I’ve made the hunt a nightly ritual. So far, I’ve gone back about ten years, and I still haven’t found anything that brings me pure joy.

How depressing is that? Especially considering that during that time, I was desperate for the life I have now, and I’m still not happy?

Obviously, it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. But then … what?

I scroll now through the years of my life in my phone. Past the Getty Images of me on the red carpet in dresses I starved myself to fit into and then had to return after each event; past the unflattering before-and-after photos from the rhinoplasty, the brow lift, and the buccal fat removal. Past the photos of my first LA apartment in Miracle Mile, which was a few blocks from the neighborhood Italian restaurant called Met Him at a Bar where I used to bartend. Past the Red Bull Vodka–fueled pictures of me partying in West Hollywood when I first moved to LA.

I scroll a little too far and my thumb lands on a low-quality video. I immediately know exactly what it is, even though I haven’t watched it in years.

I hesitate before pressing Play.

It’s me and my best friend Aimee in my high school bedroom. We met at the beginning of middle school when we got very well cast as Rhyme and Reason (me as Rhyme, Aimee as Reason) in our fall production of The Phantom Tollbooth. After that we were inseparable. Not that our parents didn’t sometimes try when we were shrieking at two a.m. during a Friday night sleepover.

In this video, we were that kind of slumber-party-girl drunk that comes from no alcohol at all, but a stash of candy, banana-yellow microwaved popcorn, and a friendship that is mostly based on inside jokes.

It starts on a frame of Aimee’s arm pulling away from the camera, which has been propped up. “Is it filming?” She checks the back of what I remember to be a Nikon Coolpix camera from Costco. “Oh, yeah it is. Okay, Meg Bryan, how have you changed since coming back from Avalon School of the Arts?”

She is, of course, using my real name, and not the stage name I’ve assumed since then, Lana Lord.

She holds out a hairbrush she’s using as a microphone.

I come into frame wearing a red wig, with a red moustache drawn on in one of my mom’s Revlon lipsticks.

“Who, me?” I say in a bad Irish accent.

Both of us devolve into laughter. When we finally compose ourselves, Aimee puts the hairbrush in front of my face. “You’re a famous actress now. Do you think the fame has gotten to you?”

She’s trying so hard not to crack a smile that it makes me, the real me watching the video, smile so hard that it hurts.