Week 2: I Give a Shit

Last week started with me catching myself in a stadium mirror and realizing:

Oh. I’m a hunk of bubbleshit.

It was funny because it was true.

The more useful realization came this week.

I give a shit.

A lot, actually.

I care about how I look, whether I’m attractive, whether I’m strong, whether my clothes look good, whether I seem interesting when I walk into a room. I care about whether people read my scripts, whether those scripts are any good, whether this becomes an actual career instead of a collection of files on a hard drive. I care about being respected, being wanted, making money, having some fucking juice in my life.

There. Considerably less dignified than saying I’m on a wellness journey.

There is a particular kind of bullshit that creeps into conversations about self-improvement once you reach adulthood. Everything has to be translated into respectable language.

You don’t want to look hot; you want to “feel comfortable in your body.” You don’t want attention; you want to “express yourself authentically.” You don’t want status; you want to “live in alignment with your values.” And God forbid you admit that you’d like to walk into a room and have people notice.

That would be vain.

This week I developed a somewhat more generous opinion of vanity.

Controlled Vanity

I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life pretending not to care about things I very obviously care about.

That isn’t humility. It’s protection.

If you don’t try to dress particularly well, nobody can accuse you of trying too hard. If you never get seriously fit, you never have to discover what your physical ceiling actually is. If you keep yourself a little goofy, a little self-deprecating, a little unserious, nobody can catch you taking yourself too seriously.

The same mechanism works professionally. If you never really push, you always retain the explanation that the thing didn’t happen because nobody gave you a chance.

There is always an escape hatch.

I am trying to close some of them.

This week the wardrobe got cut down considerably. Graphic T-shirts went, duplicates went, jackets went, hats went, and a lot of things that had been hanging around for no better reason than “I bought this once” lost their squatter’s rights.

What survived started revealing a pattern: Carhartt, denim, good black, good white, texture, workwear, tailoring, boots, old music shit, some jewelry, interesting glasses. Nothing especially loud, but also nothing designed to make me disappear.

At one point I wrote down the emerging style as:

Adult structure. Punk vandalism. Controlled vanity. Slight menace. Actual comfort.

That still feels right.

Especially controlled vanity.

I don’t think the answer is becoming obsessed with how I look. I think the answer is acknowledging that I have a body, a face and clothes, and other human beings possess eyeballs.

I bought purple-lensed sunglasses this week. I bought silver jewelry.

My Therapist Asked an Annoying Question

My therapist asked what the actual goals of this whole thing are.

Which is exactly the kind of question therapists ask because apparently “be less bubbleshit” is insufficiently clinical.

So I had to articulate it.

The obvious stuff is there: fitness, health, image, style, confidence, career, social presence, discipline.

But one word stuck with me.

Voice.

Not literal voice.

The way I talk about myself and the work.

The instinct to diminish whatever I’ve done before anyone else gets a chance to judge it. The tendency to make the joke first, undercut the achievement, soften the ambition, apologize for taking up too much conversational space.

That shit has to go.

I’ve written a lot. Some of it has been recognized. People are reading it now. Some of them like it enough to ask for more.

None of that means I need to strut around like I’m the second coming of Paddy Chayefsky.

But there has to be some ground between arrogance and self-erasure.

Apparently I am going to have to learn how to stand there.

And Then the Career Thing Got Realer

Last week I wrote about finally getting serious about outreach.

This week I discovered I had actually underestimated how much I had done.

When the larger campaign got properly audited, the number came out to more than 300 legitimate industry contacts.

Not 300 identical emails fired into the void. Producers, managers, filmmakers, companies, people whose work intersected with mine, people who might plausibly have a reason to read something.

And some of them are.

There are scripts out, conversations ongoing, producers asking for full screenplays, people offering introductions, people who cannot do anything for me right now but have said, in one form or another, stay in touch.

Nothing has sold. Nobody has signed me. Netflix has not backed a dump truck of money into my driveway.

That distinction matters because self-improvement culture has a pathological need to turn every piece of motion into a victory lap.

I sent a shitload of emails. Some people answered. Some people like the work. A few doors are open a crack.

That is where things stand.

That is also enough.

The more interesting discovery has been how much of the supposedly impossible wall around the film business had become psychological architecture.

There are real walls. There are gatekeepers, nepotism, money, access and people with credits I do not have. The business can be brutal, arbitrary and deeply stupid.

