The Newsweek Syndrome

In July of 2008, I wrote and submitted an essay to the Newsweek guest columnist section.  I honestly didn’t think anything would come of it, but I fired it off anyway since I didn’t have anything better to do in the immediate aftermath of my college graduation.  A few weeks later, I got off of a plane to find a voicemail on my phone: the magazine had accepted my submission and wanted to know when and where they should send the photographer to do my portrait.

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.