Chapter 54 Not That Bad?
Whitney thinks this isn’t that bad.
She picked me up outside Reed’s. And after word vomiting my last forty-eight hours, her first sentence was this isn’t that bad.
She went on to say I’m the most capable person she knows, and everything in my life that’s now royally fucked can be fixed.
I asked her who the fuck is gonna fix it?
And she promptly responded: You are a dumbass. Followed by: You’re a fixer. It’s what you do.
Then she dropped me off at the airport. Not exactly the comforting rescue I was hoping for.
Now I’m at a gate for the next flight to Newark. Stuck. Sitting with my thoughts. Waiting, like a teleportation-less peasant.
I don’t feel like a fixer. I feel like a rampant, oblivious ruiner of all good things. An incessant determined trier and depressingly consistent fail-er.
I sacrificed the journal for nothing. I exhale a breath, dropping my head in my hands.
That task was a message in itself.
Write the pilot to Love Today? Translation: Sit and calm the fuck down for a few hours before you do something stupid.
A story is pulling together as I board my flight.
Of course it is. The second the pitch is off the table, the characters I’ve been fleshing out on paper over the past month come to life. They’re talking. Making decisions. Moving through their world in my mind with specific mannerisms and tics. Arcs are taking shape.
When my ass hits middle seat of row twenty-three, I shove in my AirPods and pull out my laptop.
The script pours out of me unprompted. And it just keeps coming. I let it flow into the keyboard until my computer dies. Then I whip out a notebook and continue via pen.
When I land in Newark, I have a pilot script on my computer, and I’m staring at a handwritten outline of season one.
The lead will be a relationship therapist who’s never managed to procure a successful relationship herself.
Each episode we’ll focus on her trying to help one of her patients.
The patient’s issue will be prevalent to something our relationship therapist is dealing with in her personal life.
She won’t see the parallels, of course, but we do once she leaves the office.
She’s great at her job. But she doesn’t practice what she preaches.
Her mental health is in flux, but she’s not acknowledging it.
She’ll get too invested in her patients’ lives. She’ll befriend some of them. Connect some of them with her friends. We’ll see the topics running through our most viral Love Today podcast episodes mirrored in the lives of her weekly regulars.
As season one progresses, little by little we learn that our relationship therapist hasn’t quite cracked how to fully give herself to another person romantically.
To fully merge her life with another’s feels dangerous.
She’s independent to a degree that’s inhibiting her ability to love, preventing her from reaching the goal of finding a life partner.
We witness her journey as she becomes cognizant of this.
As she struggles to figure out what she’s doing wrong.
Which of her habits are hurting her quest to find a romantic soulmate?
We’ll see her trying to fall in love with lots of slightly wrong people along the way. It’ll be funny and relatable. We’ll enjoy some of them, but we’ll know it’s not going to work out. We’ll start to recognize her patterns.
Eventually she’ll meet the right person in a difficult circumstance.
We’ll root for her as she trips up and down to figure out how to navigate their connection.
As she wrestles with the idea of how logistically complicated it is to try to be with this person.
With whether it’s worth the heartache it’ll take to make it work long term.
As she ignores her own advice along the way.
As she figures out she’s not quite the person she’s aspiring to be and grapples with the changes she has to make to become her best self.
The show will have a happy ending.
The jury’s out on me.