The Work Always Wins

I had a realization watching the midterm election results come in. And it led to a completely different realization that I haven't been able to shake.

The first one was pretty simple.

As I watched people my age, or younger, get elected to Congress, governorships, and other positions of actual authority, it occurred to me:

Oh, shit. We're the adults now.

I don't know why that particular moment did it. Maybe because politicians have always seemed like older people to me. People with gray hair and boring suits who were supposed to know what the fuck they were doing. But suddenly I was watching people younger than me become responsible for entire states, and I had to confront the possibility that there wasn't another generation of grown-ups waiting somewhere to take over.

It's us. We're the ones in charge now.

And once I noticed that, I started seeing it everywhere.

All the stuff I grew up with, from Ghostbusters to Green Day, from Power Rangers to pop-punk, is getting old. The people I idolized as a kid are aging, retiring, getting sick, or dying. Steven Tyler is an old man now. The rock stars who once seemed indestructible are dealing with medical problems and the limitations of bodies that have been abused for decades. The people who shaped my childhood are slowly disappearing from the world.

And it's not just celebrities.

It's my friends.

People who were three years older than me when I was a freshman in high school, or three years younger when I was a senior. People I remember as teenagers, doing stupid teenager shit, are getting sick and dying.

There was a time when someone from my graduating class dying felt like the world had committed some unspeakable injustice. They were too young. It was cruel. It wasn't supposed to happen.

Now, increasingly, it just feels like a shame.

Somehow that's worse.

The people I still picture as kids too young to drive are thirty years old. They have families, businesses, mortgages, and job titles. Vice President. Director. Chief Whatever Officer. They're responsible for employees and children and making decisions that affect other people's lives.

When the fuck did all of this happen?

Our parents are in their seventies now, if they're still alive. Mine aren't. The dogs we got when we graduated college and started our independent lives are approaching their teens, too, and some of them are already gone.

Everywhere I look, something that felt permanent has an expiration date.

And I'm fucking scared.

The thing is, this isn't new. I've been aware of death for a very long time.

Ever since Jeremy died twenty years ago, there's been a man in a cloak standing in the corner of every room I've entered. He's holding a scythe. I try not to look at him. Most days I can pretend he isn't there, but he never leaves.

Sometimes he seems much closer than he used to.

For twenty-six years, it feels like my life has been one tragedy or emergency after another. There was always another phone call. Another hospital. Another funeral. Another person whose absence I would have to figure out how to live around.

And while all of that was happening, the world kept changing without me.

I was too busy trying not to drown to notice.

It took me longer to become aware of that change because I had found a pretty effective way of dealing with my fear.

I wrote.

I've been taking writing seriously since at least 2010. I read everything I could get my hands on about becoming a better writer. I watched films, studied screenplays, listened to interviews, and absorbed whatever philosophies about storytelling I could find. I wanted to understand why certain stories worked and why others didn't. More importantly, I wanted to understand why the stories that hurt me the most were the ones I loved the most.

I kept trying to turn the loss of my brother into something I could understand. Something I could put on a page, give a beginning and an ending, and maybe, somehow, make sense of.

And while I was doing that, Mom died.

Then I was building a life with the woman who is now my wife, and my last grandparent died. Then aunts. Uncles. Friends.

And eventually, Dad.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being something I did and became the thing I retreated into whenever the world became too much.

Instead of engaging with the people around me and spending whatever time I had left with them, I was at my computer. I was trying to deal with the fear of losing people by writing stories about what happens to us when we lose them.

How grief changes your identity. How it makes you withdraw. How it convinces you to give up on the things you once wanted.

I'm more than two dozen screenplays into my writing career, if that's what we're calling it, and I can see the DNA of loss in practically everything I've written.

Even the legacy sequel to Clueless that I wrote deals with the loss of Tai in some fashion. A romantic comedy I wrote is fundamentally about lost time and missed opportunities. My short films tend to involve people who are dying or considering ending their own lives. So many of my feature loglines might as well start with the words "After the loss of..."

I used to think that was just my voice as a writer.

Now I'm starting to wonder whether it was something else.

Because when an idea comes to me, I can't leave it alone.

I don't mean that I get excited and spend a few evenings working through it. I mean it takes over. I can't settle down until the thing is out of my head and on the page. And not just out. Finished. Polished. Made into something I can look at and feel satisfied with.

A lot of my first drafts have practically written themselves. I've had ideas become hundred-page screenplays over the course of a weekend. Sometimes the idea comes from a dream. Sometimes it's something semi-autobiographical. Sometimes I don't even know where it came from.

I open my laptop, boot up Final Draft or a Google Doc, and start typing. My fingers seem to do the work for whatever part of my brain needs the story to exist. And the rest of me gets to relax.

Until it's three in the morning.

Again.

And I have to be at work at eight.

Or I'm sitting at a family gathering, physically present but mentally somewhere else, working out the next scene. Or I'm at a conference surrounded by people I should be getting to know, but I'm thinking about the script I need to finish.

