Moving into the light of discovery

I am just coming out of what has been one of the darkest moments of my history. Hard to believe because I only lost my job. I am still healthy, everyone I love is still alive, and I have not been swallowed by destitution. Far from it. My darkness is from within but that does not necessarily make it easier to overcome. It's ironic, or perhaps appropriate, that I would become unemployed at this moment in time.

I have been wrestling the last couple of years with my purpose in life. Almost seven years ago I gleefully left my job in marketing to move to Los Angeles and pursue acting. I felt very strongly that it was my calling. I said at the time that “I wanted to make people feel.” I suppose I have always in some way wanted to influence and inspire. Whether via my interest in politics or marketing for that matter, or more recently, filmmaking and writing. However, the pursuit of show business can make one weary and diminish the fire that once burned. I made a decision a little more than a year ago to give up acting and, tired of living in poverty, went back to marketing.

That's where the darkness began. I started questioning my motivation for staying in Los Angeles since I had begrudgingly moved here from beautiful Seattle. I miss the clouds, the rain, the fresh air. I despise driving in the city so much that it has, at times, made a recluse out of me. At the same time, marketing was never something I wanted, just something I fell into and happened to be good at. With a beautiful apartment in Santa Monica and a full-time job, I stopped doing anything other than working and one other thing: writing my blog.

It is probably this blog that has saved me from despair since I feel compelled to explain myself. I started it and I can't give up on it. The blog demands to know what's on my mind. Yet I have not written about the guilt I struggle with. What gives me the right, I wonder, to require that my life have meaning? That my work have meaning? Why do I not seem capable of just having a job? I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and at the same time a sense of fate. I am meant for something valuable, I know that I am. I know that I have something to offer the world, something yet to be discovered. It could be a film that I have dreamed of making, a blog entry that I will write, it could be a non-profit that I am to launch or a bid for public office that I have not yet made. My greatest fear, the blackness that surrounds me, is that I will live an unexamined life.

I'm reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, And Steel, the 400+ page Pulitzer Prize winning book that seeks to answer the question “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?” I'm only a quarter of the way through and yet I've already learned something very fascinating. Diamond seeks to explain how it is that in 1532 Francisco Pizarro with only 62 soldiers on horseback and 106 on foot was able to defeat Atahuallpa's army of 80,000 in modern-day Peru?

Even though the Spanish conquest of the New World began in 1510, no news of this had reached the Incas, 600 miles to the South. When Pizarro first landed on the Peruvian coast in 1527 he was not seen as a threat because Atahuallpa didn't know that only a decade earlier, the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes captured and killed Montezuma in Mexico, defeating the Aztecs. The people of the New World did not yet have a written language and no way of sharing such information.

While Pizarro replicated Cortes' strategy exactly, published back home, the Incas had never heard of anything like this happening. When Pizarro demanded a ransom of a gold-filled room for the release of Atahuallpa, the latter believed he would be let go when they provided it. But he was executed just as Montezuma had been. While it is not the sole cause of the defeat, literacy – the ability to learn and know about other peoples' experiences – gave the Spanish an advantage over those living without knowledge of anything they themselves had not experienced.

Several years ago, when I was in a similar place of not knowing what I wanted to do, I considered going back to school to study archeology and instead chose acting (naturally!) But I still love to read about history because I think there is so much to be learned from our past and from other cultures. I think this is how the blog fits into my life. It is where I examine and attempt to understand humanity and myself. It motivates me to be literate, it forces me to look beyond my life and ultimately live life in the light of discovery.