Taking care of your mind should be no more embarrassing than taking care of your teeth. We all need to be proactive—to brush and floss, our minds to root out the lies we tell ourselves and the bad programming that drives so much of our behavior. We don’t. We do the opposite. We pretend and project out to the world that “I’m great!” and “We’re great!” and “Everything’s fine!” But it’s not always fine, and because we refuse to admit that, we do nothing, and all of a sudden what started out as a little cavity is now in need of a root canal.
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Society places a terrible stigma on mental illness. We judge people for it in ways that we never would for other kinds of health issues. If you tell someone you’re physically ill, they say, “Oh gosh. I’m so sorry. What’s the matter? Talk to me.” There’s no stigma attached to it. From cancer to the common cold, people want to make sure you’re okay. But when you swap out “physical illness” with “mental illness,” then people seem to start pondering, Well, how unstable is this person? Is it time for a straitjacket and a rubber room? Which makes us ashamed to talk about it. We shouldn’t be, but we are—and I was, like so many other people.
It took a long time for me to recognize how much help and healing I needed. When I moved to Texas, even though I didn’t fully realize it yet, I felt hopeless and alone. I’d been white-knuckling through my problems for so long, barely holding it together, and I was petrified of what people would think of me if they knew the truth about what a broken, horrible person I was—or thought I was. My marriage had begun and ended disastrously. My mother had passed away, which I thought I’d dealt with but in fact had not. And my work, which had always been the load-bearing wall keeping my self-esteem propped up, had started to crumble.
Even when I was doing well, Hollywood had never been a healthy place for me. I don’t know if it’s a healthy place for anyone, really, and from the time I started booking jobs in television, even at the age of nineteen, it was unbelievable to me the way the system worked. Or, rather, didn’t work. It was broken to the point of being not only inhumane, but also inefficient. Like too many industries, Hollywood is a place where the people in power will do whatever they can, within the law and sometimes not within the law, to make as much money as they can for themselves, and because of that, it’s a place where human life isn’t valued. Not more than money, anyway. For actors, it can be emotionally debilitating. For crew members—everyday people trying to earn a decent wage—it can be downright exploitive.
Trauma bends our minds into incorrect thinking patterns, so much so that we can barely see or think our way around them.
Within a few months of being inside the Hollywood machine, looking at it with my engineer’s brain, I thought, There has got to be a better way. Moving to Austin was an attempt to find that better way. I wanted to build a new kind of studio, a better machine, a place where people who love film and who love to tell stories can live and work and play, and find the feelings of community and connection that don’t exist in Hollywood anymore. After seventeen years of dreaming about it, praying about it, and waiting for it, that summer I finally decided to do it. Searching the country for the right location, I found Austin, which felt like the Promised Land. It was groovy. It had an incredible artistic vibe—and no personal state income tax. I came out with a couple of buddies, and we drove all around and started scouting parcels of land around the city. “This is it,” I decided. “I can feel it in my gut. I have to do this.” So I sold my house in Los Angeles, put most of my belongings in storage, packed everything I would need to start my new life into a U-Haul, hitched it to the back of my Ford Raptor, and headed east. I rented a small house in the neighborhood of Travis Heights to serve as a temporary home base while I closed on a gorgeous parcel of land I’d found—seventy-five acres on the Colorado River—with the hope of finding investors to come on board and help make my dream a reality.
Most of my friends didn’t understand what I was doing. I’m sure they thought I was making a huge mistake. They were probably right. It wasn’t the smartest idea, at least not in the impulsive way I’d done it. Once I arrived in Texas, the initial rush of adrenaline and enthusiasm that had carried me there started to wear off, a work project I’d been counting on fell through, and I started feeling waves of panic and doubt.
Still trying to keep up my personal and professional commitments, I boarded a flight for a weeklong trip to the Philippines in my role as an ambassador for Operation Smile, an organization that provides life-changing surgeries to children born with cleft palates, primarily in poor and developing countries. I was taking a camera crew and tagging along with a medical mission to make a short film highlighting the group’s work. That was tough. I’m an empathetic person by nature. I see people cry and I immediately start to well up. I see people in pain and can’t help but feel their pain. And that’s me on a good day. On a bad day, it’s a real problem. Even the slightest reminder that pain exists in the world can send me over the edge. So, at a time when I was already in a fragile emotional state, it was probably not the best idea to surround myself with third-world poverty and suffering. But being unaware of how fragile my emotional state was, that’s what I did.
