The Week I Was Supposed to Change My Life

There is probably never a convenient time for a major depressive episode.

That feels obvious.

There are, however, some particularly shitty times.

Like the week you have spent months telling yourself might change your life.

I had built Austin up in my head for a while. Not in the ridiculous way where I expected to get off the plane, accidentally bump into a manager at baggage claim and return home represented with three movies financed. I knew better than that. But I also knew I was going somewhere full of the kinds of people I have spent years trying to reach from my apartment. Writers farther along than me. Managers. Agents. Producers. Executives. People who understood how this business actually works because they were already inside it.

I had prepared.

I researched people. I read interviews. I studied panels. I made notes about what I was working on. I thought about what I wanted from representation. I figured out which scripts I should talk about and which ones I should stop talking about. I packed clothes that actually fit. I had business cards. I had a website I finally liked. I had spent the previous couple of months doing a fairly comprehensive rebuild of myself because I was tired of feeling like somebody waiting for his own life to start.

Then, with exquisite timing, my brain decided to shut the lights off.

Not completely. That would have almost been easier to recognize.

I could still function. I could shower. I could get dressed. I could go to the panels. I could sit in the room and take notes. I could have conversations. I could smile when somebody spoke to me and answer questions and probably look, from a few feet away, like a functioning person at a film festival.

Inside, everything had become heavy.

Talking to somebody took something out of me. Talking to five people took most of it. A crowded room could drain the rest before I had even decided who I wanted to meet. By the time the mixers started, when everybody else seemed to be getting a second wind, I often felt like I had been scraped clean.

So I retreated.

That is what I do when I get like that. I go inward. I want the hotel room. I want the lights low. I want nobody asking me anything. I want to sit somewhere quiet until I stop feeling as though I am performing the role of a normal person for an audience that has not realized there is a performance happening.

This is not a great instinct at a networking event.

There were mixers I skipped. Parties I skipped. Rooms I left before I probably should have. People I saw across a lobby or standing outside a panel who I knew I wanted to talk to, sometimes people I had specifically researched before I came, and I walked right past them.

I could always justify it.

They probably get hounded all weekend.

They are talking to somebody.

They are eating.

They look tired.

I do not want to be annoying.

I do not want to be that guy.

Those are all reasonable thoughts. That is what makes them so useful when you are afraid.

The truth underneath them was uglier.

I did not want to put my sad scent on anybody.

That is the phrase that kept coming to me.

There were people I wanted to know, people I could have potentially built relationships with, and some part of me thought the considerate thing to do was leave them alone because I could feel what state I was in. I imagined walking over there with whatever invisible cloud I was carrying and making them regret having met me.

So I protected them from me.

Very generous.

I also watched people who were good at this.

That might have been worse.

There are people who walk into these environments and seem completely natural. They are loose. Funny. Interested. They move from conversation to conversation without looking like they are calculating the exact moment they are supposed to leave. They say what they do without sounding like they are apologizing for it. They talk about their successes as facts instead of moral crimes.

I watched them and thought: I will never be that smooth.

I will never be that confident.

I will never know how to walk up to somebody I admire without feeling as though I am asking permission to exist in the same square footage.

And once you start thinking that way, the evidence becomes very easy to collect.

Every awkward conversation confirms it. Every name you forget. Every moment when somebody asks what you are working on and you hear yourself give the long, bad version. Every time you laugh too hard because you are nervous. Every person you do not approach. Every party you leave.

You start constructing a case.

Exhibit A: You are bad at this.

Exhibit B: Look at all these people who are better.

Exhibit C: They belong here.

Exhibit D: You are visiting.

The Raquelle David roundtable was probably the cleanest example.

I had prepared for it. I had thoughts about what I wanted to say. I had questions. I had read her writing. I knew this was one of the more useful opportunities I would have all week.

Then I sat down and immediately became terrified of taking too much time.

Nobody told me I was taking too much time.

Nobody gave me a look.

Nobody reached for a hook.

I simply became aware that there were other people waiting for their turn, and the good boy took over.

Be quick.

Do not be selfish.

Do not make this about you.

Do not be the guy who takes five minutes when he was given three.

So I compressed everything. I abandoned parts of the plan. I chased a thought I had heard shortly before the meeting instead of trusting what I had prepared. I made myself smaller at the exact moment I had flown across the country to take up a little space.

Then I walked away angry at myself for being small.

That is a very efficient system.

Peter Gamble used the phrase “whipped dog” during the festival, and it landed harder than I wanted it to.

Because I know the posture.

You see it in people who enter a room already apologizing. They do not need anybody else to diminish them because they have handled that part in advance. They are careful. Grateful. Easy. They make sure nobody could possibly mistake them for somebody who thinks too highly of himself.

