Feitumblr

Hi there.

I had a month off in September between starting a coding bootcamp, quitting a dog-walking job and booking 6 days on an indie film as an actor. 

I was also dealing with a difficult break-up (the only reason I ever get on Tumblr) and wanted to put my energy somewhere. 

I had a foldable scooter from my days as a dog-walker and it just so happen that my favorite pizza place, DiFara’s, was briefly closed due to tax issues, igniting a mini-fight about its place in the pizza pantheon of New York City.

So I did what I did when I’m depressed, have too much time and almost no money.

I went deep back into anime and video games.

Well, yes--

But, more to the point, I tried a bunch of good pizzas. 

I never found a place I liked better than DiFara a place where I feel like pizza approaches art, but I found some great places.

Here are some of my favorite findings.

***

NEW PARK PIZZA

A 17-minute walk from the JFK A-train stop means your pizza better be good. New Park delivers. Cheap, ordinary and delicious. Ricotta on the white has a great garlic salt flavor. Busy on a weekday lunch-time in a neighborhood where there’s not a ton of work. Cops strolling in. Seating at capacity. This place is real NY, not even needing the tourist economy to succeed.

LA CASA BELLA

The most exciting find of my picks, LCB is over in Gravesend/Dyker/Coney Island. 12 minutes off the D to 25th, the woman behind the counter when I asked why this was so good said the owner “can cook”, a term I remembered from my Italian-American friends for it’s blunt humor and truth. The pearl here is the Vodka slice, coated in fresh muzz and a little parsley. It’s a thing of beauty, along with the crust, the perfect level of “crack” on the outside and then soft chewy bread once biting in. I thought this slice was close to DiFara in terms of sheer quality, quite the compliment.

IGNAZIO’S PIZZA

I know it’s a little scandalous to put a New Haven, CT-based pizzeria on the list, but this place was the real deal. Right on the tip of Old Fulton, competing with the family-feuding Grimaldi’s/Julianna’s nearby, Ignazio’s not only offers slices whereas the others don’t, but it delivers complex levels of cheese sauce and oregano with a perfect crust in an accessible location. I’d dismissed this place as tourist garbage without trying it before, but it’s true: Ignazio has the goods.

SAL AND CARMINE’S

My favorite slice in Manhattan, Sal and Carmine’s is a pizzeria outside time. The cheese slice is thin, imperfectly cheesy and slightly sweet with its sauce in a way that reminds of me a slightly superior Joe’s of Bleecker. The Eggplant was crispy and thin, covered in an even better Marinara than the cheese, while the White was dense and fluffy. The Margherita can be skipped but it was a pleasure to find somewhere I’d never been, an alternate reality of pizza.

L’INDUSTRIE

Finally, my favorite new slice of 2019 is this. I went to Lucali, a famous pizzeria that lived up to the hype of its celebrity endorsements but cost around 40 bucks for a pie and took 2 hours of waiting to receive. I thought this is good but not really feasible. So I was astonished when at a small new Williamsburg pizzeria, I found a slice that was almost the same if not better than Lucali in the same style. Your slice is beautiful, coated in basil cut for your slice, cheese grated for it, oil poured. The cost is low, the location hip but strangely empty. L’Industrie is something to behold, a slice both democratic and essentially unadorned. A must-try for fellow fanatics.

***

That’s it. Have a happy new year. 

I went to go see ALL MY SONS on broadway. I was scared to. It turned out I knew someone who was understudying the play too, a fantastic opportunity for her, her broadway debut.

But that’s not why I went.

I mean, I went to see the play, it was reputedly good. The production, I mean. A group of friends and I got together to do a reading of it. We sometimes do that for new plays. It went well. I guess what I’m saying is that I knew the play and I knew it recently.

I went to see the star.

Almost 10 years ago, I was pseudo-famous on a reality show. I don’t regret that and I’m fact I liked how it turned out. But it wasn’t my plan and I didn’t feel like it was something I wanted to do with my life.

About 5 years ago, I got cast as a recurring character on a TV show. In fact I didn’t even get cast as a recurring character. I got cast on a TV show and brought back for another episode. I earned my place! I showed everyone, from an old improv teacher who wouldn’t speak to me at an early audition to the kid who lit my hair on fire while messing around when I was 15. I felt like I was worth something.

