I have been drafting this letter for a long time. Parts of it have been sitting here for months, clumsy at the moment of writing, needing time to give it the fluidity that comes with distance. Other parts were written this morning. But what held true then holds true now, and now, and now.
I finally watched my film on the big screen in the modest screening room of a post production house, seated alone among rows of worn leather armchairs. Despite the loss of an in-person premiere last year, I don’t think I could have asked for a better way to see these beautiful faces, huge, for the first time. It was odd and special and unexpectedly moving to be confronted with this thing I’d made, writ large, in a dark room, alone.
I have been wrapped up in a burnout loop for much of the past year. The writing comes in stops and starts. If language gives us the means to speak of things beyond ourselves and our immediate surroundings, for the moment I have little to say. I have been taking time to rest and recover my creativity and humanity. To meander and coax the writing back. I am trying to be kind to myself as I do, and quiet the voice that urges me always to hustle harder, create faster, and seek validation from institutions that consider me disposable. I want to find a better way.
This summer as things were opening up in Los Angeles, I went to the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition at LACMA and took inspiration from the material proof of a lifetime of art-making, laid out in a series of rooms. I watched The Green Knight, the first film I’d seen in a theater in over a year, and was reminded of the weird, ambitious storytelling I love and want to create, a love that has been diluted by prolonged exposure inside the Hollywood machine. I drove up the coast with an old friend to see a big volcanic rock, where we watched ungainly adolescent gulls knock about and discovered a sweeping swath of cairns at the edge of the water, which felt like it should be spiritual in some way, if not more so than the enormous rock itself. On the drive back to our hotel, a cow ran happily down a hill in our direction and that image—the cow, carefree, silhouetted against a pinkish sky—will stay with me for a long time. I have been playing board games with my sisters. We took some games to the park one evening and watched the sun slowly set over the baseball field where my dad would make us go for early morning jogs with the promise of scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns to come. “It’s so beautiful,” I kept saying, until we noticed we were being eaten alive by mosquitoes and fled home.
I told a friend that my burnout feels undeserved because I’m an artist, not a frontline worker or some other doer of tangible, immediate good. But the burnout is here nevertheless. And I am finding my way back to being.
We adopted a smokey kitten who is growing into a handsome black cat with big boy cheeks. He is sleeping on the windowsill as I write. Any minute now he will wake and terrorize my wrists and ankles. But for now he is sleepy and soft, and lets me give him scritches behind the ears. His name is Howl.
