Didn't-Spend-Pandemic-Wisely Guilt

I'm pretty certain I'm doing something wrong but I don't know what it is. I have just been feeling overwhelmed again lately. As a writer and content creator, I feel guilty for saying this for the thousandth time, but it is a real feeling that I feel often, so I do feel like I have to blog about it.

I just feel like with the house renovations, and the holiday season commitments, and Anji being in town and with Patfern being in town, I just didn't have the time and energy to think about jokes or the big finale stream as a Twitch affiliate. And to be honest, the number of viewers are always low anyway, so there's a lazy part of me that feels like I can get away with not having a big final affiliate stream. And then I've been thinking of this pretty big Youtube project that I need to learn to write, shoot and edit. Basically, it's a movie idea except I'm also feeling intimidated by it, so I've been considering shooting it in 3 acts or even smaller chunks and posting those as individual episodes. It's both exciting and overwhelmed by the scope of it. I don't even know how much it will cost. I need to learn more and talk to more people about it. I haven't talked to anybody about it other than See Ming and Tuck.

I realise I'm really not good at managing my time and juggling things. I keep hoping that as I get better at things, I would be able to do them more efficiently and I would be able to keep more balls in the air but I also feel like I'm not really good at anything, not really. I still need to prepare before a comedy show, if I want to really kill it. I can't just write a new five minutes in my head and then jump on stage and nail it, and to be honest, I don't think I ever can. On the content creation side, I still need to get good at scriptwriting and thinking in scenes and shooting and editing.

I have didn't-spend-my-pandemic-wisely guilt. Tarokka says it's "productivity guilt". I feel like the lockdown of 2020 and 2021 was my chance to really build myself up so that when the world went back to normal, I would be ready to hit the ground running and be all I wanted to be. But instead, I spent most of it gaming and doing livestreams. I guess I did learn a lot doing livestreams, like I feel I am better at talking to people than I have ever been, and I learnt how to set up video and audio feeds, and all about frames per second, and ND filters, and noise gates and compression and all that stuff and I think they are things a modern comedian will need to know all this stuff too because we're all have to create content on the Internet.

There is so much to learn, and I wish I spent more time during the pandemic learning it. I can learn it now, but it's not as easy now as when we were all stuck at home. But as I told Tuck, we can only change what we can and we can't change the past.

For 2022, I want to work on my comedy hour and also my vanity movie project codenamed Open Micer. For the latter, I really need to work on learning how to write the script, so that when the opportunity arises for each scene, I shoot it. In my spare time, I will keep working on being a better climber, paddleboarder and a better guitar player. Apart from that, there's still all that work-related stuff to stress about.


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