On set in St. Louis, Spring 2016

My life, when I was an actor, was not a happy place to be. I'm sure (or I think) there are plenty of happy, well-adjusted actors out there...but for me? My acting career and my unhappiness were tied up together in a big, aching knot.

Because life as an actor is a neverending emotional rollercoaster: you go way, way, way up, putting in enormous amounts of time and energy and hope and faith, grabbing at whatever tiny sparks of positive reinforcement enter your orbit...and then all of a sudden - in an instant - it ends with “no" (no, you’re not good enough; no, you’re not pretty enough; no, you're not connected enough; you’re just not enough). So you come down fast, and hard.

I think I lived six or seven lifetimes yesterday. It literally did not stop from the moment I opened my eyes at six until the moment my head hit my pillow at midnight.

Oh, excerpt for once. I have this little quirk: interacting with other human beings in an environment where the focus is on me generates this very specific kind of stress that has the unfortunate byproduct of making me fall asleep. You know those fainting goat videos? Like that.

So yeah, I fell asleep flat on my stomach on my parents' bed an hour before I was due to walk onto a stage and talk about pregnancy for an hour and a half. I did end up making it on time, but my micro-nap had the effect of making me a little loopy, so I went ahead and told an audience of strangers about that time when I was giving birth to my second child and was so terrified of having a repeat of my terrible, horrible, accidentally natural first birth experience that I hit the little GIVE ME DRUGS button as often as I possibly could, which meant that by the time my daughter came into the world I was a very special kind of high that made me think it might be a good idea to pull a Kourtney Kardashian and pull my daughter out...myself. The teeny tiny iota of my brain that was still functioning properly at that moment very fortunately alerted me to the fact that this would be an extremely bad idea, so I went ahead and let the doctor handle the baby-extrication process, but oh man, it was close.

Here is me, sitting on the roof of my car somewhere along I-5, holding up signs that my son and I scrawled on the blank pages of a Melissa & Doug coloring book that we picked up at a roadside gift shop specializing in BBQ rubs and adorable wall hangings that read "Wine A Bit; You'll Feel Better."

The signs I'm holding in that photo, in case you can't read them, say "SCIENCE MATTERS" and "FACTS MATTER." My son wanted his to say "MAD SCIENCE." We had been reading about Saturday's March For Science all morning, but hadn't thought to plan ahead so we could join one. We drove through miles and miles of dusty fields on our way home from the campsite where we'd spent our weekend, trying to explain what was happening to our son via the story of the Lorax. Finally we stopped, and bought a coloring book to make signs with. Then we parked our car by the freeway off-ramp, set beach towels on the blisteringly hot roof, and I crawled up, aware that I was about to seriously embarrass myself.

Then I started yelling. Mostly call-and-response chants, because despite the fact that they don't make a whole lot of sense for a party of one, I like them.