The year is young
It’s February 1st, and the year is young.
That’s the only hopeful thing I can say with certainty — and even that feels fragile.
The last time I wrote here was December 15th. Since then, life hasn’t gotten easier. It’s gotten heavier, quieter, and more complicated in ways that don’t announce themselves. The kind of weight you feel more at night than during the day.
My father underwent a gene replacement transplant. He was hospitalized for two and a half weeks. The multiple myeloma that had once surrounded his head left visible craters in his skull after chemotherapy burned the cancer out. He’s alive — and for that I’m grateful — but he’s also diminished. Weak. Fragile. A version of himself I’m still learning how to look at.
Sometimes I catch myself staring and immediately feel ashamed. Sometimes I look away because it hurts too much to hold the image for long. There’s no drama in it — just a quiet reckoning with the reality that time is no longer theoretical.
Each day brings the same slow realization: we’re moving closer to a world where he won’t be here anymore. That thought doesn’t arrive loudly. It just stays. And it scares me.
Alongside that fear is another one I don’t love admitting — that my dad might pass away before I’ve “made it” in life. Whatever making it means. When I really interrogate that thought, it doesn’t look like fame or accolades. It looks like order. Stability. A man with his life in some kind of working arrangement. Someone who can carry his own weight without apology.
Instead, I feel behind.
My parents come from a time and place where adulthood is measured almost exclusively by productivity and income. My mom’s motto has always been, “Life is about paying bills.” I understand where that worldview comes from — survival, responsibility, sacrifice. And yet, if that’s all life is, it feels unbearably narrow. Necessary, maybe. But incomplete.
Over a year ago, I was stable. I was earning well. I even traveled abroad. Funded two films by myself. Then I was laid off — abruptly — and the ground under my life gave way.
What followed wasn’t a clean pivot. It was a long, grinding middle.
Over the past ten months, I’ve been living inside professional uncertainty I never imagined would stretch this far. Applications. Interviews. Silence. Occasional momentum followed by nothing. The job market feels impersonal and unforgiving, and the hardest part isn’t the rejection — it’s the erosion. The way prolonged instability begins to whisper stories about your worth.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that a person’s value is determined solely by their income (Like my mother does) — but resisting that belief while living under its consequences is exhausting. It creates a constant background tension: between who I believe myself to be and how I’m being measured.
In the middle of all of this, acting has remained both a refuge and a test.
Yesterday, I wrapped a SAG low-budget indie film — a short project that came together quickly and disappeared just as fast. I received the audition mid-December. By the first of the year, I had an offer. By the end of January, it was over. From first notice to wrap in just over a month.
I was the lead.
As always, I worried about my performance. I questioned whether I went deep enough, whether I truly accessed the character. This role was nothing like my last major project, Two Sins. That character — Liam Green — took months to build and lived inside me long after we wrapped. He lingered. I felt a kind of quiet depression when it ended, a melancholy that comes from leaving a place you inhabited fully.
This role was different.
It asked for restraint rather than transformation. Subtlety instead of immersion. The character was guarded, ordinary on the surface, hiding more than he revealed. The work wasn’t about exploding outward — it was about containment. Finding moments to let something slip through, then pulling back.
Ironically, that’s something I’d been actively working on in acting class. My teacher kept pushing me to “bury the lead” — to trust that less could carry more. That note followed me onto this set and quietly shaped the work.
I prepped, but not obsessively. At some point, I stopped trying to solve the character and focused on listening. On being present. On letting the moment do the work instead of forcing it.
We filmed in brutal cold — one-degree weather, exterior shots, long takes. I had to drive an SUV and parallel park on camera for a scene. None of it bothered me. There’s something clarifying about discomfort when it’s in service of something you care about. What’s a little cold compared to the warmth I feel when I’m actually performing?
The people on set were good. Passionate. Easy to work with. It’s always grounding to be around others who care deeply about the same strange thing — people who show up not because it’s practical, but because it feels necessary. And then, just like that, it was over.
When it ended, there was no crash. No lingering sadness. Just a quiet exhale. A reminder that the craft is still alive in me — even when the rest of my life feels uncertain.
That reminder mattered more than I expected.
I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how this year will unfold. I only know that I can’t repeat the last one — the worst year of my life. I won’t.
This isn’t a story about triumph or resolution. It’s a record. A man standing in the middle of grief, uncertainty, and quiet persistence — still here, still trying to put one foot in front of the other.
The year is young.
That has to mean something.
Hope Without Platitude
I don’t feel optimistic in the traditional sense. I don’t wake up buzzing with belief that everything is about to turn around. What I do feel — quietly, inconsistently — is a growing refusal to disappear.
I’m still showing up. Still working the craft. Still taking responsibility where I can. Still trying to build something that doesn’t collapse the moment the ground shifts.
Maybe that’s what hope looks like now — not confidence, but continuation.
Not certainty, but staying.
For now, that’s enough.
