My Own Worst Enemy

Nothing makes me screw up like success.

I’m like a sunny day that suddenly turns black and threatening, storm clouds gathering where before there was just blue sky. People come outside, stepping off their front porches, and turn their faces to the heavens, puzzled.

Lately I’ve been buried in work. This is good, yes. Really very good. I’m cranking out copy as fast as I can, riffing off weird news stories and trends in no less than 200 words, but please, try to keep it under 300. I’m interviewing D-list reality celebs and my email pings with new opportunities every five minutes.

So any minute now, I should be fucking up royally.

It’s hard to explain and even harder to understand. And it happens all the time. I’ll do something really great, some really good work that feels effortless. I’m always surprised when I get praised for this stuff; after all, my parents shelled out $100,000 for college.

I should be good at what I do.

This week my editors asked me to interview a famous journalist-cum-kids’-news-show-host, and then turn around a short feature article on the Inauguration.

Easy-peasy, right?

Except that the interview was at 4 p.m., also known as the witching hour around here. The kids were grumpy and my husband was grumpier, considering he had to come home early to facilitate my being on the phone for 30 minutes.

It also backed right into dinner, which backs into bath time, which slides into bed time, which quickly becomes 9 p.m., a good 12 hours after I first woke up at 5 a.m.

After which my writing-brain is d-d-d-d-dead.

So I write this thing, fulfilling a promise blithely made at 10 a.m. when I was full to the brim with French roast and Fiber One chocolate bars.

The piece wasn’t great. I made my deadline, but it wasn’t the good, easy-reading stuff I’ve been getting noticed for. No one chided me, but I was edited.

Pretty heavily edited.

Which I, of course, took as a full-frontal attack, because I’m easy-going like that.

It isn’t a big deal, but it is the tippy-top of my familiar slippery slope. I start doing well and I over-extend myself and I put on this whole false modesty, “aw, shucks, it only takes me a few minutes to do it, and geez, I’m a professional, y’all, don’t act so surprised” thing, and then I make a stupid mistake or promise more than I can realistically deliver …

… and BOOM!

Once, long ago, I was an editor for a small newspaper. I rose quickly under new management, became a favorite pet of the publisher, got cocky—and got demoted.

There were other, more sinister reasons for it, but my own self-sabotaging behaviors didn’t help matters any. I decided I was better than the people who paid me, and it showed.

I do not have a poker face.

I’m feeling something looming. I’m working all the time, at a gig that was supposed to be a casual, one-post-a-day kind of deal. I am getting attention from the higher-ups and it’s making me nervous. I don’t like to be directed; I work best on a kind of free-form platform.

One month without a place to work that doesn’t have ketchup on the floor and small children making demands is taking its toll. Everything is suffering—the house, meals, the kids, my husband, my work.

There is absolutely no balance to be had in this algebraic disaster of a life and I feel a strong hand at the small of my back, itching to push me back into my place.

That hand? Is my own.