Getting Stood Up: Identity and the Freelancer

Photo by silvia di natale'S.

Folding a regular Internet broadcast into my media empire—which, at the moment, consists of a laptop and two pens which actually work—has increased my visibility as a freelancer. Everything that comes with being a freelance writer is there: the flexibility, the endless reach to bump up against another human soul through art, the second-glass-of-wine buzz of speaking with admired guests. And you know who else came over to play? Rejection and self-consciousness. Hello, old friends.

The show that was rushed into production (after one of the entrants in the Kentucky Derby was euthanized right on the track) was fielding its first guest. Even after such an auspicious beginning, I was terrified, for this was Talking To People, which is horrifying on any level and even worse while still finding my footing as a radio hostess. It would be like recording my very worst cocktail party small talk, then broadcasting it over the World Wide Web.

So we settled on a comedian, a very nice guy with a new television show on the way, and I have never met a successful comic who couldn’t spin nouns and verbs out of the deadest of air. Like any good youngest child, I tossed every other deadline overboard and hurled myself into this one, writing-peripheral, hour-long project. We practiced with the phone boards. Yes, they were working. I ran an enormous bunch of questions past people who know me well enough not to lie to me about something as important as an internet radio show with a potential audience of dozens. Yes, those should give him plenty to talk about. There was a tiny marketing campaign: emails, blog postings, a feature on the distributor’s home page. I exuded “Listen!” wherever I went online.

And on the day of the show: written monologue, tea with honey, rehearsals. It had every mark of a smashing success, and perhaps it would have been, had the guest actually called in.

I sat watching the clock on the switchboard count down to zero, and slowly up again as I jazz-handed my way through half an hour of no guest, no callers, and, by the time I put myself and the entire Internet out of its misery, no listeners. The audience levels dropped and dropped as I first discussed the cultural meaning of reality television, then death, then why I still kept a Ken doll around the house as a married thirty-one-year-old, then more death, and then finally The Meaning Of Life, which at the moment was placing one noun before another verb and making it all come out somewhat coherently. I went off the air and straight to a pub.

It was an honest accident, of course; the scheduled guest, a very nice guy, sent a frantic email full of abject apologies and an offer to reschedule. He’d confused the time zones, an error which I, as a person who was late to her own wedding, could hardly fault. But as I sat there behind the microphone with my Master’s degree and my freelance career, I felt very much the eighteen-year-old who reported for an evening shift at the college newspaper with curled hair and pantyhose, first loving everybody and everything and then slowly, over the course of the evening, deflating into the freshman copy editor who sat silently in the corner with her chocolate bar and spell check function. The section editor, who wasn’t named section editor by virtue of being an idiot, summoned me over.

“Did you get stood up tonight?” she said.

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “you just remember this. Guys come and go, but your career won’t leave you as long as you don’t leave it. You stay focused enough, and you won’t have time to mourn over some silly boy with nice hair. Get back to work.”

I got back to work.

Fifteen years later, I perched alone on a heavily cushioned chair, staring into a tiny pool of wine which didn’t stay in the glass for long. It wasn’t just a bad day at the home office. It wasn’t that the guest hadn’t shown up. It was that the listeners hadn’t stayed.

“But they weren’t listening for you,” one of my friends pointed out. “They figured that the guy wasn’t coming, and they went elsewhere.”

“A good entertainer,” I said, “a really, truly good entertainer would have kept them around whether he showed up or not.”

The only answer was shrugged shoulders, because of course the issue here was my very identity. If I wasn’t a teacher any more, or a marketing writer or a copy editor or a sports journalist, what was I? Where was my place? As a freelancer? Well, clearly I was a crap freelancer. And now what? As the listeners clicked away, I permitted each one to take a tiny chunk of my self-esteem with them.

This is a danger each freelancer faces; once the leap is taken, what to do when the sun goes down and there’s nothing left but you and the silence? Truth, maybe. Maybe you’re not good enough; maybe you’re not ready yet; maybe you’re not meant to do this. And as a childless woman who expects to remain this way, instead of an offspring’s voice, I hear whispers of fear: “You fail at this, you’ll leave *nothing* behind.”

That’s a lot to take from a half-hour radio broadcast and a glass of wine, but then, obliteration likes to hang around the edges of such things. Some people call days like this “learning experiences.” I call them “excuses to drink”—or, better, “inverse encouragement.” When we wrap our identities in our careers, every bad day is hours of clinging to the rail of a wildly tilting Titanic, and every sale twenty-four hours of fireworks. It doesn’t have to be like this. But even if I’m feeling cold water in my face, it’s a pretty good indicator that I’m still alive…me and my career, hanging on, the two of us.

Mary Beth Ellis runs www.BlondeChampagne.com. Her first book, Drink to the Lasses, is available at www.drinktothelasses.com.