not don draper, not jerry maguire
I think it was the trailer for Cameron Crowe’s new film, the awful-looking Aloha…
…that got me thinking about Jerry Maguire recently. I realized that, without ever consciously thinking about it in those terms, part of me honestly expected that losing the GameSpot job would send me on a Jerry Maguire-like trajectory of carving my own path, finding a new, more fulfilling way to work, doing work within the same vein as the work I’d done for the past few years that was simultaneously more fulfilling to me as well as financially viable, and that maybe, as part of this journey, I’d find love, too. How common is this narrative, the person (usually a man) who finds themselves only when they lose themselves, hitting a kind of rock bottom before building back up to be more than they’d been before? But now I realize, of course, that I’m not a straight white male star of a Cameron Crowe movie. This isn’t Jerry Maguire or Elizabethtown or Aloha. And my life is still filled with big, scary questions.
I wrote a piece about Dark Souls II a few days ago called Yearn, because yearn is what I’m always doing now. In the game, characters cursed by want yearn so much that their thoughts scatter.



The piece Yearn is something that I wrote for myself, because I felt like I had to. Sometimes writing is something I have to do to get something out of my system, to figure out what something means to me and to hold on to that meaning and let the rest go. Writing as a matter of survival. It felt good and true to write it and it means something to me but I don’t know if such writing can mean anything to anyone else. That piece is what it looks like inside me right now. Games and songs and movies all colliding with each other as I struggle with questions about what my life means at the moment and what the hell I’m doing and where the hell I’m going. And I know that it’s not the sort of writing that the marketplace values, but sometimes it feels like the only kind of writing I’m capable of right now, because I’m so distracted by want all the time. And if a game or a song or a book or a film doesn’t have anything to say about loneliness or love or companionship or transcending the way things are to create a new reality where more is possible, then I can’t seem to find a use for it right now. I can’t make myself think about it or care about it or have anything worthwhile to say about it.
I haven’t seen Jerry Maguire in maybe 15 years or more. I remember him saying to the Renee Zellweger character, “You complete me,” and I don’t believe that this is the way it is, that I am incomplete without another person. But I also remember him saying something about a moment that happens, something along the lines of the moment not meaning what it could have meant or should have meant because he couldn’t share it with her. And this is what it feels like to me, like the piece is missing from my life that would let things actually mean what they should mean. I get good news and I don’t have that person to reach out and share it with. I get bad news and I don’t have that person to reach out and share it with. I don’t have that person who feels the need to include me in the events and the history of her life. And again and again I ask myself, what can all this mean, when it’s just mine? Am I even really existing?

How can I pretend that things are okay, how can I do the conventional things that might be expected of me when all the time my heart and mind are breaking from the yearning for something more? But shouldn’t they be breaking? Aren’t I right to yearn for more?
On a recent episode of Mad Men, Don Draper, seeming to realize that the era in which he’d succeeded and done the kind of work he enjoyed doing was at an end and that he didn’t want to do it the way he’d have to do it at his new agency, where things are driven by data and committee and not by instinct and vision, just got up and walked away. He headed out on a quest to find the last woman with whom he felt a real connection might be possible. But I’m not Jerry Maguire and I’m not Don Draper either. I can’t just walk away and anyway I don’t think I want to. I do know that I don’t want to do it the way I had to do it before but I don’t know how I do want to do it or how I’m even capable of doing it now, when other things seem so much more important. Is it a problem that the walls inside me have collapsed and that I can’t often think or write about a game beyond what it seems to offer me right now? This perspective is real and true but perhaps it is too much of the self.

I really don’t know. I just know that I am lost and looking and writing to survive and yearning to get outside of myself and still hoping that maybe eventually, like Jerry Maguire, I’ll be able to look back on losing my job and everything that has happened and that continues to happen in the wake of it and feel like it all makes a kind of sense, that I end up doing work that I feel good about and that has value, and that I can see that it all means something.
Notes
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