I Went Blonde

This recap is late.

In my defense, I went from Austin to Atlanta, Atlanta to Forsyth, Forsyth to Panama City Beach, spent several days orbiting an Ironman, drove back through Forsyth to collect the dog, came home, and somewhere in there I went blonde.

So the administrative integrity of the Revamp suffered slightly.

The hair is probably the easiest place to start because it is the easiest change to see. I went blonde. Not distinguished salt-and-pepper. Not a subtle summer highlight. Blonde. The kind of thing that makes you look in a mirror for a second longer because your brain has not updated the thumbnail yet.

I like it.

That is almost beside the point.

One of the things I wanted from this whole Revamp was to stop treating my appearance like something that had simply happened to me. Clothes, hair, body, grooming, whatever. For a long time I had a tendency to look at whatever version of me had accumulated and decide that was apparently what I looked like now.

There is something appealingly stupid about bleaching your hair in the middle of a six-month attempt to change your life. It is not deep. It does not fix anything. Nobody at CAA senses a disturbance in the universe because Christopher Shank has changed hair color.

But it is a choice.

I have been trying to make more of those.

This was a strange week for measuring the Revamp because almost none of it happened under normal conditions. Austin ended Monday. I flew home, unpacked, did laundry, repacked almost immediately and left again. Tuesday night Dana, Charlie and I drove to her parents’ house in Forsyth. Charlie stayed there, and Wednesday morning Dana and I headed south toward Panama City Beach for Ironman Florida.

The week stopped belonging to me at that point, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Dana had an Ironman to do.

There is an enormous amount of shit surrounding an Ironman before anybody actually starts swimming. Check-in. Meetings. Gear. Bike check-in. Nutrition. Race bags. Timing. Weather. Logistics. Getting places early so you can stand around waiting to eventually need to be somewhere earlier.

Then race morning starts at an hour usually reserved for home invasions.

The useful thing about being there for somebody else’s enormous goal is that your own internal bullshit gets downgraded for a while. Austin had left me with plenty of it.

I had spent the previous week examining every conversation I fucked up, every person I did not approach, every mixer I skipped and every moment when the good boy appeared and politely removed me from my own opportunity. I had been turning over the Raquelle conversation, the “whipped dog” line, the realization that I was not nearly as good at relationship-building as I had imagined I might be once somebody finally let me into the room.

Then suddenly Dana had 140.6 miles to deal with.

My bruised festival ego could wait.

That did not make the Austin stuff disappear. If anything, distance made some of it clearer.

I went into the festival thinking I needed more opportunities. I came out realizing I need to become better at handling the opportunities I already get.

That is not as pleasant.

I have spent years thinking of the career problem primarily as access. Find the producer. Find the manager. Find the person who will read the thing. Find the financing. Get into the room.

Austin reminded me that eventually you get into the room.

Then what?

I have a lot of work. That part is no longer really in dispute. The problem is that I have spent so much time proving I can write different things that I have occasionally made it harder for people to understand who the fuck wrote them.

That started changing almost immediately after I got back.

The slate got narrower.

Not smaller. The scripts still exist. I did not drive home from Texas and ceremonially burn half the hard drive.

But there is a difference between the work you have and the work you lead with.

The Battles of Birdtown became even more clearly the movie I am trying to build. Again became increasingly useful as the screenplay that answers the other question: what does Christopher Shank actually write when nobody is asking him to prove his range?

The answer I have been circling for years suddenly became embarrassingly simple. I write people who have constructed some version of reality that allows them to keep going, and then something happens that makes the lie impossible to maintain.

Sometimes that becomes drama. Sometimes horror. Sometimes science fiction. Sometimes a comedy about something that is not particularly funny underneath.

The genre changes.

The writer does not.

That seems like something I could have figured out without airfare.

Austin also changed how I think about representation. I had been approaching managers too often as another part of the machinery for moving a particular screenplay. What I actually want is somebody who can look at the work I have written, the work I have not written yet, the movies I might realistically direct, the ones I should sell, the ones I should stop talking about, and help me make decisions about the career instead of one PDF.

