My 2005 head shot, which was clearly very serious business.
I know I said yesterday that I wasn't going to publish the post I wrote over on Medium here because I figured many of you have already heard bits and pieces of my "I was fired from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" story, but last night I was laying in my bed, half-reading about the Taylor Swift and Katy Perry drama but mostly thinking about why I'd published an original piece on a site other than my own - which is not something that I typically do; I like to save the best stuff for you guys - and you know what I realized? The real reason I didn't originally want to publish this post here was because the people who read here every day know me. Really, really well. And sometimes it's easier to release the stories that make me feel the most vulnerable into a world populated by strangers rather than writing them on the walls of my home.
It is humiliating, that some (many?) people think that the most interesting thing about me is the fact that I was once almost on a TV show, and then wasn't. It is embarrassing, explaining to people why the fact that I don't act anymore is a positive thing for me, why I truly, truly wouldn't have it any other way, and watching their foreheads wrinkle in pity anyway. If you are a person who was once an actor - or a musician, or an artist, or a writer, or anything "creative" - in some ways you will always be an ex-actor/musician/writer; that will always be the way you are introduced at a party (the subtext, of course, being that of course you wish you were something other than what you are right now). And so for years, I tried to bend and twist my past into a story that wouldn't make people whisper behind my back once I'd walked away: god, could you even imagine how much that sucks for her?!
The Choices We Make
I may grow to understand San Jose; I may learn some of San Francisco's secrets, but New York City is like a piano I can play with my eyes closed. I miss it.
Late To The Game
IG : @ramshackleglam
Sometime around the beginning of high school, my father told me about this thing called the Internet and asked me to sit down so he could show it to me. I rolled my eyes and said it was obviously not going to be a thing, and besides, I had a Melrose Place to watch.
Twenty or so years later, my manager and I were sitting together at lunch and she took my phone from me and physically downloaded Instagram from the app store, because despite the fact that most of my colleagues had signed up a solid two years earlier, I would never, ever have done it otherwise.
Or Maybe Something Different
So often, I find myself thinking that my daughter is so much easier than my son. In some ways it's true; Goldie is a bit more easygoing than her brother, a bit less prone to frustration. But as time goes on, I'm starting to realize more and more that the primary reason why my son sometimes seems "more difficult" than his sister is that every single parenting question or problem or situation that arises with him marks our first time taking a crack at it.
When Indy was a baby he cried endlessly, and it was only once these episodes were many months in the past that I realized that he had been colicky. Had my daughter cried like that I would have known what I was looking at immediately. Potty training was endless and exhausting because we tried to start training our son before he was ready; this time around we know not to push, and already the process is far less stressful for all involved.
I went into parenting very certain of how I'd react to things like temper tantrums: I would not tolerate them. If they happened I would ignore them, and in that way my children would learn that screaming and crying achieves nothing.
That One Story I Skipped
Hell's Kitchen, NYC | November 2011
How is it possible that I've never written about breastfeeding? I've written about Boobs After Baby (oh my god). I've written about the challenges of returning to work with a newborn. I've written about my fear that I might not love my second child as much as my first (spoiler: I do). How have I not written about a topic that's an absolutely consuming one for new mothers, not to mention a controversial one for what seems like everyone on the planet?
But after a request from a reader I went hunting for a post in which I talk about my own experiences with breastfeeding, and didn't find anything, save for an offhand mention here and there. Apparently breastfeeding is a topic that I've skipped around for nearly five years now...and when I thought about it I realized that there is a good reason for this: for a long, long time I was afraid to touch this subject, because I was afraid of what my choices might say about me.
