Recently, my script came up in reply to an article on diversity in black film on The Black Board. Here is part of my response with other diversity in film stuff added.

I think the real reason for the difficulty getting black movies made is a lot simpler and a lot more complicated. Studies show that too often people classify their fellow humans as something so separate from themselves they have trouble empathizing with them. It took this study for me to understand why white friends would say they don’t consider me as black. That has always hurt me. I never understood why I couldn’t be myself to be their friend. The article Brain Research Shows White People Lack Empathy for Brown People and the even more relevant Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies. explains this concept of the racial empathy divide in more detail.

This is one of the main reasons that White males are the default as a story’s protagonist. We have all been trained to see things from the White male perspective from a very young age. In many places around the world, we are still taught that he is the penultimate human being. It hurts my soul when I hear people of color praising or lamenting the shade of their skin. It is easy for whites to accept films on racism. We all know where they belong in these films. They are the bad guy and also the savior. Black people would not be oppressed without whites and would not escape this oppression if not for the one exceptional, kind white person. This gives white people an entrance to the story, someone to empathize with. Where does that emotional connection begin in a film like Akeelah and the Bee?

At the Austin Film Festival this year I saw one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while, The Little Tin Man. I had no intention of seeing this great movie. Why? Because it had a little person and it said it was a comedy. I have been trained that all comedies with little people are of the dumb guy variety. The little person will be flung around and/or treated like he’s (it always seems to be a he) a prop. Many people love the Mini Mes and Jackasses of the world but I hate these gags. Maybe part of the reason people who don’t have this empathy problem still don’t go to black films is that they’ve been taught that if it’s not historical it’s all stupid race jokes, bad writing, and melodrama. We have to make more of all kinds of films so the movie going audience can be open to seeing something that will surprise them that was made with people who will amaze them.

Not if. I don’t want there to be an if. I want to die young. You don’t have to bury me in satin or lay me down in a bed of roses. I know what it’s like to be old and I don’t want it. Though I do think that sinking me in the river at dawn would be pretty cool especially if there’s archers with fire. My Viking dreams aside, I’m good with being cremated in a cardboard box and having a party where those who I leave behind can eat and do what ever the heck else they want in my honor.

I know a little bit about being old because my arthritis robs my body of being ignorant of it almost every day. That old is just physical and means a lot, but nothing at the same time. Of the two grandparents I’ve had in my life both have gotten old. My grandpa died in 1988 of an Alzheimer’s that burned through his brain leaving his body untouched. This man wandered off to be found later that day having walked thirty miles. The sweetest memory I have of my brother is when he coaxed me out of my hiding place after Grandpa hit me in a confused rage. In the end he was a mute that didn’t notice when two little girls snickered over the outline of what was under his hospital gown.

Grandma is different. She has dementia. We’re pretty sure it comes from when she had her strokes. It rolls over her in waves of varying length and intensity. Like a teenager trying to find herself she’s gone through phases and personality shifts that effect those closest to her the most. Her body has not fared well. It’s disintegration causes her even more confusion. She doesn’t know what to do with her own body anymore. It doesn’t work like it used to and she is incapable of learning the new quirks she must use. Unlike Grandpa she knows who we all are and can fake a level of health for the people who see her infrequently. The memories of her past are as spotty and subject to exaggeration as those in the present. The slow erasure of the woman she used to be effects my memory of her as well. From the days before she was sick, I only remember flashes of her in the kitchen cooking. When she dies I will remember her as she descended into old age. I will only clearly remember the times when my mom, and sometimes I, took care of her. I don’t remember when it was the other way around. I don’t remember when I came home from school and she was there waiting with a meal. I don’t remember her taking me on adventures while my mom was at work. I don’t remember her letting me sneak out to the movies in the summers starting at twelve years old. I know all those things happened but the woman who stares, and smiles, and waits, does not seem like the same woman.

