Week 1: Taking Inventory
Two weeks ago, I was standing in a stadium with tens of thousands of screaming women.
They were looking toward the stage for validation from their idols.
Their idols, in this particular case, were four Korean men.
I was there with my wife, surrounded by an ocean of people completely losing their minds over men who had been engineered, trained, dressed, styled, lit, choreographed, and polished to within an inch of human perfection.
Then I went to the bathroom.
On the way back to my seat, I caught myself in a mirror.
Not intentionally. I wasn't stopping to inspect myself or having some dramatic cinematic moment. I just glanced over as I was walking past.
And my immediate thought was:
Oh. I'm a hunk of bubbleshit.
It was remarkably clarifying.
There are moments when you catch yourself from an unfamiliar angle and briefly see what everyone else sees.
No flattering bathroom light.
No carefully selected photo.
No internal mythology.
Just some tall, middle-aged guy standing under stadium fluorescents looking tired, soft, shapeless, badly dressed and vaguely unfinished.
Then I walked back into an arena where tens of thousands of people were screaming at four men whose entire public existence communicated the opposite.
Obviously, this was not a reasonable comparison.
I am aware that I am not competing professionally against Korean pop stars.
Still.
Something lodged itself in my brain.
A week later, it was still there.
And somewhere between the stadium bathroom and home, the thought mutated from:
Jesus Christ, look at you.
into:
Okay. What exactly are you going to do about it?
That is how this started.
The Revamp
I have been calling it The Revamp, which sounds either like a self-improvement project or a canceled Bravo show.
The basic idea is simple.
For six months, I am going to stop treating the parts of my life I am dissatisfied with as fixed features of the landscape.
My body.
My health.
My clothes.
My habits.
My confidence.
My career.
My writing.
My social life.
The way I carry myself.
The way I present myself.
The way I react to things instead of acting on them.
All of it is on the table.
Not because I think a haircut, a gym membership or a better jacket is going to uncover some secret superior Christopher hiding underneath.
That guy does not exist.
There is only the person I am now and the person created by whatever I repeatedly do next.
So the mission is this:
For the next six months, I am going to deliberately rebuild the parts of my life that have become passive. I want to become stronger, healthier, sharper, more disciplined, more professionally aggressive, more socially present and more comfortable occupying my own life. I am going to treat those things as skills rather than personality traits — things that can be practiced, measured, improved and occasionally screwed up.
That last part matters.
I have spent a lot of my life believing certain qualities simply belonged to other kinds of people.
Confident people were confident.
Stylish people had style.
Successful people knew how to network.
Fit people liked working out.
Charismatic people knew what to say.
Meanwhile, I observed them like a visiting anthropologist.
Interesting species.
Curious habits.
Apparently unattainable.
Week 1 was largely about rejecting that premise.
First, We Measure the Crime Scene
The opening step was figuring out what I am actually working with.
This turns out to be considerably more uncomfortable than vaguely declaring that you intend to "get better."
There is the version of yourself that exists in your head.
There is the version you present to other people.
There is the version in photographs.
And then there is the version that emerges when somebody asks for your natural waist measurement.
I am 6'3", around 230 pounds, and currently built in a way I might generously describe as structurally unresolved.
There is plenty to work with.
There is also work to do.
So instead of making another vague promise to "get in shape," I started establishing baselines.
Weight.
Measurements.
Photos.
Clothing sizes.
Posture.
Hair.
Skin.
Fitness.
Energy.
Habits.
Health.
The central question became very simple:
What is true right now?
Not what do I wish were true.
Not what used to be true.
Not what might be true six months from now.
What is true today?
Reality, while occasionally rude, is at least actionable.
Then There Was the Closet
One of the stranger developments of this project is that I now have people independently analyzing how I dress.
This is not something I anticipated happening at 43.
I photographed what I own, examined the things I actually wear and started getting outside opinions from people whose fashion instincts are considerably better than mine.
The feedback has been surprisingly consistent.
I do not have terrible taste.
I have unfinished taste.
There are good jackets. Good denim. Good basics. Interesting pieces.
There is very little system.
For years I have dressed in ways that conceal rather than define.
Oversized shirts.
Oversized jackets.
Oversized everything.
Some of that comes from being tall. Some comes from weight. Some comes from the fact that tighter clothing has a habit of advertising parts of the body I would prefer not to place on a billboard.
But some of it is simpler.
Camouflage is comfortable.
A stylist named Micah pointed toward heavyweight T-shirts, properly fitted suits, tailoring what I already own and dramatically improving the footwear situation.
Another stylist noticed that nearly every man whose outfits I use for inspiration wears clothing that fits him deliberately.
Mine frequently looks like I am temporarily holding another man's clothes while he goes to the bathroom.
This appears fixable.
The direction is becoming clearer.
Dark denim.
Canvas.
Good T-shirts.
Boots.
Better trousers.
Proper tailoring.
Simple clothes worn intentionally.
A little punk.
A little professional.
Nothing that looks like I spent forty minutes carefully arranging myself to appear as though I do not care.
The goal is not to dress younger.
It is to stop dressing invisibly.
The Face Department Has Also Convened
Hair has become a subject.
Facial hair has become a subject.
Glasses have become a subject.
Skin has become a subject.
Apparently my entire head is now under committee review.
The emerging idea is not dramatic transformation so much as definition.
Better haircut.
A little more texture.
Let the gray exist rather than treating it like evidence at a crime scene.
Some stubble or a short beard.
Better skin care.
Better glasses.
Maybe jewelry.
Maybe an earring.
Things I once would have dismissed as cosmetic now look slightly different to me.
Presentation is communication.
Before someone knows whether I am funny, interesting, competent, talented, kind, difficult, strange or worth knowing, they see me.
