He moved through life like a man perpetually arriving at the scene of a crime committed by others, forever explaining that his disappointments had been engineered by his ex-wife, directors, other actors, agents, critics, weather patterns, funding bodies, and his older brother. And because actors require audiences even in private he continuously narrated these grievances polished into monologues over drinks after rehearsals, at parties, in ubers. Increasingly, he developed a fixation on musicians, especially singer-songwriters at the piano or guitar, imagining they possessed some purer existence untouched by ego and compromise, “A musician just plays,” he would say with envy, as though touring, failure, addiction, and public humiliation were not common musical electives.

He could not understand that what poisoned his life was his refusal to examine how resentment bent every room around him, how collaborators slowly withdrew because every disagreement became persecution, how his ex-wife had grown exhausted living beside a man who converted all disappointment into evidence against others, and because he lacked the depth to observe himself with the same ruthless scrutiny he reserved for the world. He fantasized changing art forms would change fate and stayed unaware that he would have carried the same blindness into music too, standing under stage lights blaming the audience for not hearing him properly while never once asking whether he himself was listening.