Angela Chase Drinks My Afternoon Coffee
Find your teen self, find your true voice | plus a fun writing prompt to transport you
“People always say you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something.” — Angela Chase, sensei (“My So-Called Life”)
Let me start with a truth universally acknowledged: Dating in America in 2020-something is an absolute farce (to paraphrase Austen). Right? Seeking app-love is like seeking God in Costco. Countless samples on offer—but a 10-pound bag Wild Argentine Tail-off Shrimp is not what I walked in there for.
In 2018, I met a smarty pants foreigner on Tinder and fell unreasonably in love with him by the 3rd date. It was dumb and unhinged. He left New York City and moved home—I persisted in hoping. He was (so clear now!) a perfect specimen of the pathologically avoidant variety, and I misread that as mandate that I must summon my inner “Chill Girl.” It’s wild to think back on, but when I would write him an email, I’d literally place a stock photo of a surfer girl in the middle of my computer’s desktop (to be clear, I couldn’t say upright on a surfboard if I were bolted to it).
This Chill Girl was sipping a peach mai tai and laughing with such loony vapidity, you could only conclude she’d never encountered a single grim fact in her life—like, say, climate change. I’d try so hard to channel this Chill Girl voice in my email. The resulting nonchalance was the most inauthentic dreck I’ve ever shoveled.
Let the record show: I have NEVER been a Chill Girl. I care deeply about climate change! I care deeply about everything. When I was 5, I asked my mom to poison me “like Juliet” after my scoop of strawberry ice cream fell on the ground. I used to watch myself cry in the mirror as a kid, for kicks. When I was 8, I started a magazine called “California Kids Earth Foundation” (yes, I was both THE KID and the entire foundation), in which I wrote impassioned exposés on the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons in Agua Net hairspray and made our neighbors subscribe. After P.E. one day, in the dank hallways of the locker room, I paid some rando girl $20 for a SWATCH of flannel cut from the shirt of my high school crush (spoiler alert, it smelled like weed). I am an unshakably passionate, ludicrously romantic, intense human. All of which makes it impossible to be “chill” while also being myself!
When I lived in NYC, my meditation teacher Josh once challenged us with this: When someone asks you how your day is going, even an absolute stranger, try telling them the truth. It relieves you of the burden of carrying pain whilst smiling, and it invites the other person to cut the bullshit too. In the resulting breakthrough, we find two-way freedom. So when Joel, my favorite barista at my local coffee shop, asked me how my day was going last Tuesday, I answered: “Truly and catastrophically shitty. You?”
*
I’m a screenwriter and screenwriting teacher, and one of my favorite courses I teach, “Your Teenage Self Was a F***ing Star,” is similarly about knocking down walls, walking away from the flashing neon menace of the Chill Girl, and instead leaning into the glorious depths of your super-specific weirdness. And when were you your most unvarnished and achy and undiluted and truly fucking weird? High school!
Being a teenager is an unholy combination of the Wretched and Magical. Unicorns and panic attacks! Love and doom! Future and fixation! Dysfunctional family and zits! It’s your soft center that’s never gone anywhere.
My deep belief is that we so-called “adults”—it’s like SO WEIRD that we’re adults, right??—waste a LOT of time, and as artists, a lot of creative currency, pretending we’re cool. Pretending we’ve graduated into an invulnerable version of ourselves. Just like how I pretended chill-ability for Dumbo Dude up top here.
But I think all we’ve really done is learn to cope with the absurd harshness of being an adult. With degrees and confidence and better haircuts and quippy personalities and bank accounts and literary swagger. We trick ourselves and sometimes the world—which feels like a coup and is even easier to do if you have an Instagram account. Inside, we’re still the squishy awkward Everything We Are, but the big bad adult world forces us to get good at performance—and fast.
So I hereby dare you to drop that act and be untogether. Be raw. Be your first impulse. Be uncool. When we work to unwind these self-protective layers, we’re re-introduced to the real us. Or at least the first us. And if we befriend her, we’re reunited with our vulnerability. When we are reunited with our vulnerability: KAPOW. ALL of us is suddenly in the room. No apologies, no masking, no schtick. Just whole. Both Her and You Now.
