I should probably edit this, but if I start down that path, I’ll futz with it until I decide to delete it all. So I’m publishing something that’s a little more rough than usual.
I am a slow writer. I write slowly. It takes me hours to settle on 500 words. I rarely feel finished, but I let a lot of things go so I can get to work on something else.
When I am only a writer, of the capital-W variety, this isn’t a problem. It takes as long as it takes. A lot of the time when I’m working, it looks like I’m not. My hourly rate is terrible as a result, even if my per-project rate is standard. But that’s how I do it.
There’s an ongoing joke in my life, built on the following premise: I have a wide open calendar for months at a time, endless time to schedule jobs and meetings and press if I need to. Without fail, after long months like this, an avalanche of job opportunities, pr asks, and other stuff that I file under Adulting will absolutely need to happen on the same day, at the same time. No, we can’t move it at all the only time we have is that time.
Being my own boss, producing and hosting my podcast, is supposed to change all of that. I’m supposed to be able to focus on the podcast, ten episodes at a time, do the other things for a week or so, and then start over with another ten episodes.
In theory, this is going to be great. In practice, I’m drowning in missed deadlines and urgent responsibilities while I finish building and learning how to use the machinery that will eventually automate (or at least make more efficient) a lot of my work process.
It’s so weird to be learning how to do so many things so late in my life. I have always had tremendous respect and admiration for Felicia Day, (who is not just my friend, but my North Star on how to do the thing I want to do without compromise) but I now know that I wasn’t appreciating or admiring her nearly enough all the years we did The Guild and Tabletop together. I should probably text her and tell her this.
Today is the first day in too long that I’ve had the time and the focus to sit at my desk, open up my blog, and fill it up with words. We recorded an episode of It’s Storytime this morning, leaving us with two to go before we take a little hiatus for the holidays. I was aware of how tired and overextended I am, as I stumbled over the first page several times, fumbling around to find the connection to the material that I discovered and made while I was preparing it.
Real quick context: I choose to experience my life as a series of seasons. I’ve written about it before, the difference between living in a season and doggedly charging toward a goal; A season of healthy habits is more lasting and easier for me to commit to than a decision to lose or gain X pounds, for example.
I have been in a season of healing for much longer than I thought I would be when I started. If you read or listened to Still Just A Geek, you know that when it was done, I didn’t have this sense of catharsis or closure. I certainly didn’t have profound and lasting healing. What I did have, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was a map of all the times and places that contributed to my CPTSD. Of course, that map came with nervous system dysregulation, panic attacks, night terrors, and all kinds of delightful mental health crises. I think I’ve talked about how I reached out to my Spacemom for help, and it was one of her assistants who introduced me to the woman who is now my EMDR therapist. We’ve been working together for … I think four years or so.
During our work together, I have experienced the meaningful and lasting healing that I hoped writing about my trauma would deliver. I hear it. I hear it right now and I hear how ludicrous that is. “Ah, yes, I presumed that reliving all of my trauma in public would magically heal it. Genius!”
The public part has been helpful to a significant number of people, or so I have been told a few thousand times, and that is a real blessing. I want to be a helper whenever I can, and somehow I knew that the only way I could be a helper to myself was to spend my season of healing in private.
There’s this thing that happens when I’m working on a story. Like clockwork, I will be somewhere between halfway and two-thirds through my draft, when I get this overwhelming urge to tell someone about it. Some of you are nodding along, right? The thing about that urge is that it is powered by the same creative energy and motivation I’m using to write the story, and if I give in to it, real close to all of the energy I need to finish leaks out. Every writer has a different reason for this, I understand. For me, I feel like it’s a shortcut to the satisfaction of sharing the idea without the risk of its execution not fully working. It’s an expression of the Marshmallow Test, and I fail it all the time.
I wasn’t going to risk my commitment to healing and recovery by talking about it. I’m still not, really; I feel like I’ve already said too much about it, but at least I feel like I’m far enough along in the process and I have experienced enough very real, significant, and meaningful moments of lasting healing to know that this isn’t going to derail any of that.
I’m tired. I have really been through it. There have been entire weeks where I have just felt terrible, while working on reprocessing something particularly painful, or fully seeing something for the very first time. By terrible coincidence as I was starting to feel safe and less vulnerable in my relationships, I was stunningly ghosted by a couple of longtime friends without explanation, just dismissed and forgotten like we never even knew each other. That was such a shock, it kicked me in the stomach so hard, the pain and the loss, the confusion and disappointment. It came up over and over again until very recently, when a lot of the work I’ve been doing came together and did its thing.
All of this, so intense and so hard and so worth it, while I was doing my best to get It’s Storytime off the ground, deal with the unceremonious and surprising ending of The Ready Room, without so much as a thank you from the network after hundreds of episodes. (I guess that’s how corporate does things, now? That sucks. I’m sorry to everyone who has to experience that.)
