Like the Man in the Movies

I wanted to grow up and wear a suit to work when I was a kid. I wanted the drive to get there. To learn and to change and to develop into a version of myself that I see as the most optimal or most refined identity. Someone who’s handsome and clever and makes a good amount of money and has the ability to do something I couldn't do at the moment. This drive is not unique. As much as I’d like to think it’s mine and belongs solely to me, it is a narrative that so many people ascribe to their lives. But that’s the ego. The precious identity that keeps us beholden to versions of ourselves that no longer suit us for the sake of easing public perception. “I’m unlike any other and everyone knows it.” Yes and no. Your hopes and dreams were largely influenced by popular culture, personal friend groups, familial interference and the characters you identified with from the movies you’d loved as a kid. You’re not unique in this experience. Nobody ever is. I don’t preface with this as a way to say ‘stop trying’ or ‘don’t work hard for what you want’ or ‘this is the best you’ll ever be’. I write this to at least attempt to posit the idea that maybe I’m good enough right now. In whatever wild version of myself I’d become no matter how distanced from its idealized conception. I am good enough. Not even enough. I am good. Exceptional. Wonderful and worthy. Today. As I type this.

When I daydream about success and achievement, I see myself through the lens of the movies and tv shows I grew up watching. A handsome mid thirties man at a party in a sports coat with a fancy leather wallet so thick with the cards of my coworkers and acquaintances only kept as a way of catalgouing their phone numbers like a pocket sized rolodex. I carry a flute of champagne and regretfully say, “I can’t stay too late tonight. I fly out to Tulsa tomorrow for business” and some handsome man I’m flirting with is impressed by my restraint and conviction. I take his card and slip it into the place in my wallet where I keep cash to delineate between the business and the personal connections I carry with me. My trip to Tulsa goes great and I make the big sale and my boss raves about me for the next month and I am given a raise and I go on a date with this man when I get home but it doesn’t work out and that’s okay because I am stable. In my home that I own with a car that I own and a savings that’s healthy and professional legacy being built. I look at myself in the mirror and I am proud but always longing for more. Nothing feels nourishing enough. I feel empty even though I have so much. But this isn’t me. It never was nor would I ever want it to be.

When I was fifteen I lied about my age and joined a punk band in San Francisco replacing a long time drummer for the locally renowned group. On the weekends in high school I would scoot away to the city and practice and practice and practice. I would sneak into bars to play shows with this band, keeping a quiet secret from my teachers as certain friends at school. I was a real life Hannah Montana. We toured and played in Europe and wrote music and made a lot of people angry with our irreverence for the niche sub-genre and it made my heart soar. I wanted to play drums as my profession so I followed that dream. I grew up and played in many other bands in many different cities on many different bills and I was full with the joy that it once brought but slowly realized I was growing into a person who didn’t identity with that dream as strongly as I once had. I moved to San Francisco, went to school for TV writing, fell in love twice and went through the death of my bandmate who showed me the joy of music. The person who showed me that I could follow that initial dream had a seizure in his home by himself and that was that. I moved to Sacramento with my husband for a band and that became a whole entirely different ride. A newly invigorated love for the game and a willingness to do whatever I had to do to find success in a band with so much hope momentum and promise. Incubating a love for writing and storytelling, I quietly wrote my scripts while touring and bartending. Pandemic happened and fifty-two-card-pick-upped all structure and momentum we’d had and yet even still we wrote the best music we’d ever make. We found our dog Lucy and moved to Southern California where I’d pick up day jobs and focus more on my writing and shift into the world of podcasting as I’m sure so many others had (this little bit of self deprecation is unhelpful).

Obviously there is so much more to be said about my life but this isn’t an autobiography. It is a roadmap to illustrate the clear difference between a life that I thought I’d have versus the life that I’ve led. For as messy and sad and as difficult and as frustrating and as difficult, I know it’s in here twice, I am the person I have always wanted to be. And I’m tired of longing for a version of myself that’s yet to come while missing the gift and the privilege of living in this body with the cognizance of my present experience. I’ve come so far and changed so much. Pivoting from one failure to the next, cherishing the joy and the unpredictability of the gates that opened because of it. I have failed over and over and over reinspecting with each and every rejection refining and building the version of me that I had always dreamed of becoming.

He looks nothing like the one from the movies of my childhood but he’s everything I dreamt he’d be.

What if we decided we were good enough today? Turn off that fucking podcast and put your AirPods away and go on a walk. Let yourself be proud of all you’ve endured. Fall in love with the person you’ve become.