The Big Leap

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” – Mary Oliver

I obtained my first and only black eye at six years old. My unforgiving adversary was a cement walkway surrounding a playground.

One Sunday after church, the Arizona summer had faded enough into fall to spend an afternoon outside. My parents took advantage and hosted a picnic in our neighborhood park. Unbothered by the fact that I was the only kid present at this event, I meandered across the dry patches that passed for grass over to the playground while my parents set up their feast.

I recall that particular playground being rather small. Enclosed by a three-foot tall cement wall was one single playset, consisting of the following: a slide, a lookout, and a clatterbridge between. I don’t even think there were monkey bars. 

Much to my delight, there was one other occupant already there: a girl my age. I’d never seen her before—and never saw her again—but that was no matter. Perhaps we exchanged names or determined how we both landed in that particular park at that particular time, but those kinds of details have never been top of mind for me. (As a bartender in college, I was particularly notorious for remembering deeply intimate details about a person’s life while forgetting their name.) I probably asked this new friend the kinds of questions any six-year-old would ask, such as “Are you a Christian?” or, “Do you wanna play Follow the Leader?”

I can’t report on her answer to the first question, but little did I know that the latter would result in my (literal) downfall.

My new friend started off as the leader and began to navigate us around this small space. She climbed the ladder to the lookout. I followed. She traversed across the clatterbridge, the connecting chains clanging and clashing. I followed. She squeaked down the slide, proclaiming, “Ow!” as the static shocked her. I followed (with an “Ow!”, despite my disappointment at receiving no shock).

Pushing the very bounds of the playground, she led us to the short enclosing wall. I followed suit as she climbed atop. She put her hands out for balance, the journey now treacherous. I followed. (I had just begun gymnastics with a proficiency on the balance beam, but I hadn’t yet learnt to be a braggart.) As we rounded the final corner, mere steps away from the dismount, she declared that it was getting too slippery and flailed her arms. I followed. She regained her balance. I did not.

My nose crunched on the sidewalk before I had the chance to register that I was falling. Holding my bloody face, I scream-cried the entire sprint back to my parents’ picnic. 

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As a preacher’s daughter, I am primed to see the world through “illustrations,” as my dad called them. There’s definitely something from that story to do with leaping, or how following the leader brought my demise. There’s also the more inspirational route: I know now that if I fall, I can put my hands out. I know now that I can survive that fall, even if it hurts. 

Alas, I am not a preacher. No lessons for you.

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Without anything explicitly lined up, I quit my coffee job in December—despite my wonderful coworkers, despite my favorite regulars, despite the fact that I was only making slightly above minimum wage as it was.

Contrary to what I told the owner in my interview for that barista role, I only planned on staying a few months. I’d been a barista on and off since I was nineteen, so this job’s purpose was simply to provide me with a steady income while I found my footing in San Francisco. Outside of work, I jokingly referred to my barista gig as my “side quest” on the way to pursuing film. Then I became shift lead. Then a few months became six became nine became a year. 

I must offer the disclaimer that specialty coffee is a (mostly) wonderful world. Unfortunately after years of working in the industry, I am a coffee snob. I generally care where my beans are sourced, how they’re roasted and prepared, and how fairly every individual along the coffee chain is treated and paid for their labor. I can tell you whether a shot of espresso tastes like sour patch watermelon or has notes of orange peel. I think that the people who work in coffee are some of the most wonderful, interesting humans.

As my tenure in coffee lengthened, my side quest accidentally became my main quest. Given that I had just uprooted my life to live in a brand new city, it was easy and tempting to fall into a comfortable rhythm. It was made even easier and more tempting when surrounded by people who cared, and whom I cared about deeply. 

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I tend to steer clear of the word “ambition.” As a woman—especially a woman who grew up in the modest-is-hottest evangelical church—ambition is a bit of a dirty word. Throughout my upbringing, being ambitious as a woman was almost as bad as being a lesbian (of which I am both, so, there’s that). 

In the church, the dirty element of ambition was desire. (Quite frankly the dirty element of anything was desire, but that’s another essay.) Ambition was a classic desire of the “flesh”—which, for those not fluent in Christianese, would really be anything selfish, indulgent, and ungodly. The flesh: comprised of the mortal woes that we’ve been stuck with as a result of our sinful existence in these skin bags of bones and muscle. These desires don’t align with the more important spiritual pursuit. By my adolescent years, I had internalized the belief that in most instances, my own desire was not to be trusted. I wouldn’t dare let myself follow that inward path; what was I ambitious for? I didn’t know, but it was probably bad and would lead me far away from God.

Nonetheless, I remained a tried and true overachiever desperate for approval. Hell, my designated insult in high school was “try-hard.” I’ve regurgitated my good-girl spiel over and over again on this blog, so I’ll spare you the details of my gap year and the lessons I learned—because as we recall, no lessons for you. 

Ignoring my ambition, as it turns out, did not make me less ambitious. Ignoring the ways in which I seem to be an inescapably, innately ambitious person only left that very drive scattered in twenty directions. 