Soon Grandma will go into surgery to get her pacemaker replaced. A quick 15 minute procedure, but at 97 they give her a 20% chance of surviving the anesthesia. If it was up to me I don’t think I would give permission for the surgery. I would let the battery die. I would let her die. Being a caregiver to someone who is being stripped of humanity from the inside out is hard for me. Death doesn’t scare me as much as never being able to learn another thing in my life.

A couple of years ago, there was a medicine that worked for my arthritis. I danced, I worked out, I walked. What I couldn’t do was read, or write. I also couldn’t drive. I could feel my IQ take a dive and my freedom was linked to who could drive me that day. I chose to let my joints stiffen and the pain to return because I learned that without my brain fully functioning I could not be me.

I don’t know what Grandma would choose if she was still the person in the not so solid memory of my  youth. But I have made my choice. So let me die young, I have already seen old.

[The song If I Die Young by The Band Perry]

(Photo credit: kevindean)

There is nothing that will help a writer fully develop a villain better than listening to politics in an election year. It’s made up of people whose ideas of how to reach the exact same prosperity and opportunities are called by the other side naive, even evil.

When I was 24 Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash. I had helped out on his campaign every weekend and had even appeared in a couple of commercials for him. I have not been involved in politics since that 2002 election. Until now.

I haven’t been volunteering for a specific candidate like I did in the past. Instead, I’m telling my story. Trying to put a human face on the issues that have turned into statistics and dollar signs. These last four years have been the hardest of my life. Due to my chronic disease, and the reactions to medicines taken for it, I have lost my job, lost my health insurance, and come close to death more than once. When politicians talk about healthcare and social welfare reforms they are talking about my life. So when I see or hear someone in my personal range talk about these things like the people using or wanting these services are all moochers who just need to “pull themselves up by the boot straps” I tell my story.

It’s not easy for me. In fact, I mostly hate it because I know my words will have no effect. Most times the response I get is one so off the mark I know that the person was not truly listening to me. For example, today I read a comment about how much money could be saved if only those at risk were insured.  I responded by saying driving is a risk. At any moment we could be hit by an under insured* or uninsured motorist. The response I got was, “Secure the boarders!” That woman was so set against anything that might challenge her belief she blurted random rhetoric.

Even knowing my words will probably mean nothing to the person on the receiving end, I still say them. I used to bear these comments with shame and silence, but no more. I am strong enough to speak up now so, I do. I figure if everyone who depended on these services spoke up eventually we would become a friend, a neighbor, a human being instead of a number.

*Most states don’t require more than $300,000 coverage and most of us (US Citizens) get the minimum. Extended stays in hospitals with surgeries could reach over a million very quickly.

I haven’t posted on my blog for a while because I’ve been ill. My disease makes me very sensitive to heat. So sensitive that this black person has to wear sunscreen whenever I’m out in the sun. You should have seen me the first time I got sunburn. I was going to go to the doctor because I couldn’t figure out why my skin was peeling off. I’ve talked about my auto immune arthritis on here before but in light of some of the responses I’ve heard to the Supreme Court upholding “Obama care” I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Sorry if this feels a little disjointed but I’m not going to do a lot of editing on this because I am having a hard time just sitting up long enough to type.

The day of the ruling I re-tweeted a list someone compiled of people saying that they are giving up on this socialist country and moving to Canada. This was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. One person tweeted me back with a comment about how bad the Court’s decision was. I asked if he could see the humor in moving to Canada in spite of his political views. He said he could but also said something else. “I’m a social liberal but a fiscal conservative.” After originally accepting that I realized I had no idea what the hell it meant and whether or not it was even possible.

