text: I can't help being good at the flute, but it's a trap. What do I do, who do I become? Cut off my fingers and cast me in the ocean! Maybe it's better if I feed the earth with my flesh. At least I'll be contributing to the world somehow! There would at least be some kind of...
  
  (BEAT)
  
  ...MEANING!
  
  Harper runs away from Jax, into a practice room, sobbing.
  
  Yes, there was a sexy jazz trombone player love interest, and his name was "Jax." The script included four montages of Harper Jessamyn gazing off into the sun to the sound track of Schoenberg. And then one to Bach. In the first thirty pages. Who knows what other genius montages could have been born if I'd plowed through and finished the script, but I didn't. I bailed. Ninety pages was too daunting. But writing a three-page sketch where I could wear a funny wig and make boner jokes? That was something I might be able to channel my creativity into!
  
  The teacher at ACME, Kim Evey, was a tiny Asian lady in her thirties who had the gentle spirit of a baby panda bear. No matter how bad someone's sketch was, she would find something positive to say. "Sure, you fell off the stage, but it was great kinetic energy!" A good teacher is someone you're willing to share your ugliest, roughest work with and who doesn't make you feel ashamed or stupid. Kim did that for me, and I loved her for it.
  
  I wrote about a dozen sketches in the class, and surprise! My best ones were based on my (many) real-life insecurities. There was an awkward one about running into a hairdresser I'd ditched, an awkward one about my inner dialogue during a massage (I'm always paranoid about farting); "awkward" was a strong theme for me. My favorite was about a boy and girl arguing in a car about the morality of peeing in a McDonald's without buying anything.
  
  Jill: But if I use the bathroom without buying something, it's stealing!
  
  Robert: One flush is not equivalent to armed robbery.
  
  Jill: Fine! I'll be right back.
  
  Jill grabs her purse and reaches for the door.
  
  Robert: Why are you taking your purse?
  
  Jill: I need it... for feminine things.
  
  Robert: You're going to buy something, aren't you?
  
  Jill: No, I'm not...
  
  Jill tries to get out. Robert grabs her purse.
  
  Robert: Give me the purse.
  
  Jill: Stop it, Robert!
  
  Robert: You're not going to buy something.
  
  Jill: Just one apple pie; I didn't have dessert!
  
  Robert: Be a man! Or grow another valve!
  
  Jill: I don't know what that means!
  
  (For the record, I still will not pee somewhere without at least buying a dip cone.)
  
  I wasn't the best writer in class, but I wasn't the worst, and I enjoyed myself. It was... strangely fulfilling?
  
  Then the class ended, and I stopped writing because I wasn't paying someone to hold me accountable anymore. I proceeded to do nothing but play World of Warcraft for the rest of the year. But my teacher, Kim, and I later reconnected at a commercial audition (for soap or cat food or cat shampoo? I can't remember. Something with a mortifying jingle) and over lunch, she invited me to participate in a new side project.
  
  "Would you be interested in joining a support group?"
  
  "A what?" Ugh. Sounded lame.
  
  "I know, it sounds lame when I put it like that."
  
  "I didn't think that at all!" Liar. "What kind of... group?" I couldn't bring myself to say the word support; it sounded dirty, like douching or something.
  
  "Just me and a few friends. We want to meet every week and check in with each other about our goals. Career, family, long-term, short-term. Totally informal."
  
  People? Organized talking? Oh, God. "I don't think so."
  
  "Do you have any goals you haven't reached? Anything you could use a boost about?"
  
  Sure, a million things. Thinking about them, I almost started crying. "I guess I can come once or something. If I don't fit in, you guys can uninvite me."
  
  Kim gave me a funny look. "I don't think anyone will do that."
  
  The next week I forced myself to wake up at seven thirty for the first time in about five years and drove to a pancake house in Los Angeles to join a "lady support group." It felt like going to my first day of college. I had a panic attack in the parking lot and almost drove back to bed, but it's LA, and everyone is forced to valet, so the dude took my car away before I could escape.
  
