EDIT: I’ve had a few messages and a phone call from family and friends asking how I am as a result of this blog post. Let me say that I’m talking about filmmaking, not my day job which I thoroughly enjoy.

There was a time when I couldn’t switch my brain off from filmmaking. A shot would catch my eye on a walk and I’d be reverse-engineering the lighting before I’d finished crossing the road. A line of dialogue would land wrong in something I was watching and I’d be rewriting it in my head, half paying attention to whatever I was actually meant to be doing. It wasn’t a job I was working towards. It was just how my brain worked, all the time, whether I wanted it to or not.

I’m not sure exactly when that stopped. That’s part of what makes this hard to write about. There’s no single morning I can point to and say “that’s the day it left.” It was more of a slow leak than a puncture. One day I looked up and the tank was just… lower than I remembered, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which mile it happened on.

I want to be honest about this, because I think a lot of people carry some version of it quietly, and the quiet is the worst part.

It’s Not One Thing. That’s What Makes It Hard.

If I could point to a single cause, this would almost be an easier post to write. A bad experience, a project that fell apart, a person who knocked the wind out of me. Something with an edge to it, a villain, a clean narrative.

It’s not that. It’s everything, a little bit, all at once.

It’s the back injury and the bone spurs that mean a full day on set, on my feet, lugging kit, isn’t the straightforward thing it used to be. It’s the fatigue that comes with managing a chronic illness I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life, even in remission, even on a “good” day. It’s running front of house at the Tower Theatre, which I genuinely love, but which also takes a great deal of the same creative and organisational energy that filmmaking demands — there’s only so much of that particular fuel in the tank on any given week, and theatre has, fairly, been getting most of it. It’s the writing projects, the wiki work, the music, Sadie’s care, the general business of staying upright. Filmmaking didn’t get pushed out by one thing. It got quietly outcompeted by a dozen things, none of which were its fault, and none of which I particularly regret choosing in the moment.

And then there’s the industry itself, which I won’t pretend hasn’t played its part. The gap between the dream version of filmmaking — the one I had in my head as a younger man, scripts and sets and a clear path forward — and the actual mechanics of trying to make anything happen as an independent creator with limited time and limited budget, is a genuinely difficult gap to keep staring across. I’ve written things I’m proud of. Story bibles, scripts formatted properly, projects with real bones to them. And then they sit there, because the next step requires a kind of relentless self-promotion and networking energy that I simply don’t have spare most weeks. That’s not the industry’s fault either, particularly. It’s just true.

So: a mixture. Health, time, energy, the industry, life. All of it, a little bit, pulling in the same direction.

The Guilt Bit (You Knew There’d Be a Guilt Bit)

Here’s the part I find hardest to admit. There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with losing interest in the thing you always said was your dream. Other people remember you talking about it. They ask how the latest script is going, with genuine warmth, and you have to decide in that moment whether to give the easy answer or the true one.

The easy answer is “yeah, ticking along.” The true answer is closer to “I haven’t opened that file in three months and I’m not entirely sure why, and when I think about opening it I feel something closer to tired than excited, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.”

I don’t think losing passion for something makes it less real that you once loved it, or that you might love it again. But it took me a long time to separate “I’m not currently excited about this” from “I’ve failed at the thing that mattered most to me,” and I’m still not sure I’ve fully managed it. Those two sentences feel identical at 11pm. They are not, in fact, the same sentence.

What I’m Not Going to Do

I’m not going to wrap this up with a neat resolution, because I don’t have one. This isn’t the part of the post where I tell you I rediscovered my spark on a long walk and everything’s back to how it was. That would be a nicer ending. It would also not be true, and I promised myself a while ago that this blog is the place I tell the truth rather than the highlight reel.

What I will say is that I don’t think the passion is gone. I think it’s buried under quite a lot of other, currently louder things — pain, fatigue, caring responsibilities, a job I love that takes more than it gives back some weeks, and an industry that asks for energy I don’t reliably have. I don’t think that’s the same as it being dead. Dead feels permanent. This feels more like a fire that’s gone quiet under the ash, still warm somewhere underneath, waiting for slightly better conditions than the ones I’m currently in.

I don’t know when those conditions arrive. Maybe when the back settles into something more manageable. Maybe when there’s a stretch of life that isn’t quite so determined to throw things at me, on the evidence of my last blog post, which — if you’ve read it — you’ll know is a fairly long list. Maybe it just happens gradually, the way it left, and I won’t notice the exact day it comes back either.

For now, I’m trying to let that be okay. Trying not to force a passion that isn’t currently there, because forcing it has never once worked and has only ever made me feel worse about both the not-wanting-to and the guilt about the not-wanting-to. Trying to trust that the bit of me that used to rewrite dialogue on the walk home is still in there somewhere, just resting.

If You’re In This Too

If any of this sounds familiar — if there’s a version of you that used to light up about something and currently just feels tired when you think about it — I don’t have a fix for you. I’m not sure there is one, or at least not a fast one. But I don’t think you’ve failed, and I don’t think it’s gone for good. I think you’re just carrying a lot, and the thing that needs the most energy is, unfairly, often the first thing that gets quietly put down when the energy runs low.

I’d genuinely like to know if this resonates. Has your relationship with a dream changed shape over the years? Did it come back? What did that look like? Drop it in the comments — I think there’s more comfort in knowing this is common than there is in pretending it isn’t happening at all.

Gary is a designer, developer, theatre manager, songwriter, and — somewhere under the ash — a filmmaker, based in Kent.