“I have so much to tell you!!!!”

It was 12:30 a.m. My head buzzed with the events of the past couple of hours, the exhilaration, fear, and personal triumph, of hearing my words read out loud for the first time, around the table. I stood on the stone patio outside my guest house, pacing around like a caged tiger, unable to go to sleep yet, the darkness of Los Angeles around me, and, unthinkingly I picked up my blackberry and texted him, crazily, “I have so much to tell you!!!!”

It had been a long intense night. About eight scripts were on the table that night – there were nine or so people there, all writers and actors – some good friends, others completely new to me. It had been nervewracking at first, I would get huge jolts in my stomach every time I heard another knock on the door. My social anxiety coming to the fore, but also my nerves about how the reading would go. The two roles I had been written would be played by cousin Mike and the brilliant Missy Yager. I was also acting in something Mike had written, a script I had been given earlier that afternoon, and I was a bit nervous about that, too. The acting bug coming alive again. It is a voracious feeling, nearly unpleasant, but I so get off on that unpleasantness that it was really nice to feel it vibrating through me again. My brother was there, Melody, Larry, people I know well, but then there were others, people I had only met once or twice, or seen on TV and heard of, but never met. I was the wild card, the unknown element, a “visitor”, a cousin from the East Coast. (After my script was read, Liz – the one who said the funniest thing to me that night – fired at me across the table, in a tone of incomprehension and almost scorn, “So you’re just visiting??” Like: who the hell are you, you visitor from not-even-New-York-but-NEW JERSEY?? who just SLAYED us with that script and we don’t even know who you are.)

“I have so much to tell you!!!!”

A lot happened that night, much of which I will not share. Rehearsals like that are meant to be private, and people have moments of personal revelation or breakthroughs/downs in the process of working that need to be protected, I have seen it happen time and time again … It’s a sacred space, a process like that. Suffice it to say, that we all were in the zone that night. A zone of work, a safe space – where things were discussed, hashed out, responded to – all of us sitting around the table, watching the actors read whatever script it was, and it was a humorous and fun environment, not judgey at all: huge bursts of laughter when something was funny, but then a sudden swoop of silence as things got serious. It felt like college again. Where the WORK was sacrosanct in and of itself, something that could be reveled in with or without monetary gain. We are all grownups now. Many of the people at that table make a really nice living at the very thing they were dying to do in their college, high school, grade school years. But it was surely a nice and beautiful reminder, that night, of WHY we do what we do. And WHY we strive. The whole business side of things, while essential, can make you lose sight of it. That was what a lot of people were talking about as the night wound down. Missy said, “God, I just forget sometimes how much I love this … ” or “It’s so easy to internalize the demands of a television structure – you know, straight line, pause, joke, wait for laugh – as though that is the only way a script can possibly be a success …” Lots of great conversation along those lines. A beautiful bunch. I loved them all.

“So you’re just visiting???”

Maybe, maybe not.

It had taken a lot of preparation to get to the point of that reading. My first draft came flowing out of me in three hours. It was a one-take draft, pretty much. Mike liked it, didn’t have too many comments. Those would come later, after the reading. He was immediately on board with it, and the ball started rolling from there.

A month or so later, he (you know. He. The invisible yet felt presence on my site for a while – if you’re a discerning reader, you’ve picked up on him, he’s everywhere) asked if he could read it. I sent it on. A brainstorming session then commenced, the exhilaration of which I remember with pain today. His comments were insightful, right-on-the-money, and yet he never forgot that it was MY piece, and said to me at one point “you will always know more about it than I do.” He got suspicious if I took too many of his comments in a submissive manner – he wanted more fight from me – and there were things I fought him on, but for the most part, I had sent it to him in a spirit of openness and availability. I was not wedded to any of it. I had written the damn thing in three hours. If it had been one of my essays, I might have fought more. I told him there were a couple of essays I’ve written that I would literally go to the mat over a comma change. But this? Bring it on. We rearranged things, and chopped it up, and while by the end of it (the session lasted for six hours) I still recognized the script as my own – nothing substantive had changed, not the voice, or the event – the beginning, at least, was much better (I thought), not so theatrical, and we had also gotten really clear on a lot of the issues being dramatized – and I got clear on some of the places where I WASN’T clear. It was awesome.

