The 100th Corner: On Not Giving Up

When I was 21, an optimistic college graduate whose future shown bright with possibility, my path had been clear. I wanted to be a writer, a filmmaker. I wanted to create stories that captured magic and hope, like Spielberg’s E.T. – a movie I still can’t watch without sobbing, because that strange creature’s only desire was to find his place – to go home. To be home. I craved the experience of inhabiting other people’s skin, to understand their hardships and yearnings, and then put those emotional truths out into the world. I embarked on that path with my ex-husband as co-screenwriters, climbing the Hollywood ladder with some sparks of success, until it became clear that our marriage was not working, and that I needed to leave. But leaving him, leaving that life, meant abandoning my dreams and my identity as a screenwriter, the person that I had become. 

To divorce him, was to divorce who I had known myself to be, and cause all the fruits of my hard labor to rot and disintegrate. I said goodbye to my dreams, and started over, from the beginning, on a blank new path with no visible ending in sight.

I wrote a novel, published essays, and founded a popular blog that followed my journey as a Jewish divorcee, The Cougel Chronicles: Tales of a Jewish Cougar. Friends at my beloved Greenwich Village cafe who for ten years saw me pounding my keyboard with sparks flying from under my burning fingertips called me “the girl that could,” and the obliterated letters on all of my keyboards are a testament. I persistently cultivated my craft while simultaneously buoying my hopes, as I got literary representation and the acknowledgement that I wasn’t delusional. I had found my calling, and finally, my voice.

People urged me, “Don’t give up. Keep going.” And I did. Not because of some trope, or because of a bruised ego, but because I had no say in the matter. I had to, I have to, create. When I’m not, I am lost. And in those moments of frustration and despair where I ignore the desire, when it feels like a curse I struggle to slay, and focus on other things instead, it feels as if I am wearing the wrong shoes. I am uncomfortable, off my stride, and it hurts. 

But the alternative – the decision to no longer write – felt like a denial and betrayal of the self, of my identity and purpose. Sometimes I felt like I was a windup toy that got stuck spinning in the corner, knocking against the wall blindly, hoping to one day break through that wall.

And then, an opening emerged. It was a voice inside me that told me to reach out to someone I needed, who I hadn’t connected with in years, who had been a painful casualty of my divorce – my former film agent. She still believed in me and fervently wanted to get my stories back on the map.

I mentioned one to her that had been a nagging at me, which came from my own experience and struggles of trying to be a mother in her 40’s, but with an AI twist. She ordered me in her typical manner “to get my effin ass in the chair and pump the mother effin story out.”

I couldn’t argue with that, or with her. After all, the little voice that knew I should reach out to her predicted precisely that. And so I obeyed. As weeks of my pursuing fertility treatments had me cranky, sore, and tired, I wrote and rewrote, recognizing the irony and synchronicity that I was researching and writing about the joys and trials of being a mother as I was on the brink of becoming one myself.

But as the saying goes, “Man plans, God laughs.” Not that God was laughing at the crushing news that no, I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not just yet anyway. In hindsight, God was embracing me, asking me to continue to put my faith in him and in myself, at the signs which were blessings disguised as misfortunes, and in the prolonged timeline – to hang on just a little bit longer, because he had a plan in store for me, a new ending I could not predict or envision.

CS Lewis said, “You can’t go back to the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

I can’t go back and change the choices I had made since starting over. I don’t want to. It wouldn’t have led me to where I am now: finding and marrying my wonderful husband, my soul mate. My beautiful home. My supportive family and friends. And a new rascal puppy, a Hurricane Maria rescue. And looking back to that bright eyed girl of 21 who knew in her gut that she was destined to create, albeit all the arduous detours – I wouldn’t change that beginning either.

But I did change the ending. My short story got the highest praise, and the sweetest reward. It got optioned and praised by no other than the legendary Steven Spielberg and his studio, Amblin.

The creator of my beacon of hope and love, E.T. I have come full circle, with the culmination of years writing prose intersecting with Hollywood, where I began. 

I too am finally home.

Listen to that voice. Listen to yourself. Pay attention to who you are. And don’t give up. The happy ending may just be around the (100th) corner.

P.S. Turns out, unbeknownst to me, that the mascot at my beloved cafe that I’ve been drawn to for ten years, is none other than E.T.

PPS. Update: since the origination of this post, the movie has progressed, secured a director and is on track to getting made.