My part was small but I was told the writers loved me. I was told I was getting a storyline in the next season of the show. I had a costume fitting the next day and then it was cancelled, no reason. The trades said that the show had fired its writers. I never got an official explanation. I never was even told I wasn’t on the show anymore.

It drove me crazy for a year or so. I did stupid things, acted stupid ways. I remember talking to my therapist, I had panic attacks when I thought it was going to happen. All my life I had thought I was a loser. I had panic attacks because I didn’t know what it would be like to “win” on this scale. Who was I? Who would I be?

The star of All My Sons played my father on the show. I was told part of the reason I was cast is because I look like I could be his son. He treated me more kindly than anyone on set, doing improv that didn’t make the cut with me with no warning, he introduced me to other famous actors I was terrified to talk to.

He’s both an amazing playwright and an amazing actor. I was a screenwriter, I was an actor. As a creative professional (and a somewhat recovering codependent), I’m always looking for that person who has the answer. Who could unlock my life for me, tell me the right thing to do?

Years passed. I got some other parts, some commercials, a couple lines. I’m not asking for anyone to pity me. A million actors would trade places with me, more, not counting the people who don’t even have clean water to drink. But I never got anything like that opportunity again.

Eventually, I reached a lull where I didn’t get a commercial. I went from volunteering in shelters to walking dogs for money. I burned out of other service jobs. Recently I couldn’t even seal the deal at a job at Trader Joe’s working weekends maybe like that guy from the Cosby Show.

That experience on the show five years earlier had meant so much to me, the come up and the come down. It made me feel like I had a future as an actor, it made me feel like no one did except by chance or nepotism or money or fuck all.

I figured I’d get rush tickets to All My Sons. I was terrified to get rush tickets. I’d ask if I could go backstage after the show. It would kill me if they didn’t let me. It would confirm that I was no one so fast, that nothing I did ever mattered. That I was just another never-was actor. That my parents, that the world was right. That I was fooling myself. I was confused anyway. Why couldn’t I be wrong about my life?

The show was great. I went with my grandmother. She’s always very self assured. We were allowed backstage. I waited along side another group to go see the star: TJ and Dave. I recognized them and greeted them. I had met them briefly years ago. I didn’t expect them to remember me, I introduced my grandmother to them as “two or the greatest improvisers of all time”. I talked to Dave and congratulated him on Veep. I told him about the people we knew in common.

Funny, when I saw him years ago, probably something like 6-7 years ago, I felt a similar anxiety to when I went backstage to see the star. But now we were just backstage to see a guy who would probably win a second tony in less than a week. I could be a person to him.

I don’t know if that star recognized me. I anticipated this. He meets a lot of people. It’s an exhausting show. He does two shows on Ssturday. How could I tell him I want his email? I want to get coffee? I want him to fix my life. Did I annoy him on set with the improv? Did everyone hate me? How does one be a creative success in this world where I worry about whether a check will clear or if I can buy groceries?

He just said hi an I said hi and told him he crushed it. I asked how the show was going. My grandmother was much more articulate. Something about how powerful his performance was and brilliant. She likes that word, brilliant. She likes rolling the “ill” part of it.

“Did he even know who I was?” I asked my grandmother as I walked her to the M42. At least those were coming regularly. I didn’t even have the temerity to ask for anything. He had another show to do, he had TJ and Dave there who probably knew him forever from Chicago. And who am i?

TJ and Dave thanked me for the kind words. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who’ve said them.” I said with a small smile.

And then I got on the train. No answers to my life.

Who am I? Am I wasting my life? Will I ever get another opportunity like that? What’s the secret, not the dumb thing like positive thinking, but like, the secret secret?

My grandma asked me about my improv group. “They’re all on tv shows or struggling like me” I replied.

Anyway, go see the show. Me, I’m about to go back to the sick dog I’m sitting for and go to Trader Joe’s.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

I’ve been in film school, I’ve been a writer of sorts (criticism, personal nonfiction, screenplays), I’ve been an actor, but I’ve never seen the sheer volume of talent that I’ve seen while I was in the comedy community.

