You … Nothing? Well, I want to tell these people, I also owe you nothing! I mean, I am happy to pose for pictures, sign autographs, and participate in shows and speaking engagements that people might find entertaining or useful, but once I do all that, I don’t have a lot to give.
A father has been stalking me since my Parsons days about meeting with his daughter and giving her an indoctrination into the fashion industry. They showed up at a book signing in New Jersey and cornered me. I was, I thought, lovely to them both. I talked to his daughter and encouraged her to go to a summer program when she’s sixteen (she was eleven at the time).
But no. Still the father calls me every three months to plead for a Liz Claiborne Inc. tour for this daughter, a girl whom I can’t imagine is as desperate to see our conference room as her father thinks she is. It really does seem to be all about him and what he wants for her rather than what she wants for herself.
If she is in fact just as pushy, then she has my pity. In my world, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get the grease. Instead, I just stack the sandbags higher. People have even called my boss and said I wasn’t being responsive!
Well, I immediately shut out anyone who does something tacky like that. I will write to the person and say, “I must not have been making myself clear. This isn’t going to happen.” It’s like negotiating with terrorists. You can’t let rude people win.
Hilariously enough, it’s frequently the people who hold themselves up as paradigms who are the worst behaved. The countess from
She responded that if I wouldn’t do it, she’d write it for me.
I said, “Ha-ha. Very funny.”
“I’m serious,” she said. This was for a manners book!
Perhaps sometimes forewords are really written by the author and then reviewed and signed by the foreworder and this was what she was contemplating, but I’d already made it clear that the issue wasn’t about having time to write but with using my name.
I told her that if she was serious, then her lawyer should talk to my lawyer.
I never heard more from her.
IF YOU DON’T SET boundaries, it can get to the point where nothing’s ever enough.
Case in point: I joined the board of directors of GMHC, the wonderful AIDS organization that I’ve long supported. I’ve hosted the event Fashion Forward for them since its inception and have been happy to do so. But then they made me a board member, about which I felt thrilled and honored at the time. I didn’t think it would change my life very much, but it totally did. Suddenly, I was signing letters asking people for money. And I kept hearing back from fancy people saying, “If I help you with GMHC, you need to help me with this.” I really couldn’t give any more time or money to anyone, so I thought,
After much consideration, I said I had to bow out as a board member.
Well, guess what? They wouldn’t let me. Their CEO said, “‘No’ to me means ‘later.’ You can just do these things for us later.”
She said using my name had really helped them, and that was enough.
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” she said and talked me down off the ledge.
She reassured me that I was off the hook and they would stop asking me to do things all the time.
I relaxed and thought,
Luckily, I now have an agent who handles charity requests, and he can say no for me. What I’ve learned from him is that boundaries are very liberating. They can be readjusted all the time, but it’s important to have them. Always. When you don’t have a shopping list, you can easily go astray in the cereal aisle. If you burn out, no one’s going to benefit. So it’s in everyone’s interest for you to do what you can and then make it clear that you can do no more.
Carry On!
NOW THAT WE’RE WRAPPING up our conversation, I think it’s time to talk about the eternal mysteries. I was raised as a loose Episcopalian, but I’m fascinated by all religions. God knows they’re at the core of every society and culture on this planet. I’m also fascinated by the ceremony of it. But I haven’t been to a church since my niece was baptized, and she’s now twenty-three. None of the weddings I’ve been to since then have been in a church. I consider myself an agnostic, because I believe there are many things we don’t fully comprehend.
Going to church was not my favorite thing when I was young. From a very early age, I was very suspicious of our priest. My parents thought I was crazy and just trying to get out of going to services, but I said, “No, there really is something weird about that man.”
Indeed, one day when I was nine or ten, the priest was up at the pulpit. He went into a silent prayer and … never came out of it. After a few minutes the ushers realized he’d left the plane of reality the rest of us were on, so they had an intervention and took him away.
And yes: I smiled very smugly at my parents all the way home.
That’s the mind-set I had when I went to see a psychic once about thirty years ago. I was in the middle of a personal and professional crisis. A dear friend, who is a clinical psychologist said she’d been to see this psychic, had an amazing experience, and encouraged me to go, too.
I scoffed and said, “One of those people with a neon sign?”
“No,” she said, “I did my homework. This woman Jean MacArthur works three months of the year each in New York, Paris, London, and Washington. She’s a consultant to NASA and the FBI.”
I was so disappointed when Jean MacArthur answered the door, because I was expecting to see Isadora Duncan, and instead she looked like the checkout lady at the Safeway. She looked very haggard and had scars running along her neck. She shook my hand, and we sat down. She told me to write down my date of birth. Then she said that I couldn’t lie to her, and that whatever I said to her went through God and back to her and vice versa.
