Susan.  Finch. That’s about all I really need to say.  When she submitted her Fear, Exposed entry (click there if you need to catch up on the series), I fell in love with her in-stant-ly.  I wanted to shower her with bon bons and hire a Javier Bardem look-alike to fan her with banana leaves day and night while whispering sweet nothings in her ear, because her story was THAT good.  Girl can WRITE.

Hope you love her as much as I do.  (You will.)

xo

Ash

*****

When I was growing up, I was afraid to speak up and barely knew right from left or how to maneuver through the hometown I grew up in. But I was quietly adventurous and used my mind and creativity to inch my way forward through life.

I didn’t tell anyone about the nights I stayed up writing for hours, or how I would invent things in my mind, or picturing the creative life and journeys I would one day lead.

By the time I was graduating college, most of my friends were getting married or divorced, settling into careers, finding apartments and discovering themselves pregnant. I was afraid I would slowly suffocate if I ended up married and tied down to a job before I even knew who I was. I couldn’t pretend like it’s what I wanted too. But in many ways, I wanted to want it. Security and familiarity was seductive and I didn’t want to be all on my own.

So when I started seeing New York City as a vivid and lucid part of my future calling me forward, I was surprised.

But not as surprised as my friends and family when I announced I was leaving Georgia with no job or real place to live. Just about everybody I knew thought it was a bad–or at least a worrisome–idea. A flicker of bewilderment crossed their faces when I dropped the bomb. The pressure against the silence was insurmountable when I didn’t have any answers to their questions.

You’re not suppose to move without a job and almost no money. You’re not suppose to leave things behind without any security in your future. You’re not suppose to want to be something short of homeless.

I didn’t have much. I had a bachelors degree in Film and Video, a video editing certificate, and an idea. I would be a video editor in New York.

My last night in Georgia, I cried against the kind of fear and heartbreak of leaving almost everyone I cared about behind and not knowing when I’d ever come back. The kind of fear that sucks your breath away and radiates through your head until it throbs. I wasn’t excited about the new adventure, and I certainly wasn’t confident. But I knew if I kept putting one foot in front of the other, I would eventually get on the plane.

My mom cried at the airport when I left, something I’ve rarely seen her do. She was so vulnerable and I was stunned to see her pain. The guilt of turning my back was palpable, and the bus ride from Laguardia to the hostel in Manhattan felt like raw nerve endings grating against the concrete at every pothole.

As I settled in, I didn’t know what else to do during the day except take the subway with my resume in hand and a list of video editing houses. The crowd was like a wild pack of animals herding me into the unknown, and I didn’t know east from west or how the addresses swirled and abruptly started over at 6th Avenue.

My knees nearly buckled when I walked into businesses unannounced and had to use my voice, the one that I had neglected for so long in asking for what I truly wanted.

I dined on $.75 donuts for breakfast, snacked on $.25 pieces of fruit bought from street vendors, and became friends with the dollar menu at McDonald’s. I refilled the same $1.00 water bottle at a public fountain and sat in churches and parks because I kept getting kicked off public steps. At the end of the first week, the night before I was to stay with a friend in Connecticut, a hostel roommate robbed me of $100 in my sleep. The same $100 earmarked for the next two weeks.

I cried and felt the ache of homesickness and despair.

A friend from video editing school invited me to stay with her and her family in Connecticut, and I was welcomed with open arms. I took comfort in having a place to go and people who wanted me there. But when I lay awake that night, I felt violated and exposed by being robbed. I prayed that I could somehow undo it all and just turn back.

Something told me I had to stay.

My brother was the one that told me I couldn’t just sit around and wait to be a video editor, I had to find a job if I wanted to actually stay. And so two weeks after I arrived, I saw a posting as a receptionist at a video editing house. I applied, interviewed, and landed the job on the spot. My salary was 25k a year. And that was after I talked them up a few thousand dollars.

When I walked into work that first day, I feared I had made a terrible mistake. I was afraid I had given everything up to go broke in New York to become a receptionist. Something I could easily do back in Georgia and live in a nice apartment while doing it. So I determined I would learn everything I could about video editing, and use my voice as loudly as possible to shout my desire to become an assistant editor.

My co-workers made snide remarks about my naivety.

My Connecticut friend and I took an apartment near an enormous cemetery in Brooklyn that would prove to be a mouse hotel whose visitors tormented us in our sleep. After bills I had a scanty $300 left over. And that was before I ate.

I knew I wouldn’t make it, and wondered if I should just tug on the fraying thread of my life and just undo all I had done to go back to the familiar and easy life I knew in Georgia. But I was angry. Angry at a city that didn’t seem to want me and wouldn’t embrace me as its own.

