I'm an only child, the product of two teen parents: a (formerly) estranged dad and an overbearing mother.

So the majority of my life was spent entrenched in my imagination or trying REAL hard to get people to like me. I was a personality chameleon, becoming whomever I needed to be to be liked by the room. A slightly less murderous Tom Ripley.

While that approach to friendship could be difficult, painful, and embarrassing, it fostered an insatiable appetite for creativity. One I ignored until I moved to New York after college.

Ya see, my blue-collar upbringing never presented a career in the arts as a possibility. But as soon as I was close to it, as soon as I could smell it and taste it and live it, it was a wrap.

I started doing stand-up. Failed for four years, sharpening my axe, until I finally made a room full of people laugh. I mean, really laugh. And boy oh boy, there's nothing like it.

That led me to acting. Classes, scene study, the UCB system. Then writing and directing because I wanted to shape my own future. I never liked waiting for others to do it for me.

I would say I live and breathe storytelling, but I hate that word. Too vague. Too all-encompassing. You can't tell every kind of story. At least not well.

No, you tell the stories that have been picking at your heart long before you even knew what it was. Those are the ones that matter. Those bring honest-to-God life to what we do.

And those are the ones I'll get better at telling every single day, whether I'm in front of the camera, behind it, or staring at a blank Final Draft document for an hour before deciding, "Yeah, I definitely need more trail mix."