'A determination to find joy and pleasure, to foster community, and to laugh'
She’d spent years waiting tables in Los Angeles at a place called Cravings. She was good at it, and as a bonus, ran live shows with friends for which she had a call list of hundreds of names to pack the house . She was 29. People could see that she was talented, but anyone who’s ever pursued a career in the arts knows that talent alone is often not enough. The dramatic acting she’d intended to pursue and studied at New York University hadn’t worked out.
But then, Shannon writes—and this is what stunned me—”The one person I wanted more than anyone to tell me I was good was my mom.” Shannon had chased success hoping for something in return that she would never get. Her mother was never coming back. “I realized I’d been running for years, driven to work so hard, on this track, trying to make it, to