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Happy twentieth birthday, WWdN

Twenty years ago today, this website, which I built myself from the <head> on down, went live for the very first time.

It was SUCH a big deal. It was the culmination of an incredible amount of work, the successful summiting of a very steep learning curve that I’d only begun to climb a few months before. I was and am so proud of all that work.

Today, I am not feeling particularly celebratory. I mean, have you looked at the world, lately? Not a ton to celebrate at the moment, if you ask me, so what ought to be a big party … isn’t. That’s okay. I’ve done this nineteen times already.

Even though I’m not feeling it, I want to wish a happy birthday to WWdN and say congratulations to young me for having the courage and commitment to examine his life, and write about it in public. Everything I am doing today, in a life that is more successful and filled with more joy than I ever thought possible, is built on the shoulders of that work. None of this is possible without all of that, and I’m just so grateful to everyone who believed in me and encouraged me along the way.

Here’s to another twenty years, a few more books, and whatever cool stuff is just beyond my event horizon.

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so safe, so loved, so special

There’s this commercial where a woman comes into her house and experiences the unparalleled relief of taking off her bra after a long day at work. I think it’s a beer commercial. There’s a Toots and the Maytals song in it called Pressure Drop. It’s a great song, and if you know it, you’re probably grooving to it a little bit right now.
 
Or, at least, now you are. You’re welcome.
 
I love this song. Always have. Can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the words. After I’d heard it a few dozen times during a single baseball game awhile ago, I fired up the old Spotify and asked it to make me a playlist based on that song.
 
“This is quite a departure from your usual 80s punk playlists,” it said to me, hopefully more in interest than judgment. You never can tell with Spotify.
 
It made the playlist, and a couple taps later, I was in full groove to Toots and the Maytals’ cover of Louie Louie.
 
My whole life, I’ve been deeply into reggae music. Even at the peak of teenage angst, when my record collection was almost exclusively punk and new wave, I always made room and time for reggae.
 
And not just Bob Marley’s greatest hits CD that we all had and loved. I’m talking about artists that the average white boy in my suburban neighborhood in the 80s had never heard of, or had much reason to stumble across: Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Bunny Wailer, Steel Pulse, Toots and the Maytals. The stories they told in their music, the stories they told WITH their music, just always seemed to really land on me. There was something incredibly soothing, safe, and warm about reggae music that I didn’t get from any other music. I never really talked about it. Uncharacteristically for me, I kept it to myself. Guarded it. I only shared it with one other person, ever, and that was my friend, Dave, who loved the same music as I did, the same way I did. It’s a big part of a friendship that spans nearly three decades.
 
So I’m grooving a little, and then I’m grooving a lot, and then all of the sudden, with no warning or gentle ramp up, I suddenly realize why I love this music, and why I love it the way I do. The memory doesn’t wash over me in a wave as much as it picks me up along its face, tosses me into the curl, tumbles over and through me until it and I are indistinguishable from one another.
 
I am in the living room of my great grand parents’ farmhouse. I am sitting on the floor, atop an exotic rug that protects dark wood floors. It’s dimly lit, and the air is cool. My great grandparents are in front of me. My great grandfather, Papa, is in a pale blue guayabera and dark slacks. My great grandmother, Mum Mum, is wearing a flowing white dress, with a high neckline, and some colorful thread sewn into sleeves that stop just above her elbow. She is barefoot, holding the skirt out with one hand. Her other hand reaches to the ceiling and she twirls around it. She is pure joy and love. He watches her with tremendous affection.
 
Against the wall, a few feet away to my right, Toots and the Maytals’ cover of Louie, Louie, plays on their record player.
 
I am so safe. I am so loved. I am so special to them.
 
Just as quickly as it crashes over me, the memory is gone. I tumble out of the foam and cough some water out of my mouth. I claw at the memory as it recedes, but the ocean flows easily away from my grasp.
 
My great grandfather was Panamanian. He was born in Colon. My great grandmother was Jamaican. She was born in Kingston. I have always loved and cherished that I am descended, at least partly, from immigrants. I have such a privileged life. I know it’s the sort of life they dreamed of giving their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren — me! — when they came to America. I am doing the very best I can to make them proud and never waste it.
 
They brought so much with them to America: my grandmother and great aunt Val, who will become the most important person in my life, Central American and Caribbean culture, food, and fashion … and reggae music.
 
