20 Years

In the cab, a promo for The View points out that the show is 20 years old, and I am reminded that it has been 20 years since, having been let go from One Life to Live, I was scouting the industry for places where a person like me might land. That seems like another lifetime, a lifetime when resumes were still snail-mailed, when I was pre-children and pre-so many things.

I never got anywhere with trying to work on The View. While it may have been another lifetime, it was not so different from this one when it came to finding work--then too, connections did what a resume never could, and soap folks were rarely thought capable of doing shows other than soaps.

Yet, in those 20 years, I have done what wouldn't have happened had I landed at The View back then--I have worked on sitcoms and in news. I have edited music videos and web shows and created and distributed an educational video. I have returned to places I left, and traveled to places I never thought to go. And, oh, yeah, I have spent some time, and a lot of energy, raising kids. In some ways, you could call those 20 years several lifetimes.

At the time, The View, and other places like it, felt like brick walls--places closed to me because of where I had come from, what I had done, and the people I didn't know. But, in an amount of time which, put up against 20 years, now seems short, I had found other places--places where I knew people or people were willing to take a chance on what I'd done and where I'd been. And now, twenty years later, The View is still standing, and guess what? So am I. We have both, I suppose, undergone lots of changes. Had I landed there in that moment all those years ago, I might still be there now--or I might not. We never really know where the one step we take, or the one step we don't--or can't--take, will deliver us. We simply work around the brick walls and the closed doors, until we find the places that let us in. And once in, we simply do what we can, until it's time to move on. 

And then somehow, while we're just doing what we're doing, 20 years go by...