The hardest day for me was when we left the hospital and went out to the surrounding farms. We visited this family, a single mother raising three children, one of whom had a cleft lip and palate. They were living in a makeshift shanty, a shack with stick walls and a thatched roof and a dirt floor, and this woman, the mother, took so much pride in her shack. You can’t clean dirt. It’s dirt. Still, she had a broom and she was sweeping the dirt floors, brushing away the little rocks and sticks to make it smooth, to make the best home she could for her family. This family had nothing, and at the same time they had everything. They had a mother loving them, taking care of them. She’d been waiting three years for the boy to get surgery. They lived ninety minutes from the nearest hospital, and she had to carry him on a half-hour walk to the nearest village to catch a buggy for an hour-long ride into the city for the screening.
To see a mother doing that for her child, acting out of pure, selfless love, was both life-affirming and heartbreaking, because it was something so alien to my own experience growing up. I started ruminating on all the horrible things going on in my own life, which then made me feel even more guilty. Because who was I to feel ungrateful? “Oh, woe is you, white American actor boy. You’ve got so much and you’re sad? Who do you think you are?” I was tumbling into a spiral of self-loathing, eviscerating myself. My subconscious kept telling me all manner of horrible shit: You’re so stupid. You’re a fucking idiot. You fucked everything up. You never should have come here.
Very quickly, I found that I couldn’t cope. I was overwhelmed by the sight of these kids, their families, and the debilitating medical problems they were struggling with. Once we started filming, I was stumbling around in a fog, incapable of making basic decisions about what shots or interviews we needed to line up. Luckily, I’d brought along my good friend Justin to serve as a producer and my brother-in-law, Ian, to work as our main camera operator. They stepped in to organize the crew. Meanwhile, I kept having to walk off and find a spot where I could be alone and cry. I normally don’t have a problem with crying; I think it’s a beautiful thing, not to mention therapeutic and cathartic. But you need to have a handle on that shit, and I did not.
I managed to hold myself together for the rest of the trip. On the last night of the mission, our hosts threw us a party and somebody came out with all the traditional Filipino delicacies, including balut, a local street food you can’t get in America. It’s like a hard-boiled duck egg, only the egg has been fertilized, so it’s really a hard-boiled duck embryo. All the Westerners were whipping out their iPhones and taking videos, daring each other to try it, so I did. It was . . . interesting. It tasted like a salty scrambled egg, but the texture felt gelatinous and slightly crunchy all at the same time. I got a cool Instagram post out of it, and I’m fairly certain I got a stomach parasite out of it, too, because on the flight home my gut started tying itself in knots. Which, on top of the waves of anxiety and self-loathing I was already experiencing, was the last thing I needed.
Crying is critical to the healing process. It helps us release pain and trauma, which can help lead to acceptance and peace.
By the time I got back, it felt like everything in my life was coming apart at the same time. I couldn’t have scripted it to be any worse. It was a perfect storm, literally. Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast that week. Houston got the worst of it, but even up in Austin it was dark and cloudy and pouring rain for days. I couldn’t leave the house. I was infected with this parasite, totally constipated, nothing coming out; I could hear the gurgling and bubbling in my intestines as this thing was eating away at my insides. I had crazy insomnia from the jet lag. I was up all night, looking around this empty house, looking at everything I’d brought packed up in boxes, berating myself for making such a horrible mistake with my life by coming out here. Look what you’ve done, Zac. You stupid piece of shit. You’ve failed at everything. You had it, and you fucked it all up.
The decision to move to Texas had filled me with excitement. I was so certain that coming out here would give me renewed purpose. I was sacrificing my own money, my own time, my own resources to give people in my industry a better life and more community and better pay—to help build a better world. I’d been so gung ho about the move that I’d even quit smoking and drinking. It was going to be a new day, a clean break. And it was. But it was too clean. I was living in a new place where I knew no one. I was completely removed from my work, my friends, my family. I had no one to support me, nothing to distract me. I didn’t even have a pack of American Spirits or a bottle of Jameson to reach for to help me self-medicate my way through as I always had.
You can’t run away from yourself, so there’s no point in trying. Yet in my stubbornness and denial and fear, it’s what I had been doing for years. Here’s how stupid I was: before leaving for Austin, I’d even broken up with my girlfriend, and she was from Austin. She’s a beautiful and wonderful person and her family lives there and she wanted to stay with me, but I threw it all away because of all the same insecurities and self-doubts that have ruined every other relationship I’d ever been in up to that point. Unbeknownst to me, all the things I’d given up and left behind were the very things that had been keeping me afloat. And maybe I could have held on if I’d only lost some of those things, but I also lost the most important thing. I lost God.
Back in LA, planning the move to Texas, I felt that God was present in my life. I felt His hand guiding me every step of the way, and I was so certain I was doing the right thing. Now, here I was. I’d come to the Promised Land and I’d done what He wanted me to do, and it all felt like a terrible mistake. I felt totally abandoned by God. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know if I believed in God, or if there even was a God. For the first time in my life, I was completely and utterly alone with nobody and nothing but myself.
And that’s when the bottom fell out.