So I chose misery over defeat.

The catered client breakfasts and lunches kept me fed me at work. I took leftovers home and put a snack in my bag every night. I didn’t buy furniture or splurge on clothes. I had nothing in my bedroom but a mattress and a cardboard dresser I bought at Wal-Mart. My roommate and I took turns sitting on a lawn chair in our living room while the other laid on the floor or stood.

Six weeks after I started my job, an assistant got fired and I pressed for a promotion. After a few false starts, it finally happened. Without a raise. But I didn’t care. I was video editing! Kind of. The training of learning how to take a commercial from dailies to air was grueling and I had anxiety dreams and panic attacks when commercials I worked on interrupted my reprieve. I grabbed for floating digi-betas in my sleep.

Despite the boot camp, suddenly life grew a little better. I had a few good friends and my roommate was like family. I fought my way to two small raises, but not before my manager told me I didn’t deserve either and not to bother asking my boss. I ignored her anger when I asked him anyway and got it. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stand by while my coworkers were getting paid much more to do the same job I was doing. So when nearly a year passed, I quietly sent out resumes to line-up freelance work. I knew I could easily double my income and work less months in the year than toil away on staff for peanuts.

My first freelance interview went so well I was confident I could go ahead and quit. Maybe that very day! Suddenly I was squinting against the light at the end of the tunnel, and the city was finally making sense to me. Maybe it really did want me after all!

My spirit of adventure was climbing its way back up to the surface and I was no longer numb with fear.

Until the homeless guy on the subway shouted, “Man, someone flew a plane into a building!” No one said anything. We ignored it. He was just one of those subway crazies, after all. But when I got off the subway, everyone on the street was stopped in their tracks facing downtown. I turned and saw the smoke billowing up over the city.

It was September 11th, 2001.

By the time I spilled into my office, my coworkers and clients were already watching the news footage. It was confusing, but relatively calm. I knew the crash was on purpose, but assumed it was a small plane and someone was making a political statement. I was only half right.

We were all shocked when the towers finally teetered and collapsed, a concrete punch to the gut no one wanted to see coming. I immediately called my roommate. She was going to the Verizon store in the floor of the World Trade Center that morning.

I couldn’t get through to her. Unearthed in the shattering chaos was the information about the planes involved – American Airlines and United. I couldn’t dial fast enough to reach my father (a pilot for American) and my friend (a flight attendant for United). Both of who flew the routes involved. My heart ached for my brother, an F16 pilot, and I wondered where he was and where he was headed.

The stark realization that life as everyone knew it was over unraveled everything I ever knew. Despite the life I led in New York, I was still so very sheltered. It was all still just a bubble. Everything I thought I had learned by moving away suddenly seemed so small and insignificant. Even in New York, life was certain. Known. Resources were relatively plentiful, or could be some day. There was hope. I had a place to go. I had friends to look out for me. My family was safe back home.

I knew nothing.

My Dad turned up at home, and my brother was standing by on high-alert with his unit; but I still wouldn’t know for days that my United friend was okay. And it would be another hour before I learned my roommate had gone uptown to her uncle’s to escape the wreckage downtown. But what about everyone else? Friends of friends working in the towers? My boss who had a baby and spent the morning fleeing the choking smoke and inferno tornadoing through downtown.

The walk home should have taken just over an hour from midtown to my apartment in Brooklyn, but I had no idea how to find the Brooklyn Bridge with the subways out. I was on my own and only knew one way to do it. I inched towards the direction of the pillars of smoke signaling an widespread panic of epic proportions, and put one foot in front of the other. There were twists and wrong turns. Walking in circles to avoid blockades. Streets leading me nowhere.

It was several surreal hours later by the time I got downtown, and I was dehydrated and feeling the taught pull of a new sunburn wrapping around my neck.

I could feel the smoke pooling into my mouth when I saw the bridge choked off and slightly swaying under the weight of a mass exodus. I knew I wouldn’t make it across.

I fumbled my way towards the direction of the Manhattan Bridge and into Chinatown when a crowd suddenly broke loose and was swept up in a sea of people making their way over the bridge. During my journey I saw:

Businessmen sobbing into their cell phones.

An old woman with a walker making her way home all by herself.

Men and women covered from head to toe in ash and soot.

People white with shock.

Men without shoes that had gone missing in the rubble.

Nuns and a priest passing out water and rolls to the destroyed crowd.

We stopped halfway on the bridge to watch the smoke exploding from the Financial District. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like with a gaping hole once the smoke cleared. I realized the gaping hole would be much larger than an empty spot downtown.