I never knew where it came from, but now I do. This suburban white boy got his deep, spiritual, love of reggae music from his Jamaican great grandmother, by way of Panama … because she made me feel safe, loved, and special. So of course her music makes me feel those things.
I am so grateful for that memory, and everything that came with it.
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everything under the sun is in tune

I wrote this on my Facebook, on Thursday:

Up until about an hour ago, I thought I was going to completely blow a deadline so thoroughly that the project I’ve been working on for most of a year would be canceled.
But I had this great conversation with my team (and indirectly with my editor, via his comments) that showed me a clear and surprisingly simple path to completing this thing by that very same deadline. There’s nothing tricky about it; it’s just a little trick! The Brad Jacobs … something or other …. references aside, the trick was helping me recognize what was important, what could be cut, and what could be finished at a point in the Mysterious Future, in another book.
This means that, instead of having around 20,000 new words to write and edit, I only have 182 pages to edit and rewrite. I did about 94 pages today, which sounds like a lot more than it is, due to the nature of the work, but still feels pretty good. I am totally going to finish this thing! It’s going to come out next year! Hooray!

So, I did the remaining 94 pages, and turned them all in. That left me with these two short things that will bookend the entire text, you could call them an intro and an outro, if you wanted. They’re important. They carry a lot more weight per word than any other part of the book. I have to get them right. I knew that each part would be around 1200 words, so I had two days to do about 2400 words if I was going to make my deadline tomorrow.

This isn’t a regular deadline I can blow through. This is it. If I miss this one, the whole project will be delayed by at least a year. So 2400 words separate me from success or what I will absolutely categorize as a failure. Over a year’s worth of work hangs on those 2400 words.

Those words just refused to come. You know how you try to hold something really still and your hand just trembles harder, because all your fine micro muscle movements are working really hard to do their best work, and they can’t quite figure out how to work together? So you get exactly the opposite of what you’re trying for? It was like that.

Yesterday, I sat down with my brain, and I was, like, “dude, come on. You gotta work with me.” And my brain went, “LOL nope.”
So I emailed my editor and told him that it just wasn’t going to happen. I’d worked so hard for so long, but I just couldn’t get this last bit, which is extremely important, onto the page. I accepted that this thing would be delayed by a year, and … well, the next little bit is basically [SCENE MISSING] because sometime after I wrote that e-mail, I fell into the gravity well of my Writer’s Brain without realizing it, and everything I needed to say came out as if by magic.

Well, one of the two bookends, anyway. The second one, if it matters. I still couldn’t find my way into what will likely be the very first sentence of this whole thing. Just a little bit of pressure.

I did not sleep well last night. I kept waking up, too hot or too cold. My brain seized each opportunity to helpfully throw out ideas at me. None of them were good, but I appreciated that it was doing the work.

When I woke up this morning, about 1200 words and 24 hours away from ultimate success or complete failure, my brain was even less cooperative than it was yesterday. “Come on, man, I just need to find my way in. Once I find my way in, it’ll all come together and I can do something that’s good enough to turn in. Let’s do this together, brain!” And my brain just said, “Bro. I stayed up all night working on ideas for you, and you rejected all of them.” Then it just crossed its little arms, which is a weird image but also kind of adorable, and refused to help.

If you’re going to be a writer, you have to use tools to help you when you run into things like this. You have to work through the total refusal of your brain to be a team player, over and over again. Each time is different, each trick a surprise to me as much as it’s a surprise to my brain. But where to start? What’s going to trick my brain into letting me have the last little bit that I need, the most important bit, the bit that’s shorter than all the words I’ve written and cut already.

I learned a thing in drama school that was intended to be applied to acting. I find that it applies to all creative work: keep it simple. Keep it simple and the nuances will arrive on their own, in their own time. Keep it simple, and stay out of your own way.

Keep it simple. Okay. Let’s try that.

I went all the way back to the basics, from probably middle school, and I made an outline. For 1200 words. A few beats, broken down into a beginning, middle, and end. Not entirely perfect — oh except that phrase, that’s a nice one that’s absolutely going into it — but good enough to get started.

I opened a new text editor and started where my outline said to start.

About fifty words into it, I realized it was all wrong. It was all horribly wrong. I hate this. This isn’t where this thing starts. Oh! Shit! I know! This thing starts at

[SCENE MISSING]

And then it was done. It’s not final, but it’s good enough.

A completed first draft, 24 hours before the drop dead deadline. Success!

You bet your life I’m going to celebrate. I’ll be taking my brain out for ice cream.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences and My Number Story

California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris reached out to me last week, and asked if I’d be willing to talk a little bit about my Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) today, to coincide with the launch of NumberStory.org, a new nonprofit organization she founded to help support people like me who had ACEs, and live with the residual trauma as a result.

Before Dr. Burke-Harris reached out to me, I had never heard of ACE in this context before. If you’re in the same boat, here’s what I learned:

“The term ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences,’ or ‘ACEs,’ comes from the 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). The study, a partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is one of the largest investigations ever conducted to assess connections between chronic stress caused by early adversity and long-term health.

“The study examined exposure to childhood adversity, including abuse and neglect, and household dysfunction like domestic violence, parental mental illness, or parental substance abuse. Researchers assigned an ‘ACE score’ to each participant by adding up the number of adversities the participant reported.”

