I doubt that the Manchester airport had ever known, or has since known, a noise
quite like the one I made when I listened to that voicemail.
As someone who has been a closet case writer for most of her life, the idea of
publication induced nothing short of ecstasy. But there was a practical
element as well: the essay (found here) was about my job search as a recent
college grad with a passion for art. I thought there might be a
reasonable chance that some museum director might read my essay, be completely
charmed, and want to hire me. The glimmer of hope I had been nursing that
summer became glaring: maybe my life really was about to get going.
For reasons that were never clear to me, however, the article was pulled a few
days before it was set to print.
Looking back, I wonder which was worse: the fact that this incredible break had
suddenly and inexplicably evaporated, or that I had told everyone I knew
about it by the time it did. That same day, a very good job prospect fell
through, and I remember the sensation of being very close to broken. I
was in the territory of the two in the morning phone call to my best friend
because I was genuinely frightened by the sudden weight and breadth of
hopelessness that seemed to block out everything else in my mind.
The short version is that my best friend talked me through and out of it, and I
stopped reading Newsweek.
The long version is that since then, when something in my life seems like it’s about
to go really, truly right, I experience a sudden, crippling fear that it will
all go to hell at the last minute.
A good example is when I moved from my first job at a business school to the same university’s art museum—a miraculous and unexpected opportunity to actually start doing the thing I had wanted to do for so long. Naturally, I was convinced something would go wrong. One day not long before I was to transfer, my new supervisor called.
“So, I got a call from your main professor,” he said cautiously. I
immediately froze, because I knew that a) said professor had been massively
pissed about my leaving and b) I had never told her in which department or for
whom I would be working, so that meant she had gone through the trouble to wrangle
it out of someone. I braced myself for the news that she had torpedoed
me, of which I believed her to be fully capable.
My soon-to-be boss continued: “She told me she wasn’t pleased about your
leaving and said that we would need to work out some sort of split-time
situation to share you.”
As though I were a ski condo. My outrage spiked but did little to temper
my still freezing fear as he paused again.
“She… ah… she doesn’t really live in the real world, does she?”
As it happens, this professor’s Anna Wintour-esque scare tactics did not quite
translate across the river, and my new boss, for whom I would work happily for
two years, was not impressed. I left the b-school and never looked back—not
time-shared I might add.
Still, my shoulders tense at the memory of sitting there at my desk and waiting
for another amazing break to crumble before me. Sometimes I feel like I’m
in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I described
this phenomenon recently to my dad, who’s a very level-headed person, not prone
to fits or freak outs (too bad I’m on the shallow end of that part of my gene
pool). He told me he knew exactly what I meant, noting dryly: “I only
ever believe it when it’s bad news. I’m not sure what to do with good
news.”
A few weeks ago, four years out from that frozen moment at my desk, I sat at
yet another desk watching a few truly remarkable things come over my horizon…
and the dread was almost unbearable.
I was extremely lucky that shortly after I finished graduate school, I found
out that the woman who had replaced me at my old museum job was leaving, and
they asked me to pinch hit for a while. This teed me up nicely for a
position at the same museum I’d had my eye on for a few months. I was a
strong internal candidate with several important people going to bat for
me. Not a bad state of affairs.
At the same time, my sporadic Craigslist apartment hunt one day turned up a
pre-war one-bedroom in Watertown. It’s the unicorn of rentals: gorgeous,
cheap, in unit washer/dryer. To top it off, my landlords are
alumni of my college, and they were ecstatic that they’d chosen a fellow grad
as their tenant. Also not a bad state of affairs.
So there I was with these amazing prospects, and a part of me was convinced
everything was going to fall through.
For the record, I am aware that this fear could not possibly have originated in
that first incident with Newsweek; that particular disappointment probably just
gave concrete expression to long-held, bottom-feeder anxieties. I’m also
aware that there is, in fact, such a thing as “too good to be true,” and that
anything that seems perfect should be examined even more closely than things
that seem merely passable. Ultimately, it’s probably true that a good
dose of reality-based skepticism will serve you well. My problem is that
my anxiety swan-dives off the edge of skepticism and straight into an ocean of
borderline paranoia.
As usual, I find myself on one end of a spectrum, wondering how to make my way
back to a reasonable middle. One important thing to remember is that
something can be amazing but not perfect. A good example is that my
fabulous apartment was filthy when I moved into it—I spent my first four hours
in it wiping down baseboards and sweeping up cat hair. There are things
that are wrong with it (one psychotic, 2:30 a.m. carbon monoxide detector episode
being one of them), but on the whole it is wonderful. I never trust
things that are perfect, because very few things actually are. But maybe
I can learn to trust things that are really great.
The second thing to remember is what my best friend told me when I expressed
all these anxieties to her. In the way that she has, cutting swiftly but
lovingly to the heart of the issue, she said: “Honey, good things are
allowed to happen.”
And in this case, they did: my job offer came through the day before I moved
in.
