STORY FRAME 39 – Midnight Attacks from Anxiety Goblins

Journal notes, March 2000 – The anxiety goblins attacked again during the night. I awoke this morning feeling restless and unsettled….

As my days at the documentary workshop trickled to an end and I was struggling to find another job, it seemed increasingly as if a massive door had slammed shut on the most interesting career I could ever have imagined for myself. Like a dark fairy tale, a huge dark and immovable rock had rolled across what I thought was the only path into the magical world of telling stories and making films.

In addition to working on documentaries, for the past several years I’d also been researching and writing a nonfiction book, The Muse Factor – a psychological, non-fiction study of muses and their relationships with artists. Who would those artists be and what would their music, art, sculpture and writings be like were it not for someone who happened to cross their paths, changing the trajectory of their creativity?

I loved this book project. So did my agent in Washington, DC. I’d submitted it to her via an author interviewed during one of our film projects who was already working with her. She invited me in to speak with her after reading my book proposal and told me it was just the kind of “smart, sexy and intelligent” book she was looking to represent. I floated out of that first meeting high on a delightful cloud of possibilities.

I was assigned a staff person and together we worked on crafting a book proposal they would shop to potential publishers. A year went by, and hard as I worked on whatever they asked me to do, I felt their suggestions somehow took the zest out of my proposal and sample chapters. The agent sent a copy of what we had team-created to an editor in New York City for her thoughts. It came back several weeks later with red ink. A lot of red ink. I was dismayed and wished the editor had instead been sent a copy of my original proposal.

After receiving the response from New York, my agent told me she couldn’t spend any more time on me and my book – we were finished. This was another gut-wrenching rejection on top of the loss of my job. Disheartened, I put my writing and all the work on the book aside to focus on finding paying work.

Each day, I spent an hour or two walking with our dogs Zydeco and Bandit for miles along the bike path that meandered through the trees along the Potomac River from Mount Vernon to Old Town, Alexandria – long walks that renewed and saved me and often inspired new thoughts and possible solutions.

But the hardships kept coming. With no steady income, the bills started to back up like noxious sludge in a clogged drain. The IRS continued to hound me over a disputed return from my married years. My father’s health began to falter. His brother, my beloved uncle and mentor, Lawrence Fellows, whose multi-country career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times inspired me to want to tell stories from other lands, died unexpectedly from a heart attack. Having just lost my sister to cancer, I was worried the same fate would befall me. Despite having Zoë and Leif with me at least half of each week, I’d never felt so utterly alone in my life. At least they were fine, I kept reminding myself. And that thought kept me going.

A few days after the one-year anniversary of Karen’s death, Dr. & Mrs. Braddock, our sponsors of the American Byzantine documentary film, invited me to join them in their box seats at the Kennedy Center to see a production of Shakespeare’s Otello staring Placido Domingo, one of the greatest Otellos of the century, according to Philip Kennicott writing for the Washington Post.

Even though the plot riled my feminist blood, I enjoyed the production. The costumes were great, especially Iago’s – black leather pants with a pattern of holes in vertical stripes and a black leather tunic, which I thought looked pretty hot.

Following the curtain call, Mrs. Braddock ushered me backstage to spend a few moments with post-performance with Placido Domingo. She meant well, but there was nothing remarkable in our meeting. While Placido Domingo was shaking my hand, he looked right past me at the line of others waiting behind. Brassy women snapped his photo without first asking permission. A group of Japanese businessmen closed in upon him with their own cameras, as if he was a tourist attraction. I felt demeaned and groupiefied to be amongst these fans. Mrs. Braddock encouraged me to ask for his autograph, but I shook my head. It would only remind me of the man who didn’t even make eye contact with me when being introduced. I understood that it wasn’t the man, it was the circumstances – but still, I wanted no part of it.

The encounter that made the bigger impression on me that night had already happened, and it was not with one of the performers. During the intermission, a kindly woman in the neighboring box leaned over and began talking to me. She introduced herself as Becky Dukes. In the course of our conversation, the topic of cancer somehow came up and I confessed I had an almost paralyzing fear of dying before my kids were out of the nest. She looked startled and then very sweetly gave me a few words of encouragement. A survivor herself, she told me not to worry. I had a long way to go yet, she said, and I would do so in good health.

Oddly enough, I believed her – probably mostly because I wanted to. But also, because there was something so grounded, affirming and wise about her. After the performance, she asked for my card, saying she’d be in touch.

I never heard from her again, but it didn’t matter. Those words from a stranger – words I would not have heard had I not been working on a documentary film –comforted me and quieted the dissonance in my head, at least for the time being.

They were a prelude to what happened next for, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was about to step into flow….

[Asheville, 2013; street art by S. Karla]

Coming up next … Story Frame 40 – Flow & Flowing