Finding the Path by William Parsons | Script Revolution

Finding the Path

After a childless older couple rescues him off the Detroit streets, a horrifically-abused teenager grows into an emotionally-hardened man who struggles to accept he’s worth loving.

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120pp

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What would you do if you had survived a childhood of such horrific abuse and neglect that you had lost your human connection?

A 15-year-old hustles on the Detroit streets. Stick-thin, hollow-cheeked, and hard-eyed, he’ll claw anyone who comes near him. His one goal? Survival. When an older childless couple finds him and takes him into their home — and into their hearts — they try to chisel their way into his. And chisel they must. This boy shoves away anyone who tries to love him, because love has only ever hurt. The couple just wants to give him a family, a support system, and to give him a safe place to fall. But the thick emotional armor he’s encased around himself simply won’t allow him to accept anything, until it just might be too late. Nothing makes sense. Everyone might as well be speaking to him in riddles. Will he take the risk to really live and find his identity before it’s too late?

“Finding the Path”, a mash-up of the films Ordinary People and Shame, challenges emotions and asks the big question: what exactly is a person worth?

Submitted: January 8, 2022
Last Updated: August 10, 2022

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William Parsons's picture

The Writer: William Parsons

"Do not fear death; fear the unlived life." Ever since I read that advice given by Pa Tuck in Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, I have thought of that as my rallying call. I do not want to come to the end of my days (at 52 years old, still—so I hope—a ways off) and look back and realize to my horror, "Wow, what a waste!" A product of a bad childhood, I have stumbled through my adulthood, always though managing to keep on the path of my own happiness. The one constant through all of it has been my writing, which has lived in symbiosis with my meandering that path. My writing has served as my journal of that journey, and my journey has provided me the well of emotions and experiences to... Go to bio

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