MOVING, Part II

Hey everyone,

Welcome to MOVING, Part II.

To recap, I’m releasing the first One Word of the season in three parts. In Part I: Moving House, I talked about selling our place in the suburbs and the black hole that may or may not be in the backyard. You can watch Part I here.

MOVING is all about where we’re going, what we take with us, and what we leave behind. It’s also about challenging myself to find new ways to tell this story. So for Part II, I forego the use of voice-over.

I love my voice-over work, but I often rely on VO to transition ideas or get me out of a corner in the editing room. Not this time. Because there is no voice-over, I have no written component this week. Instead, I wrote some thoughts on creating online. You’ll find them below.

I’m going to release Part III very soon. Baby #2 is imminent— it could be a few days or, at most, two weeks — and I’m pushing to get the last part out the door as soon as it’s ready.

As with Part I, all the music in MOVING is by Toronto-based ambient artist Daniel Field and his Kilometre Club project. You can find him on Spotify, Bandcamp, and Apple Music. Thanks again, Daniel.

One Word, Two Paths

Since I don’t have a written component today, I’m using this space to briefly talk about something on my mind as I’ve been working on MOVING.

Anything I’ve ever created that felt “successful” happened online. In the early days of Instagram, I used to take photos and write little stories in the captions. People liked them and so I thought I liked them, too. But about a year after I developed the style that people engaged with, I no longer enjoyed it. So I stopped.

I could talk at length about how I still feel Instagram forever changed the way I take photographs, changed what I considered “good” composition and texture, and that while my photography did improve, these qualities were mostly defined by likes and followers. You know, the metrics of creative achievement on the Internet.

But the important thing here is this: after I released Woodbine, when I wondered where I could go next with the One Word project, I felt that same sense of malaise, that same disinterest in my creative output.

As an artist, I feel there are two paths ahead of me. I could double down and continue to do whatever worked for One Word last season. That’s very easy to do, by the way. I have all the data. I know my most popular video and my least popular. I have engagement graphs and top-liked comments from all of you. But I’ve been down that path before. I know what happens: I stop caring.

Because when I’m focusing on engagement, I’m ignoring the invisible yet deeply nourishing world within my soul. And when I no longer draw inspiration from that place, I shrivel up and fade away.

But that’s only part of the story; there’s a second path.

When I think back, formative creative experiences reveal themselves, and they have nothing to do with the Internet. Such as the time I wrote an essay in those dreamy last days of high school, just a whatever assignment, and I opened up about how my mom was doing her best to hold the family together in the final stretch of my dad’s palliative care. I can still see the tears running down her face when she read it.

Or after dad passed, when I found one of my poems — the well-worn crease barely holding the paper together — tucked into his leather wallet.

So in Season 2, I’m doubling down on the path that’s not necessarily meant for the Internet or subscriber growth. The path where I create stories for my family and the enrichment of my inner world. If this doesn’t interest you, I understand.

But I feel like many of you truly vibe with what I’m trying to do here. And I want to make it clear, however obvious that it may be to you or me, that I’m searching for a way forward as an artist and a father in a world where both roles carry a shit ton of baggage. Where I go from here may not fit the traditional metrics of Internet success. Honestly, I pray that wherever we go in Season 2, it doesn’t look anything like where we’ve been.

Just before I released VIDEO, which was my first video, I had a dream. I was in the PATH system, and it was preternaturally empty. I held a camera in my hands and I was trying to figure out where to go. I noticed an old man sitting by a short flight of stairs. He waved me over and told me he couldn’t point me in a direction, but I should know that I received a rare gift: I get to explore filmmaking later in life. As a young man, I ventured down the artist’s path as a writer. It was messy and confusing and I made a lot of unintentional choices. Now as a 38-year-old father, I get to start from the beginning and choose my steps again.

This is me simply checking in on myself as I choose the next step.

- T