And then the election. It broke me. How this country could do that … I am still just astounded and sickened. But it broke me so much, my entire Creative Self retreated into some deep, dark, safe place that even I could not find. Honestly, I wanted to join it and stay there until he’s dead and gone. For all of us who have been hurt by people we trusted, for all of us who have ever felt unsafe in our homes, for all of us who have been relentlessly abused by a bully, every single fucking day of this demented wannabe tyrant is a thumb, jabbing into a deep bruise. It resurfaces trauma that we had forgotten about or buried or thought we had recovered from. If you know, you know and I am so sorry. I see you and your feelings are valid.
I still haven’t found my Creative Self. I’ve come across some of his abandoned camps, picked up some of his notes and used them the best I can, but he’s still not ready to come back out and risk the vulnerability he work demands.
But I have found a lot of other parts of myself, wounded parts that were terrorized, ignored, minimized, invalidated. I’ve found all of them and reparented them to the best of my ability, giving myself the dad I always deserved.
I have begun to wonder if my Creative Self isn’t really hiding, as much as it’s taking itself to a place where it is safe, and staying out of the way so I can more fully participate in my season of healing.
I don’t know that this makes sense to someone who doesn’t use the IFS therapy model, and I’m beginning to feel weird about all of this, so I should wrap this up before I decide to delete it.
Something I have struggled with for years is how much I love creating good art, how much I admire performing artists, and how much the performing arts mean to me, when I was forced into the arts against my will, and held prisoner there by my mother.
I have every reason and every right to despise acting and performing of any kind. I have every right to walk away from it forever and do anything else. The most traumatic moments of my life (and there have been a lot of traumatic moments) were all on sets I didn’t want to be on, that I was forced to be on. I have every right to put all that in a warehouse, lock the doors, and set it ablaze.
Even still, I think I was always going to be an artist of some kind. I believe, and my anecdotal experience supports, that artists do not choose art; Art chooses Artists. It’s something we have to do. It is put into us at the factory, come standard on this model.
I recently worked on camera for a friend. It was just a couple of days, but I loved every second of it, and I was sad when it was over. That’s so different from my whole life on set. No matter how great the set was (and a lot of them were really, really, great) I always had anxiety and fear that I was going to get in trouble. I was always afraid that I would fuck up and get yelled at, or that I would make a mistake and everyone would be mad at me. I guess this started when I was about 8, and persisted until … uh … a month ago.
I really do like being on the set, but I always wanted it to just be over as quickly as possible, so I could get out before someone yelled at me. (For the record, I was rarely yelled at, and at least one time I absolutely deserved it.) It’s one of the reasons I suck at auditions, and it’s one of the reasons I hadn’t been cast from an audition for well over a decade when I decided that I wasn’t going to put myself through that, anymore: every single character I read for would have this simmering rage behind it, because such a huge part of me resented, well, everything about everything that culminated in me being right here, right now, for this fucking audition where the director isn’t even watching me. Or it had this current of anxiety, of real fear that if they didn’t pick me, nobody would ever pick me. And if nobody ever picked me, I would never have a chance to make my dad love me.
Yeah, that’s not great for a wide variety of roles. It’s great for the serial killer on Criminal Minds, but not much else. Certainly not any of the roles I was called in for.
I’ve been wondering if there’s a way that I can heal all that pain and sadness, recover from all of that trauma, and clear it all away, so the only thing left in the room is me, and the Art. There is no sadness. There is no loss. No pain. No endless grappling with why wouldn’t you just let me be a kid? Why wouldn’t you let me be part of your family? Why did you abandon me as your son to make me into this?
None of that was present when I worked on this thing. None. At all. It was only joy. I only had fun. I felt safe and confident and secure and I knew in my whole body that this belonged to me. I was free and supported to make big choices, to take risks in rehearsal, to really have fun and deliver a performance that I hope will show up to the audience the way it did for us on the set.
It’s the first time in my life I have felt that way. Yes, even on Big Bang Theory, where everyone was amazing and kind and supportive, I was afraid that I would fuck up and get fired. I was constantly afraid of things that only existed in my head, ugly weeds grown from seeds my mom planted in me when I was seven, and resowed year after year after year.
I remember coming home after my first day and cautiously confiding in Anne that maybe I wasn’t going to entirely walk away from this forever like I thought. Maybe I can leave that door open, just a crack, and kinda look at it, from time to time.
I really believe that Art chose me. I don’t know why, and I don’t know that I would have chosen acting if I’d been supported rather than controlled and manipulated. But I do know that when I am in a cast, when I am preparing a role, when I am discovering moments in rehearsal, and when we are putting it all together on the set, on the stage, or in a sound booth, it just feels right. It’s a place where I fit. And if I’m going to choose to be there, I will make that choice for me, to make me happy or satisfied or even just healed. I won’t make that choice from a reactive place. It will come from a thoughtful, empowered place.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be cast in a movie again, or be asked to be part of a series. But I do know that if I am, whatever choice I make will be entirely mine.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to get my blogs in your email, you can sign up here:
