Looking Up: A Memoir about Life's Sudden Exits

By Casey Roman

Losing her TV news career and her home in the same year wasn't on Casey Roman's 2018 Bingo card. Neither was sleeping in Walmart parking lots and nearly deciding to end her own life. But the world is full of blind curves, and salvation comes in unusual forms, like a cargo van. What began as a three-week road trip to erase her "news lady" image became a 12,000-mile solo journey that saved Casey's life.

Looking Up is a riches-to-rags-to-rebellion memoir that reads like a love letter to small-town America. Hop in the passenger's seat and ride along for encounters that are sometimes scary and often hilarious, from rapping in the "Murder Capital of the US" to luring a moose with a bag of bread in Maine. For anyone looking for direction who feels like they're running on empty, Casey Roman's story is a reminder to keep driving toward the horizon, no matter what. Hope is out there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casey Roman
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988833611

Book preview

LESSON 1

EVEN PERFECT PLANS HAVE PLOT TWISTS

This isn’t punitive.

Bullshit.

Todd’s facial expressions rotated on a carousel of three when we were in his office: You’re In Trouble,’’ demonstrated by pronounced forehead veins and avoidant eye contact; This Raise Will Disappoint You,’’ an exasperated look of having exhausted all budget options, but not really; or Here’s A Vanity Title With More Work, hopeful and bright-eyed, compensating for a lack of substance in the offer at hand. I sat down in the chair across from Todd’s desk and leveled up to a new hybrid of that Trinity. An unfamiliar foe that my reporter-to-corporate missile defense system was not armed for. I usually handled confrontation with management like any seasoned professional: overt insubordination and passive-aggressive emails. For more than a decade, that had worked quite well.

In preparation for battle I pulled back my hair. It was freshly dyed from its natural state, which I called Depression Blonde,’’ to a shade of siren red. The makeover had been an act of defiance, not vanity, after a recent annual review with Todd. His analysis of my job performance mostly highlighted my intimidating personality and his request that I work on it." That’s how I worked on it. I liked my boss - I actually mean that. I don’t say that because he will inevitably read this book or because his words tipped my scale from Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist to vagrant sleeping in a Walmart parking lot. Todd doesn’t get all the credit but he is owed some. Without the worst day of my career there’d be nothing to fill these pages.

Some bosses need to count their chickens every morning. Todd tracked his flock with a Chicken Abacus. He needed to know where his birds were, that they weren’t accruing overtime or doing anything that might embarrass the station on social media. That made me problematic. I was the rabid, feral donkey of the newsroom who broke out of the barn daily and could not be coaxed back in with food, force or reason. Hit me with a poison dart to the neck and I might attend the morning meeting.

I produced Special Reports and documentaries for our local TV station, WECT News. Over the years, I had molded a General Assignment position into what I felt news was missing: actual journalism. Maybe you’ve heard of it from a bygone era. It’s a lot harder to sell now, compared to shaky cell phone video of fatal fires or the salacious details of a celebrity divorce trial. I had cranked out five documentaries in just a few years and won enough awards to panel a wall. All shot, produced, written and edited as a one-woman operation.

Casey Roman

Heroin, prostitution, panhandling and general crime were the reasons I got out of bed in the morning. They were also terrible conversation starters at baby showers. 24 Hr. PD was the pilot light of my soul. I had spent three years pitching it as a documentary series to a newsroom that didn’t want it. It was an important story to tell in the midst of a nationwide divide between law enforcement and the people they served. I saw it as a way to unite my own community and I believed with all my heart that it would.

On the nights I rode copilot in a patrol car, one hand holding onto my camera and the other holding on for dear life, I knew I was doing exactly what I was put on Beyonce’s Green Earth to do. Tell the stories no one else was willing to tell. I finished the series script for 24 Hr. PD on Thanksgiving Day 2017 and tactically emailed my golden goose of journalism to Todd and the producers just before turkey plates would be hitting tables. Awfully hard to suggest edits while saying Grace.

My seat belt was halfway across my chest in the parking lot when my cell phone pinged.

From: Todd. Reply: All.

There was no way he could have read the script; it had only been a few minutes. I opened the email and read a decree, not the start of a conversation. 24 Hr. PD would not air. Ever. The only reason given: it was too long. The series would be relegated to our website, which was the media rollout equivalent of uploading footage of a cat running into a screen door on YouTube. Somehow in the 7+ hours of shows we produced daily, a half-hour special was unmanageable. I still maintain that the docuseries simply did not fit the law enforcement narrative most mainstream news outlets were looking for at the time.

