Yesterday I woke up at 4am with my brain on fire. My eyes opened staring at the blank white ceiling, listening to the window fan, and I was like oh my God, I can’t publish a memoir. What if I say something that my family doesn’t like? What will happen? I got all panicked, and within 20 seconds I was not going to be writing a memoir anymore and I was just crying. It took a therapy session and most of the morning to realize what I was doing.
I’m really good at seeing problems before they exist and bringing them to the attention of people, and then I get looked at as the problem. When in fact, I’m not the problem.
When you’re on a production and there’s millions of dollars at stake, nobody really wants to hear that the color of aging that was on the other doorknob isn’t the same color that’s on the doorknob now. They just want to keep filming.
I am the last line of defense for the paint department for a the production. There’s one On Set Scenic Artist on a crew of a hundred plus people. There’s only one of me. And I have to make those calls, then go in and fix it as quickly as possible while all hundred-plus crew wait.
I remember working on a show where I got four phone calls in the hour before my call time, plus a phone call the night before, telling me this was going to take place the following morning and I had to be ready because it was first up. I went into work completely prepared. Three art directors came up to me intermittently. Camera was in the room trying to block in the scene, and I was scrambling to paint an entire countertop to match an existing one. I stood there with a hairdryer in hand, two of my Art Department supports helping me, a team of painters in the background for anything that might go wrong. I had about 45 minutes to complete the task, and it had to be done at the same time that everybody else needed into this little office space — more than 30 people needed to be in there. But to me, I had one job. I needed to make that countertop look like the existing one so it would read as if it was always there.
When they called for the actor, which I could hear on my walkie, I went up to the first assistant director and said, this isn’t an exact match yet, I need a a few more minutes to age it down. They said, “It’ll be fine.” I looked at the team of painters waiting to assist, and I started grabbing my materials and walked away defeated, because we had to start rolling.
Because of how I grew up, I was literally wired to do this job. I’m really good at putting out created fires. However, most of them are (were) not my fire.
There’s nothing like being on a show and you have your headset in and you hear them call your name — the body remembers situations like that.
I don’t enjoy chaos. I never have, although it might’ve looked like that from the outside.
2016 was the year I found out my husband had stage 4 esophageal cancer and had only a few months to live. It was also the year I turned 40. And the year he died. It was an epic year, but not in the kind of way you want a year to be.
The urgencies that came with the chemo. The emergencies that came with uncertainty. The anxiety and fear that fed into all of it.
There was literally no way to put out that fire. I just had to watch it burn. And it did. It burnt my whole world down.
After it did, I’m pretty sure I spent a couple years just trying to re-ignite the ashes to burn even more down, because I had no idea what to do.
It’s been about six months since I’ve been on a show.
I have to be careful with creating problems where there are none, and getting involved in other people’s created chaos just to fill that dopamine rush of putting something out. My body hasn’t caught up with my brain yet.
I got some really great advice this week: just because people create chaos doesn’t mean I have to create a fire.
I’ve spent decades being excellent inside other people’s emergencies. And now I’ve been working on my memoir for the past three weeks very intently, and there’s no fire here. Nobody’s calling saying Jolene, where is your memoir. It’s only me.
I’ve just spent six months without any emergency or urgency, and I kinda realize I actually prefer it. I can’t help but wonder though, is this the calm I’ve been looking for or just the part before the next fire.
I’m finishing the memoir this September. Free essays every Friday. Paid subscribers get The Atlas — the drafts, the journal pages, and the story underneath the story — starting in October.
Unless a fire comes up. Or maybe I am the fire.