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I gave my manager 8 weeks’ notice. I knew I’d be exiting my barista job right before the holidays, and I didn’t want to be an asshole who left a bustling cafe understaffed during one of the busier seasons. That decision, however, meant that I had eight weeks of gearing myself up for near complete uncertainty. I couldn’t picture what my days would be like if I wasn’t greeting dawn from the bus or smelling like stale coffee down to my fingernails. Would my days be spent job-searching? (No, and thank god.) Would I spend mornings writing? (Not yet, despite my daily guilt.) Would I run out of savings before I started making money and not be able to afford rent or groceries and therefore have to crawl back to coffee or retail or Uber Eats or selling my plasma? (Somehow…no.)

Four months after leaving coffee behind for good, I have managed to still afford to live in San Francisco as a freelancer. The small, part-time work that I’ve found (I am currently a part-time assistant to three different incredible women doing incredible things) allows me the freedom and flexibility to take last-minute gigs on sets around the Bay and to continue pursuing the more fun, creative passion projects. A couple weeks ago, I was able to drive on a whim down to LA to help alleviate the press madness for a director that I previously interned for (and you all must see Bob Trevino Likes It in your city before it’s no longer in theaters!). I’m currently co-writing a short film with a friend from college and writing and directing another short to be filmed in SF with an incredible crew of folks (not just three twenty-two year olds with a Sony and a dream). 

I have to admit—it feels damn good to have been right all those months ago. I quit not because I hated the work or disliked my coworkers, but because the dissonance of showing up every day when I knew I wanted to be pursuing something else blurred my vision. In a metaphorical sense, yes, each day my dreams, goals, and curiosities felt farther away, but also quite literally my anxiety was so severe that my vision blurred most days when I stepped into the cafe.

In that sense, my body made the choice for me. And thank goodness. 

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Dare I say that I am grateful for some of the hesitancy around ambition that I was raised with. It’s pretty clear where ambition can go awry. As we watch individuals in power with unchecked ambition, it feels hard to align myself with anything close to that. I am not ambitious for power. I am not ambitious for amassing wealth—for many reasons, but the pure pragmatic reality is that for most, film is generally not a lucrative career. Nor am I ambitious for fame. I’ve read too much Poe and Dickens to choose such a fickle and useless moving target. 

Nor do I align with the connotations of ambition that suggest that my life’s meaning resides entirely in how hard I work at a job and how successful I am within that field. I am not ambitious to improve someone else’s bottom line or play the game correctly. And I should not have to have unrelenting ambition in order to pay rent and afford groceries.

I’d shrug off the use of the word entirely, but I struggle to find another that encapsulates the tug I feel within the truest part of me to pursue film. I want this. I know to the core of my being that I will not be satisfied unless I give this everything I have—not because I want an Oscar, but because I know that I am meant to create, and because I have never felt more alive than on a film set. What is that, if not ambition crackling within me?

Now that I am able to recognize and face this part of myself that bounces in the corner of the ring, shaking her limbs out and eager for the next round, I have the task of tending to her. As with any part of myself, of course she can be misdirected towards harm. Instead, I will choose to carefully, lovingly water my ambition and provide the soil and nutrients that she needs in order to blossom and (to borrow once again from Christianese) bear good fruit.

Okay, that’s enough with the metaphors. Let’s return where we started: little Mads on the playground, bloodied and bruised. 

From the very beginning, she had all the ingredients for why film is—and I’m so sorry for using these words—where I feel called to. That little girl who fearlessly made new friends and took leaps on playgrounds also lived in her imagination. She created new worlds almost every day, but she always preferred to do it with people. Had Follow the Leader not ended in such tragedy, she and her new friend would’ve almost certainly made up a new fantastical game together. 

She wrote “novels” on her mom’s newfangled Dell laptop that she’d show to anyone who would willingly read. She played spies with her neighbors, and edited home videos that she’d created with her best friends on her family computer’s Windows Movie Maker. 

(She also showed up to kindergarten the next day absolutely giddy at all the attention she knew she’d receive for her harrowing and treacherous playground experience. I feel so much tenderness and gratitude when I think about how alike we still are. I’m a writer, director, and Libra. Of course I love attention.)

My ambition is to honor who I am. That includes the little girl who wasn’t yet seeped in shame or concerned with upholding a very careful hierarchy of desire. When I think about little Madison, I just keep thinking about how she strutted so boldly to that playground, content to play alone but delighted to make a new friend. Little Madison’s big leap was in remaining open to new possibilities over and over again. 

Honoring who I am also includes the self that I continue discovering. To be honest, there’s so much freedom in this journey because I have already given myself permission to evolve. How beautiful to be witness to the transformation of my curiosities.

I quit my job, and now I see about a hundred pathways that I could traverse. I can’t see which path will end up littered with my footprints, though there will almost certainly be evidence of leaps, falls, sprints, and crawls. I’m sure there will also be signs of doubling back or attempts to flatten undergrowth between paths. 

I simply must do the next right thing. In October 2024, that was quitting my job. In December, that was letting my body rest. In January, that was saying yes to direct my first commercial. Today, it’s making a cappuccino, eating my brown-sugar oatmeal, and responding to emails about avails for a director whose calendar I’m managing.

With one foot in front of the other, I will make my way.