Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Things ending with Luke sent me on another existential spiral. I would be thirty-five in a couple of months—the age that I used to think was so old! The age when I assumed I would have my proverbial shit together! The age when I would not still be pining over a guy who did not reciprocate my feelings and crying over him in yoga! Thirty-five was the age that I’d been dreading ever since I watched my first episode of Sex and the City—it was the Rubicon where, once crossed, women shriveled up and became crones living forgotten and alone; my former Gawker colleague Alex jokingly referred to people’s thirty-fourth birthdays as “last call,” but the joke hit a little too close to home.

  Throughout this period, the only thing that was keeping me somewhat sane was running. I had started running a few months before Jon and I had broken up. It was grueling and hard. My lungs burned at every step, my legs ached. In high school, I played lacrosse for two seasons because some of my friends were playing and I had nothing better to do, but I couldn’t run very fast or very far, so they made me the goalie. Instead of a cute little plaid skirt and polo shirt, I wore a big, hulking, padded uniform that covered almost every inch of my body, and a helmet. I waddled out onto the field and took my place in the net, mostly just waiting around until one of the girls from the other team—inevitably blond, long-limbed, and fast as hell—came charging down the field, hurling a small rubber ball extremely close to my face.

  For close to two decades, I had been content to be someone who was emphatically not a runner. I didn’t understand runners, didn’t get how they could literally just put on a pair of sneakers and dash out the door. In my mind, runners were focused, determined people. Running itself seemed like a pursuit that was almost the opposite of how I saw myself—as an impatient person who preferred instant gratification to long-term planning—and I think that’s why I wanted to get good at it, as though to show myself that I was capable of something I was convinced I wasn’t.

  I started by running on the treadmill at the gym, and then I was running the length of Court Street from the Carroll Gardens apartment I shared with Jon, and then I was doing that faster. It still didn’t feel great, but charting my progress was immensely satisfying, both in terms of the number of miles I was running and how quickly I could do them. I did my first race that spring, a 10K in Central Park, and felt a sense of achievement that I’d never really felt before. It seemed so straightforward: Set a goal, achieve said goal through hard work and focus and determination, and get a flimsy participation medal and a T-shirt with a corporate sponsor emblazoned on it.

  It occurred to me that, other than graduating from college, there hadn’t been that many things in my life where I’d actually articulated a goal that I wanted to achieve and plotted exactly how I was going to reach it. Maybe getting good at running would be my way into becoming a more focused person, instead of just flitting from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, apartment to apartment.

  Then I found out that if I ran a certain number of races in a year, I could qualify for the New York Marathon the following year. It seemed like a reasonable, if intimidating, goal. At least one weekend a month I would have a race, usually in Central Park, and by the end of 2011, I had run all the races I needed to qualify. In January 2012, I officially was entered in that year’s New York City Marathon. I went into deep training mode; I was running a few times a week, with a long run on the weekends. It was winter, so I would put on my cold weather running gear: running tights, a long-sleeve shirt, a light jacket, gloves, a hat or fuzzy headband that covered my ears. Still, on those long run days, when I would usually take the subway into Lower Manhattan and run on the path along the Hudson River, the wind whipped off the water, chapping my face and making tears run from my eyes. Even though I wasn’t crying crying, it still felt cathartic.

  At least I wasn’t sitting around my apartment by myself, moping about Luke, I reasoned. But even thinking about not thinking about him meant that, yes, I was still thinking about him. Random times we’d hung out when I’d felt happy would pop into my head, like the time we sat at a bar and drew a flimsy map of the United States from memory and filled in all the states together and I couldn’t remember the direction that the hypotenuse of the triangles that formed New Hampshire and Vermont went in. I didn’t think about the times I waited for him to email me back, or when he would flake on plans and tell me his phone died, or when it felt like I was begging him to hang out with me.

  I was able to keep it together at work, but at night, I felt lonely and despondent. In my darkest moments, I wondered why I hadn’t just stuck it out with Jon. It hadn’t been perfect, but was it any worse than how I was feeling? We’d definitely be engaged by now, I thought, if not already married. Maybe we’d have bought that apartment we’d always been talking about! Maybe I’d even be pregnant. After we’d broken up, I had chased the high highs that I thought I’d been missing with him, and now I was experiencing the lowest lows. Running was only going to get me so far, literally and figuratively.

  I was on dating apps, and going on dates here and there, but I still couldn’t let go of my feelings for Luke. One weekend afternoon a couple of months after Luke and I had broken up, I met Meera for coffee. “Is it crazy to say that it feels like things with him might not be totally over?”

  She looked at me, slightly alarmed. “What do you mean?” she said carefully.

  “No, I mean, I know we broke up,” I said. “I guess I just mean that, like, there’s a part of me that just feels like we could get back together, like we still have more to do, or something.”

  “I think it’s okay to let yourself feel those things,” she said. “I just…I wouldn’t fixate on it, you know?”

  I nodded. I knew she was right. I needed to move on.