On that matter Todd and I may forever disagree but his immediate reaction to my script was why I landed in my News Director’s office the following Monday. I prepared for a lecture on script length and hoped for a change of heart on the website-only verdict. Sure, he’d be frustrated about the extra work to reformat the shows for the series but I was optimistic our meeting would end with high-fives and brainstorming about a big marketing plan. Instead, I sat face-to-face across from Todd as he unceremoniously announced that I was officially off investigative reporting, back to the grind of daily news and please, no more law enforcement stories. The station wanted more content out of me, and they wanted it faster and cheaper.

This isn’t punitive.

Bullshit.

The simple act of calling me into his office was punitive.

Though we had danced that dance many times before, this time was different. This time there wasn’t an upward inflection at the end of each sentence, signaling a negotiation. He was letting me know, not letting me consider. That part was evident. Uncharacteristically, I sat with little to say, despite being known as a confrontational fire-breathing dragon. Todd remarked on how well I was handling his decision. A coping mechanism hadn’t kicked in, but rather a certain knowing had settled over me, a signal that a decade-long chapter was ending.

After my meeting with Todd I was still technically a reporter, though instead of journalism, I would be back on content gathering for things like ribbon cuttings and recording local reaction to whatever a politician said on Twitter. The kind of assignments an intern could handle. I still had a paycheck but that’s all it was now, just a paycheck. I was one of those weirdos who had found their calling early. Up until that meeting, I had always felt I’d spent every minute of my Earth trip wisely so long as I had a camera in my hand and a story to tell. Once that was gone, so was my God-given purpose and my entire identity.

I walked out of Todd’s office, sat back down at my desk and stared blankly into the editing timeline on my desktop. My three-year vision for 24 Hr. PD stretched across the screen in hundreds of colorful clips of footage. A switch flipped somewhere in my heart and the lights dimmed over what I had believed was my forever. I didn’t hear a voice from up above. I hadn’t read my horoscope that morning. I just knew that my career was ending that day, but I hadn’t seen it coming.

LESSON 2

PARACHUTES ONLY OPEN WHEN YOU JUMP

If I was a bigger person, I’d tell you that for the next year I fearlessly barreled forward toward an uncertain future, showing up diligently at my job with a positive attitude and grateful spirit. Thankfully, I’m only 5’2", so I can leave the higher moral ground for the bigger people.

I had three legitimate options after I was reassigned: (1) accept my fate, punch my time card, and try not to run out of antidepressants before the refill date; (2) dig my heels in, refuse to compromise on long-format reporting, and see how long it took to get fired; (3) wiggle my behind to the edge, say a prayer, and jump.

There’s a funny thing about parachutes: they only open if you jump.

In these situations, the responsible thing to do is to recognize the value of a steady paycheck, health benefits, and a company cell phone. This is the advice we give to people we love. Say it twice in your Dad’s voice—you’ll hear it. That’s not a parachute. That’s a safety net. Everyone wants that safety net. Hell, I wanted that safety net.

Option 1 wasn’t an option. I refused to spend my best working years reporting live outside a pickleball court ground-breaking. So Todd and I began Option 2: Cold War, playing chicken with termination. Our Alamo was a colorful meeting where my professional short-comings were read aloud; namely, stubbornness, insubordination, and an uneven attitude towards management. When I countered that those were actually my strengths, Todd overheated and had to take a break.

For the next several months, I carried a freshly printed resignation letter in my back pocket—just in case. It turned any instance of communication between us into an Aaron Burr / Alexander Hamilton duel. A simple Good Morning had my hand over the folded sheet, ready to draw. The tension became unbearable. Todd wasn’t getting the turn-and-burn daily content out of me, and I wasn’t getting my documentaries back. That only left Option 3: Jump and Pray. Refusing to let the final chapter of my dream job be written by anyone but me, I inched towards the edge and looked out to see how far it was to fall.

I couldn’t see the bottom. That’s what quitting without a plan feels like.

If the parachute didn’t open, the first branch I’d be impaled on was that of the mortgage company. I had just finished restoring my first home, a 110-year-old, historic Queen Anne named The Babe Cave (that’s capital B and capital C, proper noun). My entire life’s savings were in her walls. At the impressive starting TV news salary of $20,000/year, it was a small miracle that I had qualified for any mortgage at all within my lifetime. Particularly without a Mr. Casey Roman paying half the bills. It had taken years of begging for raises and scraping by to finally hit about $45,000/year and have enough saved for a down payment. During that time I had lived in a roach-infested, low-income complex, and then with various roommates found on Craigslist. The Babe Cave wasn’t just my address, it was my reward for years of sacrifice.

