Where's my Orson Welles?

It was a little over a year ago when I had my first existential crisis.

It was a Friday night. Halbastram and I were still living in East Lawrence in a crappy two-bedroom with barely enough room for two people, let alone two people with mountains of belongings. He was still driving drunken KU students between the campus and Mass. St. bars on the weekends, so I was left to my own devices. As I usually did on those lonely nights, I had a couple of beers as I watched a whole lot of nothing on TV. I found that I needed the alcohol and the mindless entertainment to take my mind off of the fact that Halbastram was driving around drunken students who could turn into dangerous drunken idiots depending on the moon. Except this night, my mind refused to rest. And it was nothing to do with inebriated students. It was about my place in life and how slowly anything was progressing for me.

I can’t remember how exactly I ended up on Orson Welles- I wasn't watching Citizen Kane or anything with him in it- but that’s where I crash-landed. For reasons only my lubricated brain and subconscious know, I began ruminating on the fact that Mr. Welles, that wonderful man, had written, produced, directed and starred in the greatest movie in the history of the world by the time he was 26. At 26, I was busy going through a bankruptcy, a foreclosure and working a shitty retail job. And where was I at 30? Sitting in my crappy living room, drunk and still unpublished, crying about how Orson Welles had achieved so much more than me before he was my age.

Now, if this were an inspirational movie or novel, this is where my character, after hitting rock bottom, would toss that bottle aside, pull out her laptop and start making waves.

Except I’d been doing that for the better part of a decade with minimal results. I was tired of that trope because it wasn't a trope that worked in my favor.

So I did the next best thing: drunk-texted my best friend and whined about it.

The beautiful thing about my best friend- My Lady- is that she’s always been supportive of me and my decisions, whether I decide to live as a housewife or work crappy retail or write the Great American Novel. She doesn't judge nor does she scold. She listens and offers advice, but never pushes. And I like to think that I am the same with her. When she moved to Hollywood to work in radio, I was beyond elated. There was never any jealousy- only sadness, because she’d be so far away from me.

So, in the midst of an existential crisis, I trusted her more than anyone else.

And, although I wasn't even sure what it was I wanted -needed- to hear at that moment, somehow she found it. The text message has been lost in the tangle of the thousands of others we've sent each other since, so while I don’t have the exact wording, her message was essentially this: that I shouldn't compare myself to Orson Welles because we’re all meant to do things differently and that we all take different paths to get there, and that I’ll get to where I’m meant to be soon enough.

Summarized as it is above, you could probably find guidance counselors and self-help gurus across the country giving the same advice for a fee. But when coming from someone who truly loves you when you’re at a ridiculous low point, it’s the difference between cracking open another bottle and choosing instead to go to bed and attempting to start again when your head's clear.

Nearing 32, I’m still unpublished, but I don’t feel sorry for myself anymore. I still find myself thinking about all that Orson Welles accomplished at a young age, but now it’s more from a place of awe than jealousy. I completed my first crappy novel and I’m constantly fine tuning it. Maybe it’ll get published this year; maybe it’ll get published when I’m 40. Or 50. As long as I keep working, I feel fine.