Always take a chance to pursue your passions, to chase your dreams. You’ll never know what life has prepared for you.

When we moved to Los Angeles I spent the first five years grinding away like every other actor. Schlepping from commercial audition to commercial audition. Performing in small stage productions in front of seven people. Taking scene study classes just to keep my chops up (if I actually had any chops).

I did the cattle call casting sessions and spent who-knows-how-much money on attending casting workshops. The casting director of “One Life to Live” called me a creep because I kept fumbling the lines for a character I was auditioning for. I felt like an idiot, but I didn’t care. Others made promises they never intended to keep. And I was just happy to have an opportunity.

The life of an unapologetically naive struggling actor.

To pretend like I was actually making enough money to pay our mounting bills, I worked at a theater company during the day doing development work. It was nothing more than clipping reviews and articles about the company. It felt ironic. Working a stereotypical day job in a theater company, trying to make enough money to live, watching the acting ensemble come in and rehearse. And yet I never was able to get on stage.

My wife and I lived in an ant-infested hotel room near the Burbank Airport for the first six weeks of moving to Los Angeles. The place was crawling with ants. A damn ant farm. We lived entirely on the bed. Ate dinner on it. Slept on it. Watched TV on it. Questioned what we were doing with our lives on it. I’ve never looked at a hotel bed the same since then.

Everything we owned, including the new dishes we got for our wedding, our clothes, pictures from home, was sealed and stored away in a storage cube in some warehouse in a part of the San Fernando Valley we never heard of. For all we know our life’s belongings could’ve been stolen and sold on the black market.

I don’t know how many times my wife broke down crying in the hotel elevator.

It was rough.

The life of a stubbornly persistent actor.

It was all I ever wanted. The chance every artist dreams of having. To pursue something that I promised myself a long time ago that I would do. I wanted to “give ’em hell” with reckless fervor and an undeniable belief that I was going “to make it.”

I wasn’t thinking about a family back then. I wasn’t even thinking about myself or my wife. I was only thinking about becoming a working actor.

When we moved to Los Angeles, I had already been studying to be an actor and going on audition-after-audition for the better part of eight years. I was eighteen when I started taking acting classes in Chicago and then eventually went to college for theater.

I was living my dream and luckily I found a life partner who supported that dream. (And she still does!) Whenever I felt like completely throwing in the towel, my wife was there to pick it up, whack me across my face with it, and tell me to keep going.

We eventually found an actual apartment to live in. One with a room called a “kitchen” and another room called a “bathroom.” It was a place we could unpack our lives from a steel storage box and really begin our Los Angeles adventure.

We bid a sweet adieu to the ants and headed to West LA.

I continued acting and working at the theater company, and my wife found a new job closer to where we lived. Living in West Los Angeles meant I was closer to the commercial auditions. I had an agent, and I landed a non-union commercial about a home security system that only aired in Texas. I did the smart thing with the check I got from the gig and bought a new iPad while we were visiting some friends in Santa Barbara. I felt like my acting career was building some momentum.

We had friends, jobs, a roof over our heads, and no ants anywhere.

And then I had to make a difficult choice.

Even though those times were fun, they couldn’t last. We were living lean. Way too lean for us to start a family. And starting a family was something we’ve always wanted.

After a few preliminary doctor’s visits, my wife and I learned that we needed some medical assistance and intervention if we wanted to have kids. That translated to needing more money. We needed better insurance to help cover the costs of infertility. And we needed a steady stream of income.

I had a choice to make:

Option 1: Continue to stick it out as an actor, making very little money, and no insurance?

Option 2: Get a steady job and still try to act but not be as free and open with my time as I had working at the theater company?

The first option wasn’t really an option. Yes, we moved to Los Angeles because of me, but I didn’t feel it was right to put the sole burden of making money and enduring what we would eventually endure to have our two sons.

The second option had a silver lining. Maybe I could find a job that paid me more, gave me insurance that actually paid for medical procedures, was steady, and I could act on the weekends or maybe take a day or two off to go to an audition.

I decided I had to put my acting career off to the side in order to start our family, which was even more important than acting. It was difficult, for sure. I felt like I was abandoning a promise I made to my younger self. Like I was telling that younger version of me that I couldn’t help him. That whatever he wanted he couldn’t have it.

I still wonder about that younger version of me.

I also knew the decision affected my wife and our potential kids. I wondered and thought long if the guilt I’d feel for putting our family dreams on hold would be worth it. Looking back on it, the decision was a no-brainer.

But at the time, when you’re in the throes of pursuing a passion, when you’re chasing something that you’ve always wanted to chase, you have blinders on. You can’t see what’s in front of you. And you can’t conceive of anything beyond tomorrow.

(For the record, my wife told me she was perfectly fine if I chose the first option.)

While in graduate school I worked as a substitute teacher in the Special Education department in a local high school. I was solid. I could build relationships with kids and other teachers. I liked the hours. But I never thought I’d be a teacher for a career.

When it came time for me to make a decision, I leaned on that experience as a substitute and I took a job as a full-time, credentialed teacher. I figured I’d teach and then continue to take acting classes, perform on stage, and take the occasional day off work if I got an audition. Plus, I would have summers off to pursue more creative opportunities. And having time off during the holidays wasn’t too shabby either.