Or maybe I should say “around comedians”. A friend of mine once told me “the comedy community” was a mental construction, a way of shared internal organizing that didn’t equate to shared values or an agreed structure, of those sorts of things even matter.

I should also note, I’m definitely someone who struggles with mental illness and codependency. I’ve come to recognize that part of the nature of my illness is that it’s easy for me to “see” others, to “take their inventory” to use program-speak, to recognize ways they might be holding themselves back and what their potential might be. This feeling, potent, sometimes backed up by their once-future accomplishments, gives me a sense of self-righteousness and a feeling of purpose, like I was doing something “right”.

Ironically or not, I find it incredibly difficult to take action to change my own life or confront my own shortcomings, though I’d like to think at least I’ve gotten better at not projecting them on to others.

I’ve thought about being a manager, an agent or a producer many times. After all, this compulsive, instructive impulse in me feels gratified bossing people around, being in charge, feeling like I’m creating order or making things right in the world for people other than “poor me” (a self-pitying fallacy). I think I’d be quite a good business entertainment person and I’ve been good at it in the past, organizing programs and running a theater however briefly.

But another part of me resists. Firstly, there’s this idea that maybe I’ve got something. I feel I’m a pretty good actor. I struggle in class but I do well. I work hard. I feel confident in my creative choices and feel confident helping others prepare for their auditions in a way that feels less icky or compulsory than telling them what to do with their whole lives. The business of acting is a difficult one, but there’s some sense in me that is related to my logic, my save haven from the hazy insecurity of my self-esteem, that in theory I could “make it”.

Maybe the second reason why I don’t is just that I fear what’s on the other end of indulging and using my compulsory behavior no matter what good it does.

I sense this might be confusing to a reader. Maybe an (oversimplifying) analogy would help?

If someone with OCD becomes a person who is a meticulous cleaner or design expert, that may use their compulsion in a constructive way, but does it push them past or out of it?

If a person with a misanthropic outlook or a human resentment becomes an actuary or other job that isolated them from people and human interaction, does that truly improve the quality of their life?

To take it a bridge too far, if a self-aggrandizing narcissist with a desire to prove himself and a lack of healthy childhood affection becomes a paternalistic, narcissistic leader, does that truly help him?

I guess a deeper question about what is a good life, what makes one happy, what is happiness could be asked. These are things I’ve been contemplating as well and haven’t necessarily found satisfying answers to.

Any way, I think I want to keep being an actor for as long as I can, despite my parents’ skepticism and my own pitiful financial state. What’s to say being some sort of business of entertainment person would be significantly easier or similarly fulfilling anyway?

I second guess myself there. What part of that is my fear of change? It’s certainly there.

No need to make any decisions now though, my better angels tell me (an expression, I’m hardly religious).

This was all probably started off by my acting teacher, this coming back to writing anyway.

I was doing a scene from Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield and his mother. A bit of passive aggression, confrontation, individuation, stuff certainly I could relate to. I was having more trouble in the scene than I had anticipated.

My acting class is quite important to me: to practice and stay sharp as an actor, to feel connected to other people struggling, failing and succeeding in their acting stuff and of course, for some form of validation and competition.

I wanted, I’ve always wanted to be “good”. To be “good enough”. To live my life and my craft so that struggle could be avoided as much as possible.

I sort of throw myself down subway stairs walking sideways to take advantage of momentum without tripping. I give myself time limits for going out to karaoke so I’m not too hungover the next day. I apologize to friends or peers if I sense I might have offended them.

It’s not that I want conflict and struggle eradicated, that would make life boring. I just want it to be contained in a way that I can understand.

I was praised today for being good at walking two chunky corgis. The “chonks” as I call them are not heroic lassie dogs. They stop frequently, till around on the ground and get jealous when only one of them gets petted. They won’t go upstairs unless the doorman gives them a treat, throwing themselves on the floor on their bellies if I try.

But they’re predictable. They’re reliable in their foibles and thus, easy to love.

I want that sort of controlled chaos, reliable chaos. Sounds dumb, doesn’t it.

But as much as I want to struggle in acting class to earn a payoff, to feel like I’m growing, I also want to succeed.

