Why I Left Entertainment
I spent over fifteen years in the entertainment industry as a writer. I left in my forties with no other education, no foothold anywhere else, and no idea what I could do instead. People assume there was a plan. There wasn't. There was a deep, dark bottom… And then there was something my wife said to me on a beach.
Here's the part I'd skip if I could. In 2020, I'd been sober twenty years, after almost a decade of serious substance abuse. When COVID hit, the industry shut down - and I relapsed. I was going through multiple handles of Jack a week, blacking out, losing whole days. And having full-blown panic attacks, feeling like I was trapped under a mile of pitch-black ocean, a piercing pain in my chest that felt like a heart attack.
My whole identity was professional writing. Every project started to feel like my last, desperate, pleading hope, like I was trying to claw my way out of a slippery-walled pit. "Please, let this one be my savior."
Every year the studios and networks run writing fellowships, and along with submitting a writing sample, applying means writing essays like the ones you'd find in a college application. One of the questions on the NBC application I had completed months earlier was what you'd want the last page of your autobiography to say.
Cut back to my relapse, when my wife and I were walking the beach in Marina del Rey. The rocks that border the marina's channel at one end, the pier at the other - back and forth, shambling. I remember my feet in the sand and my eyes half-focused. A shell. I didn't want to die, but if someone had offered me a pill that would have gently drifted me to sleep forever, I would have taken it. I said some version of this to her: "I have no idea what to do. If I can't do this, who am I? I put every egg I have in one basket, I'm not economically viable, I have no other marketable skill set, and I'm too old to start again."
She had read those NBC essays before I submitted them; she was my editor. She reminded me that in the autobiography question, I hadn't written a word about looking back on a life in the entertainment industry - or even as a writer. I'd written that I wanted to be connected to people, to be in touch with myself, and to love myself, to make some sense of what the hell we're doing here for the time we're here. She just pointed out that I was the one who said that's what actually mattered to me.
In a Hallmark movie, I would look out at the immortal ocean, tearfully digest those words, and be fueled by a new sense of purpose. Back here in reality… It didn't land at all. I got pissed. I argued that they wanted for that dumb question to be answered with some "deep thought," not the truth that everyone applying to the fellowship actually feels.
The fact is that while I was thinking I was the smartest person in the room, playing the game, only writing what I wrote to give the application committee what they wanted to hear, my gut had actually snuck in some truth while I was looking the other way. Which, hell, is usually how it happens.
That was the day the seed was planted. But then there were the many months of denial, feelings of failure at the idea of leaving writing, hopelessness at what a pivot would even look like.
I love movies. And TV. But what really fueled me about it was the exploration of psychology - the question of how (and if) we can possibly overcome trauma, how we lie to ourselves, how we heal, how we sacrifice ourselves for our desires and addictions, how we try to make sense of the 80-90 years we're given on this planet to deal with what it means to be alive.
Storytelling is amazing. But it happens on the page. As a therapist, I get to explore the human experience for real. The abject fear, the identity collapse, the career shift with everything riding on it - that's what a lot of the men across from me are living. It's what I did, too.
If this resonates… let's talk.