Baby’s first rage write: 11/8/16

Backing up to tell the tale of my relationship with anger and writing. In an eerie Covid-19 coincidence, I told a version of the below at a storytelling show benefitting the ACLU 48 hours before LA was ordered into quarantine. Or is there no such thing as a coincidence anymore? Is everything Covid? If so, are you there Covid? It’s me, Jessie. Can I please have myself back?

The prompt for the show was: tell a story about your reaction to the 2016 presidential election. Here was my reaction.

I have a very simple relationship with anger. I don’t do it. I don’t usually get angry. No huffing or puffing or yelling or crying or – I don’t know – smashing plates? It’s all very foreign to me.

I obviously have anger. We all have anger. Mine is just typically hiding. And I now know – after a dozen wasted trips to the gastro and six beautiful years in therapy – that it’s most commonly hiding in my stomach.

Example: two weeks ago I got screwed on a TV project. The details aren’t important just know that I made less money for doing more work.

When it happened, I felt this familiar tightness rise in my stomach – kinda up where the lactose intolerance lives. And so I took that feeling and ran to my car so that I could pound on the steering wheel and scream like everyone woman on TV.  But by the time I buckled my seat belt – safety first – the desire to scream had passed, like it almost always does. The pain in my stomach sunk from up where it’s hot and tight and feels like it’s about to escape out my mouth…or eyes – down where it sort of lingers as this low uncomfortable aching black muck.

And that is my typical experience with anger. A weird unconscious body wave that starts high and lands low. As a result I am usually bloated and rarely poop.

But Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 was not a typical day.  

On that Tuesday morning I woke up feeling fabulous, and I promptly pooped.

Then, my husband and I drove to the Sony lot to do some final phone banking, for Hillary to be very clear.  

After that I went to H&M to buy some pants suits I could donate to Dress For Success in Hillary’s honor. I bought a white one in my size so I could celebrate in it for the rest of the day, before donating it to a young woman that would no doubt ascend from poverty to presidency just like Hill.  

That evening we took our dog and two bottles of Prosecco to a friend’s house to watch Hillary Rodham Clinton become the first female president of the United States. I believed with my whole heart and my entire stomach that she was going to win. Yes, I know she’s a complicated person with a complicated past and very complicated marriage, but I love her. I’ve always loved her.

I was not prepared for what came next, and neither was my stomach.

By the time they announced that she’d lost North Carolina it hurt so much that I could barely stand up straight. It burned up high, in the too-much-cheese spot. I was angry.

We left the party, but my husband and I sat up in bed until they announced that Hillary had called Donald to concede. And then the pain in my stomach rushed up my throat and through my head and out my eyes. And my husband held me while I cried.

I’m about as good at crying as I am at being angry. I can get a few tears out, which gives me a little belly pain release, but my brain cuts me off and the tears suck back in. Then they join the ouch up high which, before I know it, becomes the ache down low.

Most times. But not this time.

This time that high tight pain stayed. It was still there two days later when I flew to Boston to be a speaker at my alma mater’s annual Women’s Conference. Yeah. I know.

I had, for many years, kept a blog called 20-Nothings. It had been very kindly named to Forbes Top 10 Websites for Millennials. So I was invited to give a speech about how to give voice to Millennial women - 48 hours after the voice of all women was fucked up the ass.

By that point Hillary had given her own speech. The concession speech. It know it was beautiful. I know it was powerful. Yeah, that “to all the little girls” line was good. But I fucking hated that speech. Which is exactly what I said during the Q&A of my own. A girl asked, “what did you think of Hillary’s concession speech?” And I said, “I fucking hated it.”  It was so steady and even and fair. It felt dishonest. Why wasn’t she angry! Where the fuck is her anger??

Ironic, I know. Also not a popular opinion, at least not in that room. “When they go low, we go high!” someone yelled from the crowd. (A personal Covid prophecy if ever there was one…) “Let’s just do one more question,” the event moderator said.

But I realized - after I said fuck on stage at a private Catholic college - that the pain in my stomach was eased. In its place was this energy in my arms and a rapid-fire series of thoughts in my brain. I had to write my own concession speech for Hillary. The speech I think she should have given.