When I moved in on December 16th, 2016, her walls were so rotted that mushrooms grew from the ceiling, fertilized by a crusted, festering layer of rodent feces baking in the attic. Wharf rats the size of cats were living inside the floors. One day they sent their gang leader, a deranged squirrel, who ejected himself from a hole in the plaster and tried to fight me in my own bedroom. The renovation had taken nearly a year but she looked like Downton Abbey, minus the cool outfits. Shortly after laying down my tools was when I had found myself in Todd’s office, listening to his verdict over my job. The tension between us became so palatable in the weeks leading into 2018 that it became abundantly clear that either I was leaving on my own accord or my contract wouldn’t be renewed—the nice way people are fired from news. Saying a prayer and taking a leap was the only way forward, and owning Ye Old Money Pit wasn’t included in that option. Did I care enough about the fate of journalism to lose the roof over my head?

Some people say they hear God’s voice when standing at a crossroad. I don’t, likely because God isn’t looking for the second opinion I’d be happy to give. Instead, this decision was made for me. My white knuckle grip was loosened, making it impossible to hold on, so that jumping became the only choice.

It doesn’t really snow in southeastern North Carolina. When it does, there’s a baby boom nine months later because locals think the world is ending, and they’re bored for the two freezing hours when they’re forced to shelter in place. In early January of 2018, Wilmington had a bizarre three-week stretch of freezing temperatures. Old house protocol requires leaving the faucets dripping to prevent freezing pipes. That worked, until the morning it didn’t.

I woke and listened for the blip, blip, blip of droplets hitting the bathroom sink. Silence. I flew into the bathroom and opened the faucet full tilt—nothing. In little more than my Tinkerbell bathrobe I ran outside to the crawlspace access and beamed a flashlight into the underbelly of the Babe Cave. It looked like a water park. The pipes had split. It was a good time to panic. No, it was a great time to panic. I was out of money to pay for any more repairs, staring down the barrel of unemployment, and standing in the frost wearing Disney Princess pajamas. I felt the same flip of a switch that I had felt a few weeks prior in Todd’s office, that same knowing and feeling of calmness. As I crouched down and shivered, the second switch flipped and shadowed my only other love, my home.

That morning I knew I could let go of both home and job.

When we go through these seasons of life, we label them a string of bad luck. We cry that nothing is working out, because that’s how it feels and because we can’t see ahead. We hold on for dear life because the unknown seems far more terrifying than what we have, and because the human mind is not wired to understand our losses as preparations.

I can say that now—not then.

I turned off the water main, packed a bag, and slept in my office until a plumber could come.

The plumber came and I put a For Sale sign in the yard.

Looking back, how else could I have been talked into living inside 60 square feet?

LESSON 3

YOUR GARAGE IS A MUSEUM OF MONEY

It took three months for the Babe Cave to find a buyer, a wonderful family from Colorado who made an odd request: "Can you leave everything?"

Even my used mattresses? Yes.

I high-fived myself for reducing my moving costs to zero. No sooner had I shot back an enthusiastic Sounds good! then the quiet mourning period of divorcing my stuff began. We have a spiritual attachment to stuff and I was not exempt. We work unenviable hours at a job we don’t like so that we can afford a house we barely see because the bulk of our waking hours are spent at the job that pays for it. In time, hopefully that job pays for a bigger version to hold all the things we bought using the money from that job we’re trying to quit.

If that didn’t make any sense, good.

In my case, once again, separation was preparation, not punishment. I wasn’t losing my precious things, there just wouldn’t be room for an 8-place formal dining set or marble-top side tables. I would only understand that much later, when sitting inside a cargo van. At the time I had only planned on moving into the smallest, cheapest apartment available until I found a new job. Little did I know that a few months from that day, the only things I’d actually need were a good pair of sneakers and my camera.

On my last day in the Babe Cave I grieved, bitterly cursing the circumstances which had forced her sale. I stood at the top of her hand-cut staircase, hugging the newel post. Staircases are my favorite part of any historic home. I always made a point to put my hand on the banister and pause. Babies were carried up those stairs; the elderly, carried down. No matter your status, owner or staff, every person in the household traversed that expanse. If I could compress time, my hand would share the same space with the twelve other owners of my house over more than a century. I never touched my banister without imagining them. I hoped that I had honored all of them with the restoration, and that my short time there would be worth remembering for the next 100 years.

