Regardless, making my own fake Caesar salad (a major deviation from the overcooked pork chop covered in Shake and Bake, canned corn, and iceberg lettuce with white vinegar and vegetable oil that was a staple in the Krikorian household), along with some peace and quiet, sounded downright divine.
I walked in the back door and entered what we referred to as the “downstairs bathroom,” situated steps from the rec room. That bathroom had an unfinished, therefore never used, shower stall (plumbing but no tiles) in it, a crawl space, unstained wood-paneled walls, a sink, a toilet, and a bifold door.
Feeling ever so slightly under the weather, but not full-blown sick, I entered the bathroom and sat down to pee, pondering whether I was actually feeling well enough to make my meal. When I stood up to flush, I was suddenly gripped with fear as I stared into the toilet bowl.
I had peed blue. Full. On. Smurf. Blue.
Clearly, I wasn’t just under the weather. I was dying. There was no other rational explanation. I didn’t know much at that age, but I knew healthy people didn’t pee blue.
I stared at that bowl in disbelief and remained in a panic for a few minutes, unsure of what to do. Nobody was home. I didn’t want to fail at taking care of myself, or I might never be left alone again, but I didn’t want to die alone either.
Hesitant to destroy the evidence of my disease, but also polite enough to know I had to flush, I hit the handle of the toilet, still shell-shocked and in a state of disbelief. To my great astonishment and great relief, the bowl refilled with blue water.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was happening, so I flushed again to be safe. And there it was, blue again. I wasn’t going to die after all.
Along with premade croutons and premade salad dressing, my mother had apparently discovered another modern convenience: toilet cleaning disks that made the water blue after each flush. Phew.
Not that I learned a lesson from that incident.
Re-Trusting My Gut
For my smoke situation, I saw a long list of doctors, learning all sorts of useless things along the way that had nothing to do with the smoke problem itself. My sense of smell, I learned, was fading, which was uncommon for a woman in her forties. My hearing, I was told, was also not as good as it should have been.
I was prescribed nasal sprays, allergy pills, nasal rinsing (tres gross) regimes, and more. Nothing helped.
Eventually, after exhausting all other potential issues as they related to smelling smoke, I made one of the many doctors I had seen send me for the brain scan. A tumor, it was clear, was the obvious answer.
Good news: I did indeed have a brain, but I did not have a tumor. Bad news: I still needed an answer and a solution.
Since no doctor seemed overly concerned about my situation, and there was no tumor, I left to go on my annual month-long trip to Venice, knowing that upon my return to New York, I needed to see a neurologist to get to the bottom of the smoke-smell situation. So, there I was in Los Angeles, at a fancy party in the Hollywood Hills, at a house with both the most impressive view of the ocean on one side, and a spectacular view of downtown and its sparkling lights on the other.
Early into the evening, I smelled smoke, but, like, real smoke. I told my friend Martha that I thought something was burning, but that I couldn’t be 100 percent sure, given my issue. She confirmed that, indeed, something was burning in the kitchen. There was another woman chatting with us, someone we had just met that evening. As I often feel compelled to fill strangers in on the details of my life, I explained to this woman that I had something medical going on with my sense of smell and that I hoped the neurologist could pinpoint the issue when I got back home.
In classic LA form, she said, “You don’t need to see a doctor for this. You need to see a clairvoyant. Someone from your past, maybe someone who smoked, or had something to do with smoke, is visiting you.” It made sense. And we were in Los Angeles, after all, where it was legitimately fine to ignore doctors and double down on clearing passages in alternative ways. While you might get laughed off the subway platform in New York for weighing clairvoyant vs. neurologist, in LA, it was de rigueur. The New Age set is strong there, and so this suggestion was to be taken seriously.
Like all unsolicited advice given at parties by non-experts, I took this tidbit about the smoke-past-life as gospel. And since obviously I, by this time, had a clairvoyant (or six) at the ready, I booked an appointment. Tout suite. The next week, I returned to the Mystic Bookstore on Abbot Kinney Road, and in another dark little room, with another mysterious clairvoyant du jour, I learned that nobody was actually visiting me per se, but my smoke smelling was an indication of a psychic event happening around me. Over and over.
My cosmic intuition was coming to me in the smell of smoke, apparently.
Later, back at home, the neurologist did a series of tests involving my brain and eventually informed me that smelling something that is not actually there is a neurological problem. Period. His conclusion was that every time I smelled it, I was having small silent seizures.
The only fix, he said, was anti-seizure medication.
That didn’t feel right to me.
For most of the decade that preceded this diagnosis, I had found myself following the advice of basically anybody, unquestioned. I had ceded power over my life to the dating coach, the Rainbow Healer, the Dove, and even some more mainstream experts. For a smart girl, I had been pretty dumb.
Handing power over to one such expert turned out to be costly.
Within months of getting laid off, I did two responsible things, in addition to making vision boards. First, before my paycheck actually ended, knowing that having an actual paycheck showing that I had an actual job was a fleeting thing, I scrambled to refinance my apartment to take advantage of plunging interest rates. It had been on my to-do list for a long time, but in that moment it was an imperative. Second, I found a financial planner to guide me on consolidating all my 401ks and help me get myself organized as I faced a different financial future. I was overloaded with the job search and I wanted to outsource some pressure.