Because once the idea has me, everything else becomes an interruption.

A few months ago, I looked at what I'd produced and realized I'd written twenty-seven things in about five years. That's a ridiculous amount of work, particularly for someone with a full-time job and an actual life to maintain.

So I made myself stop writing for a while.

I thought maybe I needed to give the creative part of my brain a rest.

Instead, I filled the time with outreach.

Emails. Queries. Submissions. Research. Networking. Finding the next person who might be able to help me get something made.

And looking back, even that wasn't really about building relationships.

It was about getting an outcome.

Because somewhere along the way, I'd decided that everything I'd been through, everything my family had been through, every night I'd stayed awake writing, every dollar I'd spent trying to make a career out of this, had to be worth something.

It couldn't all have been for nothing.

I had to make it.

I had to turn all of that pain and all of those years into something that justified the cost.

And for a while, I felt pretty fucking good about my chances.

I liked my work. I believed in myself as a writer. I knew what I was capable of, and when I walked into a room, I felt like I could hold my own creatively with anybody in it.

I'd built an identity around that confidence.

Then I went to Austin.

And I was surrounded by people who were every bit as creative as I was. Some were much better at presenting themselves. Some were better at translating an idea into something tangible. Some had already figured out how to navigate an industry that I was still trying to understand.

I wasn't some uniquely tortured creative genius trying to get the world to recognize what I'd done.

I was a writer. One of a lot of writers.

And I started to notice something about the way I approached my work.

I met people who seemed to create because they loved creating. They had ideas they were excited about, stories they wanted to tell, and careers they were working toward.

I had those things, too. I still do.

But there was something underneath mine that I hadn't really acknowledged.

Fear.

Not the fear that I wasn't talented enough or that someone wouldn't like my screenplay.

The fear that I was running out of time.

That's why films like tick, tick... BOOM! and Hamnet hit me so hard. There's something about people trying to use their work to confront mortality that I recognize immediately. The desperate need to create something before time runs out. To make something permanent in a world where nothing seems to be.

I used to think of myself as a tortured artist because it sounded cool.

I didn't realize how close to the truth I was getting.

And I don't particularly like what that truth looks like.

I have no idea how much time I have left on this planet. None of us does.

I'm not even sure I'm afraid of death itself. I won't be around to experience being dead, so there's not much point in worrying about what that feels like.

What I'm afraid of is losing another person I love.

I'm afraid of getting another phone call. Another diagnosis. Another funeral.

I'm afraid of not having told someone how much they meant to me while I still had the chance.

I'm afraid of being a drain on my wife, who works incredibly hard to give us a life where I can pursue these ambitions and make mistakes without one bad decision destroying everything we've built.

I'm afraid I'll never get the opportunity to speak in my own voice publicly, at least beyond the handful of people who might read something like this.

And I have no delusions about that, either.

This stuff doesn't get many eyes on it.

I know there are things I could do to change that. I could promote myself more aggressively. I could spend more time selling my work and telling people why they should care about it. But something about that has always felt gross to me.

It's much easier to disappear into another idea.

To take whatever I'm feeling, turn it into a story, finish the story, and move on to the next one.

Because that's something I know how to do.

I know how to write.

I don't know how to make peace with the fact that the people I love are going to die. I don't know how to accept that I can't recover all the time I've already lost. I don't know how to stop measuring my life against some imagined version of myself who has finally achieved enough to make all the suffering worthwhile.

And here's the thing that I haven't really wanted to admit.

Writing has been the way I deal with the fear of loss.

But it has also contributed to the regret I carry about the losses I've already experienced.

Because I was working on the next thing instead of calling my dad.

Or visiting my mom.

Or picking up the phone when my brother called from Iraq.

Or going to see Grandma when she was feeble and in hospice.

I can't know what any one of those conversations would have been like. Maybe I wouldn't have said anything profound. Maybe we'd have talked about the weather, or the Cardinals, or whatever stupid thing had happened that week.

But we would have talked.

And now we can't.

Instead, I have the work.

All those screenplays. All those characters dealing with grief, desperately trying to recover something they've lost. All those stories about people discovering, too late, that they were so focused on one thing that they failed to see what was happening around them.

And I wonder how many of them I wrote instead of doing the very thing I was trying to tell my characters to do.

I don't know what to do with that realization.

I'm not going to pretend I can simply stop writing. I love it. I need it. There are still stories in my head that I genuinely believe deserve to exist, and I still want to make movies. I want people to see them. I want to make a living doing this.

But I also don't know how to keep doing it the way I have been.

Because there's always another idea. Another draft. Another opportunity. Another person to contact. Another thing that might finally be the thing that changes everything.

And the people I love are getting older.

So am I.

The man in the cloak is still standing in the corner.

And every time I have to choose between the work and the life happening around me, I know which one I've historically chosen.

The work.

The work always wins.

Because, in the end, writing is my drug.

It's the cause of, and solution to, all of my problems.