After that life was different. Splintered. Raw.

The entire city was engulfed in post-traumatic stress. One moment someone could be tittering with laughter, and the next nearly falling over into a deep depression. Life felt empty. My eyes and mouth burned if I got near Canal Street, miles away from Ground Zero. I could smell burning and knew it wasn’t just buildings and steel, but people who had perished, all the way to midtown.

And yet when I went back to Georgia for a visit, I realized how much I needed New York to hold me in its lap and tell me everything would be okay. I somehow couldn’t connect to the hometown I knew. For the first time since I had left, I realized I had changed. And I longed to be in New York and see it through. I had to know life there could be okay again.

It was a slow recovery, but the city kept moving and rebuilding. And so did I.

In less than a year, I was ready to quit my job again and go freelance. This time, it wasn’t just my desire for more freedom but to escape an abusive editor who screamed and cursed at me to get out of his room, then later screamed at me that I was never around. He told me I would never amount to much of anything when I announced I was quitting. Others questioned the timing of my decision in the midst of a faltering economy.

Instead, I landed work immediately. It wasn’t great work, but it was work nonetheless. But what I really wanted was freedom and possibilities. And I got it. A month into freelance, my friend invited me to go to Europe for 3 weeks. When the fear showed up to say it was too soon in my freelance endeavours, I shut it down and turned my back. I took a job digitizing footage from 2am to 9am, and then ran to another job from 10am to 7pm. For three weeks. I was near delirious, but had enough to pay my rent for a few months and booked a ticket with no work lined upon my return.

My new experiences felt life-changing and free, and I was more determined than ever to work hard and travel more. Life was suddenly my own, and that person I wanted to know finally showed up. Me.

I was so happy that I knew who I was. I knew how to take the subway and stand-up to bullies and take care of myself. I knew how to stay in on weekends and not be afraid of the quiet. Or the loneliness. I knew how to think myself into and out of just about any situation. I knew how to be lost and still have confidence I would find my way. I knew I was witty and strong and sometimes vulnerable. I knew when I was helplessly in love and wanted to get married. I knew I was creative. I knew how to keep dreaming. And I knew how to be afraid and still push forward.

I maneuvered through nearly 8 years of self-employment, past steep learning curves, past intense fear I would never find another assignment, and past mediocrity and into being great at my job when I could no longer ignore how much I loathed working on commercials.

My real dream of writing kept calling to me like a persistent hum. I eventually forged my way into some online copywriting, a stint at an educational website, and finally for a travel website. I didn’t look back when they asked me to freelance long-term and could I go on press trips and review them for their website? I said I could.

I happily traveled and wrote and traveled some more for nearly 2 years. Telluride. Turks and Caicos. Budapest. Prague. Lake Tahoe. When work slowed down, I left the travel website after I landed a literary agent and spent nearly 2 years working on guidebook updates, rewrites, and pocket hiking books. People told me the work would be insurmountable, to learn to use a hiker’s GPS and find the time to cover so many trails was impossible. But I did it. I hiked 10 miles a day for over a week to get it done. Twice.

In the midst of living my dream… something changed.

Somehow I felt I was ready to move on again. The free travel was fun, but I wanted more. What was I contributing to other than my own good times? I wanted something different that would open new doors and insights. But who was I to give up something everyone else seemed to want? Would they think less of me? Would they think of me as unreliable and foolish? Or would they see I’m just a communicator and creative at heart? But I stopped to remember who I am.

Fearless. Or at least powerful in my fear.

I decided to go staff again at a theatrical marketing company while continuing to do freelance writing on the side. I wanted to regroup, learn something new, and plan for the blog I aimed to launch. This time, I ignored the fear of starting anew. Shut down the fear of what people would think.

Shunned the fear of shedding an adventurous identity based around a job. Instead of around who I am.

I knew it was what I wanted. And when I don’t want it anymore, I’ll move on and embrace my new dream with a renewed passion. And it won’t matter if life as I know it crumbles down around me… I know I’ll find my way home again.

*****

Right?

Don’t you want to shower her with bon bons, too, after reading this brilliant piece of work?

That’s what I thought.

You can catch up with her over at her site, www.CreativeGuidetoLife.com, where Susan blogs about creative strategies for life.

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If you liked that jazz. . .check out some of these:

• Fear, Exposed – Featuring Monica O’Brien
• Fear, Exposed – Featuring Illana Burk
• Fear, Exposed – Featuring Danny Mannina
• Fear, Exposed – Featuring Nina Yau
• Fear, Exposed – Featuring Steve Thomas