by Andy Greene

It was Friday, the day of the writers retreat. Part of me wants to add an exclamation point to that sentence, but that’s not how I felt that morning.

Everything had been packed. I had done my preparations. I had justified my lack of preparations. It was too late to do anything else. I was never one for cramming before a test. I preferred to stew . . . 

The weekend was a big opportunity—I would get to meet picture book agents and editors in person, face-to-face! They would read my work. (Gulp, they would read my work?!)

I was trying not to have unwieldy expectations. I’d been in Los Angeles for over ten years. I’d collected a lot of disappointments, near misses, teases, broken promises, rote panels, and terrible networking events along the way. I’d been sending my work out to agents and editors during all of that time, and receiving something less than crickets. Crickets are soothing—Jiminy, they can even be your conscience! That morning, I was wishing I had a chorus of crickets in my brain instead of the warring orchestras of Hope and Doubt. 

Hope knew I was good at what was to come. “You can get an agent out of this,” he whispered. 

“You better get an agent out of this,” another voice piped up on cue. Whenever belief in myself managed to sprout, the Pressure Police arrived, sirens blaring, drowning everything out. I didn’t know this voice was Doubt at the time, because Doubt is devious and wears many masks.

But I’d been here before. This rerun was always in syndication in my mind, although I’d never received any residuals. Instead of allowing Hope and Doubt to engage in an endless back-and-forth, instead of hearing them out, the Council of Andys (which comprises every voice, every part of me) put them both away and changed the channel. Literally. I put on Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. 

Films are my happy place. For better or worse, they are the visual and emotional language I know best and therefore seek when I’m sad, anxious, angry, nervous. So, I turned to the hero of my childhood, the movie star on the poster that still hangs in my childhood bedroom, and fell into his true-life story. Of struggle, of poverty, of Hollywood, of the Big Break™, of alcoholism, of being unwilling to sit still. And then of being diagnosed with a disease that made stillness impossible.

Right as things were about to get darkest, I couldn’t fight time any longer. It was time to go. There was no DeLorean in a garage that could take me away from now.

I didn’t even have a garage. I only had street parking and my Granny’s ‘99 Subaru. Granny was the first picture book writer in the family but she had never been given that validation. More importantly, she had never given it to herself. Could I do what she hadn’t?

An hour later, I was sitting in an auditorium, a gray nondescript room. I sat there, alone amid dozens of other writers, desperately nervous, trying not to sweat. A goal that has always made me sweat more. It was nearly time for the wild rumpus to start, but I wasn’t ready.

A chorus of something, definitely not crickets, played in their head.

I yawned. I yawn when I’m anxious, because I’m not breathing. Back in eighth grade, Coach Hopper “jokingly” called me out in front of my entire baseball team for yawning dozens of times during our All-Star championship game. The joke belied a devastating implication: that I didn’t care. I felt like my body had betrayed me. This moment had been enshrined in shame and guilt until years of therapy helped me learn better.

My body hadn’t betrayed me. My body was trying to tell me something then, and here it was trying to tell me something again. Was I going to listen?

I remembered how it took his Parkinson’s diagnosis for Michael J. Fox to realize the importance of stillness. 

I remembered to breathe.

I took out my notebook and started speaking to Doubt, to that nervous, shy part of me who didn’t know if they were good enough.

“It’s okay to be afraid. To be nervous, worried, anxious,” I thought and I wrote. 

This was Hope again, the part of me who always says “Yes” to things that scare me. The one who dares a challenge.

“I understand. I feel that way too,” Hope added. “We’re in this together. All of us.”

He meant all of Andy, every part of us, not just the two in dialogue. Reading my notes back now, he was also talking about every one of the writers around me. A community-in-waiting to belong to.

“Our goal is to learn,” he said. “To grow.”

I was skeptical. That sounded great but didn’t feel quite right.

‘Our goal is to learn,’ he said. ‘To grow.’
I was skeptical. That sounded great but didn’t feel quite right.

Faced with clarifying my own feelings in that moment, I pivoted the conversation into fiction. Now I was writing a scene from “Before the Ballet,” a story I created on the spot. I needed to slip into another character’s personality in order to continue my own inner dialogue.

“Do you still want to do this?” Hope asked.

“I’m not sure,” Doubt, the Ballet Dancer, whispered.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” 

I don’t think he had ever said that to me and meant it. But he meant it now.

“What if I suck? What if I fail?” She meant to write “fall,” because this was about the ballet, remember, not the writers retreat. 

Hope responded to what we meant: “Everybody falls. But not everybody gets back up.”

“Have you fallen before?” we asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I got back up. Finished the dance.”

My notes end there, but the story doesn’t, which is good, because it definitely needs another draft.

I’ve fallen a lot in my life. Almost always because of this push-pull anxiety between the different voices, different identities, different parts of me struggling to be heard and my impatience and unwillingness to sit still and listen.

Thanks to a breath and an assist from Michael J. Fox, I found the stillness that so often eluded me, a stillness necessary to understand myselves. 

Because of this simple conversation, I was able to give that gift to myselves that weekend. Every Andy in the Council came into alignment—and when alignment happens, we can achieve our goals. 

When the conference began and our retreat leader implored us all to identify our “Why,” I wrote the following: 

Telling stories, connecting with people when it’s hard for me, hard for all of us, is my why. I have to share these stories, myselves. It’s how I operate, learn, live in this world and find hope and belonging. To make-believe a better world.

That night, in my double room that felt suspiciously like college, I returned to my journal.

I’ve been doing the work. I can feel it. I do belong. I deserve to be here. I can do this. I believe in myself. 

TRUST. 

I love you, Andy.

The next night, I returned to my journal. The grand finale of the retreat was in the morning, where we would all read the first pages of a manuscript in front of everyone in that auditorium where the weekend began. This daunting task would normally be incendiary fuel for Doubt. Instead, I sent this text to my partner:

Two weeks later, I signed with my first-ever agent.

That quieted Doubt, for a little while at least. But it’s not about silencing Doubt or any of the parts inside me. All those parts, all those voices remain and always will because they have something to say. And, as I learned during that retreat weekend, I’m only going to go as far as I’m able to listen to them.

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Andy Greene is a writer, director and actor, an artist rediscovering their child inside. Andy is in post-production on Contraction, a psychological horror short. They are the host of The Naked Man Podcast, a mental health odyssey that explores vulnerability and masculinity by confronting what scares them. Andy lives in Glendale, CA, with their partner and monstrous cat.

Photos courtesy of Andy Greene