Most of you reading this already know my story. For those who don’t: For as long as I can remember, I was emotionally abused by the man who was my father on a daily basis. In fact, I didn’t have a father, I had a bully. Both my parents spanked me all the time, but when I got into my teens, he hit me, he choked me, he shook me in anger, and he never showed any remorse for it. My mother was so obsessed with the attention got because of my work, she emotionally neglected me, used me to chase her dreams of fame and fortune in Hollywood, and protected her husband when he was cruel to me. She gaslighted me about his cruelty and bullying, and frequently made ME apologize to HIM when I got upset after he did something cruel to me. They never treated me like a special son who they loved. He treated me like I was an irritant who was unworthy of his love, and she treated me like a possession she could use for money and attention. I never felt unconditionally loved and supported in my home. After literally a lifetime of trying to make my mother happy and convince my father to love me, I accepted that they were too selfish, too narcissistic, too prideful, and invested in the lie they told themselves and the world about our family, to see and hear me when I begged them to … well, to just love and accept me for who I was. I ended contact with them several years ago, and while it’s a relief they can’t hurt me any more, I’ll always have a painful, gaping hole in my life where the love and support of my parents should be.

Every day, I struggle with the residual trauma from my childhood. Some days are tougher than others, and I am so grateful for the support network I have to help me on the really bad days.

But some people don’t have that support network, and don’t know where to look to build one. That’s where Dr. Burke-Harris and My Number Story come in. MyNumberStory was founded to help adults identify our Adverse Childhood Experiences, so we can begin healing from them.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) directly affect two out of three of us – and impact the rest of us as well. Learn more at  https://NumberStory.org

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“I just want to be a kid. Please let me be a kid.”

It’s like … 1980, probably. Maybe late 1979. It’s the summer in Los Angeles, and it is as hot as I can remember. The smog is so thick, you can taste an oily sheen in air that looks overcast, all the time.

I’m in the back seat of my godmother’s car. My little sister and little brother are on either side of me. We didn’t wear seatbelts in those days, which is nuts but it’s how it was.

My mother has enlisted my godmother (who is my aunt, my father’s sister) to drive me on a commercial audition that I don’t want to go to. I presume my father was at work and my mother had some audition of her own, so my godmother ended up with three kids, plus my cousin, in her VW.

I can see this like it just happened. I’m sitting up on my heels, on that sort of plastic seat that 1970s Volkswagens had, with the waffle pattern. I look into her eyes in the rearview mirror, and I decide that it’s time to ask for help.

“Aunt Dorothy, will you tell my mom that I don’t want to do this anymore? Will you tell my mom that I just want to be a kid?”

What 8 year-old has to beg their mother to “let” them be a kid? What kind of mother doesn’t hear that? What kind of father doesn’t care?

You know the answers  — well, my answers — to those questions.

She looks back at me, and she says, as kindly and gently as ever, “You have to tell your mom that, but I’ll go with you if you want.”

And that’s when I knew that I was never going to just be a kid, because my mother refused to listen to me, refused to hear me, refused to see me as a person. I was her property, a tool to be used that would get her closer to her dreams, dreams she was focused on so singularly, she stole my childhood from me (before she and my dad stole all my money from me) and then lied to me about it.

I can’t count the number of times I begged her, “please let me just be a kid. I just want to be a kid.” I said those words through tears so many times, I can still feel how my throat burned with grief and fear and desperation. I can feel how much I was suffering, how unhappy I was, how I just wanted to be a kid, and how awful it was to be dismissed and gaslighted about it.

“You made a commitment,” was something she would say to me all the time, as if a seven year-old can understand what that means. “I gave up my career so you can have yours,” she told me, throughout my entire childhood, every time I wanted to quit, which was pretty much all the time.

It hurt, so much, to feel unheard, unseen, unsupported, and unloved. It was shameful to lie about it, to protect my abusers, for 46 years of my life. I know that it is the root cause of my CPTSD, my Depression, and my Anxiety.

Which brings me to the whole reason I told this story today.

My friend, Mayim, has a mental health podcast, and she asked me if I’d come on to talk about living with Depression. I said yes, and in the course of our conversation, we ended up talking quite a lot about my experience with selfish, narcissist, emotionally abusive, parents.

It’s intense. In fact, it’s so intense, this is the second podcast we did. With Mayim’s blessing, I spiked the first time we talked, because I felt like it was just way too raw and made me uncomfortable. So we had a second conversation, and it’s going to come out tomorrow.

Here’s a preview. What you don’t hear, just before this clip starts, is that my mother made me go to her commercial agency when I was just seven years-old, and coached me to tell the kid’s agent, “I want to do what mommy does.”

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is at Spotify, Apple, and all the usual places.