I have spent years thinking that was humility.

Sometimes it is just fear with better manners.

That realization has been difficult because I have spent a lot of the last couple of months trying to get more honest about what is actually holding me back.

It would be convenient if the answer were simply access.

Access is an external problem. You can solve it with enough introductions, enough emails, enough festivals, enough persistence. It would be convenient if the answer were simply the quality of the work. Write better. Rewrite. Study. Improve.

Those are problems with instructions.

This one is worse.

What happens if you get the access and then get in your own way?

What happens if the work is good enough to open a door and you are too nervous to walk through it properly?

What happens if you finally get into the room and discover that you are staggeringly mediocre at the part where you have to make people want to continue knowing you?

That is a harder thing to sit with.

Because screenwriting has allowed me to hide from that problem for a long time.

Writing is solitary. You can be excellent at it while being terrible at almost everything required to build a career around it. You can spend months making a character more charming than you are. You can write somebody who controls a room while sitting alone in sweatpants eating something over a sink.

Eventually, though, somebody has to sell the screenplay.

Eventually somebody has to sell the writer.

And if you do not have representation, that somebody is you.

This is where I have to admit something I do not particularly enjoy admitting.

I am not a very good salesman.

Not yet.

I am not especially good at relationship-building either. I can write a good email. I can research somebody. I can prepare. I can follow up. I can be genuinely interested in another person. But the spontaneous human version is harder for me. The part where you walk into a room full of strangers and somehow emerge with three new friends and a coffee meeting next Tuesday still feels like witchcraft.

For years I probably comforted myself with the idea that this was fine because I am a writer.

It is not fine.

It does not mean I need to become somebody else. I do not need to become the loudest person at a party or develop some grotesque networking persona where every conversation is evaluated according to its possible market value.

But I do need to become better at being known.

That is different.

And it might be the most uncomfortable part of the Revamp so far because it cannot be solved with a haircut or a calendar or another set of push-ups. It requires repetition in the exact situations I am most likely to avoid when I am feeling bad.

Talk to the person.

Stay at the mixer a little longer.

Tell somebody what you have done without immediately qualifying it.

Let them decide whether they are interested.

Stop deciding for them.

That last one is probably the biggest.

I have been doing a tremendous amount of deciding for other people.

They are too busy.

They already know better writers.

They have heard this pitch a hundred times.

They would not be interested.

I would annoy them.

I would bring the mood down.

They have enough people asking them for things.

Maybe.

But none of those people elected me their spokesman.

The truth is that leaving somebody alone because you are certain they do not want to meet you is not respect. It is mind-reading.

Sometimes it is cowardice.

That is not a comfortable sentence.

Neither is this one:

I am probably my own worst enemy.

That phrase is usually used in a cute way. Somebody procrastinates or dates the wrong person or eats a whole pizza and says, “I’m my own worst enemy,” like they are describing an adorable personality quirk.

I mean it more literally.

There have been real obstacles in my career. I did not invent the difficulty of breaking into film. I did not invent gatekeeping. I did not invent the amount of money required to make a movie or the number of people standing between a script and a screen.

But there is also me.

Me not sending something because it is not perfect.

Me talking myself out of approaching somebody.

Me shrinking a pitch because I am afraid of taking up time.

Me retreating when my brain tells me everybody else is more impressive.

Me leaving the party.

Me convincing myself I am protecting other people from whatever darkness I am carrying.

Me getting into my head and then being furious that I am in my head.

At some point, if I want a different life, that guy has to stop getting the final vote.

I do not know yet if he will.

That is the part nobody puts in the self-improvement story.

There is usually a clean moment where the person realizes what they have been doing wrong, dramatic music starts, and then the realization itself somehow becomes the solution.

Real life is much more irritating.

You can understand the problem completely and still do it again tomorrow.

You can know that you should walk across the room and still stand there.

You can know that the depression is lying to you and still believe it.

You can know that you have earned three minutes and still give yourself ninety seconds.

Understanding is not transformation.

It is just the first piece of evidence that transformation might be possible.

That is where I am.

I am forty-something years into being this person. I have habits of thought that are older than some of the people giving me career advice. I am not going to wake up next Tuesday charismatic, fearless and capable of working a cocktail party like George Clooney.

I am probably always going to need to retreat sometimes.

I am probably always going to be better one-on-one than in a room full of fifty people shouting over music.

I am probably always going to have days when my brain is a hostile work environment.

The question is whether those facts get to make the decisions.

That is different.

Austin did not change my life.

It did something less pleasant.

It showed me the person who is going to have to.

Me.

Which, based on recent evidence, is not entirely reassuring.

But it is at least useful information.