The Tri Tip Abortion
When I was on the set of a TV show I wrote, someone turned around to me and said, “Isn’t it crazy to know that you created jobs for every single one of these people?”. I mean, yeah. The producers would probably have disagreed with that statement. Especially considering I had zero to do with what happened to the script once it left my inbox.
No one ever really thinks of writers as Job Creators. The three or more years spent writing and developing is not considered a valid part of the production process. It’s more like the script arrives, uninvited and unannounced, like the glistening, grapefruit-sized ball of flesh I found in the middle of my apartment one day and thought was an abortion but turned out to be a Trip Tip wrapped in plastic wrap that the dog had stealthily eaten whole, python-like, from the grocery bags, and then vomited up on the floor. Everything I have ever written for TV and film has been the Trip Tip Abortion. If we wanted to continue this metaphor, it would be the Trip Tip Abortion adopted and revived by Fundamentalists, but let’s end it there.
On the set of the short I wrote and directed last week, one of the lovely actors said the same thing to me - about everyone being there for this moment because of this one thing I had written, but this time it wasn’t a Tri Tip abortion. It was a project I had nurtured for nine months, a project that hadn’t been aborted, a project that was about to be birthed, by me, and I’d had severe anxiety over it since January which was not helped by all the other things going on in my life - the endless family drama, Dad’s death, eternally existing in LA, a city I loathe, the constant and ever growing pressure of trying to make something work which doesn’t. I hadn’t really thought anyone would show up for this little movie I wrote - getting anyone to show up for a half hour zoom in prep is almost impossible - and suddenly there’s 25 people, a grip van, c-stands, and headsets and people have devoted a sixty hour week of their life to this thing.
So much of my life has been about the people I am closest to not showing up. Or worse, showing up only to perform impossibly petty tasks of vengeance and violence. I have always been extremely uncomfortable with celebratory events like my own birthday, my own wedding (I eloped) primarily because of the anxiety I have about being the focus of so much attention. Attention in familial group settings usually indicates a high probability of mental, verbal or physical abuse. Do not look at me. Do not move. The eruption of rage, a hot, angry spat, life spun 180 degrees, you’re wondering if this time they really mean it when you’ve been kicked out with nowhere to go, or if you just have to wait a few hours for them to calm down. Harder still - especially for neurodivergents - is the fact you are expected to pretend, for a few short hours, that these people who have decidedly not shown up for you in any particular way are now here for the party and you are expected to be grateful and enjoy it. I absolutely love other people’s weddings and commencements and birthdays, especially people I have decided are less fucked up than myself. I am an eternal tourist of other people’s community. I am not sure all the therapy in the world will change my deep discomfort with any event which focuses attention around me.
And yet what is writing - particularly writing for print, for theatre, for TV and Film - if not a plea for attention? Writing online is the equivalent of giving yourself a Paris Review interview, a monologue of your thoughts shared precisely because no one cared enough to ask in your alternate existence of waking up, taking child to school, logging into zoom, saving another draft of script. Perhaps we writers (and actors, and anyone involved in storytelling) have a fundamental starvation of positive attention in our personal lives. I know I do. And conversely, I am OK with that. I don’t like dinners and bars and screenings and parties and premieres with strangers, while more intimate settings have traditionally been the location of abuse.
When I write I am having the conversations I want to have but can’t. In my head there is so much to be said, and so much that is misunderstood about my movement through the world and the narratives depicted about me by other people, that writing becomes a Sisyphean task undertaken to simply exist as I am, not as someone else wants to tell me. Perhaps this is why it feels so natural to be in a place where I am simply working with a bunch of people to make a story. The discomfort I feel socially is erased. I do not have to entertain, convince someone erroneously that I am sane or either dumb down or bring out the smart. I’m just there to get something done, alongside all these other people who are there to get the same stuff done, stuff that happens to be yours.
This was a random collection of thoughts I threw together. After ten years of being silenced, I’m trying to take the time to jot something down here as much as possible. This week N and I escaped to Mount Shasta for my birthday. I abandoned USC in the middle of the semester - apart from my week of filming, it has been a particularly strange and isolated semester - and it has rained the entire time so our planned waterfall hikes have turned into sofa expeditions and finding solace in the sound of enormous, heavy raindrops pelting the pines, the analog hum and screech of the freight train, the overflowing river, wet dog. Part of my coping mechanisms for LA is doing - constantly moving, constantly making, constantly learning, constantly creating, hanging upside down, kicking, catching that wave, goading my body into producing dopamine and seratonin. So this learning to just be is so important. I do not really know how to be in LA, which sets my teeth on edge, so many people, so angry, so concrete, so much traffic, so much painful history.
One more day of filming and I am eternally grateful and astonished for the people that showed up. You know who you are.
