What’s the matter Johanne?

For a little while now I’ve been feeling a little flat. Not depressed, not morose, not any of the dark things that take the shine off. Just, flat. As in plateau.

In the first half of the year it was all going quite well. I had just signed with two new agents, for Mocap and Voiceover. I’d filmed within a short space of time two, count them, two roles for TV. I’d been getting a steady amount of voiceover work from various sources, including via my own website. I'd performed in a number of plays in local productions. Things were looking up. And then it all seemed to peter out.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not on the bones of my arse eating the wallpaper to stay alive and I have enough creativity knocking around that my soul is well fed. There is however a level of stagnation that I am not ok with. I can’t help but feel I should be booking more roles or being seen by bigger casting people, in many areas. And how do I fix it? There’s the rub.

See, if this was a friend of mine telling me about their issues, let’s call them Johanne for argument’s sake, if Johanne was experiencing these issues; lack of motivation, comparing themselves to their peers and online presences, frustrated at lack of roles etc etc then I’d know exactly what advice to give.

Photo by Andrew Ness, 2019.

"Get off your ass and make something, don’t wait for them to come to you. Write something and perform it or make a short film and promote the hell out of it. Create a social media presence yourself, make content that you want to see. Be known as the person that does the thing that you do."

And loads of other advice as well. But Johanne isn’t real. He’s me. And me is an idiot when it comes to taking GOOD advice. Me is the guy who worries about what if it all goes wrong, what if they don’t like it, what if I try and fail? Me is also the person that if I heard those coming out of Johanne’s mouth I’d slap him so hard that he’d have a handprint tattoo on the side of his face.

Why do so many creative people have this blind spot? Don’t get me wrong there’s tonnes of creatives out there who are killing it in their career and doing all the things that I just told Johanne to do. There’s also a lot of us who have this… dread that paralyses us into inaction. At least I hope there’s others out there, I mean by law of averages there has to be at least one or two more out there.

This is a way for me to recognise my failings and make this the start of a new more productive part of my life, here’s to Johanne.