A house-sitting gig fell into my lap just a few doors down. Another family, the Colstads, came for a showing of the Babe Cave, but ultimately offered on the enormous house down the street. I was disappointed until they mentioned they’d be needing someone to look after it until they were ready to move. From my decadently appointed Queen Anne, I unpacked into an empty shell that echoed when I sniffled. I opened a beach chair in the middle of the living room to establish a home office. There I would look for jobs while huffing out my last days at the TV station, going through the motions towards a final date that was still To Be Determined. I put a mattress on the dining room floor and stuffed my underwear and socks into small boxes on the mantel. That would have to do for a bedroom.

In retrospect, it was all great training.

For the things I couldn’t bear to part with, I justified a $120/month storage expense by affirming that soon, very soon, I would have a new career, and could go shopping for my next mini mansion. I would certainly need those trinkets then. Weeks passed, and I never went to see all the chattel I was paying to forget. In a final exorcism of earthly possessions, I went to the storage unit, rolled back the door, and reenacted my own modified version of the iconic Lion King scene:

Casey, everything the Light touches used to be money . . . and now . . . it’s NOT.

I sold everything inside it on Facebook in less than a week and returned the key to the storage office.

LESSON 4

NO IS A BUMP IN THE ROAD, NOT A DEAD END

The sale of the Babe Cave put a check in my hand equivalent to two year’s pay at the TV station. I rewarded myself with a pint of tasteless, low-calorie, fake ice cream and put the rest in a new bank account named F-U Money.

It was just enough to liberate me from my W-2 but would need to cover however long my unemployment lasted. It was now July of 2018, and in a few weeks my TV contract was set to expire. While I hadn’t yet been formally fired, I knew this was usually done indirectly by not renewing a contract. It didn’t matter. A resignation letter was still hot in my back pocket, and when the time came, I’d be pulling the trigger before corporate could.

Leaving news wasn’t just about lost dreams, it was about lost stability. Like most people, my health insurance and other benefits were controlled by my employer. I hadn’t shopped for a cell phone for more than a decade, and I rarely worried about gas, having the equivalent of a take-home car. They were nice perks that made me, in many ways, completely dependent on my employer. To unwind all that took months, particularly the health insurance. Even with no preexisting conditions, chronic issues, or routine medications, I’d still be swapping a $150/month employer-sponsored plan for $850/month private coverage. I was told that was a good deal. Gone were the days of tossing my corporate insurance card across the front desk like a rapper ordering Dom Perignon for the table.

I’ll take a round of colon screenings for the waiting room—this one’s on me, guys!

In the newsroom, my unspoken demotion was obvious, but no one knew that I was quietly disassembling the longest relationship I had ever had: my career. My coworkers were my family; I’d be leaving them, too. As in any family, secrets don’t stay secret long, and I needed time under the radar to weave a safety net before anyone realized. It was just assumed that I was taking a break from long-format news. I was a lifer after all. I loved Wilmington, I loved my work, and there was no Plan B to pay my bills. Reasonably, I was at the top of my game and I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t want a break-up, but "24 Hr. PD’’ was the straw that broke this camel’s lumbar region.

I had found health insurance, and I would get used to paying for a cell phone. Finding a new home for my skills would prove nearly impossible because TV news is not a repeatable job and is largely misunderstood. What other career involves knocking on the door of a homicide victim’s family, interviewing murderers in jail, doing live shots at an active shooting and speed editing in the back of a Chick-fil-A parking lot to make deadline? While the type of reporting I did required a host of technical, analytical, and creative talent, most employers couldn’t unsee the TV thing. To them, reporters read words written by someone else off a teleprompter, and were manufactured personalities, not journalists.

I did what any reasonable adult would do when playing chicken with unemployment: I looked for a job, any job, to anesthetize the fear-filled void left from a bi-monthly paycheck. Real estate photographer, personal assistant, social media coordinator. I didn’t care what it was or what it paid, and perhaps they could all tell—everyone from Lowe’s Home Improvement to the Army.

Interviewer:

Where do you see yourself in five years? (Honest answer: Not here.)

Why do you want to leave your current company? (How much time do you have?)

What gets you up in the morning? (Anxiety.)

What’s your greatest strength? (Pointing out the flaws in other people’s flaws.)

What motivates you? (Spite.)

After the years I’d spent saying Now back to you! someone in an HR office would recognize my voice, start snapping their fingers, and begin a game of "Where Do I Know You From?"