My new financial planner and I arranged to have an initial meeting at a Starbucks in Harlem. She was a young woman and I liked that fact. She seemed eager and helpful, and I liked that, too. I asked a lot of questions, as I do, and she answered them all. One specific question I asked pertained to how the fee structure worked when one employed a financial planner. After all, I was basically putting my money into one mutual fund (at her direction, but it made sense to me at the time). I knew enough to know that I could have done that on my own, but also thought maybe I would get some more helpful advice from an expert. That said, I still wanted to know what that would cost me. The answer, it seemed, was that she was paid a percentage of the money I made. If I made money, she did too. But I had it wrong. That was what I understood from her answer, but that wasn’t the case.
For the first year or two, I couldn’t add a penny to my retirement account. When I finally had enough spare change, I fed my fund, as I had been told to do by Bill Griffeth, an anchor at CNBC, on the first day I started there. He said, “If you do one thing here, make sure to put the maximum away into your retirement account directly from your paycheck.” I did that then, as directed (even in 1993 I liked advice), and eventually, when I could scrape it together post-layoff, I resumed doing so.
It was difficult, though. I was still single-pumping shampoo and not going out for dinner, but with a self-help habit to feed. Most austerity measures had remained in place. But any spare change I did have went into my 401k. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Strangely, though, every time I checked my statement, it didn’t seem to be getting any higher. That should have been a red flag for me, but it wasn’t. I was too busy taking dating seminars. And I had replaced my gut instinct with full-on trust in the Universe and the expert’s thinking. I should have known better. After all, I had ma
de a career covering financial news. And while money might have been an intimidating topic for some people, it wasn’t for me.
Years later, when my planner and I were doing a review, she suggested I upgrade my account to some special product her firm was offering. It was an array of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), a fund of funds essentially. The good news, she said, was that her fee was much lower.
“What’s the new fee?” I asked over the phone.
She told me. It was a percentage of my total nut.
“Well, what’s the current fee?” I asked.
She told me. It was a much, much higher percentage of my total nut.
I took a moment, realizing that something was not quite right. After some quick calculations, I said, “Wait, you’ve been collecting a fee far greater than what I’ve been able to save and deposit annually?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s how you should look at.”
To me, there was no other way to look at it. It was, in my opinion, her job to look out for my best interests. She should have noticed what was happening, I thought. Her job was, after all, minding my money. She had failed me. But worse, I had failed myself. Her job was to manage my money. But it was my job was to trust my gut and I had failed. I had seen the numbers, and they gave me pause, but I ignored them.
The money was only one example of not trusting my gut. There were so many more. I had been focused on so much other shit—like getting a red streak in my hair—that I’d taken my eye off the ball in probably the single most important department in my life next to my health. Worse, I’d ignored that nagging feeling I had every time I checked my statement and noticed it wasn’t getting larger very fast.
And that was a problem. I realized I had spent so much time listening to everybody else, and searching for solutions to non-problems, that I’d stopped listening to the person who knew me best: me.
Recently, I had dinner with my friend Alison. We were laughing about my dating-coach days and the way I had lectured her on one particular date she was going on. She’d had an OkCupid date that was taking place in the middle of a snowstorm. She was going to go despite the weather, but she was going to wear sensible footwear. I implored her to reconsider and wear high heels because the dating coach had said it was critical. We went back and forth and back and forth until she said to stop.
My response, as she told it later, was “Fine, but you are making an enormous mistake.”
I trotted myself out in the heels and the shiny hair on my dates. That’s what I was told to do.
That date for Alison, that was the first date with her now-husband. He didn’t mind her sensible shoes.
Footwear choices weren’t life and death. Unless of course Alison had slipped in the storm and cracked her head open. Cause of injury: high heels.
But anti-seizure medication, that was different altogether. Fortunately, slowly, I had begun to regain trust in myself and done some careful considering and investigating before I listened to that doctor.
I said no to his diagnosis and continued on with my own investigation. I’m not sure that, in previous years, I would have done the same.
Remote Reiki
I used to manage stress and anxiety so much better. When I think back to the newsroom days of getting screamed at, or where deadlines weren’t down to the day but literally the second, nothing about it makes me think, “What an anxiety-filled time.” I thought it was fun.
One of my all-time favorite bosses at CNBC, Tom Anthony, was usually in a good mood. But when he lost it, he lost it. One time I was boldly debating him on some issue or other. When he’d finally had enough of me, he said, and I quote, “Shut the fuck up.”
I didn’t, and so he whipped the opened packet of mustard he was about to put on his sandwich at me. It spilled all down my shirt and I laughed out loud. But it didn’t stress me out.