I had a callback for a commercial today where I couldn’t remember the lyrics to a song I was supposed to sing and the melody. Debt seems to keep crawling up on me not for extravagance but simply to fulfill and maintain my lifestyle. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to keep my therapist and my job at the same time. It’s terrifying and frustrating and I have a headache just writing this.

So the acting class, I was doing Tom Wingfield and he’s a writer. And his mother is interrupting his writing. My teacher pointed out in her critique of my scene the ecstatic creation of writing something one must write, drawing something someone must draw. The act of inspired creation and its ability to transport us out of despair. The scene from Glass Menagerie represented a disruption to that and that was a missing element.

“You must be writing something you need to be writing so we can see the despair of not being able to, the disruption of your escape.”

Writing something I need to write. I used to be a writer. A pretty bad writer of sketch comedy (my most popular sketch: a wizard of oz type farce called “blow job city”), a poet when I was in elementary school and no one told me how lame and hard doing that was. I was an alright writer of essays in my class with NYU President John Sexton back in the day (I felt special so I wanted to impress them), though if I recall correctly they thought I was too quick to make literary assumptions about the connectivity and meaning of an authors intent.

I enjoyed blogging till I felt it played out in a psycho-social meltdown. Is it a good sign I’m writing again? Or not?

Anyway this felt like what I needed to write. Maybe getting to this will get me to that moment in that scene. I don’t know. I still distrust this impulse.

It’s been a long time but I felt like writing something. I saw someone I admired on social media writing posts weekly in a long form medium rather than just incessant small posts about the days foibles and I thought I’d try it out.

So here goes:

I’m in a relationship I’m really happy about. She’s great and gorgeous and silly and spunky. For some reason, the relationship is healthy, probably because we both have put in a lot of work on ourselves and on it. Not that it’s not a struggle, but I’ve generally been making myself and my surroundings cleaner and less smelly as a result (byproduct?) of being with her. So that’s great.

I’m in therapy. I’ve been doing group once a week since my job schedule keeps changing prohibiting me from doing my individual therapy on a consistent basis. I’ve been off my meds (prozac, wellbutrin) as an experiment and while I feel more ups and downs, so far its been manageable. I know it’s a little gauche and public to mention meds but I feel they should be destigmatized.

I’ve been working new jobs. Even though I feel like I’m a pretty decent actor, I’ve had pretty bad years the last couple years for booking work. When I was not in the actors’ union, I booked a lot of commercials then when I joined, I booked about one big one a year or so for two years and then 2017 I booked two web series and then 2018 I booked a 500 dollar commercial and then nothing. It’s hit my self esteem pretty hard. I contemplate some form of quitting but there’s honestly nothing much I can see myself doing other than dog walking and since my entrepreneurial sense doesn’t extend to that, I’m not sure I see a future there.

I’ve been trying to stay sharp. I’m doing an improv show at the Magnet on Monday. I’m in my acting class with my teacher Mercedes for at least the next two months, so even when I face-plant (like when my girlfriend came recently), at least I’m working that muscle, identifying my weaknesses and trying to stay a good actor, if not a working one.

I wonder if there’s something more to life, something I’m missing. I’m 31. I’ve been to film school, comedy school, acting school.  When do I become the person I’m supposed to be? Is there such a thing? I keep wondering if there’s some sort of fact or secret or underlying truth I’m missing out on, something other people know.

I asked my girlfriend and my roommate the other day about secret, illegal things that people don’t talk about but that are sort of accepted in society. The topic of rub and tug massage parlors came up, I think someone mentioned smoking in bars in NYC after a certain hour. I mentioned how bodegas sell loose cigarettes (loosies).

I wonder about that a lot, if there’s some alternate world people are living in inside our world, some place that is happier, more fulfilling than this one. If life has some secret clue. 

Right now at 31, I feel almost as lost as I did at 21 though significantly less crazy and somewhat more mature.

A dog named Bones is staying at my apartment. He’s a big golden doodle. We all call him “Scones”, a name I came up with and that his owners seem to silently disapprove of but tolerate. My roommates enjoy him too. When he gets near me I grab him by his belly and give him kisses. When he’s on the floor, I try to tickle him gently with my foot. The goal is to try to get him to the place where he’s silently spazzing on the floor in happy delight, mouth open with a smile, waving his paws in the air.

I delayed even writing this.

