The problem was that, while I desperately craved a map to somewhere, I didn’t know where exactly that was.
Eventually, my New Age and self-help efforts went next-level. It wasn’t difficult. All I had to do was open my eyes, read a magazine, or listen to a talk show. Suddenly, everywhere I looked there was another fucking opportunity for growth. AFOG.
The Secret had ratcheted things up a few notches. This stuff was fully and readily available. Plus, we were in an economic downturn, and people were feeling desperate. Where does one turn when feeling desperate? Self-help. If you couldn’t find a job, you could always self-improve. That was, after all, my first instinct.
It was not the job market, or the dating pool, or my weight—it was me. There was something wrong with me. There had to be. Which meant self-help books were suddenly the macaroni and cheese of comfort. The world had made a few things in my life feel out of control, so rather than sitting still, I chased a fix.
Like flashing neon signs on the Vegas Strip, the vision board had actually highlighted my shortcomings until, eventually, all I could see were the holes. Apparently, the Universe wasn’t just offering up beach houses. It was offering up a full roster of experts, happy to sell you the way to a better life. Suddenly, self-help began screaming my name, which meant that, despite already having a great life by most measures, I wasn’t maxing out my greatness.
Oprah created a mantra: “Live your best life.” Which surely meant I wasn’t living mine. None of us were, presumably. Just a big world full of humans not living up to our potential. All I saw was everything about myself that couldn’t possibly have been as good as it needed to be. And so—just like a bag of chips—I assumed that, if all those fixes were sitting right there in front of me, then I should most definitely be consuming them. Not doing so seemed downright irresponsible. Or, at least, insulting to Oprah.
Eventually, I decided that if I kept reading more and hiring more coaches and trying new diets I’d 100 percent find not only the map, but also the destination.
And so, for nearly a decade, I went on a high-speed chase with balance, enlightenment, growth, and betterment—over-guruing myself with near desperation in an effort to be the absolute best I could be. I hit the healer circuit hard, like it was my job. It was a noisy ten years that resulted in a couple of major, off-the-rails Zen Benders, but not for one second did I declare a cease-fire between me and the urge to fix me.
Until I finally did. And certainly not in the way, or for the reason, that I would have expected.
A Far-from-Exhaustive List of What I Was Told and Sold on the New Age and Self-Help Circuit
From the Dating Coach: Always wear high heels on a date, and keep the first date to one hour.
From the seminar on Why I’m Single: Keep hair long and shiny to show you’re fertile. Then someone will want to marry you.
From the Life Coach: Make a vision board, but don’t overload it with too many hopes and dreams (like I did on my second and third vision boards). Wish a little smaller and tighter, or the big-ticket items will not happen.
From the other Life Coach: Write yourself a check for a million dollars and look at it every day. Eventually, you’ll be successful and rich, and able to cash that check. (Still waiting.)
From the Rainbow Healer: You work too hard and nothing is ever good enough because you want to be liked because you must have been traumatized as a child. (I was not.)
From the Acupuncturist: You keep weight on to make yourself larger to keep people away—to literally create more space between them and you. (I’m a New Yorker. I like my space.)
From the Alternative Medicine Practitioner: If you sleep with a $150 magnet on your foot (magnetic therapy) when you have an injury, it will heal you. Unless, well, it won’t. Especially if what you really need is foot surgery to remove a three-inch piece of wood from your foot. Like I did. (True story.)
From the Spa: Squat bare-assed over burning incense at a high-end hotel. (I’m not sure what that was supposed to do, but it was expensive, so I assumed it couldn’t be bad.)
From Everybody Every Day: Beware of Mercury in retrograde. Don’t sign contracts during this time. (And, uh, trust me, your lawyer and your clients won’t think you’re nuts when you delay executing a deal for a week. Or at least they won’t tell you.)
From a Clairvoyant: Smudge your house with smoldering dry sage to get the bad juju out. (Feels like you’re doing something even if you’re not.)
From a Supermodel: Be sure to keep a cactus, and if it dies figure out who was at your house, because someone bad killed it by being there. (I did that. And a cactus died once. So, I moved. Not 100 percent because of the dead cactus, but I couldn’t remember who had killed it and I hadn’t yet learned how to smudge the place.)
From a Book: Dyeing a red streak in your hair will lead to personal and creative achievement, like The Artist’s Way said it would. (It said to do something wild that you wouldn’t normally do, and for me, wild meant a red streak.)
From Marie Kondo: Throw out all clothing that doesn’t spark joy. (This will mostly leave you with nothing to wear.)
From the Feng Shui Police: Put flowers to the right side of your desk if you want to find love. Put something green to the left so that you’ll get rich. Put reminders of your accomplishments in the center to ensure that you accomplish more. (Still waiting on said promised results.)
From a Random Magazine: Write negative things down on slips of paper and put them in the freezer every year to clear them away. (Or end up with a freezer full of stickies.)
On the other side of the Great Recession of 2008, there were those stories of the people who prevailed and happily came up with a second act, built million-dollar businesses, and overcame the big layoff during what felt like the end of days. There was also the flip side of that coin: the heartbreakers about the people who never recovered, who lost their homes and livelihoods, and experienced insurmountable declines in health.
