THIS IS BARRASSING, BUT WHEN I was a teenager, I used to write fan fiction about the pop group NSYNC. It’s what I did instead of homework or class work. It’s the reason, other than skipping gym, I had to work so hard to graduate. I would spend most days incessantly writing down my creeptastic fantasies about Justin, JC, Chris, Joey, and Lance in composition notebooks. I’d write about Crystal and me being adopted by NSYNC after sneaking onto their tour bus, getting caught, and going on the rest of their world tour with them. (What? Like that can’t happen?) A lot of times I wrote about being friends or even enemies (for drama!) with them in a reality (Ha! Reality? What’s that?!) where they weren’t famous at all and we were all in high school together. My friends, classmates, and teachers wanted to know what I was always writing. Because my bedroom kept filling up with more and more notebooks, my family suspected I was up to something other than just a what-I-did-today diary. The most interesting thing I did back then was cut class to sit by myself in the bathroom until math was over or head home to watch The Kids in the Hall reruns. My life has never been interesting enough to record at length. Until now (wink).
No one but Crystal knew that I was, in fact, writing a TV show starring a boy band (one I knew most intimately from daily Internet searching in my eighth-period computer class). Obviously. GOD, I’M SO EMBARRASSED! WHY CAN’T I STOP MYSELF FROM ADMITTING THIS! Anyway, every day I’d write a new episode of the show. After about six months of writing, I’d end the show, take a day off, and then start writing an entirely new show with the same cast, a different story line, and a different personality for each cast member. I’d go from being a senior in a performing-arts high school who insists on being a virgin until marriage to being a widowed, single mom down on her luck in Las Vegas who becomes a prostitute in the next season. If this sounds familiar to you, yes, I was doing then what Ryan Murphy does with American Horror Story today, which makes the fact that I eventually joined the cast of American Horror Story so weird. Life is so weird, you guys!
Anyway, this went on for about seven years. I wrote thirteen seasons. That’s what I did when I couldn’t afford therapy. I wrote. If I had a bad day, I wrote myself a better day. If a cute guy just wanted to be my friend, I’d write about two men fighting over me even though neither of them were good enough for me. Writing helped me to process what was going on inside me and around me. I created characters who dealt with depression, eating disorders, rejection. When I started my phone sex job in real life, I wrote a season about prostitutes and strippers. The members of NSYNC were my scaffolding, but I didn’t know them. I knew me. The stories were about me. I mean, please, go ahead and make fun of me. I still have the notebooks and they are truly my secret shame. To this day, the only person who has ever read what I wrote is Crystal.
When it turned out years later that several people including agents and editors thought I could write a book, I froze! I was some fat nobody who now starred in a film but was still often treated like a fat nobody. How could I write a book about that? How would my mom and dad look on the page to people who didn’t know and love them? How would Ahmed look? My friends, my bosses, my coworkers? If I told the truth about foster care, Dad’s second wife, my parents ignoring my depression, phone sex, Hollywood—wasn’t someone bound to get hurt? Or would it just be me? Never mind getting hurt, would I curl up and die of embarrassment from all I’d admitted about myself? I was sure everyone was completely wrong about me and whatever book they thought I’d write.
Today, obviously, I wrote this book. You just read it. The way it happened was . . . I just wrote the truth, and it made me feel better. So I wrote more. I felt even better. After two years of telling the truth on the page, as I know it, I’ve written an entire book that has helped reshape my view on life, my work, my body, my family, and, most important, myself. I used to think celebrities wrote books for the money or to squeeze a few more seconds out of their fifteen minutes of fame. Now I know that many people in general, not just celebrities, write about their own lives to find purpose for pain. I get it, man. Writing this book has sent me straight into the arms (couch) of my therapist, but it has also allowed me to see people who have hurt me as just that. People. The hurt is no longer part of the equation. People. Just like me. I’m a person who has been hurt, but I’m also a person who has hurt. When I first started writing more than two years ago, I had cut my father out of my life entirely. Now I’ve found a way to forgive him enough to listen to him bore me to death about real estate in Senegal. (Seriously. He is hella into that shit and talked to me about it for twenty whole minutes while I said, “Mmhmm . . . Oh? . . . Wow . . . Cool,” in two-minute intervals two days ago.) Any money I make or seconds I add to my fifteen minutes of fame by writing this book mean nothing compared to the peace of mind I get from being happy and settled in my heart about my family. I love them dearly even if the stories in this book prevent you from being able to do the same. What’s great is that my mom keeps saying she’s fine with anything I write as long as it’s the truth. She also said she probably wouldn’t be reading my book, though. That’s fine, too. (OH! And by the way, neither of my parents or Ahmed knows that I was a phone sex operator, so you guys be cool! I can’t afford to get grounded right now.)