Oh! You’re that prostitution lady! they’d squeal.

I smiled and tolerated each interrogation about the horrible things I had seen while working in news, while swirling the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee and congealed creamer I’d been gifted at the door. Each job interview would end with something like: "I doubt you’d like it here. This isn’t as exciting as TV news."

I kept downgrading my prospects. From large firms to minimum wage retail jobs. I dumbed down my resume from Investigative Reporter to Media Associate. Time after time, I excused myself from the table. The loss of my professional life caused a heavy resentment that quickly evolved into grief, combined with the rejection and frustration of a failed job search.

God had shut many doors, but there was one last window: the North Carolina Police Executives Association’s Annual Conference. I was invited to make a two hour presentation on how to improve the relationship between law enforcement and the media. This was my moment. In front of every Chief in North Carolina, I would pull back the veil on media bias. By the time my talk was over, they would be throwing their business cards on stage, all begging me to come work as their Public Information Officer. I practiced every night with my laptop propped up on the beach chair. Without a mirror (or really, any furniture), I used my reflection in the windows at night to check my posture and hand gestures.

A week before the meeting, I caught a cold that didn’t act like a cold. It acted like depression. The simplest of tasks became a Herculean labor. My body ached and my head was clouded. Two days before my big presentation, my voice began to crack. By the end of the day, I could barely squeak.

Diagnosis: acute laryngitis.

Prognosis: two weeks before regaining volume.

I took steroids. I gargled salt water. I prayed.

On the morning of my speech, I woke up completely mute. All of my hope was planted firmly on that day. It was supposed to be the turning point in my story, a day and an opportunity that was given to me, and I was robbed of it. To 100+ potential employers, my big first impression was a cancellation. My prayers turned into rage. I sat crumpled on the floor of that big empty house. In my own silence, I could hear my teeth clenching. Heavy, hot tears exploded from my eyes, but I couldn’t even make a sound while crying.

I asked God, quite formally, if he would please just make me disappear. He had accidentally built a recalled product named Casey Roman which needed to be returned to the manufacturer to be fixed or destroyed. No one wanted this make and model. It didn’t even work when it needed to. He made a storyteller who couldn’t speak and who no longer had any audience to listen.

It’s said that the darkest hours are just before dawn. The hands of my clock were headed into blackout.

LESSON 5

NEVER MAKE PERMANENT DECISIONS IN TEMPORARY STORMS

There’s a marked difference between saying I just want to crawl into a hole and die and actually plotting to do it. Over the summer of 2018 I crossed the line into the latter mindset and did a flawless job of making sure no one knew it. I wasn’t looking for a shoulder to cry on. I was looking for a way to stop another day of disappointment from dawning. I didn’t really want to die. I just didn’t want tomorrow. Tomorrow might be worse.

We all have a reason to get out of bed in the morning: our children, spouse, a business, or a cause we care deeply about. It’s the coal in your furnace, your "Why. My stories were my why"; they were my art. The video people saw on their TV screen was actually a meticulously woven tapestry of hundreds and hundreds of specific moments that I had captured. I had chosen their exact location across a 60-minute timeline and I knew each second of every story intimately. I had shot it, edited it, and married it to a particular note of music. Hitting play could take people into another world they had never seen. I brought them there.

That kind of creation was my oxygen. Now it was gone, and no one lives very long without oxygen.

This is all to say that the work I did was never just a job to me. The documentaries were my reason for existing. My entire identity and relevancy were cross stitched to that kind of work. The only way I knew how to introduce myself was as: Casey Roman, Investigative Reporter (pause) WECT News. There was no line where Casey Roman, News Lady stopped and where just Casey Roman started, and I didn’t want there to be one. I didn’t even know who just-Casey was and I didn’t want to. She didn’t sound nearly important enough. She wasn’t the person strangers stopped in the grocery store so they could tell her how much her reports meant to them. Her spotlight didn’t help catch the bad guys. Community initiatives weren’t created as a result of her exposés. She wasn’t out in the trenches of severe weather and active shooters with live reports that saved lives. Just-Casey was just some lady who lived in Wilmington.

At some point, we’ve all lost our identity to something or someone outside of ourselves. We’ve made it our Higher Power. If it wasn’t a job, it was a relationship, or a label, or maybe a social standing we enjoy. It gives us an imaginary sense of gravity . . . ballast in the search for meaning in our lives.

