Never Surrender Pursuing Your Passion

Many years ago, when I lived in Southern California studying engineering at California State University at Long Beach (Yes, Long Beach State. The 49ers. No, not football. The football program ended in 1991 the year I started college, but that is an entirely different story!) I watched Chris Carter's new X-Files show as I studied. I loved the strange and unexplained phenomenon featured long before the plot became an alien agenda. I dreamed of writing for X Files. Even after I graduated and became a bridge engineer, I plotted story lines and mimicked Fox Mulder and Dana Scully's repartee. I counted sentences. I counted syllables. I counted beats. Yes, by rewinding a VCR. Yes, THAT obsessive.

Then a few years later, listening to Zydeco at a music festival in Sacramento, I happened to meet somebody who actually worked on the X-Files show. We struck up a friendship based on our love of the Sci-Fi show. He told me David Duchovny and others wrote and directed episodes and that X Files would accept speculative scripts. I had some great ideas and immediately started working on three of them. Once I finished the first script, I gathered courage to call Kim Manners, producer and director for X Files at the time. And, remarkably, I reached him. Miracle in itself! 

Mr. Manners liked my idea and really thought it had hope, but at the time, he explained, they were negotiating a new contract with the studio. As part of the new contract, they were required to follow an alien conspiracy theory story line. My script was not about aliens or the alien conspiracy theory; rather it was on Native American shamans. (See X Files is FBI and FBI has jurisdiction over tribal lands.) 

IMHO (of course!), it was a wonderful script and I still laugh when I read it today (Well, I think I'm funny!). But hearing Kim's news dejected me, and I put the scripts away. What I should’ve done was use the script for a writing sample or calling card for other writing jobs. But instead I quit. I was a new mom, head of household with all the responsibilities and obligations that entails. Excuses. Excuses. Blah Blah Blah. I retreated into my safe, secure engineering career abandoning my passion. 

But here is the thing. You can never get a true passion or desire out of your mind. And, if you are like me, you won't stop thinking or obsessing over that passion. PRO TIP: Don't give up! Go after it! So, here I find myself behind a computer screen. This time, I am not calculating bridge beams or analyzing mast arm foundation depths. I am sculpting scenes into eight mini movie formats, mirroring antagonists and protagonists, and bending character arcs. Whether I am successful or not is moot because you cannot abandon your passion. And, passions generally yield successes! 

I made this!

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Namaste.

Lesley Davidson