FOMO

Edinburgh on the brain and I’m afraid I’m missing out.

The 2026 Edinburgh Festival started today.

As an aspiring creator for the 2027 event, I’m following them on Instagram, getting all of the emails, and asking anyone with ears how I can get into this festival.

I’m watching my favorite comedians/TV personas - James Acaster and Nish Kumar - kicking off the literal party by DJing in front of crowd packed with my gurus and mentors celebrating weird creativity in real time. I’m getting the maps, show recommendations, and recaps and feeling so inspired…but mostly feeling…

FOMO.

Why aren’t I there, now?

Why am I an ocean away like Angelica Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton?

It feels like I’m married to the US when I should be living it up with my wildest Icarus, Scotland.

My soul is wrent, and I’m in flux.

Because, my family is here, but why can’t we be there?

I’m not even sure it’s just Scotland.

Sure, I feel an ancestral call to the green lands, burned viking ships, and remote islands. I hear the songs of experimental theater, winding streets, and words that become feelings. But, mostly, I just feel like I cannot create enough to be satisfied. 

I feel like the hours in the day and my rebounding energy from years of health strain aren’t enough to get these stories into the world and I might die before they all get out!

I don’t even know why they need out so bad, but I’m starting to realize that’s not my question to answer. 

The marketer in me doesn’t want to hear that, but the creator in me must hear it because she doesn’t care anymore if there is an “audience”, or a “demand”, or a “stage”. She’s boiling over faster than I can produce, edit, and distribute.

And while the finished projects are piling up, so are the half-finished ones. There are fragments that go into my notes app, into my dreams, and onto the pages of the journals that are scattered around my home, car, and backpacks. I wake up in the night writing dreams. Every conversation is a potential screenplay. Every morning journal, an introduction.

I can’t get there fast enough, and I also feel like I can’t see enough of this open world before these horrible dark men poison it to death and trap us all in a Hell of poverty and illness. (And we all know that Revolution makes good writing, but offers little time and space to complete it.)

I know that there must be destruction for every creation. I’ve read enough magical fiction to know that forces must have balance. But, I don’t want my kid or my art to grow in a world without hope where this idea of wealth punishes every light and good thing.

I don’t feel like my light is enough, and I don’t feel like I can release it quickly enough while still managing to parent, live, and earn as I “should”. All the creators I admire are doing the thing I want to be doing and so much of it is happening in Edinburgh right now. I can feel it.

Here in the US, the streamers are becoming a monopoly and the writing jobs are drying up fast. Check out the recent network mergers if you suspect I am being dramatic.

NOTE: Of course, I am being dramatic - I AM dramatic - but it’s also true.

Hollywood is starting to revisit, remake, and repeat. New creations exist and they are exquisite (like Ride or Die currently on Prime Video), but they are the minority. It’s a cycle we’ve seen before and will see again. So, right now, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival sort of feels like the one place left in which people can make something new and possibly give it a life.

But I’m not in Edinburgh yet, and I’m not yet back in the writers room or on the set, thus it feels like I’m not yet living. Even though, I have started just making the things I write myself with the resources I still have available to me.

Now that I’ve come out as a writer, I’m eager for more of what I write to be in the world. It’s like I’m 10 months pregnant eating spicy foods, doing tuck jumps, and trying to shimmy the baby out so I can get pregnant again.

I know that’s a wild analogy.

But, I do this little dance in the hope that this time next year, I can look back here and say, “Oh my lucky darling. If you only knew. Look at all of these gorgeous babies you wrote shining joy into the world because you didn’t stop!”