I’ve seen it completely scramble a writer’s self-possession and voice, in the very best way. It’s like someone turned the lights on.
And it's from this purest heart that we can best create our vulnerable, aching, beating fictional worlds. In “Teenage Star,” each student works towards coming up with their own original concept for a teen film or TV show, starring an all-new heroine of their invention.
When I met “My So-Called Life’s” Angela Chase and Ricky and Rayanne and Jordan Catalano (yes, he of the lean and the eye drop fame), it changed my life. It first aired August 1994, right before I started my freshman year. From then on, I had a planet to go to every Thursday night. I had access to a landscape that was attuned to my squishiest heart—however fumbling, confused, grandiose, hopeful, tragically crushy, depressed, it received it. I would hear the “MSCL” theme music in my head as I walked between class periods, feeling suddenly the center of my own story. Moving in slow-mo like Angela’s horny dream sequence!
Angela Chase said whatever the fuck she wanted to on that show. Not out loud—her shares were cloaked in voice-over narration—but to us and us alone. And her shared truths, like my small “catastrophically shit day” bomb at my coffee shop, set us free.
As she famously says in the “MSCL” pilot episode:
“I mean, this whole thing with yearbook — it’s like, everybody’s in this big hurry to make this book, to supposedly remember what happened, but it’s not even what really happened, it’s what everyone thinks was supposed to happen. Because if you made a book of what really happened, it’d be a really upsetting book. You know, in my humble opinion.”
I’m here to tell you: Write the upsetting book. The upsetting book is the best fucking book because you’ll find yourself there.
Writing prompt!
Write a yearbook entry that confesses the TRUTH to your high school crush. All the stuff they never knew, all the stuff you would have been mortified to say, all the ridiculousness. Say it now. In your V1 voice, no word limit, no “right way.” Just you being you, in an updated version of high school-land that can hold you. You're safe now; let it rip. Love her back.
Workshop Details
Your Teenage Self Was a F***ing Star with Lauren Veloski
Dates: Sundays, May 18 - June 15
Time: 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM (EST)
Duration: 5 weeks
Price: $380
Beginner to experienced screenwriters welcome!
"YTSWAFS" Testimonials
“YOUR TEENAGE SELF WAS A F***ING STAR was fabulous. Lauren immediately created a safe space for everyone, giving us an opportunity to explore our own childhoods and unearth long-forgotten memories. I walked away from this class incredibly excited for my new project!”
—Kelley Greene
“Lauren is the best screenwriting teacher I’ve ever had. No, seriously. She is able to keenly identify what kind of writer brain you have and provide tangible solutions to your creative blocks that go way beyond canned advice and common knowledge. Remember your favorite teacher from school who made you feel seen and met you where you were at and knew exactly what you needed to hear? That’s her.”
—Aliza Small
“I loved this class! Part group therapy/part generative workshop, this class helped me shift how I'm looking at my writing and my creativity in general. As someone who has written a lot but also gets stuck a lot, this helped me find my joy again and most importantly leave my "cool" critical ego at the door.”
—Hadley Dion
“Lauren is the best! Her teaching style is so welcoming and encouraging for writers of all skill levels. The skills I took away from this class will have a lasting impact.”
—April Pascua
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I'm 34 and still not over the Jordan lean
I understand the message of the essay that opens this post, but I don't think it's cool to dump your problems on service workers, even ones that you think you have a genuine rapport with. I worked in food service, retail, and admin for 5+ years and I can promise that 99% of the time, I wasn't looking for a deep conversation, I was just trying to be polite and get through the workday. A barista or other service worker can't honestly respond to the question "how's your day going?" when they're at work. They might be concerned about what their boss or other customers would think of their response. Plus, if a service worker's day is going shitty, it's probably because of another customer or a coworker. And they can't exactly discuss that while they're still at work.