  * * *

  —

  FINALLY, I REALIZED I needed therapy. My daily Gchat sessions with my friends about the state of my romantic life were wearing on them, and I was having trouble escaping the well of self-pity I found myself in. If I really thought about it, I’d been stuck in the same pattern for the better part of ten years—dating someone seriously for a while, and then after breaking up with them, getting into torturous situations with guys I was usually infatuated with and who didn’t totally feel the same way about me, but who strung me along and gave me enough crumbs that it was difficult to extricate myself from their spell. Some of my friends had been there for the duration. It was time—for my sake, and for theirs—to figure this shit out.

  My friend Mandy sent me the name of a woman her therapist liked to refer people to. Her name was Cynthia, which seemed like a perfect therapist name—it connoted a woman of a certain age, who would be wise and warm. Cynthia was, in fact, all those things. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, and had curly gray hair that she wore piled on her head, and no makeup except for lipstick. She wore lots of button-down shirts and boots. I liked her immediately.

  “So tell me why you decided to come to therapy,” she said. I was sitting on a leather couch facing big windows that overlooked a busy SoHo corner not far from the old Gawker office.

  “I broke up with someone a couple of months ago, and we weren’t even really in a relationship, like I’m not even really sure what we were, and we were only ‘together’ ”—I put this word in air quotes—“for like, five months or something.” I took a breath. “But…I feel sadder about it than I feel like I should. Like the proportion of my sadness over this relationship doesn’t make sense, for how long we were ‘together.’ ” Again, the air quotes.

  She contemplated this. “Why do you think that is?” I knew the question was coming, and still, I struggled to answer it.

  “I guess…I mean, I really liked him,” I said.

  “What did you like about him?” she asked.

  This was a more difficult question. “He was really…hot,” I said. The word hot strobed in the air—neon
teen pink. “Um, but also, he was really interesting and smart and he…wrote me really good emails? When he would email me.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, he just wasn’t around very much,” I said. “He writes for the magazine where I used to work, and they’re always sending him on assignments in random places with, like, a day’s notice. So he’d just disappear for a few days, or weeks. And then when he was on deadline he’d disappear but then he’d resurface as though nothing had happened.”

  “That sounds really frustrating,” she said. “And like it was hard for you to get to know him.”

  “I mean, yeah,” I said.

  “Why do you think you were attracted to someone who wasn’t around very much?”

  Yowch. Cynthia’s questions were all the ones that I had avoided asking myself over the last few months, and now, sitting across from her in this blandly comfortable room, I had nowhere to hide from them.

  “Um…” I stalled. “Well. If someone’s not around very much, and it’s hard to get to know them, I guess it’s easy to, like, project anything you want onto them. I guess in my mind I turned him into the person I wanted him to be, not the person he actually is.”

  She nodded. “He didn’t give you enough data.” She paused. “The way you responded to that is completely normal, by the way. When we don’t have enough data, we tend to fill in the gaps ourselves. And that means it’s easy to create a kind of fantasy of a person.”

  “Right,” I said, turning this idea around in my mind. I also realized I hadn’t responded to the rest of her question. “Do you…do you think it’s possible that I was attracted to him because I felt like I didn’t deserve to be with someone who was going to give me all of himself?”

  “That’s certainly possible,” she said. “Is that what you think?”

  I thought about the ways that I had felt so desperate for any scraps of attention from Luke, the anxious feeling I’d have as I waited for his emails and texts, how I made excuses for him about why he wasn’t my boyfriend, how I had always felt like I wasn’t pretty enough to be with him, how my friends had tried to tell me that I deserved more but I didn’t want to listen to them.

  “Yes,” I said. “You know…I think in some ways I feel stuck. Like, even though I have this new job, I’m wondering where I am in all this. Who’s steering the ship, I guess. Like it sometimes feels like I’m just sort of careening from one thing to the next, whether it is a guy or a job or…anything, really.”

  “It’s just about time for us to stop,” she said gently, glancing at the clock facing her on the table next to me. “Do you want to set something up for next week?”

  The rest of the day, I couldn’t get my conversation with Cynthia out of my head. I needed to go for a run—I didn’t feel stuck when I went running, even though it was still a struggle. I liked the solitude. Even in the noise and chaos of the city, I could let my mind wander, and each mile that my running app told me I’d logged gave me a little jolt of satisfaction. The next morning, as I jogged north through my Fort Greene neighborhood, then past the Brooklyn Navy Yard and up into Williamsburg, the sweat dripped down my forehead but my lungs weren’t burning, my legs weren’t aching. I wasn’t especially fast, but I felt strong.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was Valentine’s Day 2012, a couple of days after I had started at BuzzFeed, and from my desk in the middle of the open-plan office I could hear a commotion at the reception desk. Just then, we got an email with an exciting announcement: To celebrate Valentine’s Day, BuzzFeed had gotten a white minihorse named Mystic to come hang out, and everyone was invited to take pictures. When I got to reception, I saw that the minihorse had a horn affixed to its head, so it looked like a unicorn, and ribbons on its mane. I bent down and someone took a picture, which I immediately posted to Instagram. If I was going to be working for the ultimate millennial startup, I might as well try to play the part.