  There were three other women in attendance besides me and Kim. Jane, who had an oovy groovy air like her chakras were WAY in balance; Trina, who was pretty and pleasant, the kind who screamed "perfect TV wife"; and Susan, who had big hair and laughed like a trucker. They were all in their mid-to late thirties, and I was in my midtwenties, so I was intimidated from the get-go by the mass of womanhood. I was wearing jeans I hadn't washed in a week. I had a feeling they'd left those times far behind them.
  
  We went around the table sharing our goals. I learned that Jane wanted to be a director, and she was writing screenplays in order to make that happen. Trina and Susan were actors who wanted to work more, but Trina's bigger goal was to get pregnant. Hearing that immediately made me think, Uterus talk? Get me outta here! but I just nodded quietly, mimicking the others' supporting-type vibe.
  
  I got tenser and tenser as the conversation circled around to me, because I didn't know what I was going to say. I've always felt like a failure inside if I'm not already a success. If that makes any sense.
  
  Jane was the leader, and she was so generous and open; just being around her was like taking a Xanax. She tossed the conversation to me last. "And Felicia, what goals are you working towards?"
  
  "Uh, acting more. And writing... something. A screenplay? Or... a pilot? Yeah, a TV pilot." I grabbed "pilot" out of the air because Jane had already said she was doing a screenplay, and it's a personal rule of mine never to order the same thing off the menu as someone else. You're a flawed human being if you think two beet salads at a table is ever acceptable.
  
  "A TV pilot? Neat! Do you have a concept?"
  
  "Uh... well..." Sweat popped out under my armpits. What did I know about? What did I know about?! THINK! SAY SOMETHING, FELICIA! "Gamers?"
  
  They all jumped in. "That's great!" "Awesome." "How unique!" Suddenly I realized, Hey, a gamer TV pilot is a great idea! I put it at the top of my "goals" list. I won't lie, the sheer act of writing the words "TV pilot" down on the corner of my dirty paper napkin made everything seem possible. This group support thing was gonna work out!
  
  By the end of the breakfast, we'd named the group Chick-In. 'Cause we were all going to "Hatch GREAT THINGS!" No, I just made that up; it wasn't our tagline, we were not that dorky. Well, kinda.
  
  Over the next six months, the group met once a week, covering pancake houses across Southern California with hope and positive feelings. (I found out later the whole meet-up idea was inspired by the book The Secret, but I decided to gloss over that fact, like you do when eating nonorganic produce. It's still good fiber!) And over time, the support started to work. Everyone was getting their lives organized. Step by step.
  
  Everyone except me.
  
  The ladies would go around the table sharing "wins" every week.
  
  "I finished the first act of my screenplay..."
  
  "I booked a national commercial! That gets me health insurance this year!"
  
  "Met with a new manager, he's keen to help me get more TV jobs."
  
  "We're thinking about doing infertility treatments..."
  
  Then it was my turn. "Uh, I created a Word template for our weekly to-do lists."
  
  They stared. I babbled on. "You know, because it's nice to get organized. I used a special font and imported pretty graphics."
  
  "Isn't that the third to-do template you've made for us this month?"
  
  "Yeah... but this one perfected the format! I also wrote down some Universe Goals to motivate myself." I'd thought long and hard about them, for maybe twenty minutes the night before, and was confident about my new "self-statement."
  
  Realistic goals all around, right? Especially the rain forest part. I was excited to hear the group's affirmation of my goals.
  
  I got none.
  
  Kim said, "Did you work on your pilot?"
  
  I dug into my pancakes with a fork. Stabbing motions. "Well, I did some research." Which meant, I'd played a lot of World of Warcraft. They all sort of deflated. Because they'd heard it many times before.
  
