Consider the Microgreen...

Okay. My feelings didn't get hurt. But I was worried they were going to....

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! Every ♥️ makes an impact on the life cycle of a microgreen….)

Over the past few years, the possibility that I’ve done everything wrong has crossed my mind more than once. A day. More than once a day. From little things, such as neglecting to learn the right creams and salves to apply to my skin before it puckered into an apple doll, to bigger choices like say, becoming a writer. I am a fortunate person. Opportunity has cast its butter yellow light in my direction, but have I grown toward it? Or, like a petulant sprout, have I crossed my little pea shoot arms and said, “No thank you, sun! I’d rather stay a tiny microgreen! Why experience the transcendence of a full bloom when I could be a snack for possums?!” (A little context: it’s a beautiful spring day in California and I just discovered butter yellow is the color of the season.)

Yesterday I spoke via TELEPHONE to an old, dear friend. In some ways, our lives are very similar. We are the same age, both writers, both married, both parents of two small children. Your textbook normies. We met doing comedy in New York in our mid-twenties, when I was a writers assistant at The Daily Show, convinced I would toil below the line forever, and he was a lawyer, regretting all the time he wasted becoming one. We bonded when we were placed on a regrettable improv team at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, which, after a consistent run of truly terrible performances, was quickly disbanded. (If you aren’t familiar with improv comedy, congratulations! The hours of vicarious embarrassment you’ve spared yourself have added years to your life!) I would take our team’s dissolution as a sign that I was not good at improv and exit Homer-Simpson-slinking-into-the-bushes-style from the art form. My friend would persevere because it brought him joy, earn a spot on a new team, and become the kind of guy who everyone in New York comedy knows, likes and respects. All to say, if you ever meet this guy, don’t feel the need to be nice to him. He could stand to be knocked down a peg.

Look at this filthy animal. Just waiting for you to turn your back on your garden….

Our divergent paths in improv would be the first of many times he would seize an opportunity that I would shrink away from. Fast forward a few years, and we were both writing for The Daily Show. And sure, getting there took hard work, persistence, and a lot of luck from each of us, but once we’d arrived, we approached the job differently. He threw himself into it whole-heartedly. I indulged my own crippling self-doubt more than I wish I had. Too often, I let it keep me from pitching a particular joke, or writing up a strange idea unsolicited, just to see where it would take me. I let myself stay the microgreen. After all, microgreens might not make a meal, but nutritionally speaking, they pack a far richer punch than any regular green. They live in the permanent state of exceptional potential.

My friend’s doggedness, intelligence and easy collaboration made the show, and my life at the show better. He batted down my own self-consciousness by believing in me, encouraging me, making me feel safer, looser, freer — all vital states of mind if you want to create something that isn’t total dog shit. Which is why, years later, when he was promoted over me even though I’d been at the show longer, I was ashamed, but not resentful. He’d shown the world he’d be better for the job. It’s also possible that his upward trajectory had less to do with our disparate attitudes, and more to do with him being smarter and more talented than I am, a distinction that can’t be undone no matter the work ethic. (When Jon Stewart stepped down as host, I remember hearing certain correspondents lament, “If only I’d done [insert behavior here] differently, I could be hosting the show,” and thinking, no, no. It could never have been you.) But, much like those lamenting correspondents, I have to believe in my own eminence. Being the only person who is me, I simply don’t have the luxury of accepting my limitations.

So, back to yesterday’s PHONE CALL. He is still at The Daily Show, now one of the folks running things. I told him how the job market sucks in LA. He told me that together, people back at the show are aging. (Less of an issue in an injectables mecca like Hollywood.) As we talked, I scrambled to put together a nutritious dinner my kids would refuse to eat, while he told me about moving uptown for the elite public school his kid got into. He talked about his demanding schedule, I told him I’d kill for an excuse to get away from my children. In some ways our lives are very similar. But mostly now, they are different.

When I talk to people who are still in New York, still working for The Daily Show, I worry about inflaming that aforementioned ache of having done everything wrong. I left the show. I worked for other shows that would never become the cultural institutions the place I began my career still is. I moved to LA. I had kids, which still means something different for a woman than a it does for a man. And because of these decisions, I don’t have things I want: money, stability, prestige, co-workers. How could my feelings not hurt, after staring directly into the blinding light of the road not taken?

Imagine my relief (my surprise!) when I hung up the phone and felt only the comfort of reconnecting with an old friend. The call did not hurt my feelings. It was more like drinking a hot toddy, which undoes the chill of loneliness and leaves you with a pretty sweet buzz. Inexplicably, perhaps, given the amount of complaining I do, I am happy to be where I am. Even when I’m unhappy, happiness lurks nearby, like some freak waiting to pelt me with a glitter bomb. I want to be here more than where I was. I like my kids. I like my husband. I like good weather and flowers and getting to write my own ideas instead of other people’s. Sometimes I have to remind myself that, of all the things for a person to want, feeling good is a pretty coveted one. I have not always had it, but now I do. I’m not entirely responsible for the victory, but I definitely helped.

Should I be embarrassed to find it a revelation that I can be trusted to maneuver my own life? I haven’t botulized myself by eating out of fucked up cans, or lit myself on fire with the gas stove, so shouldn’t I know that by now? Probably. But if, like me, your life is animated by the constant uncertainty that you’ll ever be able to get where you’re going, it doesn’t hurt to remember that you’ve already gotten yourself where you are. Maybe this microgreen can become a full grown leaf yet. I’ve kept the possums at bay this far.