I was supposed to write this, well not this, just, well, SOMETHING, two days ago but I couldn’t even do that. Maybe my therapist is right that I just don’t want to write.

But that would be so bad for my career! How could I make it long term as an actor if I’m not generating material?

Maybe I should be gentle with myself? Al-Anon asks me to be gentle with my self. Easy does it but do it and all that crap.

Man maybe I should go to a meeting today. I felt good going to a meeting yesterday but then bad the day before kind of?

I set up all the chairs and brought cookies because I want to be liked and it feels good to do service but then I didn’t get called on. Which was fine anyway because I was the impromptu head of a different meeting I had gone to earlier in the day and had shared there but I felt like sharing about the chair thing.

People like that I had brought cookies.

I’m low on sleep today. HALT, is the al-anon slogan, be gentle with yourself when you are hungry, angry, lonely, tired.

Yesterday in group therapy I got upset and felt like people didn’t like me. Why is it when I talk in group I feel bad and when I don’t talk in Al-anon I feel bad? Am I expecting certain kinds of responses certain places?

My group therapist wants me to ask less questions, he thinks they are low-yield for me in terms of connecting to humans. This made me feel anxious about my ability to connect to humans. What am I supposed to do other than ask for things or ask them about themselves? There’s a sense in me people don’t want to see me or be with me or care.

I slept in Central Park this morning waiting for Shakespeare tickets. I was proud of myself I got there early, methodically, I made excellent use of an inflatable pillow I keep in my backpack, combining it with a light post and a towel made an impromptu chair and ultimately I used my neck pillow as a butt pillow because my butt felt sore from sitting on wood chips over a towel for so long.

Alright now I guess I have to go look for jobs. I’m still broke AF with only the nebulousness of the future to attempt to take care of me. I’m glad I wrote this even though it was very little and extremely unfocused.

My therapist seems to think I don’t.

It’s true I feel a big “should” before writing. Like as an actor, I “should” be writing, “should” be creating”, “should” be constantly generating material for myself and others thus giving myself some sort of sustainable living plan for the ups and downs of being an actor.

I find writing therapeutic. It helps me to feel like I’m expressing myself. Oftne I have so many feelings tumbling (haha) inside of me and I don’t always feel like I have an avenue for expressing them. I fear alienating other people by overwhelming them with my feelings. My parents might want to fix or change my emotional state or hearing it might worry them too much. Most lovers I’ve had have been somewhat receptive but I fear overwhelming them too and pushing away the physical affection I so desperately desire from someone I feel close to.

Writing allows me to get those feelings out. But I hate writing them down and then not sharing them. It makes me feel like I’m being silenced. Like people don’t want to know me or that my thoughts or feelings are too shameful to share. I often vacillate between fear and defiance, opposite poles. Defiance wants me to share my writing.

And then there’s the issue of sharing my writing when in it’s in a product, a form like a sketch or a story or a screenplay. I fear criticism which my therapist points out is odd because I’m an actor and I deal with criticism and rejection frequently. I tried to express to her that just like Norm MacDonald shared in his stand-up special, maybe whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, not stronger, and that it’s all I can do in my threshold of tolerance for rejection to just deal with acting.

There are few feelings I hate more than people not liking what I write qualitatively. I know this is insane and that to get better one must go through periods of suckage, but man is it frustrating. There’s still that little boy in me that just wants to be loved and seen and heard and embraced. And he can’t deal with people criticizing something as personal as a writing he has no filter for.

I’m working on this, ya know? I’m doing Al-Anon and examining myself. But this isn’t therapy and I cannot share everything I write here. It feels dangerous and uncontrolled.

Whatever. The task was to write this. So here it is. 

I think I’d like writing if I knew it was good. But right now I really don’t want to write. It feels bad and scary and obligatory.

I am desperate for it, really.

I’m grateful that I am in program now and have some recovery. I still really like therapy and think it has been extraordinarily helpful for me, but there’s something you should know: I wanted all those therapists to approve of me.

I wanted to talk to them, I wanted to be open, I wanted to be “good” at therapy, I even wanted to “recover” and improve (and improve I did and have) and all of that is due in part at least to wanting approval, acceptance, love.

As for why?