Another manager used to assign me to get credentials so that we could cover various events. Occasionally, I would report back that the event organizers had said no, that there would be no press allowed in. He would frequently respond by saying, “Call them back, tell them your job is on the line and you’ll be fired if you don’t get in.” It was never quite clear if he was serious or not, but even that didn’t stress me out. A decade-plus later, I ran into him and we laughed about it. He also said, “We certainly treat young women differently now than we did back then.”
One of the smartest people I worked with in news was Kevin Newman. While working on his show, I was sent to produce special network coverage for President George W. Bush’s first visit to Canada, joining the local reporter and team in Halifax. Kevin would anchor from the desk at headquarters.
There were going to be protestors. As I recall, there were various places to set up a satellite truck in order to see these protestors marching, but the night before the big day, in a local bar, someone (I truly don’t recall who—a stranger or an official) suggested a place that would be best for us to catch the action on camera. Over drinks, I listened to this advice and then, after consulting with my local team, we made some last-minute arrangements to park our truck in this particular spot along with no other news outlets. It was a risk, but taking it didn’t stress me out. Though it probably should have.
The next morning, the shot set, no protestors in sight, we waited. I trusted my gut on this one decision, and while there was the usual stress of working in the news, it wasn’t an all-consuming anxiety, like I would later experience in life.
Back at headquarters, the anchor, Kevin, would be breaking into network programming, throwing to our live shot and the reporter, and watching these protestors walk behind us. We had our platform built, our shot was up, and we were ready to go. Two minutes before we were supposed to go live, there were still no protestors.
My phone rang. It was Kevin from the anchor chair. That was not a phone call you generally wanted to receive one minute to air. But he wanted to know where the protestors were.
Kevin was the kind of anchor you didn’t want to let down. Not that I ever wanted to let any anchor down. Or, really, anybody. But he was exceedingly sharp. I learned early to try to anticipate what questions he was inevitably going to ask about something. I used to write five down before I spoke to him on any topic and made sure I could answer them. Wouldn’t you know it, he always had six. Or more. He always had a sharper focus or smarter question for me and it would piss me off over and over that I didn’t have the answer or that I hadn’t thought of the question on my own. So, when there were no protestors arriving in my ultra-gamble of a shot, Kevin was rightly not a happy anchor.
Here’s where the naive anxiety-less-ness of the old me came into play: I was calm (on the outside) and I assured him they would be arriving. After hanging up, I said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, we’re fucked,” but I didn’t actually have a breakdown.
Cue the protestors, by the way. Programming was interrupted. Kevin went live. The protestors filled the shot within seconds. My gut had paid off. All was well with the world. And I didn’t need therapy or Rainbow Healing or the Dove to get over it. Not then. That all came later.
During one particularly stressful period, when I was in the last gasps of forty-nine, I sought out a Reiki master, not Rainbow Reiki, a no-strange-breathing, traditional energy-moving Reiki. My healer’s name was Erin. There was no chanting and no touching this time, just silence and stillness as I lay down, eyes closed, and she moved my energy around without me even noticing.
Interestingly, she found what the Lampshade Healer had found: that I was difficult to read. She told me after the session that she’d had a hard time getting in and had to work to figure out what was going on with me.
What was going on was a long list of things.
First, my mother was having surgery, and that stressed me out. It was a shoulder replacement, so not life-threatening, but old people and anesthesia isn’t a comfor
ting combination, I knew that. For whatever reason, I had a bad feeling about it. I was catastrophizing in my head—terrified surgery would go wrong long before the surgery even took place. For weeks, in yoga class, at the beginning of the practice, I would dedicate my practice in my head to my mother, and silently say, “Please don’t leave me.” The single most precious soul on this earth to me is Julia. If I had to choose the company of just one human for the rest of time, I would choose my mother. When I’m not with her, I miss her. As such, I feel preemptively sad for the days when she won’t be around, when she won’t be getting up in the middle of the night to track my flight to Tokyo or wherever, and then texting to see if I landed. I am preemptively heartbroken, knowing she won’t always tell me every dumb little thing that I wrote or did was “just terrific.” So, as perhaps irrational as it was to worry at this particular time, it was a stress that I faced.
Second, and less tragic by a lot, I had bought a new Volkswagen Tiguan Limited—quickly, like the Harlem apartment, with little thought. Three days and 192 miles into the new Volkswagen experience, the car dropped dead. The steering seized up while I was driving, and I had a harrowing time wheeling it to safety. That car was taken away on a flatbed, lemon laws did not kick in, and a week later, with no apology, the $26,000 bought-and-paid-for-not-leased mistake was back in my driveway, with steering.
In addition to that, my bank account got hacked, and, while they didn’t get any money, it was a complete time-suck for weeks.
Finally, and I brought this one on myself, I was renovating my kitchen. Not a feel-sorry-for-me stress, I know. Please don’t mistake my bringing it up for that. But I learned that I was ill-equipped for the ups and downs of this, and during the work, anxiety overwhelmed me. Plus, try doing that while you work from home. Ultimately, I went into the renovation thinking I was a breezy person, ignoring what everybody warned would be a horrible and challenging experience. I learned quickly that a life’s worth of pent-up indifference about a lot of things suddenly came out in that construction project.
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