Rough Draft Act 2

My friend sent me a link the other day for an article setting a new prediction for the end of the world according to the Mayan Calendar. The supposed 2012 prediction was part of my Master’s Thesis, so this sort of thing is right up my alley. I have been waiting for the end of the world for the past 21 years. Twenty-one years ago, I was waiting for the rapture. In time, I was just waiting to be freed from this hell I considered my life. I would have previously rejoiced at the notion that the world was going to end. Bring it!

My response to her was, “Hopefully not. I have a Foster the People concert and Hamilton to attend. I still have work to do.”

I still have work to do. The day she posted that might have coincided with the day I found my life’s work worth of writing. Everything I had written since probably high school, maybe before, with the possible exception of music because I unfortunately write the music in my head, was found in a scattered pile under my bed. I had at one time contained all this work in an apple crate. I have spent at least a decade looking for an apple crate. The loss of this work caused me to lose interest to some degree, though not completely, in writing. I still wrote, but not with the same level of proliferation I had then. I felt like when I got married and my husband didn’t want me to do theatre anymore, and then I couldn’t find my writing after our last move, that my soul and my creative muse had been ripped from me. I felt incomplete. Some of the writing sucks. Some of it is dark. All of it chronicles a moment in my life, much like a picture chronicles a moment in time. We used to say that we would save our pictures in the event of a fire. I would save my writing.

Finding my writing and having someone encourage me to write again has given me purpose. Being in musical theatre again has made me feel alive again. My life isn’t perfect. There are probably still dark days and dark writing ahead. But I have my soul and my muse back. I dusted her off, gave her a proper shower, put her in some clean clothes and now we’re ready to work again. So, if the end of the world comes today, that will suck. I have some writing ideas to tend to, including one very crazy, lofty idea inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda, My Fair Lady, and my love for music, theatre and writing; Rough Draft, the Musical.