For a while that set-up worked…until it didn’t.

I didn’t take into account that the reason why teachers have summers off is to plan for the year ahead. And even if a teacher spends the summer planning for the year ahead, the likelihood of the teacher tossing away all those plans at the start of the school year is damn near certain.

I started my career teaching at a charter school in South Los Angeles, working with teens who were on probation or were in placement (juvenile hall or in a residential treatment center).

The work was incredibly rewarding, and I reflect on those times quite often. (I’ll write about it sometime…lot of great life lessons.)

But that’s not what I wanted to do. That’s not what the little voice inside of me was screaming. That’s not what I spent the better part of a decade pursuing, grinding, sweating, dreaming, crying, wishing, failing, hoping, wondering about it.

That little voice was my creative spirit; a time gnome that lives inside my gut that has a knack for reminding me at just the right time that he’s still in there. That he’s alive and needs to be fed.

That’s when I shifted my focus from acting to writing screenplays.

During the day I taught English at a high school in East Los Angeles, about 60–75 minutes from where we lived. At night I’d take classes at UCLA Extension program for TV writing.

Any spare time I had at night would either be preparing lesson plans, grading students’ work, or writing a screenplay. My wife had to take care of our first son, who was a newborn at the time.

One night when I was feeling really burned out, long days at work, long nights writing screenplays, my wife reminded me that as our son got older things would change.

“Take the time and opportunity now because you may not get it when he gets older,” she said.

It was difficult to balance everything. Teaching gave me the stability I needed to support a family. Writing gave me the creative outlet I needed to feel connected to my dreams.

So I kept going.

While at UCLA I met a lot of cool people in the writing program. I started attending workshops and events at the Writer’s Guild, too. I needed to be around writers and other creatives.

I felt like I was inhabiting three different worlds with three different identities: a teacher, a writer, and a father.

I used that feeling to write and produce a webseries called DADLY, about a group of stay at home dads who decide to start a business selling baby bottles that look like beer bottles. The idea was that these stay at home dads struggled with being a dad and following their own desires and dreams. They wanted to show their young sons what it meant to follow their passions and interests.

Not the best idea, but to me it was about writing, shooting, performing, and making something. And I wanted to involve my wife and kids. I needed them to be a part of it to feel like I wasn’t just using the time to be away.

There were two sets of parents in the series and to keep production costs low (or almost non-existent) I “hired” my two sons to play…you guessed it…my kids.

My wife, the best event planner the world has never heard of, took care of food, catering, and even had t-shirts made.

The actual production and filming was great. My kids took an interest in everything behind the camera. They called action, and watched the performances through the screen, and handed out granola bars and La Croix’s to everyone during breaks.

For me it wasn’t about producing and acting in something I wrote. Yes, that’s super cool. But it was sharing my passion and interests with my kids. They loved it. They enjoyed every day of the shoot.

My wife was supportive and proud. She always wanted me to continue pursuing acting and being creative.

But finding the balance between work, the production, and family proved to be difficult for me.

Most artists and creatives step away from their passions not because of a lack of talent. Or even a lack of consistency.

What I lack is the business acumen to know how to budget and market myself and my art as a business.

I was so caught up in the production that I didn’t think about the budget. The casting, the read throughs, the lights, camera, microphones, food, props, clothes, all of it. I was swept away in sharing something I love with my wife and kids, I was swept away in the fantasy that maybe this could be the launchpad that gets me out of my job and into my dream, that I didn’t even think about what post-production would look like or cost.

Seven years later the four episode webseries lives on an external hard drive. Random edits and a disjointed narrative live in binary code encased in a piece of plastic.

Is it unsalvageable? Probably not. But if I had to do any reshoots, there’s no way I could make that happen. I don’t live in the home where it was shot. I have no way of contacting some of the cast.

I let down everyone who participated and gave their all.

I let down my kids and wife who loved every second of it.

I let down my own dreams and desires.

But I have something that no one can ever take away.

Part of being a dad is showing your kids how to make difficult choices.

Work, family, the dreams you’ve carried with you your entire life. At some point, you have to make a decision of what to let go and when.

(And maybe it’s not a “letting go” but rather a “see ya around sometime.”)

But regardless of the decision, it’s the memories that matter. The fact that I was able to make something — at least 90% of the way — and share that experience with my kids is invaluable. Years later and they still talk about how much fun they had. Years later and they’re still asking me to create a YouTube channel with them. Years later and they still carry around notebooks writing stories.

The funny thing about passion is that it never extinguishes. Its flame may dwindle to a flicker, but it never leaves the soul. I believe it’s passion that gives light to the soul. Without passion our soul becomes a void. No light enters. No light leaves.

To some, those choices may seem silly, trite, or even selfish.

But the choices we make give rise to memories and stories that might otherwise never have existed.

There’s never failure in pursuing your passions; it’s failure to never share those passions with your family.

Hollywood Dreams to Family Scenes: A Journey of Passion, Sacrifice, and Parenthood

Parenting as Myth-making: The Stories We Inherit and The Memories We Create

Handheld Memories