A tale of isolated panic, p.1
A Tale of Isolated Panic, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
A TALE OF ISOLATED PANIC
First edition. September 17, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Marcilena J Bailey.
Written by Marcilena J Bailey.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
I. A Break (In Routine or Otherwise)
II. In Which I Barely Hold Myself Together
Intermission: Wait. How is a Surprise Sister not Surprising?
III. A Return to the Break Room for More (Coffee)
IV. The Good Kind of Break
V. A Welcomed Collaboration
VI. The Internet Giveth and Taketh Away
VII. Time for the “Giveth”
VIII. A More Literal Break
IX. The Pieces, Picked Up and Discarded
X. Breathe...
XI. Cue the Screaming
Intermission: An Unnecessary Story
XII. Cue MORE Screaming
XIII. Choices not fully considered...
XIV. When Various Limbos Overlap
XV. A Very Brief Reprieve
XVI. On Towns and Their Character
XVII. Another Meal, Another Idea
XVIII. A Distorted Familiar
XIX. An Awkward Dinner with Myself
XX. Actually, It Wasn’t.
XXI. Silence Again
XXII. Awaken
XXIII. The First of Many Hurdles
XXIV. A Chance Underutilized...
XXV. The Chases We Cut to
XXVI. Business Resumes
XXVII. I Really Did It?
Intermission: Less Glamorous Reunions
XXVIII. Anticipation, A Poison All Its Own
XXIX. My (Unexpected) Nightmare
XXX. Glimpsing into the Past is Staring into the Sun without Protection
XXXI. The Part You Might Have Be Waiting For
XXXII. I Should Be Better with Words
XXXIII. Ground Me
Intermission: FYI
XXXIV. Crush Me
Intermission: Hole in One
XXXV. Keep Me
XXXVI. Break Me
XXXVII. Me.
XXXVIII. Another Unwanted Reboot
XXXIX. Kick Me Again, I Guess
XL. This is Inescapable, isn’t it?
XLI. How to be a Person (according to Ellie)
XLII. Fight Me
XLIII. Futures Glimpsed. (Break Me Again)
XLIV. Promises Broken
XLV. The Calm Before the Storm
XLVI. The Show Must Go On
XLVII. Lying: My Main and Only Talent
XLVIII. Break
XLIX. Broken: Promises, Plans, and Me
L. Inescapable
LI. The Final Break (One Way or Another)
LII. You’re Never Alone in a Hospital...
LIII. The Thing I Didn’t Want to Tell You
LIV. There it is...
LV. Social Media Gets One Last Hit In
LVI. What is Closure Anyway?
Intermission: A Thing I Ended Up Writing
LVII. Some Kind of Ending
Acknowledgements
Author’s Stuff
To my sister Amy, in the unusual circumstances we found ourselves in.
I love you.
I. A Break (In Routine or Otherwise)
The main reason Erika was a good agent for me was that she could always make me feel bad about not writing, otherwise known as not doing the thing that generated the income we both needed to survive. Of course, that was inaccurate for a variety of reasons. First and foremost neither of us were strictly dependent on my output for our livelihoods. But in my mind, it didn’t matter that I had a day job or that–much like the cat my father named me after–I always seemed to land on my feet or even that Erika had other clients who were far more consistent than I could ever be. Both things were true but irrelevant. They paled in comparison to my need to care about other people.
Or maybe it wasn’t a need. Maybe it was just an impulse, an instinctual reaction like what the knee does when it's smacked with that little hammer the doctor uses. But regardless, I cared too much about people. In particular, I cared too much about people like Erika who looked out for me in one way or another. As my agent, looking out for me meant selling my stories, and by letting her do that, I was looking out for her. But for that exchange to work, I needed to write. She could not sell my books and take a cut of the deal if I did not produce books, so I needed to write as many books as possible. Or, rather, I needed to produce books that could actually be considered publishable, which I had done once and only once. Nothing else since then has been–in any way–promising.
But without the manuscripts, she had nothing to sell, and if she wasn’t selling anything, then she could occupy her time by pushing me to write so that she could–at some future date–have something to sell. She would make it clear that needed me to write, which I was not inclined to do. And that’s when the guilt would start. It didn’t matter that she had a bunch of other clients who were at least as, if not more, successful than I was. Nor did it matter that she also had a seemingly endless supply of young people who earnestly dreamed of being writers and a rolodex of contacts who could make that dream a reality. It didn’t matter that logic would tell me that she definitely did not put all her eggs in the basket of me and my ability to produce books. But there was a part of me that still believed the self-aggrandizing lie: that only I could make or break her life. This was a perversion of Erika’s ability to make me feel seen and special. When Erika was talking to me, I felt like I was the only jewel of her crown or that I was the prized turkey she had picked out for the Thanksgiving feast, that no one could compare to me, even if these other hypothetical writers actually existed, which sometimes I actually doubted.
After only a few years with my name on her client list, Erika also had me feeling like one of Pavlov’s dogs because the mere sight of her name on my caller ID was enough to evoke that same feeling. I would see it and realize with a deep, foreboding dread that I should be writing. I should not be doing [insert whatever task I was actually doing, like staring at my phone screen with a certain pulsating dread or just existing innocently]. Instead, I needed to be writing.
On what I now think of as a day of reckoning–the good ole 21st of June in the year of our Lord who was likely appalled at what I had become 2018–I saw the dreaded notification on my phone while sitting at my desk, at the job that I thought I was pretty good at but not doing a “pretty good” job. Most days, I was pretty good at my work, but on that day, I could not focus. And if I could not focus, I could not do anything, like write or the tasks that collectively made up the day job that I showed an unexplained devotion to.
While Erika made it difficult to focus, she was not the problem that day. In fact, until her name popped up on my phone screen, I didn’t think she would call me. She had never called me on Thursdays. She had other things to do, things that did not involve me. And I was happy about that because it was the smallest piece of evidence that her world wouldn’t end if (when) I failed to write another book of note, and on Thursdays I would not have to live in fear of her calling me to tell me (verbally or not) that I needed to be writing.
So I guess on that day she must have had a cancellation, and the best use of this newfound time was to call me and remind me that I needed to be writing. Maybe because her other clients weren’t producing enough to pay her bills, negating whatever defense I could normally muster for myself.
Or that’s what I was ready to believe, anyway. Great.
But like I said, Erika was not the problem that day or many of the days I spent not properly writing. The problem was that I was tired. I was tired because–despite what my output would suggest–I was trying to write another book. I was always trying, but writing books is hard. Writing good books is harder.
At that point, I didn’t even WANT to write a good book. I was more than willing to settle for a decent one. Or a few decent sentences strung together in a row to make a quoteworthy block of text. That block of text would then be quoted by people who have not read the book in order to seem deep, profound, and well-read, thereby giving the book a very effective type of advertising to those around said people who will want to look as deep, profound, and well-read as this friend. Consequently, they too buy the book with every intention of reading it, but they have so many books at home that they never get around to it. Eventually, they stop thinking about that book, and it ends up on the bottom of a stack of other books that person had every intention of reading someday (ideally soon) where it waits unread until the end of time.
While that is sad for the sake of that poor object with all the aspirations and hopes that it likely had when it was first printed and bound, in this example, we are not considering whatever hypothetical feelings the book might have had. Rather, we are looking at the economics of it all. In this model, the book has already been bought, and payment has already been given. Erika and I would have already received our cuts of the sale. And that might not actually matter because I don’t care about the royalties so much, and Erika will still make me feel bad for not writing when I probably should be writing the very moment this new, hypothetical book is out.
Overall, it’s not a great strategy. But it was one I–painfully aware of my limitations–actually had a chance of realizing, and the end result would be som ething Erika could be momentarily content with. And so–assuming that the Pavlovian conditioning didn’t ruin my relationship with the other things that I associate with Erika like my cellphone or my fiancé’s sister who was also named Erika–I could find my own momentary contentment or something like a second of peace.
With this destination in mind, I tried to devise a sort of schedule to make both that set of decent sentences strung together in a row nestled in a book-like vehicle and the book-like vehicle itself. So every day I tried to wake up early, in order to get a sentence or two down before work. But I never did. My alarm would go off, but I wouldn’t get out of bed. The intention was there. I just needed a few more minutes. That meant hitting the snooze button once or twice, but then I would shut it off entirely because I’M REALLY, DEFINITELY GOING TO GET OUT OF BED THIS TIME, JUST YOU WAIT. But then I didn’t. I rolled over and slept until some pain of primordial panic that I would be late to my job would rip out from my gut to the rest of my body. And yes, it would jolt me away, but it would do so with the cutting abrasiveness of a cold bucket of water.
As if it were making up for that horrible wake up call, said panic would show me the kindness of waking me up with a bit of time to spare. I could have used it to get a few sentences down. Maybe I would even make it to my computer. But then my stomach would rumble, and I would have to reevaluate my priorities. When I did so, I never chose writing. I would promise myself that tomorrow would be different. I just had to eat today. So I would race out the door to a cafe or fast food place of some kind. I seldom had the patience to make breakfast in the morning nor did I usually have eggs or bacon or [insert breakfast food of choice here] in my apartment. If luck was in my favor, I’d have time to buy myself a pastry, a breakfast sandwich, an overpriced and needlessly “fancy” coffee beverage or some combination of the three with just enough time to feel guilty about the purchase, not because of the calories or the (stupidly high) price but because I was not writing when I could have been writing. And once again, this is the sort of guilt-trip that falls apart with any sort of challenge. If I had gotten coffee at home, then I could have been writing while the coffee machine was running, but what about food? All sorts of preparation require some mental energy or investment: things that writing would need to have a monopoly on if I were to try to spend that time writing.
