The dread grew immense, threatened to swallow me whole. It knocked the wind out of me when I was walking home from work, and I had to duck into a dark Civic Center alleyway and lean against a wet wall, breathing heavily, paralyzed by grief and terror.
But I dealt with it. I handled it the same way I handled every wave of dread. I stayed at work until midnight on Friday and went in at seven a.m. on Sunday. I went to work on Christmas and on New Year’s Day. I sometimes worked with tears running down my cheeks, blurring the computer screen. I downed Diet Coke after Diet Coke and ran down to the Korean deli for kimbap and ate two rolls over the course of a day, and then I worked some more. I checked my email and cut my tape or logged my music, and then I texted everyone I knew asking where the next party was. I told myself that everything was fine, that my life was incredible and I wasn’t sad and I’d just send more emails and swig whiskey in order to fall asleep at two a.m. every night, empty bottles lining the foot of my bed. I wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” until one day, I woke up and there would be a new accolade on my shelf, a new accomplishment I could never have dreamed of, and then—finally—it would be fine. It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.
CHAPTER 9
In this way, I was able to convince myself that the dread was good for me. It was the biggest driver of my ferocious work ethic. Because of the dread, in 2014, I got my dream job at This American Life—the biggest storytelling radio show out there, the one with several million loyal listeners and walls full of Peabodys and Emmys, so popular it had parodies on Saturday Night Live and Portlandia. It took just four years to go from Get Me On This American Life to actually working at This American Life. When I got the job, I screamed and threw a big party and then moved to New York to become a public radio superstar.
* * *
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New York was difficult at first. I didn’t have the right coat or socks for the winter weather. I didn’t know how to spot black ice, and I slipped and fell on my ass. At twenty-six, I was the youngest person in most of the circles I was exposed to. And it was weird that, all of a sudden, I wasn’t the hardest worker in the office anymore. I didn’t understand how New Yorkers stayed alive. They worked all day, and then after work, they went out for drinks and got tanked and went home late and woke up early and worked some more. At the bars, the first question everyone asked was, “What do you do?” They feigned indifference when you told them you were successful. They actually were indifferent if you were merely normal. Everyone had their job and their side project and their speaking circuit. They all wore overpriced black sack dresses and geometric statement jewelry. Here, I was nobody special. Which meant the dread became even more difficult to feed.
* * *
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I did a little bit of everything at This American Life. I pitched stories, helped design shows, reported and narrated stories, edited others’ work, and did a lot of sound design. My first month, I produced a kick-ass story and was told that the music I’d scored it with was excellent. This was a skill I was particularly proud of. I’d mixed hundreds of pieces at Snap Judgment and was known for my speed and music taste.
But then I was reassigned to a different boss. He listened to five seconds of one of my stories before recoiling. “Can you hear that?” he asked, playing it again. “Can you hear how this piece of tape is coming in too early? It’s two-tenths of a second too early. Can you hear it?” He played it again.
“I guess so. Maybe? Okay, I’ll note that. I’m sorry,” I said.
“You can’t? What’s wrong with you?” He played it again. “You can’t hear that? I thought you were supposed to be good at mixing? But this needs space. No, no, no.” He played it again and again.
“Okay, I’ll fix it right away. I’m sorry,” I said.
“Ugh, this isn’t working,” he muttered, as if he couldn’t hear me. He played the same clip four more times. “This isn’t good. Too early, much too early.” I apologized until he decided to move on to the next mistake, which came just a few seconds later. He dwelled on that error, too—I’d made the music two decibels too loud.
My piece was ten minutes long. It took him an hour and a half to play through it, and he spent the entire time telling me I was deaf. He seemed surprised when I fled the room, crying.
After that day, this boss seemed to determine I was incompetent. Whenever I said anything in meetings, he ignored me or snapped that I was wrong, and the other producers would look at me sympathetically as I bit my lip and shrunk in my seat. It took so much courage to speak, but if I was quiet, he’d ask why I didn’t have an opinion, or if I waffled around a point nervously, he’d sigh exasperatedly and interrupt me to ask one of his favorite reporters, “What about you?” Sometimes they echoed me, and then he’d praise them for being so incisive. Did I not communicate as well as they did? I wondered. Did I not use big enough words? Was I not witty enough? I tried to emulate them—Ivy League–educated journalists who came from brilliant stock. But I was unsuccessful. A year in, I started being excluded from group edits on important stories. I asked my co-workers if I could sit in, but they apologized nervously. “Don’t say anything, but X said he doesn’t want you there,” one of them told me. “He said that you’re too contrary, that you’ll slow the edit down.”
“But—really? I feel like I agree with him 90 percent of the time. And other people are way more aggressive than me,” I said, but my co-worker shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, running down the hall, “I’m already late.”
Another day, a photographer for a Malaysian zine came into the office to shoot me for a feature on badass women of the Malaysian diaspora. My boss literally chased the photographer out the door, then told me I was threatening to “misrepresent the company’s brand.”