Epilogue

“Whats going on with mycareer”

CHER’S TWITTER (@CHER)

I opened this book talking about my adult journals and some of the ridiculousness found in the dried-up old pages. There was one entry from a particularly tough 2012 night that I thought I’d share as we wrap things up. It was years before my first entertainment gig. I hadn’t made a penny off my writing, social media, or comedy, aside from a couple hundred dollars I earned doing a dinner theater show in Chicago. I felt like I was struggling to keep my head above water while everyone else seemingly had the career of their dreams (they didn’t, but truth never gets in the way of feeling sorry for oneself). Here’s a piece from that entry…

August 18

Dear Diary,

Someone told me that I look tired today but I’m not tired at all. It broke me—

Oops, that’s the wrong day! Here’s the actual entry I was referring to…

August 19

While my peers are finding success in areas they may not have initially been drawn toward, I’m stuck in limbo. When I left college, I didn’t care that I was a struggling artist because my friends were also struggling to find jobs and make money. Now, those same people have risen in the ranks in their chosen professions. They have the money to go out to dinner when they want and buy clothes and nice things. I’m still wearing Old Navy hand-me-downs from a decade ago. They order steak and split checks evenly. I order a side salad with extra dinner rolls and have to pay my bill separately. They bring bottles of alcohol to share at house parties, and I’m like, “I didn’t have a full bottle to bring, so I just got drunk before I came!” I’m embarrassed. I know that this is the price you pay for chasing dreams in your late twenties, but isn’t that the point of all those movies we watched when we were eight? Why am I now the outcast for wanting something different in life? Friends and family are telling me to grow up, while they tell anyone under the age of twelve within spitting distance that they should “never give up on their dreams.” I used to visualize those dreams coming true, but the older I get, the blurrier that vision becomes. I still hope I’ll get there, but I feel like I’m going through life with protective eyewear on, and the more time that goes by, the dirtier they get. I’m losing sight of the life I want, but I’m not prepared to take off the glasses. Is seeing the world without the protection of my own hopes and dreams worse than fighting through the fog?

The entry reads like a low-budget Carrie Bradshaw, but I made it through that evening and I’m sharing in hopes that any of you who are feeling similarly might be able to fight through your own fog. I still don’t have it all figured out, but I’m learning not to compare myself so much to other people. I’m not sure where I get off ending this as if it’s some self-help guide instead of a collection of silly stories about Judy Garland and childhood trips to Florida, but when you put this book down, I implore you to do the same. Just because your best friend is sharing pictures of their perfect kids or your cousin is posting about a fancy job promotion, that doesn’t mean they have it all together. Whether you’re seventeen or seventy-four, just keep on doing you. We all have similar experiences to help us relate to each other, but we’re on our own journeys. And although time may have a way of stealing our happiness, try to remember those childhood moments when everything seemed possible.

Recently I went to a Los Angeles restaurant with a pop-up Instagram installation. People crowded around to take pictures for social media, crafting the perfect captions and using the photo to show off to all their friends online. A few days later I flew to visit my family in Northeast Ohio, spending lots of time in early June with my nieces and nephews. As the sun set one night and an old Faith Hill song played on an outdoor speaker, I watched the kids running barefoot and happy on the green grass, and I thought about all the times I spent as a child catching fireflies in old mayonnaise jars at dusk in the same place. I gathered all the youngsters for an “Uncle Danny” photo, and although it was hard to get everyone to look at the camera, the lightning bugs lit our smiles more perfectly than the manufactured twinkle lights that are strewn together on a restaurant IG set ever could.

I often think about when I was their age, when my parents would assemble us in the unfinished basement before bed, and we would line up alongside the wall where there was a rickety piece of lumber barely attached to a doorway. My brothers and I would lean up against it one by one to mark our height. I would wear extra socks or stand on my tippy toes to gain a few extra centimeters. Dad would draw a line on the wood with a pen while Mom would tell him the date to write above the measurement. This repeated once a year, or whenever they would remember to corral us in the lower level. Our family of five gathered to mark time in between basketball practices, second jobs, mortgage payments, and puberty. That is, until we grew taller than the loose piece of timber. One by one we moved out of the house we grew up in and started our own families. My parents knew back then that life moves so quickly we must take a moment to acknowledge where we’re at and look back at how far we’ve come. I tried my best to appear a little bit taller, to rush time, but now I’d give anything to go back and relive one of those nights exactly where I was, surrounded by the people I love most in a moment that was ours, when everything seemed possible. I hope that one day my nieces and nephews will hear that same Faith Hill song, think about those nights catching glowworms and feel the same, yearning to go back to a beautiful moment in time.

Nostalgia is a helluva drug, and although it’s important to live in the now, I love knowing I have a bank of experiences I can escape to when the present is too much to handle. The reason I love ’90s and early-aughts pop culture so much is because it helps me with my great escape, allowing me to time travel to those happy moments as often as I want. The things we look back on from our youth are more than just music, movies, TV shows, or toys; they are the quickest road to nostalgia, one of the easiest ways to recapture the feelings we had when we were our most innocent and optimistic selves, and the closest thing to getting into a time machine alongside Doc Brown.

My podcast usually ends by doing a little breathing exercise and sharing some cheesy motivational words. We get so caught up in our day-to-day that we forget to take a moment to catch our breath. So breathe in and breathe out. Measure your life not by the markings on the wood, but by the memories there within. Let the fireflies guide you through the fog, reminisce in the quiet of your mind, look back at how far you’ve come, and embrace the nostalgia. It’s hard to un-remember the bad in life, but the good is a flashback away, and the sun will always rise to remind us that new memories start with the shine of the morning rays and continue through dusk.

Pictured left to right: Bryan, Dad, Jr., Mom, and me.