When I was first diagnosed when I was 16 my mom had just enrolled me in our state’s health plan for children. Even though she was a full-time worker making about $22,000 per year she did not have the option to add her children to her work’s health insurance. I had been an extremely healthy kid involved in a different sport for every part of the year. Then at 16 my body gave up on me. At 17, I spent three days in the hospital getting inter venous drugs as a last resort. My mom didn’t tell me then but now I know the doctor was worried I was going to die because I was deteriorating so rapidly. I saw the bill.  $20,000 for three days that saved my life.  Thank God the state paid for that or mom would have gone broke to save her child’s life. So as a social liberal you have to believe I deserved to live. But as a social conservative you don’t think the government should have paid for my life. But that is where I have the trouble. If my mom had paid  for that hospital bill we would have ended up on welfare, food stamps, and possibly homeless for who knows how many years. I don’t understand how that is better and more cost-effective than having the government give me healthcare.

My mom was not forced to get me, a healthy child, healthcare but I’m glad that when she found out about the state program she did or we would have been out of luck.

After I got laid off from my job at one of the studios, I applied for health care because even though I had been in remission for nine years my childhood experiences taught me that anything could happen.  I was denied because of my previous condition. I sighed and continued to look for a job.  I applied for a job at the USPS for the holiday season and after passing the tests with perfect scores they asked me to speak to a nurse to answer some questions. It was part of the process so I thought nothing of it. I was applying for a desk job where the only lifting would be that of my fingers to hit the next key. The woman asked me if I had been denied for health insurance in the last year. I answered honestly and we laughed at the insurance companies with their rubber stamps. Moments later, I was taken outside and dismissed because they could not hire me with my condition. I was so angry boiling hot tears scorched my face. I wailed to my mom if my past health would be a hindrance to me throughout the future. I stayed on unemployment a few more weeks because of that.  More money from the system because of my health problem. I realized I could only get healthcare from a large corporation that had too much money and employees to ask those questions. So my talents and education could not be shared at a small business. I took a peon job where I was only a cog in a great machine.

Sadly, as I was tolling as a cog my remission ended. I did everything I could to hold on to that machine. I didn’t want to be without a job. Without a contribution to society. I held on until I broke. Depression set in as I believed I was worthless without the means to be the person I chose to be. There were three types of people in my therapy groups. One, the chronically depressed. They’d struggled with it off in on throughout their lives. Two, the grief-stricken. Sons, daughters, mothers, brothers, all dead. For some reason these people thought they could have stopped the accident, the fire, the pills and their lives were torn apart. Three, the useless. Like me, these were the people who had been yanked from the life they knew and thrown into the deep end of the pool. A laid off fortune 500 executive, a broken family man who could never fully recover from his accident, the woman suddenly tasked with everyone else’s job who finds out she can’t do it all. People who not only want to be part of the productive world but when they can’t their lives fall apart.

One thing I’ve learned since I’ve been sick is most people who need and use the system are very quiet about it. We are ashamed and don’t want the world to see us, see what we consider a failure.

Back to the beginning of this post, Canada. For a couple of years now I’ve been debating on breaking the law and renting some form of mail box in Canada so that I could get  hook worms shipped to me.  Some people say hook worms help auto immune diseases by secreting something that suppresses one’s immune system. Despite being completely harmless and easily eradicated, the FDA won’t allow them to be shipped to the US. Our healthcare system is broken. Insurance will pay ten to twenty thousand dollars a month to give me infusions but won’t allow a one time payment of $3,000 for me to swallow some worms. Yes, I am that desperate to swallow a capsule full of worms.  That’s how much I want to work again. I don’t want to be on disability. I don’t want my body to dictate what kind of life I have. I want to stand, walk, run, date, work, park at the other end of the lot. I want to be able to choose.

No, I haven’t had any kids but the faces the women make on those TLC shows look about right.  National Autoimmune Arthritis Day is this Sunday, May 20th.  So I thought I’d annoy you all with tales from the hurt locker.  I know that’s combat lingo and I’m legally 4F (at least according to my understanding from It’s a Wonderful Life) but I think it’s appropriate.

When I tell people I have arthritis they don’t understand what that means.  Many minds conjure up images of their grandma’s osteoarthritis with swollen fingers or knees worn down from years of usage.  Unfortunately, autoimmune arthritis is not your granny’s arthritis.