My layoff wasn’t like any of these. It wasn’t as dramatic, or nearly as dire. I had enough friends and family in my life to know I’d never be homeless or hungry. They were all incredibly generous, keeping the wine flowing and, in my mom’s case, the health-care premium paid for. But it still stung.
And, unlike the fog Valium gives you the day after you take it, the burden and anxiety of my layoff never, ever left me. I don’t wish job loss on anybody. Even as a layoff based on the economy and not my performance, it felt deeply upsetting and utterly personal. Not to mention painfully embarrassing.
This book certainly isn’t another the-recession-hit-then-I-found-a-job story. I don’t want to dwell on the job loss here, but it was, as they say in the movies, the inciting incident. And while it consumed me for a long time, I finally realized, it’s not the story, just a tiny part of this one.
Still, here’s the way it played out…
Chapter 2
The End of Everything
survival
In mid-September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and things were looking bleak across the country. That was putting it mildly. We were staring into a global economic abyss. At the time, I was producing a television show for BusinessWeek magazine called BusinessWeekTV. It was a financial news show produced on the forty-ninth floor of the McGraw-Hill building, so we were keenly aware of what was happening, economically speaking.
Right around that time, my friend and colleague Wendy and I were running out to grab lunch. As we waited for the elevator, we ran into Jack, the guy who did the budgets. Jack being a usually chatty and friendly person, we asked how he was, and he explained that he was frazzled because it was budget time and he was working long days.
Friendly and amusing as always, Wendy said to him, “Make sure you leave enough for us in TV.”
If there was an Academy Award for Best Worst Poker Face, Jack would have won it. He froze. His smile vanished and his face
went white. Then he practically dove headfirst into the elevator without saying a word.
Wendy and I looked at each other after he left and noisily burst out laughing. “Well, that was awkward,” she said. We thought perhaps there would be some belt-tightening—no more holiday dinners at Bobby Van’s. Maybe due to lack of imagination, or over-confidence, or just plain naiveté, we had no idea what we were in for.
We should have known better.
Still, I didn’t think too much of Jack in the elevator. Later, I was meeting some friends for dinner at Otto off Fifth Avenue, and I had some time to kill. As usual, I was ultra-early, so I sat on a bench and stared at the fountain in that little triangle park where Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue intersect.
I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t shake, so I called the anchor of our show as I sat there soaking in the last licks of September sunshine.
“Do you think we will lose our jobs?”
She insisted we had nothing to worry about because we were making money for the company. Still, deep in my gut, I felt a shift on the horizon.
And, of course, there was the Jack incident, this probably marked the last time for a long time that I would trust my gut.
When in Doubt, Buy a Bad-Ass Handbag
Anticipating that I might never again earn a proper living, I did what everyone should never do when facing unemployment and financial collapse. I got up from my seat in that park and walked, with urgency, to Marc by Marc Jacobs and bought a show-stopping five-hundred-dollar purple leather bag.
It was a floppy, large, chunky-hardware, hobo-type bag with lots of outside pockets (a subway rider’s dream). For years, I’d been contemplating what life would be like if I owned that bag or one like it, but up until then I’d never spent five hundred dollars on any single clothing item or accessory. It was an insane purchase, but I felt strongly it was the last expensive purse I’d ever be able to afford. I joked later that night with my friends that if I did get laid off, I would live in the handbag.
I had been right to worry.
A week later, I was late to work. Very late, for some reason I can’t remember. At ten fifteen, I got a call from my boss asking where I was. I said I was on my way in a cab. He’d never called before.
“Hurry up and get here,” he said. “We’re all assembled in the conference room.”
“Are we being laid off?” I asked. Somehow I knew.
“I can’t say,” he said.
“So, yes,” I said.
I was late for my layoff.
Everyone had been sitting in the conference room since nine, waiting to get axed, when I rolled in wearing ripped jeans and black suede boots suitable for farming. They had filed out eventually, and when I finally arrived everyone filed back in. And with a prepared statement and limited information from non-human human resources types, it was over.
The magazine would live. The TV show and my career would die.
I was gutted. In slow motion, everybody on the team walked to their desks and made a phone call. I didn’t call anybody right away. I just sat there and stared off into space, feeling humiliated. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I simply didn’t know what to do.
Later that day, on the subway ride home, I looked at all the people on the B train heading uptown and wondered if they knew I was a loser, who, in three months’ time, would be without a paycheck.
“This will be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I heard that a lot from well-meaning friends when, shell-shocked, I told them what had happened with my job.
I’ll say this as yogically and New-Age-ily as I can, but every single time someone said that to me after I was laid off, as a single-income homeowner facing a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, staring at the end of my thirties—and likely the end of my best days professionally, not to mention for my ovaries—I wanted to literally punch the living crap out of them.
And I’ve never hit anybody. Except my younger sister, Jennifer, but only once, and that was a long time ago.
