I don’t care what Bill Clinton says. I didn’t almost dislocate his shoulder. There, I said it.
The best part about figuring out how to acknowledge the otherwise most destructive elements of my personality and channel them into something useful is that I don’t have to spend a lot of time in therapy figuring out how to deal with them. I was twenty-one years old when I realized being a reporter, specifically a television reporter, was going to do me just fine when it came to scoring my fix. I also found I could acquire my drug of choice virtually anywhere. Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Sure. Pueblo, Colorado? Why not? Memphis, Tennessee? Absolutely.
My particular addiction was, and to some extent still is, The Puzzle. I know there are people who get into journalism because they want to change the world. There are others who want to be the center of attention. Still others need it to create their own flavor of what they see as art, to feel the adrenaline rush of a deadline, to experience the pleasure of working with people who have just as short an attention span as they do, and for any number of other reasons noble and reasons craven. Pick your poison.
For me, it was the challenge of solving The Puzzle. A puzzle with a shot clock. I’ve always said if I have only one skill (which may very well be the case, as I have yet to find another) it’s this: tell me there’s a bone in the yard, and I’ll find it. Being a reporter, for me, is the constant challenge of finding the bone in the yard, and this metaphor manifests itself in so many different ways when a newsroom is your home, or at least your home base. That challenge might emerge from finding a story to do when there seems to be absolutely nothing happening. It may arise amid the crush of deadline pressure when your story absolutely has to make slot, because they can’t just run an old episode of Lassie in its place if you fail. It may result from finding something, anything, to use as a sound bite when your interview bails. Scoring my fix as a reporter meant one thing: starting the day with nothing, and ending the day with something. The cardinal sin in television news is forgetting that in the process of getting it first, getting it fast and getting right, the most important common denominator is “getting it.” Get the story.
In 2003, I quit cold turkey. As any addict can tell you, this does not come without consequences. Everything that defined me as a person existed in a world I could no longer access. A year’s worth of surgeries that were, in retrospect, first-ditch efforts to save my eyesight had left me in the next stages of the term that keeps popping up – the muddled middle. Not quite blind, but not fully sighted, either. The daily confirmation that I was good at finding he story in a mishmash of seemingly unrelated jigsaw pieces was gone. It didn’t seem there would ever be another way of finding that challenge and scratching that itch.
Turns out, I found it by doing what I’ve always done. Looking for the story, and by digging up the bone in the yard. Plus, as I’m fond of saying, I‘ve gotten to do it in a way that lets me keep the mirrors in my house.
Let me tell you about Melissa. That’s not her real name, but it’ll do for the purposes of this story. I’ve never met Melissa – for me, she only exists as a collection of pixels on my hard drive – but she is without a doubt the reason I’ve come to work every day for the last twelve years… the reason Mondays don’t feel like Mondays. She’s why I learned to love the second act of my life.
I was still very new to the world of production, and my first gig – a training video for a local supermarket chain – left me exhausted, a little bent, and almost entirely empty. Cutting ten minute training videos was the polar opposite of every story I had ever cut in a newsroom, and the prospect of spending the rest of my career as an empty vessel for hire, filling my soul… or more likely draining it… in the service of the make-work assignments of people I barely knew was a frightening prospect.
Enter the Heart Gallery. A childhood friend of mine was the local executive director of this phenomenal nonprofit that exists for the sole purpose of finding permanent adoptive homes for boys and girls at risk of spending their entire childhoods in the foster care system. The chances of a boy or girl over the age of three years old, a sibling group, or a child with a severe handicap finding a permanent adoptive home can be expressed as a point on a scale somewhere between improbable and impossible. The Heart Gallery mission is to transforrm these children from case files gathering dust in a Department of Child Welfare file cabinet into living, feeling and caring individuals who just need a fair shot at finding what the rest of us take for granted… a family. They do this by creating a traveling art gallery composed of professionally produced portraits of these children… caught in the act of being children. When my friend approached me, they were adding a new approach – professionally produced videos of these children talking about themselves and their dreams. My friend had a few sample interviews and she wanted to see if I could make something interesting out of the raw material. Melissa… a fourteen year old girl who had been widely written off as unadoptable… was the first tape of raw video I received.
It was a long interview, almost an hour, and for someone who had earned a living by getting the maximum number of sound bites from the fewest possible questions, this was foreign territory, but the little voice in the back of my mind was whispering that this was my new back yard… so start digging. That there was a story in there somewhere… if I could find it.
That little voice was right, of course, and it changed my life. Wading through the back and forth of failed questions, missteps and restarts, there was indeed a story in there – a fourteen year old girl who just wanted to find a home. A young woman talking about her first manicure, her perfect birthday party, her dream of becoming a veterinarian and so much more. The story began to take shape, and it was a revelation.
However, what was more of a revelation was what happened next. The work kept coming. My friend had liked the pieces I cut, and we made plans to use some grant money they had received to produce more videos. It was a leap of faith that they would do any good, but that leap of faith ended up with us completely sticking the landing. Three months into our work, she called me at my office.
“Hey, do you remember Melissa?” she asked me, and I assured her that I did.
“Of course. How’s she doing?”
“Well, yesterday, she was adopted.”
During the next five years that we worked together on this project, more than seventy percent of the children we interviewed found what my friend at the Heart gallery calls “forever families,” and I’m not exaggerating when I write that at that moment – the moment I heard about that first success – I felt that if I didn’t do another project for the rest of my life, it would be okay, because at least just once, I had done something that actually made a difference. Somewhere out there, there was a kid who had people she could call Mom and Dad, and at least in some part, I had been involved. I wasn’t just reporting on something that I had no stake in, and the rules didn’t require that I be objective and distant. Just the opposite, in fact. This time, the metric of success was that I be a stakeholder in this person’s future. We had created something from nothing that helped make that happen. Everything I’ve done since then has been an expression of that first success.
And now, this third act.
What I’m very much hoping is that F. Scott fitzgerald wasn’t just wrong, but that he was very wrong. That not only are there indeed second acts in life, there are third acts, too. If there aren’t, I’m making a huge mistake, but I have to believe that everything in my life, good and bad, is prologue to what happens in the now.
I wrote last week about the purpose of the expedition. How it exists as a three legged chair, built on the foundations of urgency, action and results. I’m realizing now that this is an incomplete way of looking at it. It’s a flawed design, because it only acknowledges the passions that drove me in the first act of my life. I think I realized even as I was writing it that I was shoehorning the last twelve years into the style of a life I haven’t lived in a very long time.
I think a better way of expressing the expedition is as a Venn diagram of sorts. In the first circle is what I’ve already descried as the driving forces of urgency and action. The urgency of seeing the world while I still have some eyesight left with which to see it, and the action of proving that anything is possible for any person, that time is fleeting, no matter who you are, or what handicaps or disabilities are in the mix.
However, in that second circle are two other forces that have come to mean so much to me.
Outreach. The fine art of living beyond one’s own shell. Of truly connecting with a circle of community and expanding that circle in the service of a larger purpose.
Awareness. The drive to raise social consciousness, change perceptions and raise expectations. I’ve written about how important it is to set the bar high. I think by raising awareness and shining a light on a problem, anyone can create change. Where those circles intersect is where we achieve results.
So there it is. In Urgency and action. Outreach and awareness. Results? That’s where we meet in the middle. That’s my roadmap… and I hope you’ll join me.
And I promise that I’ll explain the Bill Clinton story next time.