So when I got home, I started correcting course.

The website got another pass. The public version of me got simpler. The Revamp itself came off the site because it does not need to be part of the professional sales pitch. The About page became less résumé and more answer to the question Austin kept asking me: tell me about yourself.

That took me all the way back to southeast Missouri. Wanting to play first base for the Cardinals. Getting sick one summer. A friend bringing me Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Discovering that movies might be another way to make something people cared about, and maybe another way to make my dad proud.

It turns out “tell me about yourself” is significantly harder than writing a screenplay.

I also kept cleaning up the places where the work lives publicly. The website. ISA. Stage 32. Project pages. Posters. Awards. Loglines. Synopses. Statuses. Making sure the things I say exist can actually be found by somebody who goes looking for them.

This is not sexy work.

I have learned that careers contain a shocking amount of data entry.

But there is something different about doing it now. Earlier in the Revamp, a lot of this activity still felt like preparation for a career. This week it felt more like maintenance of one that is beginning, slowly and inconsistently, to exist.

There is an option on Nobody Leaves. Other work is being considered. Save Point exists as a premise I am developing rather than a screenplay I pretend is finished. Birdtown has moved far beyond being a file on my computer even though it still has a long way to go before it becomes a movie.

Those distinctions matter to me now.

I am trying very hard to stop inflating things because they sound better and stop minimizing them because I am embarrassed to sound proud.

Just say what is happening.

That has become part of the Revamp too.

Physically, this week was never going to be some triumphant training block. The schedule was absurd. The gym was mostly unavailable. I had been traveling for more than a week and spent the middle of this one supporting somebody preparing to do an Ironman.

So I did what I could.

That sentence used to bother me because “I did what I could” can be an extremely elegant way of saying “I did nothing.”

That is not what I mean anymore.

The plan was to restart running gently, use bodyweight work when the gym was not practical, keep moving, drink water, meditate when I could, read, keep the basic grooming and self-care stuff alive and avoid turning an unusual week into an excuse to declare the whole system broken.

No restarts.

That rule continues to be one of the better ideas I have had.

There was no reason to come home from Florida and announce that the Revamp was beginning again Monday.

It never stopped.

Sometimes it looks like lifting six times in a week and tracking everything. Sometimes it looks like getting up before dawn to support your wife while she does something fucking insane, trying not to eat like an escaped zoo animal on the road, washing your face before bed and reading twenty pages in a hotel room.

Both count.

That has taken me a while to understand.

The Revamp started with a lot of dissatisfaction. That was useful. I still think dissatisfaction gets treated unfairly. Sometimes looking at something and saying, “No, I do not like this” is the beginning of taking responsibility for it.

But nine weeks in, the project cannot survive if its only fuel is disgust.

Eventually you have to notice the things that are working too.

I am taking more risks with how I look.

I am clearer about the work.

I am more aggressive about putting it in front of people.

I am learning which opportunities are real and which ones just make me feel busy.

I am learning that I am not good enough at some parts of the career yet.

That last one matters.

Austin fucked with me because I got to see a weakness I cannot rewrite away. I can become a better salesman. I can become better at meeting people. I can learn to stay in the room when my instinct is to disappear. But those skills are currently behind the writing.

That is not self-hatred.

It is a scouting report.

Work on it.

The depressive episode that hit around Austin made all of that harder, and I do not want to retroactively turn the experience into one of those stories where the depression was secretly a gift.

It was not.

It sucked.

It took a week I had hoped would feel expansive and made a lot of it feel claustrophobic instead. It made conversations expensive. It made retreat feel safer. It gave the good boy an opportunity to convince me that leaving people alone was an act of kindness.

But I came home with information.

And then life immediately required me to stop staring at myself and help somebody else.

There was something healthy about that.

Dana raced.

I watched.

She did the thing.

Then we packed everything back into the car, picked Charlie up on the way home and returned to the regular world.

And I came back blonde.

The outside version is changing faster than the inside one.

That is probably normal.

Hair takes an afternoon.

The rest takes reps.