Another Month, another Country

I am in L.A at the moment. After having returned briefly to Sydney to hang out with dad and sleep in the empty shell of my family home (dad is selling up, so the house was being painted and floored and all that pre-sale stuff), I have flown to America for the L.A Podfest.

This trip was paid for out of the AMP Tomorrow Fund grant which I was given to help Tea With Alice get over here. It’s an incredible privilege and one that I am grateful for.

My Podcast is an odd beast - deliberately so. I want to talk about complicated things, demonstrate how to feel your way through a difficult conversation, be undecided and uncertain but also engaging and interesting. That’s not something that’s super marketable. Sometimes I feel like it’s not something that can be done well, or by me. Other times I’m very happy, though never satisfied.

Part of the problem with ambition or drive or whatever it is that makes you keep striving for things is that urge can never really be fulfilled. It’s that horizon that moves as you approach it, and a downside of that is it’s hard to really *feel* successes. Also Comedy/writing doesn’t have promotions built in, so you kind of have to set your own measures of progress. This grant was definitely one.

Coming to LA, chasing guests for my podcast becomes the new goal - making interesting people interested in my stuff. But the new goal can erase the old goal, and I want to remind myself that being here is already a massive deal.

LA is a very strange city - the air feels strange, and then you remember that it’s basically a desert, despite the fact that there are buildings and roads and cars (so many cars) on it. 

Every person you meet talks about chasing their dream, and having an open heart and gratitude. They also talk about guns and fear and the healthcare system and how unstable it is being outside the traditional system here, where most people’s health insurance is tied to their employment. Taking a risk here is much more of a risk than in Australia or the U.K. it becomes more existential, which is maybe why they talk about it in such spiritual terms.

For me it feels more pragmatic, this then that, then the next thing. But it’s worth feeling the LA style ‘blessing’ once in a while. 

Like doing a slightly less than perfect show at the end of your run, or running just under your PB after months of training. It’s a nice thing to take time to remember on a really basic level that my “almost good enough” now is better than my absolute best would have been a few years ago.

After three years of podcasting, I have built up an incredible audience, a set of skills, refined my understanding of people, my own ways of thinking, my own mistakes.

Not that progress is linear necessarily; especially in the modern world, being stationary can feel like going backwards.

Do you have moments like that?