I could map it back to my family and my childhood and my upbringing, but for the most part I love those people and I think anyone who ever met them would tell you they loved me. I think my parents were and are trying their best and I believe that earnestly. I hope as an adult (30 is creeping up), I can let go of lingering resentments I have towards my family as I begin to accept this.

There’s a black hole inside of me, pulling at all times. It’s like the Dementors from Harry Potter, which themselves are probably living symbols of intense depression made by the author. It tells me I’m worthless and unlovable and that all my mistakes are like stones in my pockets weighing me down and I am drowning and unsafe.

These are not very manly things to admit.

I went to a recent men’s meeting in my program and someone read out their inventory of “what I got wrong” about his life. He talked bravely about not believing in love, not thinking he was worthy of love and feeling like he had to manipulate people to get what he wanted. 

He told people, it wasn’t that I am wrong and bad, but what I got wrong, things that I believed. He said that when he went into a new therapist and showed him the little card he had written this on, the therapist told him: “Well, no one could build a healthy life out of these values”.

He sighed the relief of the directness of hearing that.

I’m on my third step in program and my next step is to make an inventory of my faults and merits, a historically difficult step in the program. I’ll admit, among the reasons I desire to do this is because I desire approval. My sponsor’s approval, my group’s approval, the feeling of righteousness I’ll have from “getting things right” and what’s more, that golden moment at the end of the rainbow where more people even will like me because my behavior has changed to a way that’s (more) socially acceptable.

A lot of this stuff makes sense and a lot of this stuff I have a lot of shame about (and not because I think it makes me more worthy of approval to have it).

I definitely am trying to fill that black hole inside me, because that black hole is pain, that black hole is reinforced, constant thoughts. It seems all-powerful and unbeatable, like a massive drain I keep trying to plug with small achievements.

The result: I am unable to hear praise often even if I desire it. I know that small comments will only be sucked into my nothingness and so I fear holding on to them because if I do, the painful memory of when I thought someone approved of me will remain and I will feel shame and longing that I cannot return to this feeling.

I’m starting to believe in god again, or at least some sort of higher power. Maybe the cosmic order of the universe. I like the idea of turning over my feelings and agitation when I feel powerless. I like the idea of a conversation with the world of what I can and cannot see.

Why am I doing all this?

Because I want to turn it over. I want to fight my shame and in order for my shame to resolve, I would like it to be out in the open.

I would like to have the courage to write again and not worry about if its good or bad or how people will judge or perceive me. I would like to live fearlessly, or if not fearlessly, then like with a modicum of healthy fear? I dunno.

I am grateful for the people who live and accept me in my life. I still feel ashamed but maybe less so of how much I desire that approval. I know I am not my desires. That I am the captain of me, even if I am overwhelmed from time to time.

I guess this is the third time or something like that that I’ve returned to my blog.

Writing, or at least the idea of it, feels more painful for me than ever.

I recently entered into a 12-step recovery program called Al-Anon, which isn’t about me drinking or doing substances, but is about the family I grew up in, the ways I took it in or learned to cope and learning to move forward day by day.

I go to a lot of meetings now, one every day almost. In a way, even that feels embarrassing to admit, but that’s what the program is about: shame around self-care.

It was very liberating for me to find out that I was not alone in my problems--my smelly, annoying-people, entitled-and-then-gratifying, intimate and unruly problems--but it was also overwhelming.

There was a lot of liberation in the idea of just giving up and deciding I was crazy in an intransigent way. That I was a victim in some ways and an aggressor in others. I used to find some serenity in accepting that I was just nuts and that I was going to be weird to people or judge others harshly or be brash and impulsive because, well, that was the way I was. 

And as long as I was doing all I could to try to help myself in the moment, to try to improve myself as I knew how: yoga, dieting, exercise, taking various comedy or acting classes, anything to make me a “better” or more worthy person, well then, that was all I could do.

But looking back on this sentiment, this too was incomplete.

The problem was not just that I was and am fucked up, as many people are in their own particular weird, wonderful and terrifying ways, but that I fundamentally thought I was lacking. Not good enough. Less than.

In Al-Anon, we call this “alanonic” behavior, like in AA they call it “alcoholic” behavior when the user engages in substances and behaviors they know are unhealthy for them.

