How one damn-good Netflix series marks one woman’s creative rock bottom.
I'm an Ideas Person.
This typically translates to:
I'm an underachiever.
It's true: I have indeed been both of these. But I recently got a slap in the face: A walloping, shocking, wake-up slap.
You see, in 2013 I had a brilliant idea for a screenplay. Titled: "Self-Help: The Movie," it was the story of a woman who comically but touchingly evolves out of self-denial and self-abuse, and into self-acceptance and self-love. This process is externalized--made visible and concrete--through the relationship she develops with a literal second-self: A clone.
By the end of 2013, I'd written 76 pages of the script. I studied screenwriting from Aristotle's poetics to Aaron Sorkin's Masterclass. I hashed out my characters and my story-arc. My script was good: well-paced, witty, playfully obedient to the rules of storytelling.
But I didn't finish it.
No, I kept my 70%-done, once-in-a-lifetime, million-dollar idea on the back-burner for SIX YEARS. I always intended to go back and finish it, of course, and I did work on it a bit here-and-there...
until, two months ago, when I saw this:
‘Living with Yourself’ Trailer: It’s Paul Rudd vs Paul Rudd in Netflix Series
Nails scraped down a chalkboard as I scrolled through the article. This was my movie. This was...MY movie!
But, it wasn't mine anymore.
I didn't do right by it.
It left me for someone else, someone better, and I deserved it.
A Massively Worse Kind of Failure
This isn't the first time this happened to me.
There was the college thesis I wanted to expand into a book, (with a lot of passionate support from my professors!)
Didn't finish it.
There was the memoir of the year I lived in "The WhiteBus," my 1971 Volkswagon camper van; a tale of travel, transience, wild romance and self-discovery.