Devil or Angel

I just returned from four days in Los Angeles with my three best girlfriends. It was one of the best times of my entire life, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. I can’t wait to talk about these women and our Sideways tour through the San Ynez valley, getting lost in Santa Barbara at 2 a.m. and laughing so hard that my face hurt and I feared it might freeze in the Permalaff position.

But we’ll do that later. When I left for vacation, I expected a break from reality. I didn’t expect to have a small career/identity crisis. My upbringing, combined with my Capricorn tendencies, blesses me with a propensity to believe that work is supposed to be mind-numbingly hard, and you certainly aren’t supposed to do what you love. So, I stumbled into a career that is all of the above. Soul-suckingly boring, borderline abusive, and incredibly difficult – not challenging, yet lucrative, and I happen to be very good at it.

While in LA, I spent time with a friend of a friend who is trying to be a screenwriter. This woman is, in many ways, the antithesis of who I want to be. She has very few real relationships and suffers from brutal insecurity that manifests itself in dangerously destructive ways. She’s maladjusted. Discontent. Perpetually searching for something to make her feel more whole.

And yet I envied her so much during our time together that it almost consumed me.

She’s doing what I didn’t have the balls to even attempt. She’s in the film school at UCLA and is about to graduate. She has a writing partner and is writing scripts and shopping them around. She has a job as a script screener for a film agent. She might fail, but she’s fucking trying.

I know this isn’t right. It’s not healthy and it’s so, so very wrong. And stupid. And a waste of time. AND NOT LIKE ME. But I sat there in her gorgeous velvet chair in her small, charming apartment in Beverly Hills and I wanted to run screaming out of my skin. For the first time in a long time, I really and truly felt like a failure. I felt like a failure for not trying. For valuing stability and the potential for a family over what I really think I might have wanted. For being gutless and a total wimp and having that overwhelming Capricorn desire to contribute to a 401K and climb climb climb to some pinnacle of ambition with a clear path instead of doing what I wanted to do. For being a fool in not realizing what I might want earlier in life.

My dear friend Micki wrote a brilliant post already that sums up how I feel about what I’ve done. I’ve sold my soul to the corporate devil, thinking that writing press releases and technical whitepapers is going to fill the void for what I should have done. I have fucking failed. Yes, yes, I know my life isn’t over, but I look at what my practical Capricorn self has set out for me and I don’t see moving to LA to become a screenwriter in the cards. And it’s all my fault, for even as I write this, I have the little muses of negativity whispering in my ear, “But you’d hate LA!” “But you want children!” “But you’d die living with the Plastic Movie People!”

And they’re right. It’s not about the screenwriting. To compound the negative muses, I don’t do well with dialogue. It’s the fact that I have signed myself up for perpetual failure by continuing to devote time – mind-boggling amounts of time – to a job that breaks my heart. And the rest of my time to nurturing other parts of my life – my relationships, my cat, resting and relaxing. And I fail a lot at those, too. I’m not perfect.

So what’s it all for? Is the path I’ve chosen the right one? Will I ever get my shit together and stop fucking around in corporate America? Or – perhaps even more terrifying – will having a child actually bring me fulfillment, or will I resent them? Will it ever be enough?

I don’t fucking know.

7 comments May 16th, 2005