Then I got to my job, and most days I actually did my job, the details of which notwithstanding. Then came lunch. I tried to remember to bring lunch with me every day, but I did not always (or usually). So I would go out to try to find something, but I would never know what to get. There were options, maybe too many. But eventually after I walked around and eyed some familiar signs and smelled some familiar smells, I would pick a place. And order my food at the counter. And wait for said food to be made. And then eat. All of that was more time I spent not writing.
Then I got back to my desk and worked through the afternoon, which usually included listening to the frequent complaints of Perry in the next cubicle over who spent her mornings gathering up her frustrations to spew at me all afternoon, stoking this unseen fire in my blood until it was well and truly boiling. Which of course left me feeling terrible because blood is not supposed to get that hot, particularly not regularly, so I would get home where I would try to write but surprise, I couldn’t write because it was too hot in my body for my brain to work.
At the time, it was just an annoyance, but then I would think more about it. Then this interpersonal anger and the self-directed anger about my failure to actually write turned from smoldering ashes to yet another raging fire eating primed to eat me away. It was all metaphorical, of course. But even though the fire wasn’t real, it would keep me up late. And my body, desperate for sleep, would keep me in bed lost past my alarm. So I then woke up late, and the cycle continued.
Nowhere in that cycle did I get any writing done. Which sucked. I needed to get writing done. And the fact that I have internalized this need would likely please Erika for a short while. Like for half a moment. Then she will ask me why I’m not doing the thing that I know on every level I need to do. And I did not have a good answer for that.
That is a long, drawn-out way of saying pretty much nothing. Maybe there’s a few scraps of value in there, but I could also just say that I was perpetually tired, and the point would have been made. Being tired is a common thing. We’re all tired.
On the 21st of June, in the year of the Lord 2018, this state of continued exhaustion did define my life, but the day was set apart not because of how I was feeling but because Erika was calling me while Perry in the next cubicle over was yapping away on the phone in what sounded like a very personal call despite it being with our contact at the print shop charged with sending out our physical advertisements.
This left me with two options (neither of which was writing), I could continue listening to this increasingly personal phone call made by someone I did not particularly like whose very voice was a prolific irritant, or I could take this phone call from Erika who was more of a mixed bag. Plan A and B, respectively.
The problem with Plan A was Perry and all my issues with her, which were numerous and things that I had been reminded of during a meeting that morning that could have been an email.
The problem with Plan B was that I was not writing and Erika always made me feel bad for not writing, even if there was a practical reason I wasn’t.
But on the other hand, the other reason that Erika was such a good agent for me was that she made me feel safe(r).
When we first talked on the phone, before the contract was signed and my first and only book sold for way too much money, Erika and I were discussing our possible relationship, and she asked me what I wanted in an agent. Now, that is an important question. Different agents have different ways of agenting, and compatibility is incredibly important in every relationship you will ever have in your life. In this case, you and your agent have to be a coherent team, so if you did not ask yourself that question and compare your answer to the type of agent they are, then you’re gambling with your career.
“Well,” I said. “I should probably tell you that I am a shy, scared little marshmallow. When I was a kid, I got chased by a chicken on my grandpa’s farm, and that’s stuck with me. I’m literally afraid of chickens, Erika. That is a problem. You should also know that there are days when I am on the verge of tears for no reason, and that a part of me doesn’t want to do this. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I’m also scared of being a writer. And I don’t know why.
“So a backbone, I guess,” I finally said. “I think I need an agent who can be a prosthetic backbone because I do not have one, and I clearly need one.”
We were having this conversation on the phone, but I always thought I knew what her expression was when I said that. Maybe it was a psychic vision or maybe I just knew what I wanted Erika to look like right then. Regardless, I imagined that Erika met my confessions with a sympathetic look because she recognized how pathetic that whole speech was. She didn’t give that look all too often. It didn’t suit her. And yet, it came up more than a few times when she was talking to me.
Right then and there, Erika promised to be my backbone if I signed with her, and that promise was enough for me to do it. Mostly because I didn’t have the heart to push back. I was so confrontation-averse that once she had me on the phone, she had me as a client simply because I was afraid to say no.
But that’s why my first book–written at the ripe ole age of 21–was sold for six-figures, a rare achievement that Erika miraculously pulled off in a way that was wholly beyond my understanding. After all, I didn’t think the book was any good. It was just a veiled attempt at me hashing out the many issues I had with my parents. And who wants to read someone’s grievances with their parental units when we each have our own to deal with? But the book sold to a publisher at a high price, and then it sold to the public at a high volume. And then the movie rights were sold for a hardy sum to a well-respected studio I would have never thought to approach. This all happened because Erika, my agent and backbone, handled everything and knew exactly how to pitch it. Which apparently meant pointing out that it was the ideal book club read: “emotional but not graphic or fetishistic,” “a digestible encapsulation of the human experience,” and “a perfect fit for the bestseller list.” All of which turned out to be true.
