Driving and Deadlines

In the first week of my first year of university, Maury Breslow, our Drama 100 professor, paused mid-lecture and said, in the way older people often do when presented with youth and inexperience, “You’re all so young.” He shook his head. “Most of you haven’t even been fired yet.”

It was an admirable setup, playing with our expectations, then providing a twist, but when we laughed, he said, “You think I’m joking? You don’t really know yourself until you’ve been fired at least once.”

I remember that he told us why, but not the actual reasoning. I don’t remember many particulars of that class—though I remember that on the first day Geoff Pounsett used the word “venue”, a word I’d never read or heard, which provoked a gamut of emotions, from dismissal to intrigue—but from time-to-time I’d remember Maury’s bold statement, and it always made me smile.

It was 17 years before I found out it was a prophesy.

I was working for a non-profit with a board comprised entirely of senior executives from the major multinational corporations that funded it. It was a good job in that it paid well, offered me opportunities to advance, and came with the lofty title of Vice President, Communications. It was also a job that I needed. My husband and I were recently married, with five children between us. We’d just bought a van and a house. His own freelance communications contract had ended, and we’d decided that he wouldn’t try to replace it until he finished his novel.

In the meantime, there was a mortgage, and car payments and groceries.

I’d been excited about the job when I started. I’d admired the organization’s past work, and the early months went pretty well. But both the job and my sense of myself in it had been shifting. When I’d begun, the office had been in downtown Toronto, where I’d lived. Since then, I’d moved quite a distance from the core, and the office had moved out of downtown too—in the opposite direction. I could no longer take public transit to work, and my roundtrip drive was over four hours. I’d negotiated a couple of days’ work from home, but that led to tension with others who didn’t have the option. And then there was the fact the work had changed significantly. The organization made public service announcements for kids, and I was hired to promote that work, giving their funders an altruistic gleam. But the food industry was under increasing pressure, and facing the threat of new government regulations. My bosses at the organization were angling to change my responsibilities, sending me to Ottawa to lobby on its members’ behalf.

Everything felt wrong.

I had no time for my own writing. I felt like I barely had time with our children. A weird thing on my hands turned out to be callouses from twenty hours a week of gripping the steering wheel. I told my husband that when I got home and took off my suit, I felt like I was peeling off my skin.

But I didn’t see how I could get out of it.

Then one Monday morning after a week’s vacation, I was called into the board room and fired. Or rather, “let go.” They’d been as unhappy with me, as I had with them.

I called my husband in tears from the parking lot. Then I got back in the car and headed home. I spent the whole drive thinking:

But I don’t get fired! and Oh my God, I don’t have to go back!

By the time I pulled into my suburban driveway, I knew something very clearly: I was not going to get fired and miss a chance to change my life.

I had a deadline to meet.

For the past few years, I’d studied the application requirements for the optional residency MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC. And each year, I’d fail to apply. I needed to submit a significant portfolio, writing in a minimum of two genres—and I just didn’t have enough. Not by a long shot. And though I’d told myself that this year was going to be different, once again, I’d been resigning myself to letting it pass me by.

Not anymore.

I was no more capable than I’d been a year, or a week, before—but I was newly determined.

I wrote the portfolio in under two weeks and submitted the application on time. I started providing freelance communications for several clients. It took a while, but eventually I managed to surpass my old salary. By the time I learned that I’d been accepted into the MFA program, I knew I was not going to take that opportunity for granted. “I’m not going to claim I’ll be the most talented writer in the class,” I told one of my instructors, “but I can promise you that no one will work harder.”

I kept my promise.

I did it for myself.