THE STORY BEHIND INTERVALS
Where It Started
When I first created Two Thousand Miles, it focused heavily on a group of friends who grew up together in California and ended up in New York, trying to accomplish their goals and live adult lives both separately and together.
Davis, a playwright in his twenties, was at the center of it all. He was fighting to get a diagnosis, which eventually turned out to be lupus. When he wasn’t fighting for answers about his health, he was trying to graduate college. And failing. Over and over again.
He channeled all of that into writing a musical, partly because he needed an outlet and partly because he thought creating a show of his own would be the one thing in his life he would actually be able to control.
His friends were trying to support him while going through life-altering changes of their own. At the time, the show was largely about what it takes to keep showing up for the people in your life when things don’t go the way you planned for yourself, or the way they planned for themselves.
Why I Wrote It
I was going through almost everything Davis was going through. That’s why I wrote the show.
One of the biggest differences was that I’m a woman, and I was fighting for a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis instead of lupus.
That was almost ten years ago.
At the time, graduating college and finally getting answers about my health felt like two enormous finish lines. I thought reaching them would mean I could finally move forward.
What Changed
I eventually did both.
I graduated after nearly a decade of trying. I got the diagnosis I had spent years fighting for.
And neither one solved my life in the way I thought it would.
Now, after living with an official diagnosis for three years, being four years removed from college graduation, and being 32 years old, I understand that getting answers was never going to be the end of the story.
The diagnosis wasn’t the ending.
Graduation wasn’t the ending either.
Why Two Thousand Miles Stopped Feeling Big Enough
As I started living more of my life in my thirties, I started to feel less and less like Two Thousand Miles actually mattered anymore.
Not because the story wasn’t important.
Because I realized the story I had been telling was only a small piece of something much bigger.
Chronic illness doesn’t happen in one dramatic arc where you fight for answers, get the diagnosis, and finally move forward.
It happens in intervals.
There are periods where your health takes over everything and periods where it fades slightly into the background. There are stretches where you think you’ve figured out how to live with it, followed by moments that completely change the rules again.
And while all of that is happening, the rest of your life keeps moving too.
Where It’s Going
That realization is what began turning Two Thousand Miles into INTERVALS.
The story is no longer just about getting diagnosed, graduating, or making it through one difficult chapter.
It’s about what happens after.
About the cycles.
About rebuilding, adjusting, losing progress, finding new versions of yourself, and figuring out how to keep living a life that refuses to move in a straight line.