  The atmosphere at BuzzFeed could not have been more different than what I’d just come from at Rolling Stone. I’d been one of the younger employees at Rolling Stone; here, I was one of the oldest. BuzzFeed had a kitchen full of snacks and free soda and seltzer; at Rolling Stone, you had to pay a quarter to get a handful of peanut M&Ms from a gumball machine in the break room, which was too small to actually take a break in.

  I was employee number sixty-five at BuzzFeed. Every other Thursday afternoon, the entire company would gather in the office kitchen for “BuzzFeed Brews,” where we would eat pizza, drink beer, and welcome any new employees. All the new employees had to give a “fun fact” about themselves, in front of the whole company. Then Jonah Peretti, the company’s CEO, would usually make an announcement about a new initiative or hand the microphone over to a department head to explain what their team had recently accomplished.

  Every week there were at least five new hires, often more. When I started, the company had just gotten $15 million in new venture capital funding, and we had a mandate to grow—quickly. Jonah was determined to create a news division from scratch that would compete with big mainstream media outlets like The New York Times. Until very recently, BuzzFeed had been known for highlighting and creating viral online content, as well as for so-called native advertising, which from what I could tell basically consisted of posts paid for by big companies that were designed to be nearly indistinguishable from nonpaid posts. Jonah was convinced that news content could also go viral, and that we’d be able to apply everything BuzzFeed had learned about creating “fun” viral content to news.

  At Rolling Stone, I’d been a senior editor, which sounded like a more important job than it actually was. But now, I was running shit, and it was exciting. Sometimes I couldn’t totally believe that this was my job: Ben put me in charge of creating an entertainment and lifestyle division. Jonah wanted BuzzFeed to have a women-focused section to compete with blogs like Jezebel. I could launch sections for food, music, entertainment, sports. I’d never had the chance to create something like this from scratch, and I was very aware that it might never happen again—mostly because it’s almost unheard of for a media company to just say, Here’s some money, just build something. Usually when they say that, there’s a catch, but as far as I could tell, there wasn’t one this time. I didn’t want to fuck it up.

  Ben gave me pretty much carte blanche to hire as many people as I thought I needed. I’d never really hired anyone before, and there was just one overworked recruiter to give me guidance, so I operated mostly on instinct—if someone seemed smart and like they had good ideas, their references were decent, and Ben liked them, I usually took it on faith that they’d be a good employee. Sometimes this worked out, and sometimes it didn’t. For senior positions, we’d often reach out to people in the industry we thought would be good, and they usually would come to a meeting at the office and then tell us they weren’t interested. But a few times, we got approached by people who wanted to work for us whom I’d had a bad experience with, or who had a bad reputation. “We can’t hire anyone gross,” I said to Ben firmly, after he floated the name of a guy I’d worked with who had a reputation for preying on interns. But even guys with decent reputations seemed threatened by the notion of a woman in a position of power. Sometimes I’d be hiring for a job, and a man—it was always a man—would try to go around me and approach Ben; eventually I realized that these men had literally never worked for a woman before. To Ben’s credit, he always responded, and CC’d me, saying that I was the one hiring for the job and would be in touch if I was interested.

  I liked working for Ben, even if we were both kind of making things up as we went along. He had been a politics blogger, so he worked quickly and had sharp instincts for a good story, and he was excited about practically every idea I brought to him about expanding lifestyle and culture coverage. He was quirky—his phone was practically attached to his hand, and in meetings, if someone else was talking, he would just s
it there scrolling Twitter and responding to emails, every so often making a comment without looking up from his phone. He wandered the newsroom, chatting with reporters constantly, as though he missed being one of them. Despite giving the okay for the teams in my purview, he also had little to no interest in those subject areas. Which was mostly fine, when he would leave us alone, except that sometimes he would suddenly get interested in them—usually when he felt like they weren’t a big enough part of “the conversation.” From what I could tell, “the conversation” consisted of the people Ben followed on Twitter, most of whom were politics and local New York news reporters.

  Over the summer, Jonah decided he wanted to start covering the entertainment industry and simultaneously launch a video division that would create entertainment. I went out to Los Angeles to start trying to hire people to cover the industry. I’d been to L.A. several times before, but always for vacation or to visit friends, and it felt different and more important, somehow, to be going out there for work. L.A. felt exciting, romantic, new—and sunny. I stayed at the Sunset Tower Hotel, the classic Old Hollywood hotel on Sunset Boulevard that was also known as the site of the Vanity Fair Oscar party. One day, after a morning spent in my room doing work, I went downstairs for a meeting by the pool, which has a large patio for dining and a breathtaking view of Los Angeles. The weather was perfect—not too hot, the bright blue sky punctuated by palm trees. As I took in the view and waited for my appointment to arrive, I noticed a group of guys on a couch on the nearly empty patio, drinks and some food on the low table in front of them. It was the former Entourage star Kevin Connolly and a few of his friends, just casually hanging out on a weekday afternoon. This poolside C-list celebrity encounter was perfectly, deliciously on the nose, and I was enamored with all of it.