Scared Selfless by Michelle Stevens PhD

Author:Michelle Stevens, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-02T11:59:41+00:00

PART III

HEALING

—

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest

Daze of My Life

Please, God,” I prayed. “Please. Please, I’m desperate. When I get home, you have to make the phone ring. You have to make them call today. Please, God, you owe me this.”

I was walking back from a grocery store on Ventura Boulevard, having just spent my last five bucks on ramen noodles and frozen burritos. When the food in my grocery bag ran out, I would starve to death. After everything that had happened to me, I didn’t have much faith left in God. But He was my only option now. Getting my life back on track was going to take a miracle.

The miracle I sought was a job, which doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should require divine intervention. But a year into California dreamin’, things felt more like a nightmare. Steve and I were living in a craptastic one-bedroom apartment in the Valley that shared a wall with the 101 freeway. The few pieces of furniture we owned were all procured via Dumpster. I knew absolutely no one, which was probably for the best, as a gazillion streets with crazy names made it impossible to find anyone or anything anyway. I suppose transitioning to postcollege life in a new city is challenging for everyone. But being penniless, estranged from family, and preprogrammed with endless fear triggers really turned up the heat for me.

So did having undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder. Try as it might, my psyche just couldn’t get a handle on what identity was going to help me triumph in LA. The Preppy was too traditional and uptight to hang with laid-back Angelenos, and the Student had lost her one and only purpose in life. The Writer should’ve been able to fit in; lots of Hollywood writers are former theater-loving New Yorkers who eventually grow up and move west in search of grown-up wages. My alternate personalities, though, are not real people. They are caricatures drawn from external images. Like cartoon people, they never seem to age, change, or grow. They are trapped in time. (My wife, in fact, calls me Homer Simpson because I continuously make the same stupid decisions!) As a result, the Writer, who was originally conceived as a New York playwright, had a hard time envisioning herself in La La Land.

Despite all this, things in LA started out well. Within a few days of arriving, I scored a job interview with the head writers of the NBC soap Days of Our Lives. The meeting went well, and I was asked to intern in the writers’ offices, which is the common launch pad for budding TV scribes. It was a dream opportunity, the kind every young writer wants after college. Things were going great, and within weeks, I was asked to write my first script. By all objective measures, I was on the fast track to a lucrative career as a Hollywood writer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.