It’s 2026. So, what am I getting up to this year?

As I write this I’m housesitting. The two 4-month-old kittens want to stick their noses into everything, especially if it’s people-food they can’t have full of onion and chilli and dairy and salt, the spout of the kettle while it’s boiling, my laptop keyboard while I’m trying to write an email, or the lid of the toilet while I’m trying to scoop their many, many daily poops into it. I’m watching the weather forecasts like a hawk, because a 30-degree day means multiple sessions of watering different parts of the garden — especially the wisteria, whose leaves have been observed to shrivel up entirely in harsh sunlight.

To put this year in context, I’ve been spending the last couple of years moving toward a career change out of video editing and back into storytelling.

After COVID and the advent of AI, the last company I worked for downsized its video team. My options were to become an all-in-one editor (taking up things like graphics and animation) or pivot back to why I learned editing in the first place: to facilitate my broader filmmaking and, more importantly, writing. I took a two-year course to spend some time easing back into it post-burnout, rebuilding my ability and confidence to write at least a few episodes' worth of material per year.

That course is now over, leaving me at a turning point: either sink without the external structure, or learn to swim for real.

I have a few projects. Most of them are leftovers from the screenwriting course — writing assignments that had to hit a page count, without regard for whether that was the end of the story (it never was; it’s always 25-30 pages. For my brand of outlining, pacing, and scaffolding scenes that get cut later, 40+ pages are needed). Once the first drafts are finished, some of these will become portfolio pieces and others will become part of an ongoing development slate. Short films to produce, pitch decks to create.

I’ve heard it said many times that, as a screenwriter or producer, you should have a slate of about six projects at any given time, in varying states of development. I definitely have a longer list than that, but three-to-six is a good number for prioritising. The rest is officially ‘backlog’, to be reinstated only when items from the current slate are either formally deprecated, or done.

I’m not sure whether to include this stuff on the slate: the website, the portfolio, my spreadsheet systems as their own set of tasks. It seems trivially obvious that I’ll never run out of things to do.

The meta-task right now is to set up a bunch of spreadsheets I’ll need to actually use, whose functions include (but aren’t limited to) tracking progress on my slate (see above), managing my networks, and (perhaps, eventually) tracking how I spend my time and money. I think I’m ready to start reporting on and being accountable for my progress — not always to you, the reader, but at least to myself. And if I’m going to learn some basic coding (e.g. for interactive storytelling), then I might as well practise and expand on the coding knowledge I already have, which is specifically in the context of spreadsheets.

I cannot stress enough how much Create, Consume, Cavort, Commune has been improving my life as a form of mental health food pyramid.

That’s, on a regular basis, to: **Create — ** Build something, make an art, craft an experience, experiment **Consume — ** Enjoy what someone else has made; music, games, shows, but all the better if it’s someone you know. **Cavort — ** Move your body, work up a sweat. **Commune — ** Connect with other people. Share experiences. See and be seen, have a few dozen micromoments of liking your community.

Create and Consume I tend to have covered in the average week, if not the average day. But Commune and Cavort I have to actually pay attention to; they’re the first things to go when I start to feel overwhelmed.

Exercise has always felt like a chore. I hated sport as a kid (at least in part due to a culture of hostility in and around it), and the feeling of burning lungs and dripping sweat after a run were straight up unpleasant.

For twenty years I thought I hated swimming.

I was good at swimming, once I was in the pool. I learned it earlier than most, even for Australia where swimming lessons are a compulsory part of primary education. While other kids were at the pool for an hour a week ten times a year, I was there twice a week, missing out on Power Rangers and afternoon cartoons until I could pass the Grade 6 tests. As soon as I passed them, I was done.

I realise now why I hated swimming. It wasn’t that time I was nearly swept out to sea. It wasn’t the burning feeling of holding my breath. It wasn’t the lessons or the feeling of being un-coordinated or the FOMO of afternoon TV.

It was the change rooms.

At school, surrounded by other kids, I couldn’t concentrate long enough to put on a sock until the teachers were in there screaming at me that the bus was about to leave. After school, it was my grandfather, who would turn every car trip, every meal, and every interaction in between into a shouting match. Not with my older brother, just me.

After twenty years of not swimming, a friend dragged me to the local reservoir. Even doing a few strokes into the deep water kicked the shit out of me, but I immediately realised this was a form of exercise I could do. Running still feels like a chore. Dancing is expensive. Weights are great when you know exactly which muscles to hit and how to hit them, which takes an entire education in anatomy that I don’t have. Swimming feels natural to me and hits all the right places.

Even after getting back into it (and progressing pretty rapidly), I’ve been pretty flat out for the last month. I didn’t swim for two weeks, and started getting anxiety attacks again. Half an hour back in the pool and now I feel ready to take on the world. It’s absolutely wild how much of an impact it has.

Hi! I’m Mike Gorrie, and I feel the need to explain myself. Constantly.

I’m writing a screenplay and a couple of pilots for my second university qualification. I livestream on Twitch a couple of times a week. Once or twice a month I’m struck with an uncontrollable urge to tinker with a DAW until the catchy sound in my head sings back through my headphones. For the last two decades I’ve been slightly obsessed with Shadow the Hedgehog, and for a little longer than that I thought I hated swimming. I was wrong.

At 36, I don’t know what to do with my life. Anything I want seems only further out of reach the more I work toward it. I look back and see a road piled high with my failures. Sure, I’m wearing a set of lenses that colour things that way — what’s the opposite of rose-tinted glasses, blue? Seafoam? — but it feels wrong, like cheating, to take them off.

After burning out hard, an AuDHD diagnosis, and (eventually) losing my job, I’m living out woop-woop with my parents. It’s okay. Good, even. It’s been a chance to work through some Things™, both personal and family-related (ha). My job description is “student” again. I’m getting better at living instead of surviving. I don’t know what’s next for me, but I don’t need to know. There’ll be writing and swimming and music involved, and talking to fellow weirdos on the internet, and maybe — if I’m a very good old boy — a cat.