Greetings!

Yes, I’m still alive. Thank you for taking the time to come back and check out this last part. It’s pretty wild.

So, I left off at the low point.

No money. No Job. Until a friend threw me a bone and the next thing I knew, I was working in development at an indie in Bristol during the week, and going home for the weekends.

Now, what was interesting about Bristol (besides all the Buddhist meditation centres, yum), was the writing situation. I stayed with a couple who rented out their spare room to temporary TV people who worked in the area.

But this was no regular spare room in a regular house.

They were a specific category of hoarder which does not have a name. It was not garbage everywhere. It was wondrous and glorious vintage things. Dozens of piles of china. Victorian circus costumes. Feathers. Old newspapers and journals. Baskets. Knick-knacks and curiosities.

The problem was there was nowhere to sit. Even in the room I rented. Nowhere. I wasn’t alone in there- there was the bald 1920’s mannequin that was wedged up against the wall. From time to time she would fall on me when I was asleep, and I swear to god my soul leapt out at least two of those times.

So I’d have to sit on the bed, for 3 or 4 hours every day after work writing. Working. Torturing myself. Every day. For 6 months. Because having felt what I did the year before – sitting in a dark gallery, looking down at the stage, watching my stuff being filmed – that was a rush that needed to be felt again.

And then, the Bristol job let me go early. It was understandable – my heart wasn’t in it. All I cared about was scripts and mannequin resale listings on eBay. The big boss said something to me at my leaving do –

Go do what you’re meant to do.

Which I strongly suspect really meant, “Thank fuck you’re out of our hair now”.

Anyway, in a tremendous stroke of luck, I landed a job on a surreal, bizarre, amazing sketch show.

It was FANTASTIC.

Imagine yourself as a kid – 7 or 8, and getting every single present that you want from Santa at Christmas.

Every. Single One. That’s what it was like.

I wrote, rewrote, helped plan the season, worked in writers’ rooms, got to go to costume, bonded with the actors, and then direct the first edit. The laughing. The camaraderie. The excitement.

We got an order for a second series within 4 or 6 weeks of broadcast.

This was it! THIS. WAS. IT.

Except it wasn’t. Once again, after the job was done, everything dried up. I was out again. And this time I couldn’t get a job in TV at all.

So…wait for it…I temped at a law firm, with a boss who SCREAMED LIKE A LUNATIC at the kids who worked there. It was like being around my mom’s family again. But more pleasant.

The best bit? A 3-hour round trip commute every day.

Once again, I sat wondering what the hell I did wrong? How did I end up here? How did I get these tiny tastes of what I know I was supposed to be doing, only to end up ever further behind than I was before?

What was extra depressing was that the kids I worked with (fresh out of uni) were charming and delightful. And every single one of them hated working there. They didn’t want to be lawyers. But their parents made them. I couldn’t get it – I told them, the world won’t implode if they told their parents no.

That life was too short. That nothing else mattered except their dreams.

But inside I felt like a phony. What did I know about going for your dreams? I was shit at it! And here I was telling them to go for some unstable life? Possibly filled with unheated apartments in the winters and carrots and potatoes for food?

(The grand irony is the law firm offered me a full-time job.)

But I couldn’t take it because I managed to land a script-writing job! An animation! Hooray! It would last a good couple months and THANK CHRIST no more shouting man! Plus, I was going to be featured in a big writers-overcoming-adversity profile as part of a series with lots of Hollywood writers. And I got a job teaching one class a week to the media students at my local uni!

It was back to my destiny! And this time I was gonna make it!

Then, COVID hit.

The entire industry shut down. Everything shut down. Like many of us, I had no idea what was going to become of me.

And then I got the autism diagnosis. That explained A LOT, including why I couldn’t understand why I kept getting people so wrong. I knew from researching autism because of my autistic soon that our employment rate is about 22%. That’s any kind of employment.

The penny dropped.

Onto my head from the top balcony of the Empire State Building.

I had no idea what my future was going to look like, but at least the past was less of a puzzle.

All I could do was look after my son during lockdown and figure out how to make the best of a shitty, shitty situation.

Spending all that time with my boy was a gift. And there was something else that was a surprise gift. The entire writing (and TV!) community went on Twitter and started talking. A lot. I jumped in and got involved. Leading sessions, co-leading online talks, making friends, and networking.

And I started circulating a script I wrote about my time in a lunatic Baptist cult. It was a comedy, obviously. Some writers loved it, but the industry people who read it didn’t get it.

Then the sketch show people got in touch. The new season was going to go ahead- just with super strict COVID rules. HOORAY!!!! They encouraged me to apply for the job again, but added (and this felt a bit off) that if I didn’t get it, I could still write on the show.

I didn’t get it. They offered two sketches – at – get this – the lowest rate possible for writers. What was their reason for that? They countered with this gem – what had I written since the last series?

Ooft. That sent me into a tailspin where I questioned everything. You know that sense of overwhelming unsafety where you can’t see how to get out of it? You can’t picture how it will get better? And on top of that the utter confusion of how on god’s green earth you got there in the first place?

Turns out that’s the exact place where you have nothing left to lose.

And so you start taking chances because why the fuck not? It can’t get worse, right?

The first chance was accepting that the “normal” way of doing things clearly wasn’t going to work for me.

The second chance was friendly-stalking the comedy director I was convinced would love to direct my church script until he accepted it to read.

And he did. And that’s when everything changed.

The next thing I know I’m on a call with him. And then things happened very fast. It got optioned by an A-list film star. Then I scored a job script editing. Then a few other deals started. Collaboration. Ghostwriting comedy. Another script optioned. And a creative partnership with that director.

Stuff’s happening. It’s finally happening.

And I don’t know if I had to get to the low point where I had nothing left in me. That might not be something that’s ever solved.

But the point is that no matter what happens, I learned the greatest lesson possible for weirdo misfits like me. It takes a lot more energy to try and fit in and prove your worthiness to people who will never get it, versus finding the people who understand you. The people who you naturally belong to.

And I think I’ve found that now.

Thanks for reading this. I hope you feel some encouragement if you’re struggling too.