When I was 16 years old, I was at a  six-week math/science summer camp staying in a dorm at a community college not far away from my home.  One day, we took a break from classes and went to an amusement park for the entire day.  I had a great time walking around the park, riding the rides.  Happy from a day of sun and fun I strolled into my dorm room with my five roommates and closed the door.  Laughing on my way to put my things on my bed, a spear was suddenly trust down the line of my spine.  I screamed and I fell to the floor.  I was being sliced in half.  “Help me.”  The other kids just continued their conversation in full view of me.   I pleaded, explaining that I couldn’t move and they all said I was fine.  As I clawed and dragged my way to the bed, I wondered why no one was helping me and if this is what it felt like to die.   Minutes later, I had made it to the bed and did what has saved me a great amount of pain in my life.  I fell asleep.

They pain was on and off.  At the end of the camp, my evaluation concluded that I faked illnesses for attention and to get out of work.  I argued but it was put in that elusive permanent record anyway.  A few months, and just as many doctors later, I was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and Spondoloarthropathy.  My body had decided that the fluid in my joints were a foreign body trying to invade.  It attacked those joints with the same force, and as much success, as the Ebola virus.   One half of my junior year and three-fourths of my senior year were spent in bed using my super power of sleeping through pain.

As an adult, I lived in remission for ten years.  Then, the joy of not noticing my body stopped.  When the remission first ended I was desperate to regain my independence and continue working.  I tried drug after drug.  When I was young the best thing they had was small doses of chemo therapy that I injected once a week.  Now, biologics are the rage.  Petri dish concoctions made of mice cells and drug companies profit margins.  Hours of sitting in a room hooked up to an IV getting an infusion that cost thousands of dollars an ounce.  My insurance was paying 10 to 20 thousand dollars a month for those drugs that healed my body but attacked my mind.

For months, I couldn’t read, write, or drive.  My mom had to be with me when I took a shower to make sure the dizziness didn’t land me ass up, sucking on the drain.  Facing these severe side effects, I became suicidal and was forced to choose between my mind and my body.  I chose my mind.

It took me months to accept that I wouldn’t be able to go back to work.  During the three years it took for my social security “government safety net” to kick in, I lived off my mom’s retirement fund.  After catching my mom crying over finances, I swallowed my shame and embarrassment about accepting food stamps.  I loved the freedom to buy food but I hated it as well.  My inability to move had contributed to me gaining 80 lbs.  I was thrust into the stereotype of a fat young black woman with no job on welfare.  I was angry.  I had always been a person who changed my situation if I didn’t like it.  But I had lost control.  Arthritis had taken it away from me. Took me almost four years and countless therapy appointments to accept where I am now.

I write and I sleep.  I try not to worry about not having any real arthritis meds to stop my body’s attack.  I try not to think of it spreading to my lungs, to my heart, to my eyes, like it has for other people with uncontrolled autoimmune arthritis.  I try to be grateful for getting pass the times when I didn’t want to go on.  The autoimmune arthritis online community has a couple of people each year that don’t make it through one or the other.  We mourn these people we only knew through pain and pray that things will get better for us all.

This is not your grandmother’s arthritis.  This is a disease with no cure.

I am 34.  My diagnosis is the dual arthritis of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Ankylosing Spondylitis.  My dream is screenwriting, and my hope is understanding.

I once went to a WGAF event where the speaker asked if anyone had ever felt like they were from an alien planet.  I raised my hand.  Surprisingly, so did a lot of other people.  Writers are weird.  I have accepted my weirdness as  part of me and embraced it.  I am convinced that a lot of my weirdness comes from having to grow up so fast ’cause I was smack dab in the middle of so many social issues.   The biggest area that this infection of weirdness has broken out on me is in my ability to make friends.

I read, a lot.  I used to choose what I read by what grade I was in.  If I was in fourth grade and your book was titled Tales of the Fourth Grade So and So, or The Fourth Grade Blank I devoured it off the shelves of my local library.  No matter what books I read, even the outcast kids always had a best friend. (Well, with the exception of Robert Cormier.  Compelling writer but that guy’s a downer.)  I never had a friend that came over to my place and vise versa until I was in college.

