Imagine yourself as a constant traveller, consistently arriving, meeting new people, working on something intensely together, then moving on. It's a habit, a way of life, an absolute weird existence full of emotional highs and lows, and lots of private thankless moments where you, the hero of the story, are given a completely justifiable opportunity to quit. You're Luke Skywalker, Rocky Balboa, Atticus Finch. You're Pee Wee Herman. You can travel with one of two things: Either an ornate weapon never used in battle, or a bag of tools. What's the theme music that plays when you choose?
I am fully and wholeheartedly the product of bullying. Grade school was a series of recurring vignettes, with Catholic cautionary tales and ghost stories, a group of tormentors who used summer vacations to dreamed of coming back to make each year more miserable for me than the last, and a couple of best friends slowly lured away by drugs and petty crimes. Eight years not only took a toll on me with the random sucker punches I never expected, a few years of pop warner football toughened me up a little on the outside, making the random punching and tripping land much softer. The last bit of the bullying that happened in that era was punctuated late in 8th grade with a single punch across Peter Farrell's mouth, cutting the inside of his mouth against his braces. That was the last thing I cared about. I didn't even go to my grade school graduation.
After I picked up a guitar, I fell deep into a basement of self-expression, writing songs, poems, eventually plays, and I found myself uniquely aware of the experiences other artists had. I saw the ones with egos and fame, with expectations and hype, I saw the ones with hope and talent, and nobody in their corner. I didn't know what to do for them, or if I was even a person who could do something, anything. I got published in a few anthologies, played in garage bands, and started stage managing plays until Tom Vitorino gave me a producer credit on a play. Whatever bullying ever took away from me, I filled the void with hard work and an obsession with creating just about anything. Props, sets, writing plays, rehearsing and figuring things out, it all took the place of relationships or any kind of a social life. Hanging out the way I did in high school and early college just felt boring, like a waste of time. Spending whole weekends in the theater rehearsing, or playing with a band in my living room, that felt real. It was community. It wasn't about me. It was about us. Nobody on the outside understood.
I still found bullies in the world, free range jerks seeking to control and establish a power structure in an office. On my last day working at an auto insurance company, I worked with the execs to secretly set up a massive layoff, and then at the very last minute, they walked me into the conference room to pick up a fat severance check, followed by an escort off premises. As I walked out to my car, the most hated of those execs waved to me as an employee, sobbing and catching her breath, loaded up her little hatchback with boxes of personal items and plants. She yelled "Bye! Thanks!" in a sing-songy voice, and I glanced back at the prison walls. The next time I'd visit there on a whim, there were only a few left in the building, all wondering when their time would come.
The next place I landed at, there were a few sharks in the ocean, and I had a ton of support, but somehow I was even more isolated while standing out in the midst of thousands of employees. The corporate world has voids and blind spots, many places to build amazing things you'll learn to abandon. It's fantastically effective basic training to exercise the muscles required to execute and appreciate sand castles, because in the grand scheme, everything we do on stage is temporary, isn't it? People will care intensely, and then at the end of the night, we all go home. Repeat that a couple thousand times, you'll find yourself at a desk in an office with your history around you and an email inbox bubbling like a bottomless cauldron.
You have a completely justifiable opportunity to quit. People will want you to quit. People will help you quit. They will see your bag of tools and assume they can pick them up in your absence, and nobody will know the difference. Bring on the music.
Let's stay in the fight together. Sometimes it takes 30 years to become an overnight success, but it only happens when you take it one show at a time. There's only one place to go from here....
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