Member-only story
Doubt has Ruled My Life
But now I’m finally pushing back!
I was 23, hanging out in my college friend’s dilapidated apartment in West Hollywood. My friend’s roommate was enrolled in film school. A page from a scene for a screenplay he was writing sat in a typewriter. We discussed his work and he invited me to try my hand at finishing the scene.
Then: Boom.
Something extraordinary, uncomfortable, and inexplicable happened to me when I sat down at that typewriter. Decades later, I can still summon that feeling — and the boatloads of regret I’ve carried deep in my gut ever since.
I began shaking — quite literally, all over. My heart raced as if I were running hard. I wrote dialogue for characters I’d only just met as if my very life — and perhaps theirs — depended on it.
When I’d finished, the film student said something noncommittal. He didn’t tell me I’d produced a scene of great genius, or showed astonishing promise. He didn’t tell me to run, not walk, to film school and enroll.
A day or so later, I flew back east, where I held down a deadening admin job that so many post-college English majors like me fell into on the way to figuring out who they wanted to become.
I don’t remember anything about that job, or about my trip out west except for those…
