My 2005 head shot, which was clearly very serious business.

I know I said yesterday that I wasn't going to publish the post I wrote over on Medium here because I figured many of you have already heard bits and pieces of my "I was fired from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" story, but last night I was laying in my bed, half-reading about the Taylor Swift and Katy Perry drama but mostly thinking about why I'd published an original piece on a site other than my own - which is not something that I typically do; I like to save the best stuff for you guys - and you know what I realized? The real reason I didn't originally want to publish this post here was because the people who read here every day know me. Really, really well. And sometimes it's easier to release the stories that make me feel the most vulnerable into a world populated by strangers rather than writing them on the walls of my home. 

It is humiliating, that some (many?) people think that the most interesting thing about me is the fact that I was once almost on a TV show, and then wasn't. It is embarrassing, explaining to people why the fact that I don't act anymore is a positive thing for me, why I truly, truly wouldn't have it any other way, and watching their foreheads wrinkle in pity anyway. If you are a person who was once an actor - or a musician, or an artist, or a writer, or anything "creative" - in some ways you will always be an ex-actor/musician/writer; that will always be the way you are introduced at a party (the subtext, of course, being that of course you wish you were something other than what you are right now). And so for years, I tried to bend and twist my past into a story that wouldn't make people whisper behind my back once I'd walked away: god, could you even imagine how much that sucks for her?!