forgotten just which box I had packed my inspiration. That may sound silly. I know that there are many people, who have made me aware, in no uncertain terms, that I must be mad to complain about anything. I mean, I am living on a TROPICAL ISLAND. Paradise. My husband has a wonderful job, we have an amazing house on a hill overlooking beautiful, turquoise seas. I want for nothing. I should be enjoying my adventure and comfortably nestling myself back into my preferred role as an expatriate. Yet, it would seem, that the universe or God or what-have-you cannot allow complete and total bliss. As my father always says "It just goes to show ya, there's always somthin." Well my somethin' is simply this: what is a girl to do when she has nothing to do?

I am an actress by trade. Have been since I was 8 (good lord!) and really honestly never was interested in doing much else besides that and travel. For work I mean. I have tons of hobbies, but as Anthony Perkins says in Psycho, "hobbies are meant to pass the time not fill it." And yes, there is a lot to do here, lots of outdoors-y fun when we aren't getting pelted with typhoons. But can I really manage to be happy just puttering about, like a spoiled little rich girl, doing absolutely nothing but what pleases me? It would seem that I cannot, but not for lack of trying.

When we first got to Okinawa I had so many plans. I thought about starting a business teaching public speaking. I had a screenplay percolating in my excited brain. I was going to learn to scuba dive. I was going to get in on the action at the Japanese Acting School and try and start a theatre company of my very own (a dream I have been nursing, like a sickly kitten for years) I had plans! Oh the PLANS. But after the initial buzz wore off, I was left, sitting alone in my house most days, feeling the pungent hangover of dashed dreams. Plans became no good to me anymore, as one by one I was informed of their silliness. It made me feel desperate to think that perhaps, after so much money and time spent on this beloved profession, this defining label of who I was, it was all for naught.

Of course I ignored this. I spent time enjoying the ocean, the castles, trying to learn Japanese, collecting cats like some mad old woman, and occupying my time. Yet it still kept creeping back in, the despondency and the fear. What if I amount to nothing in my life? In the last few days the battle has been raging, and after a good long chat with a dear, dear friend, I have finally realized that, unless I release all this chaos in my head, I could truly go quite mad.

Yes, yes, yes. That was horribly dramatic. And no I do not intend this blog to be all about being a failed actress or dashed dreams. I just intend to search. To start an adventure. Perhaps I am in creative exile, in existential crisis, lost in the jungle of my own bullshit, but somehow, I have to find my way back to a trail, and hope that it takes me somewhere interesting. For if you stay in one place, you eventually just die.