The first Friday night of Freshman year, I went into the hallway of my dorm and it was deserted.  The quiet was startling.  Because of my disability I had a single handicap accessible room and no one was forced to talk to me because they were my roommate.  I was so out of the loop that I had no clue as to where everyone went.  As I stood in the hallway contemplating the likelihood of a mass alien abduction where the gimps were left behind, another head popped out of a room far down the hall.  A tall blonde woman with a crooked nose (which I love that she loves) came out lamenting how she was surprised how many people went out to drink at house parties.  Of course, she had been invited but she was a “good girl” who didn’t believe in drinking before 21.  So that night, we went to the brand new dry dance club on campus and that’s where we were every weekend night (running the place since we were the only ones there) until they shut it down for low attendance.  Our senior year, we became roommates and continued to hang out after college.  For a short time anyway.

I don’t know what happened but a weird distance that had started to grow between us when we turned 21 became too much.  She started to drink socially on a regular basis and I was still dry, mostly because I can’t dance well when not sober.  A few months after graduation she stopped calling me back.  It hurt but I was used to being alone.  All these years later, I finally figured out it must have been because she thought I judged her drinking.  I didn’t care that she drank.  I just didn’t want to.  The one night I did decide to get drunk, I ended up crying on the bathroom floor of the club.  As I’ve noted before, ending up on a public bathroom floor is never a good thing.

When I moved to Los Angeles I left my family behind, knowing no one but a dude from my acting class who I drove across country with (a story of epic proportions that I will tell at a later date.) Being in LA I thought what the hell, I’ll change from writing prose to screenwriting.  Should be easy.  Yeah, I was stupid.  By the time I wrote my first screenplay, I was working as a courier on a studio lot.  I asked around about who I should give it to.  Unknown to me at the time, they sent me to the VP of film development’s assistant.

I gave her my screenplay and about a week later we met for lunch and she handed me back notes from a studio reader.  She had changed my name on it so I wouldn’t be passed on for life, which I am eternally grateful for.  The notes were three single-spaced pages telling me how much my screenplay sucked.  When I finished reading them I laughed.   The rage that came out in the writing of that reader because she had to read my crappy crap was hilarious to me (sorry reader, wherever you are.)  I had thought I was so great, but having my ego throughly pounded into the ground was a good experience.  She looked confused and relieved at the weird girl sitting across from her that was so jolly about getting a trouncing.  We ate lunch and talked about things I could do better.  I visited her office more and more during my lunch breaks.  I don’t remember exactly when I wanted her for a friend or when we started hanging out outside of the office, but I counted myself very lucky and wanted very badly not to screw it up.

Not being great at making real friends, I constantly worried that I would do something to get her to abandon me.   At work, I hid in the corner trying to be invisible when her boss was around, and almost got into a fight at Starbucks over a drink that she asked me to get for Leonardo DiCaprio.  (Ahhhh! That woman is stealing Leo’s drink! Doesn’t she know it’s Leo’s drink?!)  Outside of work, I monitored my phone calls and visits to her, constantly worrying if they were too much or too little.  When she caught me at it, it cracked her up.  She told me to relax and I did.

She has so many friends from all periods of her life that I didn’t think it would make a big difference in her life when I left LA headed home.  Then one night when I was crashing at her place on a visit she told me that she had been devastated that I had left her at that time.  I thought, What?  Me?  I’m weird, awkward and don’t know how to be a friend like the ones you’ve had for years. It made me feel super good that she was still my friend after I messed up so bad.  Also, I liked that she missed me even though I wish she had told me sooner.  I might have stayed.   Even though I still worry every once in a while that I will lose her, I feel blessed that she calls me her friend and I call her mine.

So if you’re weird, and awkward, and lonely, don’t worry.  There is someone out there who will take all that in and still think you’re pretty neat.