Even now, after making it through the layoff, I don’t view my experience as “great” or “the best” in any way. To be very clear: Getting laid off was not at the time, nor is it viewed by me today as, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not even close.
Getting a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese in a gift bag at a charity event was a better, more enjoyable life event. Losing my American Express card somewhere on 72nd Street, then replacing it, only to have the new card fall out of my pocket again two weeks later—basically sprinkling Manhattan with my line of credit but having nobody use either card—was a more thrilling life event than getting laid off.
In fact, rage was all I felt when that sentiment was recklessly tossed my way by well-meaning friends. To this day, I don’t view it as the best thing that ever happened to me, but the worst, maybe. And I concede that, if that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, I’m an incredibly fortunate person.
Did I get through it? Yes. Over it? No. Not even close.
Only looking back do I see where that sentiment may have come from. They’d all been watching Oprah, too.
The Secret had permeated the collective mindset by that point. Many people were suddenly and breathlessly explaining to me that I could finally “do what I loved!” with my life. (I, by the way, loved working in television news.)
There they were, the first squeaks of self-help-esque optimism. Most everybody seemed gung-ho and on board with the Best Thing attitude. Keep in mind, I was a product of the ‘90s workforce. Work-life balance? What the fuck was that? You worked. Period. I am the daughter of parents who worked every day to provide for their children and the granddaughter of an Armenian immigrant named Mgerdich Krikorian, who walked to work to pour steel in the foundry for a dollar a day so he could send his four children to school. Doing what you loved? Liked, maybe.
Of course, this sentiment was coming from people with paychecks and spouses with paychecks and 401ks and health care—people who were all fine espousing the new-found New Age wisdom, but I don’t recall too many of them leaving their six-figure jobs to practice what they were preaching. There’s a chance that the concept of facing what I was facing seemed a dream to them. Perhaps they were seducing themselves to not have to decide to leave a job they didn’t like and chase a dream? Maybe. Maybe they really did see me as the lucky one.
Still, what New Age way of thinking could possibly suggest that an end to a career that I loved was the best thing? Or was I being too pessimistic in my frustration? Would my mortgage company in fact take a check for “doing what I loved,” or did that require actual money?
Something else that I found weird at that time that always stuck with me: Many people felt the need to point out that things could have been worse. We all knew that. Things can always be worse. It was true.
But it’s not exactly the thing you need or want to hear as you face your own personal end of days.
“At least you don’t have cancer.”
I didn’t. And for that I was grateful. But that didn’t mean my crisis was any easier on me.
One person said it was hard to feel sorry for me because I had so much going for me. Again, the cable company wasn’t taking checks for “stuff I have going for me.”
Plus, there was almost a hierarchy of pity surrounding a city of laid-off people. Many people talked about how badly they felt for “breadwinners”—a.k.a. men with families who had to feed their children and put them through private school. As a single and childless woman with a mortgage, just FYI, I was, and continue to be, the breadwinner in my home, too.
It was like an onslaught of weird advice that Lucy from Peanuts gave to Charlie Brown from her psychiatric booth, and at the time, I simply wasn’t in the mood for, or buying into, it.
Not quite yet anyway, though I was soon to be born again myself.
All the sentiment led to some layoff takeaway that probably goes against the grain of most self-help thinking: Nobody wants to hear the easy-to-offer hypothetical bright side when they are drenched in self-pity and drowning in uncertainty. I did not. I just wanted to soak in my own agony for a while, so I could feel it, and sort through my personal crisis, however great or small it was to someone else; I wanted to acknowledge the pain of it all before taking action to fix it.
Perhaps friends, or society, or whatever we are collectively, don’t want to deal with the discomfort of such a situation. But, looking back, avoiding the struggle that I was feeling wasn’t the answer. Not for me. And not now that I’ve gone through it.
My advice today? When a friend is having a hard time, let her cry it out. Acknowledge: This sucks. Feel it with her. Don’t skimp on agreeing. Tell her, “You have every right to be upset. Take a few days, eat potato chips for breakfast. Stay in your pajamas and watch back-to-back Law & Order repeats. (I have heard that that is a thing…from, uh, a friend.) Feel the sting. Don’t avoid it or look for the sunny side until you’re ready.”
Nobody in crisis needs to hear that it could be worse.
Nobody needs to hear that their anxiety isn’t worthy of a sob fest.
Irrational Panic
In the months that followed getting laid off, I went on thirty-one job interviews. It was a challenging time. It felt like musical chairs. There were jobs, then a chair was pulled away and there were fewer options out there.
People were rapidly getting laid off, dropping like flies. This led me to face the realization that returning to a position in television news, at a certain level on the ladder, was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d thought when the hammer first came down.
I remember a former colleague named Peggy called me the afternoon we’d all gotten the axe because she’d heard about the cutbacks. She connected me with people at her network, and within days, I went in for an interview. I was feeling optimistic. For like five minutes. After lots of initial enthusiasm, I didn’t hear anything back. Why? They had all gotten laid off, too. That didn’t happen just once. It was like dominos at that time, and I was struggling to get out in front of it.
Zen Bender Page 2