All true.

But none of it justified me standing fifty feet away from the wall for years saying, “That looks difficult to climb.”

At some point you have to go touch the fucking wall.

I Have Too Much Work to Hide Behind “Aspiring”

Something else changed this week.

I started looking at the pile of work differently.

I’ve written more than twenty screenplays. Some are better than others. A few probably deserve a quiet burial. Some are genuinely good.

One of them, Keep Driving, had already been recognized at a film festival.

This week I stopped treating that recognition like a nice little artifact from the past and went back into the material.

I reworked it, made the story cleaner, made the production more practical and started thinking about what it would take to turn the thing into an actual movie.

Locations. Schedule. Cast requirements. Safety. Budget. Production logistics.

The unsexy machinery.

That distinction matters because there is a very safe version of being a writer where the work never has to survive contact with reality.

You write it. You finish it. Maybe you get a laurel. Then you write another one.

Eventually you can become the owner of an impressive stack of things that do not exist outside Final Draft.

I don’t want that anymore.

I want movies.

That is harder, riskier and more expensive.

Fine.

Even the Website Started Pissing Me Off

Once you start looking at everything through the same lens, the inconsistencies get harder to ignore.

I was changing how I dressed, changing how I talked about the work, putting the work in front of more people, then I looked at the website representing me professionally and thought:

Why doesn’t this feel like me?

Not generic screenwriter. Not aspiring creative professional template number seven.

Me.

The outsider thing. The punk thing. The grown-up thing. The photography, the films, the essays, the work that exists now and the work still sitting on the desk.

If I’m asking somebody else to take the work seriously, the ecosystem around it should at least suggest that I do.

This is starting to happen everywhere.

Change one thing and the neglected thing next to it starts to look worse.

Better clothes make bad posture more obvious. More career activity exposes weak professional presentation. Talking confidently about the work creates pressure for the work to deserve the confidence. Trying to get stronger makes terrible sleep harder to rationalize.

Taking yourself seriously turns out to be deeply inconvenient.

Everything starts demanding receipts.

This Is Not About Self-Love

Maybe this is the part that gets me in trouble.

I don’t think I needed to learn to love everything exactly as it was.

I think dissatisfaction can be useful.

The man I saw in that stadium mirror did not need to stand there repeating affirmations about how perfect he already was.

He wasn’t perfect.

He looked like shit.

More importantly, there were parts of his life that felt like shit, and he knew it.

That does not make him worthless.

Those are two entirely different statements.

Somewhere along the way, kindness toward ourselves got confused with an obligation to approve of everything. I don’t buy that.

I can believe I have value and still look at a weak habit, a neglected body, an underdeveloped career, cowardly behavior or some part of my life I have allowed to rot and say:

Fix it.

That doesn’t feel like hatred.

It feels more respectful than watching something deteriorate while insisting everything is fine.

Wanting More

That may be the actual Week 2 revelation.

I want more out of my life, and I am tired of automatically putting that desire on trial.

I want more strength, better health, sharper clothes, better work, real money, better rooms, deeper friendships, a career with momentum and the kind of self-possession that does not evaporate the second somebody more accomplished walks in.

I want to become very fucking good at something difficult.

I want experiences that feel bigger than the ones I have had.

I want to find out how much life is actually available to me before I’m done.

Some of that is ego.

Fine.

Ego built half the cathedrals.

The issue is not wanting. The issue is what you are willing to become, sacrifice or do to other people in order to get what you want.

I don’t want to become cruel, fake or hollow. I don’t want to become some middle-aged masculinity influencer screaming about alphas from the driver’s seat of a rented Lamborghini. I don’t want ambition to consume every relationship I have, or optimization to replace the experience of actually being alive.

But I also refuse to pretend that wanting nothing is somehow nobler.

Fuck that.

I want things.

Now I have to become somebody capable of earning some of them.

Two Weeks

Two weeks ago I walked out of a stadium bathroom, caught myself in a mirror and had the deeply spiritual realization that I looked like a hunk of bubbleshit.

Week 1 was the realization that something had to change.

Week 2 was realizing I did not need to be embarrassed by how much I wanted it to.

The clothes are changing. The work is moving. People are reading. The career machinery is running. The physical work is starting. The public version of me is beginning to look a little more intentional.

But underneath all of that, something more important is happening.

I am becoming less embarrassed by wanting my own life.

That feels dangerous.

Good.