But it can get messy too, because you start seeing a pattern of what people are thinking about you, and you start feeling this pressure to push yourself into that role until you’re acting 24/7: during the day at your job, and the rest of the time for the rest of the world to make them think you are who they want you to be. Suddenly you discover you don’t really know who you are. The true you is obliterated, and this persona that’s been pieced together from opinions and interviews and assumptions and rumors starts to take over. The industry is like the Bermuda Triangle of reality: once you get in it, reality sort of turns inside out and backward—not just for you, but for everyone who observes you. They get sucked into the madness just by watching Entertainment Tonight.

In an attempt to preserve my own sanity and prolong my career I decided not to take any work during the off-season after the third year of DC. I stayed away from interviews and media appearances, and instead I lay around my apartment a lot, reading and thinking about what was next now that I had accomplished my goal of breaking into acting. I’d already come to the realization that television wasn’t the be-all, end-all that I thought it would be, so my next goal was to figure out what was.

Those three years had given me a lot of Hollywood-life experience, which tends to pack more into a year than most people experience in a lifetime. I went to a lot of parties, met a lot of people, kissed a lot of women, slept with a few of them, made contacts, schmoozed and brown-nosed, sampled a mind-boggling array of mixed drinks and street drugs, and listened in on a lot of conversations about enlightenment and transcendental experiences, all in an attempt to fill that hole that I thought my job would fill.

This last bit—the spiritual stuff—seemed to be a pretty serious fad among most people I met. Acting wasn’t enough, living life wasn’t enough, sex and money and relationships weren’t enough—we all seemed to come to that conclusion eventually. Yoga, meditation, kabbalah, spirit quests … everyone was into something that was supposed to satisfy the void, and I never heard about the same thing twice. Half the people I knew not only had personal trainers and therapists, but they had spiritual advisors as well, and spent nearly as much money on experiencing religion and seeking enlightenment as they did on their gym memberships.