“We take a breath. We notice that we are lighter. Something has changed. A cycle completed. This doesn’t happen when you’re crouching in the garage or on the porch lighting a pipe or taking a swig from a bottle. “

The truth is I feel stupid all the time. I regularly catch myself feeling embarrassed or stupid about the most random things.

I’ll be walking down the street and get a pang of anxiety in my gut when I think about putting myself out there. Then the thoughts come.

Several years ago, before the pandemic, before moving to Los Angeles, before getting sober I was working on applications for graduate acting programs. Programs that I desperately wanted to be accepted into. Attempting to follow in Meryl Streep’s (if you know me, you know) footsteps I believed I needed an MFA in acting to make anything of myself and be a respectable and successful artist.