CLEVELAND — Are you still chasing dreams you had as a kid? And now, do you really want those things or is it just what you’ve told yourself for so long?
If so, Dan O'Shannon gets you. He recalls what was often a lonely childhood growing up outside of Cleveland.
"I came from a family where we were all very different and I was very creative and no one in my family kind of got that. And so I watched TV because there were cartoons and sitcoms and that meant that there were grownups that were making them," he recalled. "I'd always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. But, and what I understand about myself now is that I wanted to be a writer because I wanted people to think I had things worth saying."
Dan’s childhood dream to write comedy came true. For years he wrote and produced for wildly popular shows including "Cheers," "Frasier" and "Modern Family," but he says that desire for acceptance stayed with him.
"At some point in my forties, I was driving to work and I thought, 'well, I showed them, I did it....I don't need to be compulsively funny all the time so people like me, I did it, I've done it for years and I satisfied the little boy in me who wanted to show everybody that I could be funny,'" Dan reflected. "So why am I even doing it now? You know, what do I as an adult want?"
And so, despite that incredible success in Los Angeles, his own life’s script brought him back home for a much-needed break.
"I came back to Cleveland where I, where I mostly live now. And it's just, Cleveland is very real to me."
During his own "reset," Dan says, he was able to just take time to reevaluate his priorities and what he was still looking for.
"I felt sorry for myself [during that time]. I was going through a divorce and I was really kind of really being hit with the question of who am I? It's like I know who I had made myself into, but I, I made myself into that person by following the blueprint of myself," he said. "But at some point I thought, well, I don't exist just to follow the blueprint I wrote when I was eight. You know, it's like, what do I want now? What do I care about now? What did I miss while I was busy writing made up worlds?"
Dan realized those made up worlds he helped create had morphed into his own universe. Part of the writing process is getting into the head of your characters by asking all kinds of questions, and now was asking himself those same things.
"You are pounding your head against these fake realities for all the time. And at some points in your life, when you're in your own life, you look around and you go, I've missed a lot of this. And it really affected my thinking," he recalled.
Dan says he was living in a never-ending cycle of wanting more - and not able to appreciate what he already had.
"And so I was really kind of cracking up in my forties and it really took, you know, destroying my life in order to rebuild, like breaking the bone to reheal it. And in a way, that's what I had to do. I broke my career for a little bit. I broke the marriage, and for a while I just wandered around and I was on antidepressants."
But through therapy, Dan says he learned how to change his perspectives.
"I think there's a mistake people make where they think that feeling sad, angry, depressed, anxious is bad. You should not feel these things. And here's all the things we're gonna do to not feel this. We're gonna exercise. We're gonna eat right. We're gonna take these pills, we're gonna go to therapy. I think maybe it's dangerous to treat bad feelings like the enemy that needs to be vanquished. You know?"
And in "making friends" with what he considered the worst parts of himself, Dan says he was able to find some acceptance, and eventually could sit in his emotions instead of fleeing from them.
"I learned that I could survive them, and I learned that the world didn't end. I can accept these feelings as a part of my life without letting them take over."
Dan says he also learned that it's ok not to have all the answers right away.
"I was never comfortable with the, 'I don't know,'" he recalled. "[And now,] I don't know the answer, but I've got a whole day in front of me where I can do 20 different things. And some of them are pretty great. So, you know, it's, it's hard to incorporate. 'I don't know.' But I think it's really valuable."
You can watch Christi's full conversation with Dan O'Shannon below and on our WKYC+ streaming platform.