I acknowledge also the lameness of all this. It’s hard explaining to people what Al-Anon is, or why I’m in it, or what it is that I’m even trying to get un-addicted from. I’m definitely a co-dependent of sorts for which I could be going to a whole different program, Co-Dependents Anonymous or CoDA, but that doesn’t feel right for me. My parents are not alcoholics and neither is a partner or ex of mine, so that’s out.

But growing up in my family, without blaming anyone, I internalized behaviors that made me feel like I was unimportant. Like I was wrong and that I didn’t know anything. That I was bad somehow and that people wouldn’t like me. My emotions became stunted. I spent my adolescence hiding from my peers, sure only that they would reject me and pre-emptively hating them to protect myself from their judgment, wearing what I described as a “cloak of anger and sadness”.

It still is very hard for me not to think of the world in terms of black and white, especially my own behavior, as purely “good” or “bad”, which for me “good” is hard to experience and fleeting, while “bad” behavior just reinforces the murmurs in my head that I am terrible and the voices that tell me so are right.

What’s this you say? This Nicholas doesn’t seem much like the self-pitier. In fact I think he’s somewhat of a narcissist! He’s talking about himself in the third person now, after all.

Well, that’s part of the same deal too. I really struggle to love myself and feel good about myself, so when I DO prioritize myself, it often comes in bursts of anger, resentment or grandiosity, a “martyr” or “white knight” complex. I can’t be good, so my cause must be just which lets me feel righteous which feels close to the self-respect I so desire.

This often makes me, well, a jerk. 

While to other people they might think of me like a hero or something, because I really do try to do positive things for people (mostly motivated out of my own sense of unbelonging and lack of self worth).

Also, I’m pretty high-functioning for a self-pitier (feels like grandiosity, kicks self). I’d explain this that by saying that I developed a mindset where I knew I would be rejected and I was terrible, so the only way to be not so would be to throw myself into the fray of some difficult situation and achieve some greatness.

If the world thought I was terrible (it doesn’t, that’s just mostly stuff from my childhood I’ve internalized) then I would prove it wrong, no matter how many times it kicked me in the face and pushed me down, I would get back up. I would be great and then I would finally get the love I never had for myself and from others that I so desired.

Pretty fucked up right? But to be honest, I’m grateful for this defense mechanism I built. In 2015, I booked 8 commercials! 8! I booked my first TV gig. I’ve had people rate me low in improv classes, acting classes, writing classes, been cut from teams, been rejected more times then it even feels comfortable to imagine, but this stubbornness at least kept me in the game. 

And unlike self-esteem, which my brain could undermine, it was somehow safe from my ability to tear it down.

I still hate and fear rejection. But when I feel like my brain tells me I’m going to be rejected anyway (or gets grandiose and tells me I’m the best), I might as well seek out some high-level rejection, so it’s the best rejection I could be getting.

And I’ve achieved some cool things through these defenses.

So finally, back to writing.

I’ve written a bunch of time, some of them on here. I’ve written sketches and screenplays and videos and blog posts and reviews and interviews and articles. Some times, people paid me money for it.

It feels painful to write. It feels SO painful, but it feels relieving too. By writing, I am letting my animus free, letting my mind roam wild without a filter, b ut to do so also invites my demons and my writing has been getting me in trouble since the 7th grade when I wrote a girl a poem and she told me to stay 10 feet away at all times, a feeling I never lost.

But I know I should do it. Or less than should, that I need to.

Writing is so emotional for me it doesn’t feel like a skill, but I do have some skill at it. I’m my mother’s son and she’s a multi-award winning writer and editor. Some of that crap is probably genetic.

I guess more importantly, as I’ve learned in program, I want to be brave. I don’t want to give up anymore or just shrug my shoulders if there’s a place in my life I want to change.

I want to work hard and (sigh) pray and not surrender to my fear and my “unbelonging”.

The prayer we say in Al-Anon: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I want my writing back. And I think what I need is some courage.

So that’s why I’m here, writing this.

Hopefully soon it’ll be sketches or screenplays or something. Some sort of more palatable writing. 

If it is, I’ll be fucking terrified that people won’t like it. That’s the risk with creating a product, even a mutable one.

But another thing they say is: “one day at a time”.

So this is my thing for today.