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BLOG: Living With Yourself: The Biggest Disappointment/Greatest Inspiration of My Life

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.


Epic Fail.

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.