Say It Enough

I keep telling people I'm leaving LA.

I've been back here for ten years and a lot of it has not been happy.

I learned a lot about myself.  I've been fantastic places and stretched myself further than I thought.

I've transformed my body.  Ran a marathon in Florence.

But I want so much more.

I could have been rich and famous in my twenties.  If I wanted it enough.  And I thought I did want it.  Forever, I've been telling myself that didn't happen because I wasn't good enough.  That's not true.  By the time I hit 30, I had gone from my small LA suburb to the best high school in LA to studying playwriting with one of the most gifted writers who I had mostly to myself to working at the greatest advertising agency in history to moving to the greatest city in America and studying arguably the best school for dramatic writing on a full scholarship.

Then it came to a grinding halt when I moved back to LA when I turned 30.  I even had the offer of an agent six months after I moved back to LA, but turned him down because the manager I had just signed with told me to hold off.  I often look back at that as a big mistake.  And it seems to have been reinforced by being in LA for ten years and not "making it."

But now I know why I didn't make it.  And it's not about not making it.  I was unhappy fundamentally for ten years.  Because I had steered myself away from my passion and started doing what I thought I needed to do to become important.  The only thing I needed to do to become important is to follow my passion.  And then it wouldn't even matter how important I was because I would be consumed by my passion and that would up my value in the world, but being important would become less important.

A light is turning on within me.  Being important isn't important.  It's kind of the opposite of "being good isn't good enough."

I am running towards an opportunity that would allow me a house, a building to bring to life the plays I am writing.  I am writing bigger than I have before.  I am writing bolder and riskier than I have before.  It doesn't matter if theaters decide to do my plays if I have a place to bring them to fruition myself in the way I see them.  Then I can put them out into the world--after I have raised them on my own.

LA isn't evil.  It's just home.  And I seem to do better away from home.  I'm not running away any more.  And I don't look at my thirties as a waste any more.  I had to reconcile my past with the person I've become.  I flew with more velocity when I wasn't in LA, but I flew recklessly.  I'm a more studied person now because of every difficult, uphill experience I've had in my thirties: a bad relationship, a bad work relationship, a father's illness and death.

My friend Steve told me tonight that he was hoping I would be ready to move back into my life months ago, but knew that I still needed my own time.  And honestly, I wasn't ready.  I wasn't ready to jump back into life because I didn't want to go back to the person I was.  I didn't want to be careless with my gifts and talents.  I didn't want to under appreciate what I had been given.

I honestly think this venture into other possibilities, maybe teaching, will lead me to something greater than just being an important guy in Hollywood.  I don't know if I would have known how to handle it before because I was thinking small.

I'm learning that finding a calling isn't an instantaneous "a-ha" moment.  It builds over time.  It's like a freeway, it takes years.  But once it's constructed, there is a new highway--faster and more direct--to where you want to go.  There's no traffic on a new freeway--at least not until other people use the road you've built.  But then maybe you needed to build it in order to give them a road to travel on as well.  But you will always be the one who figured out the path first.  You will always be the one who had the vision and who thought big enough to build a freeway.

I'm leaving LA.