Stop, Stop, Don't Let's Start: The Madness

I found this post by Laura yesterday (not sure how I missed it before) and it touches on the thing that has been gnawing at me for the past several months. She talks about leaving theater and about discovering that she can come back to playwrighting without engaging with what she labels the American Institutional Theater System, what I call Standard Theater Operating Procedure or STOP (I think, at one point, I called SOTP, but STOP is much more catchy don'cha think?). She writes:

I also figured out that I can write them [her plays] on my own terms. I don’t have to indulge in the American Institutional Theater System. I don’t have to stuff an envelope and mail my work (with a $15 check) to a bunch of strangers. I don’t have to work with directors who have no idea how to work with me. I don’t have to discuss what’s wrong with theater to a point where I’ve forgotten what I like about it.

My only responsibility is to write.

This is what I've spent the last 4-5 years doing and this process has paid off in my writing. I have to keep reminding myself that now. Because for the past few months (and for the first time in 4 years), my process has felt completely wrong, completely fucked, and completely compromised.

It's one thing to go off and write on your own terms. It's another to re-engage with the system. Especially to re-engage before you've completed the work you set out to do. And that, I think is my problem now. The process is compromised because I compromised it. I sold it out before I saw it through. And there is huge remorse and an enormous sense of violation. So if you set off in a direction outside of the AIST/STOP, stay on the path. Don't let anyone divert your purpose.

Wonder what the decisional regret vector on this looks like? I suspect it points directly down or else it's a slow, torturous incline.

Maybe we need to start a support group for playwrights who just want to write.