Operation Achieve Anything: Day Eighty-Seven, Dateline 3-28-2018
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“Success doesn’t come to you, you go to it.”
Good afternoon Crickets. Welcome to day number eighty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything. This is going to be another rushed post as I wrap up day number three of the closest thing that I’ve had to a vacation in quite a while. I spent the last two nights at my oldest sister’s place and am now home trying to get this over with in order to hang out with the family to round out the rest of the day.
Thankfully, yesterday’s assignment marked the start an eight-day run of lessons that the Achieve Anything… book warned will all focus on the role that failure plays when it comes to tasting the success one seeks. For yesterday’s task, I was supposed to graph the ups and downs my journey to become a writer who is successful enough to fully support myself while achieving my dreams at the same time.
It all started back when I was born on Leap Year’s Day which is a good way to start out an interesting life, though the day barely exists, it doesn’t get extra attention when the day does come around which is almost the same thing that could be said about me and my relationship to the world. Thing started out pretty strong because I had a pretty loving family and I don’t have any hang up when it comes to thinking way back to my early days.
The first major drop in my progress was the day that my parent seemed to decide to get a divorce out of the blue. As I said in the past, my family is made up of alcoholics and enablers, both side with such denial that from the outside it’s almost impossible to see anything wrong because it’s just as hard to figure it out as an insider.
I think the fact that the split seemed so sudden to my still developing brain was more damaging than the divorce on its own. It didn’t help that the instant addition of my nemesis who later became my stepfather felt like the problems of early existence really started to pile on. With a single mom and her boyfriend who never had a job, we became more broke than usual which then makes things harder socially when you are a small child.
Though times were tough, I don’t think I would have been such a story collector if I did have more of an idyllic childhood, so I’d consider this both an up and a down when you look at the big picture. It was the chaos at home that led me to understand the Tears Of A Clown which was the main recurring theme of my earlier written work, but this childhood filled with verbal abuse ate away my confidence with every passing day.
Since I didn’t find writing yet, I’d say that the plusses and minuses balanced out to where I was feeling an overall decline in my progress as I aimlessly explored the world. Once I graduated high school my childhood home was sold due to my parent’s divorce agreement. I moved with my mom but since the living situation was tighter because her and her boyfriend were then married and had two kids of their own and I definitely wasn’t wanted around by the man who was still mooching off my mother.
She didn’t mind my being there but just like my earlier life, she just wasn’t there because she was too busy busting her ass to support him and their kids. Meanwhile, I’d had a job ever since junior high but was still always told I was worthless. When I moved out, I moved into the garage of the house where I used to party at. Again, this was fun for me as a story collector but as far as feeling like someone who knew his place on the world, I felt completely lost, so I’d say the slow decline continued.
Then again, I don’t know if it was all that slow because around this time I also found a lump on my testicle and without having any form of support, I just assumed it was cancer and when my partying roommates decided to part ways, I decided to venture off to Seattle where I planned to Leaving Las Vegas myself off the world before the testicular cancer got to me. Life wise, this was a rapid decline but there was a freedom that came with not giving a fuck that may have made this the most exciting time of my life because I was facing my fears of dying by staring it right in the eye.
I was twenty-one at this time so this devil may care attitude won me more friends that I had ever had before. This led to a rapid incline in my personal life until a year went by and I found myself getting too comfortable. Keep in mind, even though I was happier, I was still fully prepared to die from the lump that had grown on my ball. As soon as everyone grew used to my unusual antics, I started to feel empty again, which led to another decline as I decided to move to Delaware in order to take advantage of a moving bonus from my work.
This was way back in the day when Amazon.com was a brand new company, so new that my employee number was in the triple digits and the stock options that I had, became my main reason to live. Delaware might have been one of the darkest periods of my life because I still hadn’t checked the lump on my testicle and I was growing closer and closer to drinking myself to death since I wasn’t as excepted by the East Coast crowd.
I didn’t fit in at all but that was perfect because the whole reason that I left Seattle in the first place was that I felt like I was getting to close to my friends. It was at this time that I discovered a program called Final Draft, which at the time was pretty expensive software that provided formatting so that you could write a screenplay without having to know all of the margins and other settings. I bought this software right around the point where I woke up next to my toilet the morning after throwing up a bunch of blood.
Again, this was a very deep low but at the same time, I don’t think I would have discovered my love of writing without it and since I feel that it saved my life, I feel committed to honing my skills right up until my many brushes with the other side manages to come to fruition even if it means that I have to struggle the rest of my life away in order to fulfill this dream.
Once I discovered that I loved to write, I feel like my trajectory became inversed where bad things still happened by I then started to feel my life was on a subtle incline that lasted for quite a while. I finished my first screenplay right around the time that I returned to Seattle and started to enjoy life again. By this point, I had learned through the radio talk show, Loveline, that since the lump wasn’t doing anything strange it was most likely a Spermatocele or a Hydrocele which neither are life-threatening issues, but living as if this was a real deal concerned may have led to mental issues that I am still dealing with today, especially since I never got it officially checked until about five years ago.
Though my life started to have a bot of direction after I discovered my new love, my personal life was still a roller coaster where I was in love with all of my friends but I struggled so hard to find anyone who I was interested in romantically to like me more than as a brother. The fact that I couldn’t find anyone to help me get to a point where I felt safe enough to admit that all I wanted to do was settle down, I continued my chaotic life of a story collector.
I feel that the battle between what I wanted and what I could get also fed into fueled the divide between what I wanted vs what I needed to where it was easier for me to seek chaos alone than to have to count on anyone else to help me truly explore the more fragile world of relationships. It didn’t really matter either way I went because either option created a story whether I came close to winning or hopelessly failed in the end.
The sad thing is that the near hits have been far more damaging than the complete misses. For example, there were about two years when I was working with the management of a c-level celebrity on one of the movies I wrote. This project got pitched on the air to Howard Stern and landed me a literary agent. Writing wise, this might have been the highest point in my life, but unfortunately, I was too young, inexperienced, and lacked the guidance to work this foot in the door into being a successful venture.
This did land me a scholarship to film school for writing, which led me to get some of my short format content to be produced, but that first close call with success became the screenwriting dragon that I was chasing, to the point where I even started to work in the film industry in non-writing roles until I realized that I was just running in a wheel getting nowhere closer to switching teams in order to work above the line as a writer.
This led to the second darkest point in my life which started about five years ago. Once I determined that I no longer wanted to write films, the lighting work became uninteresting as well, so I went back to nine-to-five work. This decision led me to instantly lose hundreds of friends who I mainly talked to while I worked. I also started to lose my non-film friends as I started to hate life in general.
At this time, all that I knew was that I wanted to write, but was always more confident in my concepts and stories over my ability to work with words, since my dyslexic head always made me feel like an imposter. Now that I’ve been working on this blog for five consecutive years, I feel like I’m coming around to where I am once again excited to have a sense of purpose. Though I still feel that I need lots of work to be considered a professional, I at least take comfort in feeling less rudderless when it comes to my relationship with writing.
Now if only I could figure out how to handle a personal life, I’d be set.
Wow, that turned out to be way longer than I expected, so just ignore that little note about making it short in the introductory paragraph. This bit is going to be quick though because my niece and nephew are getting antsy to be entertain. For tomorrow’s assignment, I’m supposed to treat success like a wild animal that I’m trying to capture without killing and share my plan to do so.
This may sound confusing with my rushed approach to wrapping this up but it will make much more sense when I recap the assignment as part of tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now that time where I finish this up by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
