I want to be Joss Whedon when I grow up.
To be clear, I do not want to be the mega famous man, but the small creative genius. A few years ago when Joss Whedon finished filming The Avengers, he somehow found the time and energy to film an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. This year, during the busyness of filming The Avengers 2, Whedon somehow found the time and energy to write a folk song called “Big Giant Me” in collaboration with Shawnee Kilgore, an indie music recording artist he met on Kickstarter. You can read all about that on Buzzfeed here and I highly recommend you do.
I want to be able to harness my creative energy, my spirit, and my energy to create, well, anything. I write occasionally, I pen little poems, I take pictures, but it is all so very hard for me to do. Why? I suffer from depression. Depression actively sucks energy and destroys creativity. I wonder what I would be able to do with the boundless energy that Joss Whedon seems to have. I wonder how he finds energy, while insanely busy, to do small personal artistic crafts. Really it is only because of Whedon’s fame and celebrity that we know anything about Much Ado or “Big Giant Me”, but the fact is he has created small, personal, highly creative things in and around his giant projects like Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the other amazing things he has created.
I just want to be able to create small, personal, highly creative things in and around the giant bouts of soul crushing depression that I am prone to. I want to know Whedon’s secret. Or maybe there is no secret, maybe it is just plain hard work. But something Whedon said sort of stood out to me. He said that “it is nice to have the balance between something that is genuinely enormous and something that is crystalline and tiny” and that the song “was so small and contained, I was able to sort of focus on it, and it was very liberating. It would relax me, while still being a very difficult little puzzle, but one that you finish, and then you go onto the next one.”
I think maybe I will start taking that to heart. Something tiny, crystalline, something small and contained that I can focus on in the midst of my depression and sadness. Maybe if I take that approach, in the hugeness of my mental illness I can find time and energy to create small, personal, highly creative things. Just maybe through plain hard work I can be Joss Whedon when I grow up.
a simple man 