  The months I went to Chick-In coincided with the height of my gaming addiction. The main accomplishments I had brought in to the ladies every week were things like, "Raided Zul'Gurub. Got new armor for Keeblerette. Achieved maximum faction with the Argent Dawn..." I watered the vocabulary down for the civilian ladies as "Played a lot of video games," but the result was the same. I was making zero progress toward my goal of writing and acting more, and that made me depressed. So I played more. Vicious cycle.
  
  "You did 'research' by playing video games?"
  
  "Yeah, but I'm definitely gonna cut back." I filled the silence that followed with positive-thinking intentions.
  
  They didn't believe me.
  
  I didn't believe myself.
  
  After a few more months of conversations like that, the guilt started to wear me down. That and the fact that I was gaming so much that my conscious and subconscious were bleeding together until I felt like a living gaming entity, a robot controlling the virtual character of my flesh-and-blood self. I knew I had to change SOMETHING. If only to make sure the ladies kept me on the invite list.
  
  I went to the next Chick-In with newfound determination. "I quit the game." It was like a bomb dropped into the nonvegetarian ladies' corned beef hash.
  
  "For real?" "Congratulations!" "That's awesome!" There was relief on their faces, like they never understood this whole "video game thing" going on with Felicia, but they knew it wasn't good. Quitting was a big step!
  
  "Are you going to start your screenplay now?" Trina said, smiling. She had perfect teeth. I made a mental note to ask about her dentist later, because I was flush with proactivity.
  
  "Pilot," I corrected her. "Yeah, I'm gonna do it!" And in that moment I believed it. I could do it!
  
  But... I didn't. Yes, I quit WoW cold turkey, but that didn't mean I could shake it instantaneously. An addiction isn't something you say good-bye to without pesky obsessive-compulsive strings attached.
  
  For a month after my resolution, I stumbled through life, sleepwalking from withdrawal. Like quitting coffee times 85,000 percent. I was in a daze, itching every moment to get back online. Time became SO SLOOOOW! Like driving behind a ninety-year-old woman in a '72 Chrysler with a handicapped license plate slow. It was torture. I'd sit in my silent house, staring at the clock, the endlessly ticking clock, wondering how people endured the task of filling their whole lives with this LIVING thing. Inside I was screaming. There's nothing to DO anymore!
  
  "Cold turkey" slipped into "lukewarm turkey." As a workaround, I kept up on all the blogs for the game, because that wasn't technically "playing." I followed the forums to keep up with my raid buddies, aching to rejoin them. At my lowest, I started sobbing when the game announced limited-edition pumpkin heads for people's characters to wear during Halloween and I couldn't get one. That amazing pumpkin would have covered my ugly penis hair SO PRETTY!
  
  And all that time I was lying to my support group. I told the ladies, "Sure! I'm writing!" when I wasn't. Yes, I could have filled all those newfound minutes with actual work, but I had no confidence in myself. I was a fraud. Who was I to pick up a pen and expect anything good to come out of it? I expected perfection as soon as the pencil hit the paper, and since that's impossible, I couldn't get myself to start. Then I felt guilty about not starting, which made me want to start even less. And with no game to bury the feelings, I got very depressed. No wonder I didn't book any acting jobs in the last half of 2006. No one wanted to hire a clinically depressed person to sell snack foods.
  
  Before one Chick-In meeting, I forced myself to work through some of my shame. I picked up a pencil and wrote, "Main character, played by me... Codex. Real name Cyd Sherman. Shy. Neurotic. Gaming addict." Then another few weeks went by, coasting on that feeling of You did some writing! Go reward yourself!, until it petered away into guilt again. Rinse, repeat. Despite that dismal pace, I DID get some work done on the pilot, but it took the whole fall season just to write down descriptions of the main characters. I thought, Don't worry. Chick-In, I'll complete this thing by 2050, for sure!
  
