The End Foretold

Perhaps the end was foretold at the start. It coincided with a bruising moment in an otherwise pretty great career. I had grown from an impoverished actress struggling to find a foothold to a highly paid agency executive. So grateful to have had a second chance, I loved the ride, loved using an amalgam of skills, having an impact, employing people, loved outperforming by a wide margin which was the only way I knew to be seen and be safe amid that noisy litter of my childhood.

Just before a cross-country flight, I lost a client of 15 years. A new regime didn’t want the old agency team. I was blamed and replaced all within an hour of learning there was a problem. Unprepared for failure, having done everything in my power to avoid it as I flew that upward trajectory, I was terrified. What someone with a different history might see as ordinary bad luck felt like a threat to my tightly reconstructed identity. Who was I if I was not ascendant? Would I fall through the cracks after all?

The Net

That night, I woke in a dark Seattle hotel room, terrified that I’d blow the 8-hour meeting I needed to QB the next day and lose another client. I called Him: He who’d been a generous friend of two years; he who was always flirting with me and therefore seemed safe and wise.

He was so shockingly unalarmed that I began to breathe. He told me about a brilliant defense lawyer he’d once seen open a murder trial. In the men’s room, just prior, someone was retching his guts out. The stall opened and it was him. He washed then went out and gave a masterful opening. “You are that guy,” he said. “You can do anything for one day. Go get some protein in you. Eat an egg; drink some coffee. You’ll be great.”

And I was, and my heart, which had shimmied on the sidelines for 2 years, suddenly cracked wide open.