Good news arrived this morning. By the afternoon I had somehow turned it into an entirely different, considerably more anxious question about my own creative stagnation.
Got the genuinely good news this morning that our show has officially been renewed for another season, a real, significant piece of job security in an industry that offers remarkably little of it most years, and I spent the celebratory drinks after work tonight in a genuinely strange, somewhat embarrassing internal state, outwardly toasting the renewal properly with the rest of the room while privately, quietly spiraling into an entirely different, considerably more anxious question about whether I have actually grown meaningfully as a writer at all across this past season, or whether I have simply been comfortably coasting on established habits that happened to keep working well enough to justify another year.
I think this particular anxiety says more about my own specific relationship with professional security than it does about anything genuinely wrong with the show or my actual contributions to it this past season, but understanding that intellectually has not fully stopped the anxious spiral itself from actually happening tonight. There is something about genuine, stable good news, a full season renewal rather than the constant uncertainty that defines so much of this industry, that has apparently freed up some part of my brain to immediately manufacture a fresh source of worry precisely because the more obvious, external source of anxiety, whether we would even get renewed at all, has now been fully resolved.
I spent part of tonight’s celebration actually trying to honestly audit my own work across this past season, pulling up old scripts on my phone between rounds of drinks, comparing my earliest episodes against my most recent contributions, trying to determine, as objectively as I could manage several drinks in, whether I could actually identify real, meaningful growth in my own craft across the year, or whether I was simply producing a competent, reliable version of the same basic comedic instincts I walked into this job already possessing.
The honest answer, reviewing the actual material as clearly as I could manage in a genuinely imperfect, slightly tipsy assessment, is probably somewhere in between the two extremes my anxious brain kept oscillating between tonight. I can point to specific, real technical growth, a considerably more confident handle on structuring a longer comedic bit, a genuinely improved ability to find an unexpected angle on an overly familiar kind of story, skills that were considerably shakier at the start of this season than they clearly are now. I can also, honestly, identify certain habitual comedic reflexes I still reach for reliably, perhaps too reliably, patterns I suspect I have not meaningfully pushed past this year in the way genuine, continued growth would probably require.
I mentioned this whole spiraling internal audit to a colleague at the bar tonight, expecting some gentle teasing about ruining a genuinely good celebration with unnecessary self-criticism, and instead got a genuinely thoughtful response about how this specific anxiety, worrying about creative stagnation precisely at the moment real job security finally arrives, is apparently a remarkably common experience among writers in this industry, a kind of psychological trade where external uncertainty about employment gets swapped, the moment it resolves, for internal uncertainty about whether the work itself still carries genuine creative growth or has quietly settled into comfortable, well-compensated repetition.
I think that reframing helped considerably more than I expected it to, tonight, transforming what had felt like a genuinely troubling personal discovery into something closer to a recognizable, almost expected occupational pattern rather than evidence of some unique personal failing. I am choosing, walking home tonight, to treat this renewed season as a genuine opportunity to deliberately push my own habitual comedic instincts somewhere new, rather than simply coasting comfortably on whatever got us renewed in the first place, a resolution I fully intend to actually hold myself to once the anxious, celebratory haze of tonight has properly cleared by tomorrow morning.
Good news today, genuinely good news, a renewed show and real job security in an industry that rarely offers either reliably. I am trying, tonight, to actually let that be simply, uncomplicatedly good, while also taking seriously the more useful, productive version of tonight’s anxious spiral, the genuine question of how I actually want to keep growing across the season now safely ahead of me.
I woke up this morning, the day after, still turning the whole spiral over, and found myself doing something I do not usually do this deliberately, actually writing out three specific, concrete goals for the coming season, particular comedic muscles I want to genuinely stretch rather than simply relying on the reliable instincts that carried me comfortably through this past year. It is a small, private document, nothing I intend to share with the room, but writing it down properly this morning felt like a genuinely useful way to convert last night’s somewhat chaotic, drink-fueled anxiety into something considerably more actionable and considerably more likely to actually produce the growth I claimed to want while spiraling at the bar.
I think that is probably the most honest way to close out this particular entry, not with any tidy resolution to the underlying tension between security and stagnation, which I suspect will keep resurfacing throughout this entire industry career regardless of how many seasons I eventually rack up, but with a genuine, concrete commitment to actually doing something useful with the anxiety rather than simply letting it dissolve, unexamined, back into the relief of good news once the celebratory haze properly clears.
More from this author at Carys Evans, prat.uk.