Beginning of the End?

Early on in my career as a PA, somewhere between my first feature and my first commercial, I realized that I could last as long as I needed to for each job, but after each one I would always collapse in to a physical and emotional heap in the same way.

Let say I had an exhausting three days. On a three-day job, those three days could lay me up on the couch for a week. But on a six-day-a-week, seven-week job I could keep going all month (as long as I hadn't given up my day off).

As long as there's something to do tomorrow, production doesn't leave you enough time to feel pain. Once the end is in sight, it all catches up with me. If I lined up the people with the least confidence in my abilities as a PA, they are inevitably the same ones I drive home after the last day of the job. By that time, no matter the shoot, I'm basically a jelly.

During my last shoot, I got that familiar sense of rising dysfunction and exhaustion, but not for the shoot - for my whole PA career. I knew enough to know what to dread - wrapping out trash and equipment that night, driving while tired, being dysfunctional at home, not getting enough sleep, being anxious about getting to the truck on time, driving tired again. That stuff doesn't bother me if I have to do it, but somehow I know the end is near.

It felt like the moment in a shoot where where I've been on firewatch long enough for the caffeine and adreneline to wear off and exhaustion to set in.