  One positive thing through that agonizing, limping process was that I created the kernel of something... not sucky. The clichéd mantra when you start writing is, "Write what you know," so I brainstormed all the kinds of people I'd encountered during my life of online friendships. I wrote down ideas and incidents that made me laugh and wince, and it congealed into a set of six characters (like Friends!) who seemed to go well together. No one was based on one person entirely (my old raid leader Autumna was the closest in the acid-tongued Asian college girl, Tinkerballa), but they all fell into categories of people from my experiences. Clara, "The Mom." Vork, "The Rules Master." Bladezz, "The Douchey Teen." Puck (later renamed Zaboo), the "Overly Enthusiastic and Doesn't Recognize Personal Boundaries" dude. Building fake people brought me snippets of joy, even though the creative process was absolute torture. And at the end, I looked at the six main characters I'd created and thought, I want to see these people do things together! That was in October. Annnnnnd then I stalled again. I might have started playing WoW. I'm not telling.
  
  I didn't tell the ladies at Chick-In, either. I glossed over that part at our meetings. They seemed happy when I told them about all the fake progress I was making, so I just kept saying, "It's going great!" I didn't want to derail THEIR progress with my backwards momentum. I was thinking about them with my lies. Yeah, that's it.
  
  Cut to December 20. I went to our last Chick-In meeting of the year. I faced the other ladies in the circular booth (Trina was finally pregnant, yay!), and I decided I had to come clean.
  
  "I'm sorry, but I have to tell you guys something. I haven't been writing for the last two months. I've... been... playing... video games again." I pulled the tears back into my eyes with sheer brain-suction willpower as I admitted what a jerk I was to the supportive, no-one's-a-failure-here environment.
  
  "We understand!" "You didn't have to lie, it's okay!" "Why did you feel the need to lie? We wouldn't have judged you!" They were all so nice about it.
  
  Which only made it worse.
  
  "It's just hard. I start to write something, then I look at it and think, 'This is gross and stupid,' so I stop. I can't write two words down without erasing it."
  
  "You're great at writing sketches; think of each scene as a sketch," said Kim.
  
  "But there are so many of them, and I don't know what happens next. I can't think of anything for the characters to do..." Okay, there was the breakdown. HI, TEARS! It got estrogen awkward at that point with a lot of hugging.
  
  "You should take the holiday off. Don't write, try to enjoy yourself." Jane was so nice, like a Mother Earth priestess. But as wonderful as she and all the supportive ladies were, I left the meeting disgusted at myself. My fears had made me a liar. My friends deserved more from me. I deserved more.
  
  I don't know if it was a cumulative effect of the breakfast trauma, or a mini aneurysm, but in the middle of the night something inside me snapped. I woke up at 3:54 a.m. with a full-on panic attack and a huge epiphany:
  
  I was going to die someday. I was going to END.
  
  And I know you can say that to yourself a million times, Live for the now!—I mean, it's the message of half the Ben Stiller movies ever made—but you can't understand something unless you FEEL it. Deep in your bones.
  
  For some reason that night, I felt it.
  
  A vivid terror gripped me. I was mortal, and I was going to die. I was twenty-eight years old. Old. Near death, in 1557 terms. Every sleep was bringing me closer to the grave, and if I didn't do something with my life RIGHT NOW, the totality of "Felicia Day" would add up to nothing.
  
  This might sound extreme, but that voice is my day-to-day inner dialogue to myself anyway, just magnified a healthy percent. A milder version accompanies me everywhere I go. It always has. I've never been in a car accident, because on every street (especially skinny neighborhood ones) I always picture a child or animal dashing out in front of my car, trying to commit suicide on my front grill.
  
  Anyway, as the cat started to cough up a hair ball in the next room, at 4:00 a.m. on December 21, 2006, I decided that if I didn't accomplish something huge by the end of the year, I would die a failure.
  
  The next morning, I sat down at my computer and took a deep breath. "I will write a TV pilot before January 1. It may be the worst script ever written, but I will finish it, or... there isn't any 'or,' stupid girl. It will happen. This pilot will happen." And I started typing.
  
