Read aloud, it did all sound reasonably and sensitively presented. Maybe I wasn’t such an exploitative asshole after all. “You told the story, you wrote what happened, and it sounds to me like you bent over backwards to be as uncontroversial about it as possible.” Of course, Michelle knew something about an insular community turning on one of its own. She survived and so did I. In the end, the book was generally well received around town. I moved on, chiding myself for overreacting and promising myself to keep things in perspective—to not make a habit of inflating matters that were not life-and-death.
But the work crisis had spooked me in a different, deeper way. Among the new sections I would be expected to write for were Sunday Real Estate, the now-defunct Home and Garden, and Sunday Styles. Styles? How stylish was I—a graying suburban dad? The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself I was a doomed man, with only months left to work.
“So what do you want to do?” Michelle said.
“I don’t know, maybe just refuse to change departments and risk being laid off at the end of the year.”
“If you do that, you won’t be risking a layoff—it’ll be guaranteed,” she said. “And who will you end up punishing, the Times or yourself?”
I nodded, the answer obvious.
“And if you show up and give it your best shot, what’s the downside of that?” she said.
I sighed and laughed—at myself, for being too predictable a patient for Dr. Musler to psychoanalyze.
“That I’ll suck at it.”
“So after all that you’ve done, you’re back to being afraid to fail,” she said. “Wasn’t that why you hesitated about doing the column in the first place? Now you’re furious that they want you to try something else again—but how did getting out of your comfort zone work out for you last time?”
“It worked out.”
“It didn’t just work out—it worked out great,” she said. “So why not give this a chance to work out, too?”
She wasn’t too modest to remind me that back in the day she had professionally reinvented herself under far greater pressure. She’d had no obvious career path—and also no choice. While my circumstances weren’t quite so dire, I didn’t either, as Michelle reminded me via email:
WELL, YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO DO THIS BY REMEMBERING WHAT CAUSES THE ANXIETY—FEAR OF CHANGE, FEAR OF FAILURE. RECOGNIZING THE TRIGGER SYMPTOMS AND LEARNING HOW TO CONTROL THEM MIGHT HELP YOU RESTORE SOME BALANCE.
I pushed forward, managed to not only accept the new role but put on my best professional face. Within a few weeks, my churning emotions gave way to old ambitions. I found my footing—and a new lease on journalism life. My first story for the feature team, reported for Home and Garden, was about the burden placed on families forced to downsize during a painful recession—an idea hatched by my own fears of pending financial upheaval. (For once, those fears were good for something!)
I found a family in central Connecticut that had been forced to downsize to a modest, cramped home from the opulent house of their dreams. Much like the women in my soccer moms book—and unlike the athletes I was accustomed to covering—the family presented with honesty and without shame their inner turmoil over perceived failure and hardship. The story was not only well received, it provoked a heated online debate in the comments section over the guilt expressed by the parents and the indignation of the children, along with an invitation from the Times to do a podcast. A ribbing email from Michelle dropped on the day the story appeared:
SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO SAY YOU CAN’T DO NEXT?
Next, I wrote a piece about how visitors to New York from abroad were obsessed with the HBO megahit The Sopranos, and how, of all places, the bowels of New Jersey, where many scenes from the show had been shot, had become a popular tourist attraction. I delivered a personalized front-page account to Sunday Real Estate about my dumping of a troubled Brooklyn Heights co-op that not long after was worth much, much more—a cathartic piece that helped me get over seller’s remorse and not want to set fire to the Times’s real estate section whenever it listed a similar neighborhood apartment for five times the amount I had sold mine for. But my eureka moment occurred when I pitched a story on why fifty-something-year-olds would subject themselves to drills from masochistic young trainers by enrolling in adult tennis camps. I was given a budget that allowed me to take a partner—Beth—to a Florida resort for a few days to interview attendees and smack a few balls under the warm winter sun. Aches and all, I had an epiphany as I lounged by the pool between sessions with a cool drink in my hand: This wasn’t such a bad gig after all.
The upshot was that I was rediscovering the pleasures of in-depth storytelling—as opposed to hasty formulations of sports-related short takes. I was also working more normal hours instead of scrambling from one airport to another and enduring the nocturnal trials of late-night events—a change that was refreshing, not to mention fairer to and easier on family.
But about a year after leaving Sports, I was told that the feature-writing team was being disbanded to strengthen sections hit by staff reductions that did not, thankfully, include me. I negotiated a return to Sports
