Member-only story
MAKING IT
Can That Fire in Our Belly Kill Us?
On being driven to extremes
Readers, the following story was recently published in my Substack, Sherry Raw. I hope you enjoy it.
Nearly twenty years ago, I decided that I wanted to become a working screenwriter and I haven’t been able to let go of that dream. It’s an eternal flame that burns bright no matter how many years pass without it coming true.
As I’ve come very close to, as psychotic serial killer Francis Dolarhyde intones in the 1981, Thomas Harris novel, Red Dragon, “My Becoming,” I cannot help but tell myself that it will happen. I will get more than close. I will make it.
Yet, how ridiculous that sounds. A seventy-year-old woman who believes she has the stuff to make Hollywood sit up and take notice.
Wow. My right eye immediately started twitching after writing that number.
Seventy. I look at that, I understand what it means, but I can’t comprehend it, if you get where I’m coming from and I know many of you do. Most days, I don’t look my age nor feel it, but there it is. And I have the evidence. My birth certificate with the year 1953 hovers over my infantile “footprints.”
“How can this be true?” I’ve asked myself this over the years as I’ve worked myself into…
