I recently went to go see an old professor of mine to bury a hatchet.

I felt like I was constantly at war with my film professor.  He never validated anything that I wrote, produced, directed, filmed, edited.   I remember the first time I submitted a script to him, he took two seconds to look at it and threw it back at my face to say that it was garbage.  After I picked up my pages off the floor in front of the entire class, I sat in silence for the rest of the class.  After class was over, I went and cried in a bathroom stall.  It was the worst.  I remember him heavily critiquing any performance I directed.  People would come up to me after class and note my directing skills, my ability to pick a cast who meshed with each other, likeable characters and the ability to get the actors to “really go there” with their performance.

All he could do was question my abilities as a director.

He was a thorn in my spine and I couldn’t shake him.  He saw my confidence in my abilities and made it his mission to chip away at it.  The tension got so high that eventually I filed a formal complaint with the University regarding his behavior toward me.

By the end of my schooling, I was officially burnt out.  I knew before I ended my last class that I would never film anything again.  People often asked me after I finished to help them out with their film projects and I always declined.  So when I went to see my old professor to help him out with his project, my first thought  was that he was genuinely happy to see me.  It was a pleasant surprise and set the tone for a conversation that essentially reset our relationship.

So i’m attempting to reset.

If you haven’t noticed, I had taken a small break from writing.  It wasn’t on purpose, as there were a multitude of subjects (my son’s first year of school, me getting arrested…i’ll tell that story later) that I could have talked about.  I’ve tried to open up the page to start, but nothing seemed to stick.  I could never fully flesh out an issue or topic thoroughly to really post about it because I had this nagging thorn in my side that was 2014 that kept begging to be talked about.  So i’ll just begin again with my thoughts.  That’s how I started the first blog post on here, and I think it’ll serve me well if I just let you know how i’m really feeling.

Last year I had a lot to talk about.

My personal life was at war with my professional life and it was a mess, a pure mess.  I had opinions and I needed a release, especially since my need to retain some normalcy with my children generated negative attitudes at work.  It didn’t help that I developed coping mechanisms that weren’t helpful (no kittens were harmed in the process) which didn’t get resolved until just recently.

But by the end of the year, I was emotionally burnt out.

But it’s hard to talk about what doesn’t work in your life, and it’s especially hard to type it out.  You don’t know how many times i’ve revised these last two paragraphs in order for me to be okay with letting the world see that my world was a bit messy last year.  So again, i’ll release the shackles that prevent me from writing to give you the truth.  And it hurts a little bit.

But in order to go forward, dealing with the past is a necessity.  So I will continuously strive to walk in truth.