It’s a strange, unsettling feeling.
My face must betray my discomfort. Because a little old lady sitting next to me leans over and pats my leg.
“Everyone’s really nice here, don’t worry,” she assures me. “My name’s Anna. We can talk afterward if you’d like.”
When the meeting ends, Anna turns to me and asks if I want to get a coffee. She’s my mom’s age, and her kindness is so disarming, so comforting, so unexpected.
As we sit in one of those neon-lit Café Metros, each knowing only the other’s first name, I tell her a little about the disaster that calling my father was the other night. I try to explain why getting yelled at felt like reliving childhood trauma all over again.
“I understand,” Anna says. “You know, there’s this principle in Al-Anon that may be helpful to you. Have you ever heard of something called ‘detachment with love’?”
I shake my head no.
“Think of it like this,” Anna says. “You can still love your father as much as you always have. That never goes away. But you don’t have to keep engaging in the same way again and again with people who have hurt you, hoping for a different result. You can protect yourself first. But you don’t have to stop loving them either.”
We exchange numbers before she leaves, but I never see or talk to her again. This happens all the time in recovery meetings. People give you little gems of wisdom that dramatically impact your entire journey, and that is your onetime exchange with each other, human to human.
I take Anna’s (and Al-Anon’s) life-changing lesson and start applying it to the Post, too.
The conflicts stop. It feels like I’m no longer thrashing and bashing around, creating problems and expecting a different result.
I love the Post. But I can detach from it, too.
OF COURSE, I don’t stop looking for another job completely.
One late night at Carolines, I start talking to Scott Einziger, a TV guy who used to be a producer on Howard Stern and was a showrunner on The Amazing Race, and he tells me about how he’s started investing in and forming new companies. Boldly, I tell him that he should invest in me. What would the investment be? he wants to know. I think about it and suggest something I’ve been reading about a lot online: the self-publishing industry. We could create an e-book company together, I suggest, and he listens to my on-the-spot business plan I’m literally imagining right then and there.
Scott has to fly back to LA soon, but we spend the next few weeks emailing and talking on the phone all day long, exchanging ideas of how such a situation might work.
Within two weeks, Scott feels enough confidence to respond to my suggestion that he should invest in me. He is game. He says I should quit my job so I can move to LA, and he’ll pay for expenses. But there is a complication at play. We like each other quite a bit. At one point, he tells me that he thinks he may just have found a soul mate in me. I like him so much, too, and I could see myself falling for him. So I don’t let the potential for personal and professional entanglement scare me off.
I’m just so excited for a new chapter. I don’t even fully believe what is unfolding until one day my phone rings at work with an alert from PayPal. “You have $8,000.” I can’t believe it at first. No one is around, so I actually fall on the floor of the newsroom in disbelief. I am going to have a whole new life. I can’t stop smiling.
I quit my job a few weeks later. My last day is February 12, 2012. Realizing that this is an opportunity to also unburden myself from all the debt that I have accrued during my insane partying days, I take Courtney Love’s advice and declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy to rid myself of the more than $55,000 in debt I’ve accrued in the last few years.
I’m going to have a fresh start, and none of this could have happened if I was out drinking and getting high and not believing in myself enough to take control.
But as much as I can’t wait for this new venture, I’m also a little bit scared. I’m going to be living rent-free in a studio apartment that Scott is paying for, doing a business I’ve kind of pulled out of my ass, and also, he tells me after his last trip to New York, he thinks he might be falling in love with me. I feel emotionally bonded as well, but I’m also nervous.
“Won’t that complicate our business relationship?” I ask.
“You’re right,” Scott agrees. “We’ll slay dragons in business, and we can figure out what happens after that.”
I really don’t want to screw this up. I just want some kind of magic bullet that will make me have the perfect mental health for when I finally move to California to start my new life as an entrepreneur. But panic attacks occur fairly regularly once I no longer have the routine and scheduling of the Post. I no longer have the daily assignments to distract me from the full weight of all the awareness that sobriety has brought into my life.
When I visit Heather Spillane, an extraordinary acupuncturist who saw me at my absolute worst, I tell her all about various regrets from how I acted before I got clean. As I lie on her table one day, I ask her, “How do you stop thinking about things that you could have done differently? That you’ve messed up?”
“You know what ‘shame’ stands for?” Heather responds. “ ‘Should Have Already Mastered Everything.’ ”
I am stunned. Heather’s words flood over me like a cool tonic of healing and forgiveness. They’re so simple and so true. No one has mastered everything. We just have to keep