  I would love to say that given my resolve, the muses flowed through my fingertips to produce a script of utter perfection. That once I put pressure on myself, I rose to the occasion and found joy in every bit of dialogue I gave my characters.
  
  That is NOT the case.
  
  Every second of writing that script felt like walking barefoot over shards of glass. I would write a bit and then I would sob, wanting desperately to erase what I'd just written. Oh God, that's not a scene, no one acts like that. I have no idea what to make happen, who should talk next? I hate myself. Then I would force my fingers to type more, every word feeling like I was bleeding from every orifice. I was engulfed with fear of making mistakes, of writing something stupid, of encountering story problems I couldn't think my way out of. I was, in short, terrified of the process. It was not fun.
  
  What drove me to continue? Sheer obstinate grit.
  
  While everyone else on the planet celebrated Christmas (except those people who don't, and that's fine, no insult intended), I wrote. A few times I made myself laugh at a joke I'd written, and then I'd get to the next scene, not know what to write next, and collapse again. Side benefit, in Codex, I was able to craft a lead character as neurotic as I was! Every fear I had about my own weakness, uncertainty about my future, and how others would judge me I poured into her reactions and dialogue. I brainstormed every funny thing that had happened to me while gaming over the years and twisted the incidents ever so slightly to fit the new world I painted. I ate nothing but takeout pizza and Doritos for days, until even my dog thought I had terrible breath.
  
  My friends tried to get me to take breaks: "Come to the mall. Let's go to old-lady Jazzercize class. Get out of the house for a few hours!" but the awful disciplinarian in me chanted, FAILURE, FAILURE! and I couldn't. I was too scared to stop. (The mental abuse was overdramatic and awesome!)
  
  I wrote every minute, up until the evening of December 31, 2006. At 7:45 p.m., I finished the first draft of my untitled sitcom script about gamers. Thirty-nine pages. And as I typed the words "The End," it was the proudest I'd ever been of myself. And I started sobbing.
  
  My boyfriend stood in my office doorway. "Congratulations! Do you want to go out to celebrate?"
  
  "No. I can't go out now."
  
  "Why not?"
  
  I sobbed, "I'm... too... happy."
  
  I'd accomplished my goal. But I had to be ruthless with myself to see the task through. Joan Crawford–wire-hangers bad. But you know what? I don't regret letting that horrible person inside bully me at all. I finished something for once, and it was worth every second of suffering through that terrible, forgot-to-buy-relatives-a-present holiday season.
  
  If ideas flow out of you easily like a chocolate fountain, bless you, and skip to the next chapter. But if you're someone like me, who longs to create but finds the process agonizing, here's my advice:
  
  – Find a group to support you, to encourage you, to guilt you into DOING. If you can't find one, start one yourself. Random people enjoy having pancakes.
  
  – Make a goal. Then strike down things that are distracting you from that goal, especially video games. (Unless it's this book; finish reading it and THEN start.)
  
  – Put the fear of God into yourself. Okay, I'm not religious. Whatever spiritual ideas float your boat. Read some obituaries, watch the first fifteen minutes of Up, I don't care. Just scare yourself good. You have a finite number of toothpaste tubes you will ever consume while on this planet. Make the most of that clean tooth time. For yourself.
  
  The creative process isn't easy, even for chocolate-fountain people. It's more like a wobbly, drunken journey down a very steep and scary hill, not knowing if there's a sheer cliff at the end of it all. But it's worth the journey, I promise.
  
  I sometimes look at successful people and think, I could do that! I could be there. I WANT to be there!, coveting the end result without understanding the WORK that preceded it. I wanted to have written a script, but I had no idea how to get there. Thank goodness, I had people who encouraged me to attempt it, or I never would have been brave enough to try. I owe it all to the Chick-In ladies for their support; I needed it.
  
  I celebrated the New Year with a script in my hand and thought, I can't believe I did it!
  
  So... what do I do now?