I wrote it on the plane ride home.

I wrote through a series of tears and giddy smiles. I wrote from the place I pull from to do a really bad ass lion’s breath in yoga. Or the part of my body that I squeeze when it’s time to hit the highest high note in Since You’ve Been Gone. Or, I realized after I finished writing it, the absolute depths of my anger.

Then I realized I wasn’t done writing. When I got home to LA I kept envisioning this series of scenes that had to come before my Hillary concession speech - all the things that I desperately wanted her to do from the moment she found out Donald had “won” to the moment she’d give that speech. So I listened to my rage-filled gut and spent eight full days writing scenes. When I was done, I had 30 pages of them: a ½ hour television pilot. And then I pooped.

The pilot that I wrote was insane. The basic plot is that Hillary doesn’t concede the election on November 8th then flees her home in the middle of the night on a journey to figure out how the fuck she lost. She’s aided by an unknown female comedian in rural PA whose brother runs a local NRA chapter. Meanwhile Chelsea, Bill, Huma, and John Podesta lose their minds looking for Hill while the entire world crumbles because she hasn’t conceded the election.  In the script Oprah tries to commit suicide over the guilt of not endorsing and  Hillary shits on the front stoop of James Comey’s house. It’s madness, and I had the time of my life writing it.

I wrote it for myself. A creative release. But, since myself is a Leo, Leo rising – I showed it to my husband for hopeful praise. He said, “Wow, this is funny.” Which was concerning because I’ve been a professional comedy writer for 5 years already, but then he said, I think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written.

So I sent to my managers. I was three weeks late on a new television sample that I owed them for staffing season so I said, “here’s something to make you laugh until I do my actual work.”

They read it and said, “This is your actual work. And your new sample.”

Then came something even better. I sent it to my agents. I had a complicated, high-stomach-pain-inducing relationship with them to that point. We hadn’t been seeing eye to eye, when they saw me at all. They read the script and had a different reaction. They said they didn’t get it and didn’t think we should send it out. So I fired them (fine, two months later but inspired by that disconnect).

Then my managers sent my script – RODHAM - to a shit ton of producers and networks - on Inauguration Day. And within weeks, my whole life changed.

I had been making my way as a writer before that – getting some meetings, coming close to selling some things, staffing on something very small. But this was a cosmic shift. I went on 46 meetings in three months because of that script.

And then, I fucking sold it.

I sold it to a streaming service called FULL SCREEN. With it, FULL SCREEN commissioned four more episodes, and I wrote a mini season of television. My FLEABAG if you will. And I will, forever. Sadly FULL SCREEN went under before the show was considered for a green light (#ClintonCurse), but all my meetings lead to another script idea about another thing that filled me with rage – the Syrian refugee crisis. I sold that pitch to Warner Brothers after a bidding war with another studio.

Those sales are incredibly exciting. They’ve provided for me and my family. But they’re not the two big wins. Big win one is the way I’m treated by the people in the rooms I now have access to because of RODHAM. I am seen as a brave, bold writer willing to pave her own way with challenging content. Big win two is that I believe I am that woman, too. I believed I was her when I started writing this series of essays and posting them online (which some might call blogging, but I can’t seem to)

I’ve never seen Hillary Clinton get really angry. People say that’s because she’s a robot. Or too calculated of a politician. Or too good of an actor. Or too bad of an actor. Or just not emotional like real women are supposed to be.

Or maybe she’s just like me. Maybe her anger just comes out in a different way. Maybe Hillary Clinton’s anger is why have the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, or the 1999 Foster Care Independence Act, or got 21 billion dollars in aid for first responder health benefits after 9/11, or a dead Osama Bin Laden. I don’t know.

What I do know is my anger comes out in my writing. And that my anger after what happened on November 7th, 2016 changed my life.

So yes. Hillary Clinton lost. I still can’t believe it. It’s still so painful. But I think her loss inspired a lot of us to find our own ways to win. Or at the very, very least - one way, the way, for me to make it through my Quarantine in one piece.