Wedding Graduates Return: Morgan and David

I’m not going to lie to you. Today’s post makes me cry every time I read it. Morgan has been around APW a long time. She was the first person brave enough to write about getting married right after a parent’s death, and her joke with me is that she basically OWNS the hard stuff chapter of the APW Book. So it was important for her to come back and write this piece about how after surviving the unimaginable, she and her husband David have somehow fought their way through to happiness. Morgan was the inspiration for all the posts about what happens on the other side of the really really hard parts this week, and I’m so honored to share her story with you.

The year before the wedding was so hard that it only makes sense that everything since has felt so easy. My dad was diagnosed with—then died of—cancer, David was unemployed for eight months, my mother was challenging, my cousin died two weeks after the wedding, and my already stressful yet boring job became almost comically awful. (I’d tell you about it, but for that HR gag order…) How could all that has followed not have been easier?

The hard stuff got better. The grief over my dad has leveled to a dull ache with moments of raw grief. David switched to a similar job in his industry with a stable company for a substantial raise. My mother turned sixty, calmed down, lost thirty pounds and found new happiness. She is so much less negative now and it’s proof, I guess, that sometimes people do change and that I was right to distance myself from her but not to close my heart. She’s still who she is and critical, but she’s not mean anymore, and that’s more than I could have hoped for two years ago.

I left my terrible job for a lateral-on-paper move within the company that’s been excellent for me, and I have just been promoted from admin assistant to engineering technician. I left my twenties behind with a surprise birthday party planned by my husband and best friend that involved party hats and goody bags and I couldn’t be happier to be thirty.

When I think back over the last year and half, I’m flooded with so many happy memories. Eating decadent Pierre Hermes treats in a park in Paris, going to a hockey game in Prague, curling up on our fancy leather couch in the basement to watch movies, and handing David a pregnancy test with good news. There have been so many happy things—days, trips, and special moments.

In my mind, the last twenty-three months have been a breeze. But the real world is more complicated, of course. I had bleeding blisters on my feet from all the walking in Paris—at the very beginning of a three and a half week wander around Europe, so I ended up limping across the Continent. We hated Prague so much that whenever we have to do something we don’t want to do, one of us turns to the other and says, “At least we’re not in fucking Prague” and then we fist bump. The basement flooded in May and insurance in Canada doesn’t cover “seepage,” so we had to do a five figure renovation without warning. Because it was all out of pocket, we couldn’t really afford to pay anyone and did 90% of the work ourselves. All while I was in the middle of first trimester exhaustion. Even the baby news wasn’t wholly uncomplicated. I had an early miscarriage a few months before this pregnancy and so we spent the first trimester waiting for something to go wrong. I don’t think I fully believed that it was happening until we had the first ultrasound at 13 weeks and saw little Skipper flailing away (nicknamed after the Madagascar commando penguin). I’m still having trouble processing the fact that we’ve like, created human life and that in March, we’ll bring home a person. Read More…

Anxiety & Knocking It Out Of The Park

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. Read More…