It's Self Care Week: Josh on what Self Care Means to Him
Our topic du jour this week is self-care. That’s because putting together both of these shorts is happening in our down time. As for me, I’m doing my image/text licensing day job.
On top of that, I have a second freelance job to help pay the bills (yay high cost of living!) and save up as much for the films as humanly possible. Hell, I’m currently looking for a third.
Suffice it to say, I have a full plate. Add, in the pressures of trying to create a pair of top-quality shorts, directing one, producing one, and scraping together every cent I can find, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
I’m not unique. At one point or another, everyone jumps into the deep end where they’re in over their head. That’s just part of being an adult, right? Add in trying to ‘follow your dreams’ in your off hours and sometimes it can feel like you’re banging your head against the wall.
For me, being overwhelmed tends to manifest itself in the form of hyper-worrying. My brain will fall into the panic well and I’ll start fixating on things about 100 miles down the road. Things I don’t have control over. When there aren’t things for me to do in a given moment, I can get wound up in my own head until my thoughts start to eat themselves.
When that happens, self-care means distraction, escapism and and decompression. At the moment, that involves going back in time and rocking out WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness on Playclassic Games. Playclassic has a DOS emulator, a Sega Genesis Emulator, and an SNES emulator to hit up old games. A ton of classics like The Oregon Trail, Warcraft 1 & 2, Super Mario World, Carmen SanDiego (incidentally, the new CS cartoon on Netflix is great). Hit some of those nostalgia notes, get some dopamine hits, and relax.
Another thing that we all like to do is to watch cheesy Hallmark movies a la Mystery Science Theater to poke a little bit of fun at them and to analyze them. It’s not unrelated to making the films, and every once in a while one of us comes up with a surprisingly useful observation that could help us in the future. It’s a fun way to stay sharp, really. Even if you’re a veteran filmmaker, I highly recommend checking out some of what Hallmark Movies and Mysteries has to offer.
Whatever the means, ultimately, it’s all about decompression. I firmly believe that people need to find a way to blow off steam before they explode. We all need to find some kind of leisure activity so we don’t blow a gasket. There is of course the danger of falling into a “leisure hole.” I’m sad to say that I’ve done that before. But, with both films on the schedule, there’s too much at stake, and frankly, too much to do, to let that happen this time around.
-Josh