That does not mean appearance is everything.
It means pretending appearance is nothing is equally ridiculous.
So I am learning another language.
The Career Experiment Got Out of Hand Quickly
The most unexpected part of Week 1 has been professional.
For years I did the thing writers are very good at doing:
writing.
Which sounds perfectly logical until you consider that writing screenplay after screenplay without aggressively telling people they exist is roughly equivalent to manufacturing cars and storing them in a locked warehouse.
So I started sending emails.
Managers.
Producers.
Filmmakers.
People connected to projects I admire.
Old professional contacts.
New professional contacts.
People I vaguely knew.
People I did not know at all.
Roughly sixty outreach emails went out during the first week.
That number sounds absurd when I write it down.
What is more absurd is that people answered.
There have already been multiple requests to read my work.
A producer asked for material and connected me with his producing partner.
A filmmaker responded strongly to one of my scripts and asked to read it.
A former graduate-school professor came back into my orbit.
A publicist gave me useful, specific advice about when publicity becomes valuable and when it is mostly noise.
Other writers, filmmakers, producers, assistants and industry people have started appearing at the edges of the network.
This is encouraging.
It is also unnerving.
Rejection is actually very clean.
You ask.
Someone says no.
Door closed.
Possibility is messier.
When multiple people respond at once, suddenly there are choices.
Who is serious?
Who is useful?
Who actually understands the business?
Who likes the work?
Who likes the idea of being adjacent to something?
Who can help?
Who can waste six months?
Who can actively hurt you?
And how do you tell the difference before finding out the expensive way?
That is becoming one of the unexpected questions of this experiment.
Not just:
How do I create opportunities?
But:
How do I recognize good ones?
For the moment, I am keeping as many balls in the air as reasonably possible.
There will be time later to decide which ones are worth catching.
The Health Portion Was Less Cinematic
While all of this was happening, my sinuses staged an uprising.
I had gotten sick while traveling between Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles and had been managing the congestion with nasal spray.
Too much nasal spray, as it turns out.
Which introduced me to the phenomenon of rebound congestion.
There is something useful about trying to rebuild your life while walking around with a pocket full of tissues.
It keeps the grandiosity under control.
You can spend the morning thinking about agency, ambition, physical presence and professional momentum.
Then your nose runs for forty-five consecutive minutes.
Nature remains undefeated.
But this also highlighted something I have been bad about for years.
I tend to regard health as something I will deal with once it becomes sufficiently annoying.
The Revamp requires the opposite.
Sleep before exhaustion.
Fitness before weakness.
Nutrition before weight becomes a bigger problem.
Medical conversations before symptoms become permanent fixtures.
Prevention instead of repair.
The physical side of this project cannot simply be about looking better.
I want more energy.
Better posture.
More strength.
Better sleep.
More mobility.
More comfort inside my own body.
Looking better in clothes is a welcome side effect.
Being able to trust the machine matters more.
The Weirdest Change Is That I'm Asking for Help
This may be the thing I noticed most this week.
I am asking people questions.
A lot of them.
People who understand fashion.
People who understand the film business.
People whose careers I respect.
People I have not spoken to in years.
People I barely know.
Historically, I have been much better at researching privately than risking looking uninformed publicly.
That creates an interesting trap.
You can become incredibly knowledgeable about something while remaining completely inexperienced at doing it.
I know a fair amount about screenwriting.
That is different from building a screenwriting career.
I know what good clothes look like.
That is different from dressing well.
I know exercise is important.
That is different from being strong.
I know confidence is useful.
That is different from behaving confidently.
There is a point where another hour of thinking stops being preparation and becomes hiding.
I suspect I crossed that point years ago.
So What Actually Happened in Week 1?
If you photographed me last Monday and photographed me today, the before-and-after reveal would be profoundly disappointing.
I look mostly the same.
There is no montage.
No dramatic body transformation.
No career announcement.
No magazine makeover.
But underneath that, quite a bit changed.
I measured things I had avoided measuring.
I photographed things I had avoided examining.
I let strangers critique my appearance.
I started developing an actual wardrobe instead of simply owning clothing.
I reached out to people professionally instead of waiting to be noticed.
I reopened old relationships.
I created new ones.
I began treating my health like a system rather than a sequence of emergencies.
I built structure around goals that previously existed mostly as intentions.
Most importantly, I started creating evidence.
Evidence that I can send the email.
Evidence that people will respond.
Evidence that people want to read my work.
Evidence that asking for advice does not diminish me.
Evidence that my appearance is changeable.
Evidence that my body is changeable.
Evidence that my career is not entirely controlled by unseen gatekeepers.
Evidence that the distance between where I am and where I want to be is probably not one enormous leap.
It is hundreds of boring, ordinary decisions.
Send this.
Wear that.
Lift this.
Eat that.
Call him.
Ask her.
Throw this away.
Keep that.
Go to bed.
Get up.
Repeat.
Maybe that is what this whole experiment is really about.
For a long time, I have accumulated evidence for the argument that:
This is just how things are.
My career is like this.
My body is like this.
My marriage is like this.
My social life is like this.
My confidence is like this.
My clothes are like this.
My habits are like this.
My life is like this.
Week 1 was the beginning of a counterargument.
Not that everything will change.
Not that I will become some flawless, optimized version of myself.
Not that six months can erase forty-three years of history.
Just this:
Things that are neglected tend to deteriorate. Things that receive sustained attention tend to change.
That seems obvious.
It also happens to be something I have not consistently lived as though I believed.
Two weeks ago, I accidentally caught myself in a mirror at a concert and thought:
I'm a hunk of bubbleshit.
A week later, I started doing something about it.
That seems like a reasonable place to begin.