Rachel Langley Tell A Friend About Us:

T houghts raced through my weary, but inquisitive mind. Would writing free me? Would writing take me to a place where I could find some sweet release? Or like so many times before, was I once again pinning my hopes too high? Shooting for a moon I'd never reach?

I had a habit of doing that. One week an actress. One week a painter. And now this week, this day...a writer. But somewhere deep inside, when I really examined it all, I knew 'writer' was something I had always been, even while I was off insisting I was something or someone else. And this epiphany, this realization was showing itself for a reason. I was looking for a way out and the words on the page that formed sentences from my brain built a ladder for me to get up, and out and breathe.

You see...life had me up against that proverbial (though increasingly literal) rock and a hard place…and I had been there for so long I had set-up camp. I had my smores melting over the campfire and my tent erected. After a few years, living in between the rock and the hard place had started to seem, deceivingly...cozy. I grew fond of the steely gray, mammoth wall that nudged me awkwardly up against the hard place. The hard place was my ever loving, but life draining spouse. And I had been stationed there, no, stuck there for so long I had even forgotten there was anywhere else to go.

I had all the comforts of home: food, shelter and sex. What else could a girl want? And that's when it hit me, maybe; just maybe, there was something else over the wall and past "Mr. Hard-Place Tent-Erect". Maybe if I could scale the rock while Hard Place was sleeping I could see out to the horizon. And then, one rainy, dusk painted hour I did just that. And what I saw was beautiful, awe inspiring and very much needed. Words, glorious words! From east to west, north to south, glowing liquid-like script filling a crushed velvet sky. I thought to myself, "this is my way out....this is it."

From that moment onward, in a hobble of a home, I sat furiously typing my way to freedom. Planning, prodding and expressing my way into a real live life that wasn't surrounded by rocks and hard places but instead, gentle fragments for cushions and tender punctuation for pillows. Soft places to rest serious words and concrete thoughts.

Of course, Mr. Hard Place stayed around. Still breathing down my neck and pulling me down by the ankles with every ounce of life in him. But now that I've seen the light, seen the writing on the...sky, I'm off running. And my fingers along the keyboard are traveling faster and further than my legs could ever take me...

Rachel Langley is an actress, writer and an all around passionate NYC artist. She has written nearly twenty short screenplays (half of which have been produced) and labored her way through her first feature "Break Night Club". Her stage works include the one act “Meeting Zelda Zonk”, the sketch comedy show “Birdcage” and the Off-Off Broadway production of her play “The Life Adventures of Freda Gleason”. Award winning scripts include the moc-doc “Meeting Nightshade” and the thriller “Inside David Cane” which placed First Runner Up (First Round) in the Midnight Madness Screenplay Competition. Rachel can currently be seen workshopping her one woman show “80's Girl". For more information on Rachel Langley, please visit www.rachelwrites.net.

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