I developed an anxiety condition when I moved to San Francisco (almost) five years ago. And I don't mean, "I'd had an anxiety condition for years, and I was finally properly diagnosed." I mean I developed it, in one fell swoop. A few short months after moving to San Francisco, I found myself hyperventilating with my head between my knees as the floor slipped out from under me, and I thought, "Ah, I'm having a panic attack. Shit." Now, five years later, I'm figuring out what it was all about, which is a short way of saying that it was so goddamn obvious that it took me a little bit of emotional distance to get it.

By moving to San Francisco, I was making a conscious choice to give up two things that I deeply loved because neither of them were serving me anymore. And while I was smart enough to know that you need to quit while you're ahead, I didn't get that quitting The Path You Are On can take you a few years (and many panic attacks) to recover from.

First, I'd quit professional theatre. I remember this moment during my final months where I was delivering something to a successful Broadway producer's office. When I got there, it was a dingy tenement office decorated with a single ratty couch. I remember thinking, first, "Holy shit, I can't believe that a kid from my impoverished California hometown worked her way up to this point by 26," and then, "I have seen behind the curtain, and get me the hell out of here." So I left. It turned out that I loved independently producing theatre, but I felt like my talents were totally wasted when only twenty people (all of whom were friends who wanted you to come to their shows) came. And the level of emotional abuse and/or total boredom required to withstand working on big-deal theatre projects was something I wasn't willing to put up with. Besides, I was tired of being profoundly broke.

Second, I quit New York City. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I've recovered from that one, or even that I think it was the best long term choice. But on some level I knew that if I was going to throw in the towel on everything I'd been working on for the last ten years, I wasn't up to starting over, again, in the hugest and hardest city in the world. I needed a break.

So, fast forward six months, and I am having my first panic attack while I try to study for a finance exam, for which I am wildly unqualified, because I promised myself that if I was leaving theatre, I was going to try something totally new. And finance, alas, is about as new as you can get.

You would expect (or I would have expected) that once we'd settled into our new city and our new life, the anxiety would have gone away. I mean, we made friends quickly, I started a blog which became a satisfying creative outlet. Yes, I was getting up at five a.m. to go to a corporate office job, but still. And when I finally stopped waking up at five a.m. to become a high powered secretary and department manager, it still didn't ease up. And when I quit my corporate gig to finally go back into creative work, it still didn't let up. At which point, I decided anxiety was just my new state of being. (And I belatedly got a little help with it. Hot tip: get help first, don't be a total moron like me.)

But what I didn't realize was that I'd always been relatively good at what I did. Yes, I gave up my star turn as a debater by not going to law school and going to conservatory theatre school instead. But I went to one of the top theatre programs in the country. I didn't f*ck around. Yes, I took some horribly low paying jobs out of college, but I co-founded a theatre company that did it's first gala at Peter Yarrow's house, and I got an theatre administration internship with one of the biggest theatre companies in New York. I did obscure artistic things, but I did them with style.

And then I quit my corporate job to write a blog. And, whatever, let's be frank. Most of the world has marginal to zero understanding of what a blog actually is. Telling people you quit your job to write a blog is a little like telling them you decided to give up your benefits to become a professional postcard writer. Everyone slowly backs away. It is not prestigious, to say the least. (At least not yet.)

But I trusted it was the right decision. In fact, I knew it was the right decision, rest of the world be damned. And some of it was an airy-fairy "it-feels-right-in-my-soul" "I'm-creating-things-I-love-this-is-the-right-direction" kind of thing, but I'm also a phenomenally practical person, and when I looked at the balance sheet I knew it made sense.

So I set out to prove myself, and it was exhausting on a soul-deep level. If you'd asked me a few months ago, I would have told you that it was exhausting proving myself to everyone in the world. Over and over and over. That it was exhausting explaining to people over and over what I did (again), and that yes I made money. And that I was writing a book, and that no I wasn't self-publishing it in my garage using a photocopier. I would have told you that it was rather exhausting doing something no one understood, after a lifetime of doing things that were obscure, but still prestigious.