By end of May, plans for the reading were being finalized, and I booked my flight to go out to Los Angeles for it. I stayed in the guest house at Mike’s, which was (have to say) a sweet situation. I had my own iMac, and TV, and I stepped outside and there was a pool. Yes, I could not figure out the child-proof gate to save my life, had to email Mike from the guest house – up in the main house at 8 am my first morning there (“uhm, help??”) and Mike’s pipsqueak of a daughter had to come out and show me how to do it … but it was wonderful. I’d sit at the table outside in the strange windy dawn, with the palm trees swaying heavily above in the grey, and work on my script. Or do nothing. Zone out. I was in the zone. Where I have always always longed to be.

“I have so much to tell you!!!!”

The freedom in those exclamation points is startling to me now. Who was that girl? Was that just a little under two weeks ago? How on earth is that possible.

How quickly things are lost.

Not everything. Not everything.

The reading of my script was (as I told Missy) a “highwater mark for me” in my life, whatever happens with it. It was an honor to be there. It was a privilege to be part of such a group. The integrity, the kindness, the SMARTS, and the generosity.

I have been thinking a lot about generosity lately.

It is difficult for me, because I experience the world as stingy. It withholds. This sounds ungrateful, and it is ungrateful. I have a great family, a posse of people who care about me, I have talents, I know what I love to do, I do it, and seriously, I know that I am blessed. But when the one thing you want, the ultimate thing, is denied to you, the world is a desert. I relate to it with my friends who have “dreams deferred” (and I am one of them). Those who had dreams of being a great and famous actor, and who have not achieved that. They have made sense of it, or tried to, they have gone on, found compensation in other areas … but they are haunted by that “dream deferred”. Or there are those who are unable to have children, and it is a dream that will die hard, it is something that must be accepted, with as much grace as is humanly possible – but acceptance is not an easy thing, it takes sweat, tears, your own fucking blood spilt as you give up that dream, you rage at God, the universe, the cosmic plan that seems to have gone awry. If you boil it all down, if you strip all else away, what is it that I REALLY want? I know what I REALLY want, the one thing that haunts me (literally. I am a haunted woman, ghost-ridden), and so I find ways to navigate, negotiate, survive. Many of my coping mechanisms, things I have generated as a way to survive my pain and loss, have become highly involved artistic pursuits which have generated a lot of success for me. These are not quiet hobbies done in the solitude of my home. These are things that can be pointed at, out in the world, and said to exist. I am a survivor. I find ways to wrench my disappointed narrative into something that either serves me, or serves others. I don’t always succeed. I am often left without words. All evidence to the contrary (my whole damn blog), I have had no words for where I have “gone” in the last three months. Not to mention what I went through in the year before those three months. Those experiences lie in the ineffable, the ether, the spaces between the words. I struggle with that.

As long as I have my words, I feel like I will be okay.

And in that dark moment, with the rustling sound of palm trees in the night sky above me, the words I had were, “I have so much to tell you!!!!”

There was only one person I wanted to tell everything to, in that particular moment. I would tell other people the story, at other times, my posse, my friends and family. They all wanted to hear about it too. But in the first flush of excitement, my thoughts, my heart, went to him. He was who I wanted to share it with first. And I knew, like you know your own face when you see it in the mirror, that he was dying to hear.

After all, during the reading, I could hear my blackberry buzzing from time to time in my bag in the other room. During a break, I went and checked it, knowing (again, like I would know my own face) who all those messages were from. There they were.