The only reason any sane person works in local TV news is to tell stories and there is a profound difference between the stories a reporter is passionate about telling and stories that are assigned – usually a grab bag variety of gory crime headlines, city council meetings and advertiser-appeasing fluff. Without my investigative reports, my craft was dead. The 10+ hour workdays and the pathetic salary would rack up an invoice against time that I could not afford. Working in news doesn’t teach you how to apply studio makeup or talk in a voice not found in nature; no, it teaches you how to measure time. Stare at enough gruesome accidents through a zoom lens and the internal clock of your mortality will tick so loud in your head it will blur out the sirens. You don’t see a car wreck, you see the mangled soul inside that just a moment ago was someone who had plans that night. Ten feet back from where the wheels stopped was a living, breathing, sentient being who had somewhere to be with someone waiting for them. A second or two beyond that point, they no longer exist. That’s all it took.

All their dreams. All their goals. All the big ideas for one day. Whatever was filling up that Bucket List.

Gone.

I had soaked myself in those experiences for years and it had taught me to measure my minutes differently. In the big picture, my financial situation was not dire, but how I spent my time and losing my purpose was. My well was dry, there was no rain in the forecast, and I could only think of one way to stop the leak.

Still desperately searching for a job while still working at the station I was assigned a story on metal roofs. One of those bullshit filler pieces that even a mute, dyslexic chimpanzee could report on (as far as dyslexic chimpanzees go. . .). When the business owner recognized me and laughed about it obviously being a slow news day if I was covering a roof story, I felt a wave of shame and couldn’t make eye contact with him. Staring out his warehouse door, I noticed how blue the sky was. What was I doing? On a gorgeous summer day I was throwing away precious time engineering a pathetic, non-news story just to keep a job that was on life support. My work had no value anymore. I had no value anymore and neither did my minutes. What was the point?

On the way back, my eyes stayed on the road while my consciousness crawled into the darkest void of my mind. From there, a new narrator emerged, repeating on loop every painful moment I had lived over the prior months. With each flashback I sunk deeper into the internal warehouse holding all my pain and I slammed the door behind me. A highway overpass caught my eye. I estimated its height above the marsh below and considered how much speed it would take to break through the guard rail. If I drove off it, I would likely survive. People had jumped from it, but they usually lived, enduring an embarrassing extraction while TV cameras rolled. I should know—I had been the reporter hitting the record button.

My gaze moved to the large concrete columns holding up the overpass.

If I turn this wheel hard, right now . . . I don’t have to do this anymore.

As quickly as the thought entered my mind, I was past the columns. I had to pull over to collect myself and quiet my breathing, somewhat shocked at how very committed that impulse felt. I understand now why seemingly happy people sometimes turn that wheel, so to speak, and why the rest of us all lament not seeing any signs. It wasn’t what had happened that day; it wasn’t the metal roofs. It was what had been happening for months. Living with little hope makes living at all painful.

That afternoon, my world got shadowy. In the coming days, it would turn pitch black.

The following week, I learned that our police department was building a case against my former orthodontist. He was the doctor who had cracked several of my other teeth when pulling out my wisdom teeth, as if he had done it while wrestling a bear. I had woken up from the surgery hyperventilating, crying, and panicking, though I felt no pain. My orthodontist had been caught sexually assaulting his female patients while they were under anesthesia. His number of victims was more than 200 and I was now on that list.

The dimly lit corners of my mind darkened completely. I started to see the world around me as a buffet of options and opportunities to kill myself. Not for payback and not so anyone would pity me. I just wanted to be rid of a body that tied me to a life I no longer saw value in. That night, while emptying out the dishwasher, I paused at the knives.

I could take the trip of a lifetime. I could just GO. See every place I’ve ever dreamed of. To hell with work, money . . . ALL OF IT. It won’t matter. I won’t be alive when the trip ends.

I doubled over the counter and watched more of those big, hot, heavy tears fall off my cheeks and bleed into a kitchen towel. That had become the signature response to that year’s significant moments. Something had to give or I wasn’t going to be alive much longer. I had no prospects and no home, and I was not OK upstairs. Months prior, I had stared over the edge, into the unknown, not knowing how far the fall would be. I was about to reach the bottom, and the landing would finally crack me into pieces.

LESSON 6

THE HIGH VALUE OF HAVING NOTHING

There are certain phone numbers that only call in the middle of the day, and only when there’s bad news to deliver. This was one of those numbers.

My maternal grandmother, Granny, had died. She was the last of my grandparents. At 92 years old, with a pacemaker she didn’t maintain and a morning bourbon habit, perhaps no one should have been shocked. Still, Granny had evaded death better than El Chapo