But then, on book tour, I figured out I was wrong. Continue reading Anxiety & Knocking It Out Of The Park

"He hadn't pushed through that one last barrier, his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him." —Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

This year has been hard. There. I said it. As I've been trying to wrap my head around the fact that I've been working for myself all year, as I've gone back and read each monthly post I've written about self-employment, the only honest thing I can say is that this year has been staggeringly difficult. It's also been by turns magnificent, surprising, and joyful. It's clearly been life-changing. It has been actually awesome, full of awe.

But I think the two defining words for this year are success and terror.

I went through large parts of my twenties consumed with worry that I wouldn't make something of myself, that I wouldn't live up to my own internal standard of success. I have something inside me, wound up like a spring, that won't let me stop until I'm creating something and putting it out into the world. In my early twenties, when I was one of three partners in a theatre company, I had that moment of feeling like everything clicked. I was running a creative business, producing shows, doing something that I thought mattered. The only problem was that running a small theatre company in New York City is virtually financially unsustainable. So when that project ended, I spent years feeling around in the dark, trying to figure out what else would work for me, scared out of my mind that I wouldn't find something and that my time would run out. And the simple reason I got to where I am now is that I could not rest until I'd gotten to that place where things clicked again. I'm profoundly lucky that for me, unlike so many creatives, that drive was constructive not destructive. For me, that drive was paired with an entrepreneurial drive, the skills to hustle, the desire to create a business structure that could support and sell my work. So I'm running a business, not drinking myself to death in a corner somewhere, and I'm acutely aware of what a blessing that is.

After that period, I thought things could not get more scary than the constant gnawing fear that I was not doing what I was made to do. Sadly, this assumption was false. I was absent the day that the "nothing is more terrifying than success" memo got passed out. Or maybe that memo never got distributed because no one wanted to be the asshole that said, "I got what I wanted, and it's scary as shit." So, f*ck it. I'm going to come out and say it because I would have felt a hell of a lot less alone this year, had I known.

Let's start here: It turns out that success looks totally different than it feels. Success looks like everything magically coming together for another human, who (when it's happening to anyone other than me) I immediately imbue with slight magical powers. This is happening for them and not for me because they are half-human half-magic. Duh! Logic! The thing is this is not, strictly speaking, true. From the inside, success feels like being in the center of a hurricane that you are both in charge of and is threatening to pull you apart.

This year at least, I found that things did not happen to me, as much as I made things happen. And then managed the things happening. And then followed up on the things happening. Success didn't happen to me, nor did my year feel like it was about success, except in retrospect. Instead, I woke up almost every morning feeling terrified because I was going to push myself as hard as I could and as far as I could. I was going to push myself to the point where I felt comfortable, and then push myself way beyond that point. I was going to do that over and over and over, all year long.

By the end of the year, I was going to learn a lot about my own personal terror cycle:

• Set a really ambitious seeming goal
• Say, "Oh yeah, I can totally do that."
• Start working on it
• Panic
• Have something go wrong
• Possibly have an actual panic attack
• Keep working
• Have the thing happen imperfectly but wonderfully
• Slowly feel panic recede
• Surf a wave of joy

...Over and over and over. By the end of the year, this cycle would start playing out in hyperspeed. Because the strange thing about success is that it pushes you up against your own limits faster than you thought humanly possible. I spent this year worrying about turnout for each individual event that APW threw. And now I'm facing down a whole book tour worth of events. And interviews. And new experiences. In very rapid succession. And I've learned that the only way through... is through. So I just push through work, panic, work, more panic, event, joy, as fast as I can. Over and over again.

Success is some of the most terrifying shit I've ever experienced. And I never saw it coming.

When I look back at my writing in entrepreneurship this year, some themes emerge: Showing up every day no matter how you feel. Doing the work without worrying if it's good or bad. The importance of building my work life around the core of my creative craft. Pushing through the fear over and over again. The fact that it's been hard (surprisingly hard). Letting Go. Joy. Here are some of the best bits: Continue reading Working For Yourself: One Year