“I know you can’t answer hahahahahaha you are doing the reading right now! hope it’s going great – can’t wait to hear …”

“what’s happening right now, I wonder? has yours happened yet? thinking about you …”

An eager heart, open and available, excited, and with me, in my high watermark moment. Vicariously. Not present, but there in spirit.

It is the zone I have always dreamt of.

“I have so much to tell you!!!!”

Standing alone by the dark pool, in the shadows, my blackberry buzzed five minutes after I fired off my exclamation-point-ridden message. There he was, quick-fire typing away in response. “can’t wait to hear – you will tell me all about it in person tomorrow!”

And I did.

A couple of days later, Mike and I were talking about my script, fleshing it out, riffing, not really setting anything, but going off on the ideas brought forth from the reading. Where could it go? What was I missing? What needed to be fleshed out? Could it be expanded? We were talking about breakups, and what it is like when we are left behind. The pain of that. My script is all about the legacy of one particular breakup. Mike said, “I think that one of the worst things is that you get used to having this person inside of you. They’re not outside, they’re not just your boyfriend or girlfriend. There is a huge space inside of you reserved for that person – everything you want to tell them and share – and so when they are gone, you still have that space there. And all you want to do is fill it. It seems so wrong, so wrong, that you are left with that huge empty space.”

Prophetic words as it turns out.

I still have so much to tell you.

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14 Responses to “I have so much to tell you!!!!”

  1. m says:

    Oh, Sheila. My heart hurts. You are always, always so beautiful.

  2. tracey says:

    Oh, brave girl. I can feel your heart from here.

  3. Emily says:

    One of the best fucking things you have ever written. So fucking good, I wrote “fucking” when I usually reserve myself from swearing in polite company away from my own site.

  4. Shasta says:

    Wow indeed. Sheila, I don’t know you outside reading this blog, but I simply adore reading it. A lot of times you speak to and for my heart as well as yourself. Thank you!

  5. De says:

    You are my hero is SO many ways!

  6. melissa says:

    what an essay. You are always lovely and thoughtprovoking. Thank you.

  7. David says:

    As deeply as I have involved myself in this trauma, and sometimes aggressively, it’s the imagining the girl typing that sentence and comparing her to the girl I dropped off last night that really brings home the starkness of this story.

  8. jean says:

    What happens to a dream deferred?…
    does it stink like rotten meat?…crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?…does it sag like a heavy load…or does it explode…

    I could have some of that wrong…i think the word to focus on is ‘deferred’. hughes didn’t day ‘dissolved’ or ‘disappeared’?

  9. red says:

    I love having an English teacher as a sister.

  10. De says:

    Dammit!!!!
    I meant “You are my hero IN SO many ways.”
    Jeeeeez. I guess my excuse is that I had tears in my eyes!

  11. Catherine says:

    There’s a feeling I get when I click over to your homepage and see that the latest post is not a photograph of Hope, or a film review, or a link to another webpage (although all of these are appreciated) but a personal essay of some sort.

    It’s partly a feeling of anticipation, because I know that for the next 10, 15 minutes I’m going to be reading something well written, moving and thought-provoking. What a trite phrase, but honestly, I mean it in the very basic sense – I always come away with something to mull over, whether the essay pertains to my life or not.

    It’s partly a feeling of trepidation. Because occasionally, something you’ll write will strike a familiar gong somewhere deep inside of me, and it might hurt. I might recognise something, and that might be hard to deal with.

    It’s partly a feeling of sympathy. No, not sympathy. A desire to mentally vibe out fierce, protective, positive energies towards you. For being so brutally honest and open and connected.

    It’s partly a feeling of inspiration. Because even though I call myself a writer, I don’t do it as often or as hard as I probably should – and you always make me want to grab a pen.

    But mostly, it’s a feeling of gratitude. Thank you.

  12. Noonz says:

    The way you share these things…

    So gutsy. Reading your essays is a privilege.

  13. amelie says:

    beautiful, breathtaking.

    THANK you!

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