Year of Yes Read online

  You know what else you don’t want to see?

  Shonda having spontaneous fear-snot shoot out of my face.

  Fear-snot.

  Nuff said.

  All of these things could happen if I were to go on live TV. These are all not good things. These are bad things. Baaaaaaad things.

  You may think I’m exaggerating. Or trying to be funny.

  Does fear-snot sound funny to you? Close your eyes and imagine it shooting out of your face in front of twelve million people. It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.

  Okay, I have never had fear-snot. But I am the kind of person who WOULD GET fear-snot. It would happen to me. Simply because it would be horrifying. That is how the universe likes to treat me, teach me, keep me in line. I’m the girl who splits her pants and does not notice the breeze. I’m the woman who forgets to cut the price tag off my dress and walks around with it stuck to my back so everyone can see not only how much I spent but also WHAT SIZE I AM for an entire dinner party. I’m the one who spills. Who trips. Who drops. I once accidentally flung a chicken bone across the room at a very elegant cocktail party while trying to make a point.

  Did you hear me?

  I FLUNG A CHICKEN BONE ACROSS THE ROOM AT A COCKTAIL PARTY.

  While everyone stared at the chicken bone on the white carpet, I pretended that the culprit was not me. True story.

  You can’t take me anywhere.

  You certainly can’t take me somewhere and then film me live in front of millions of people. Because if there is fear-snot to be had, I WILL HAVE IT.

  And Chris knows this. He knows what could happen on live TV. He knows how I feel about live TV.

  He just doesn’t care.

  He doesn’t have time for fear-snot. He’s trying to help me build a career here.

  Against my will.

  Over the years, every single time that Kimmel’s people have asked me to be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live, I’ve said no.

  And no.

  And no.

  I don’t tell Kimmel’s people that I am saying no because live TV is a minefield. I don’t tell them that I am saying no because I am afraid I may accidentally Janet Jackson Boob Jimmy. Or pee on his sofa like an excited puppy. Or fall on my face before I even make it to the sofa. Or die. I don’t say anything about any of that.

  Because I’m a lady, damn it.

  I just say no.

  Kimmel’s people are so nice. When I see them at ABC events, they smile at me while I look at them with my statue face and my swirly eyeballs.

  Then I shuffle to the buffet table to put some food on top of my stress.

  I am pretty sure that the super-nice Kimmel people think I’m an asshole.

  My publicist, Chris, doesn’t think I’m an asshole. He thinks I am a pain in the ass. To him, I am the Sisyphean ball he has been shoving up this same hill for years now. And yet he continues to believe. He continues to hope.

  He keeps hope alive.

  He uses buzzwords. Buzzwords we both know I can’t just say no to. They want to do an hour-long Scandal special. On finale night. ABC is excited. And it’s a delicate time for me and ABC right now. So I have to be a team player. If I say no, I am not being a good team player. All that Athlete Talk will have been for nothing.

  See, I am in the middle of negotiations for my next contract.

  You understand what I’m saying?

  Athlete Talk has to MEAN something.

  We sit on the phone together. I am silent. I’m hoping he’ll get the hint, hang up and call ABC and tell them I have the plague. It could happen. I could get the plague. I feel it coming on right now.

  Chris doesn’t hang up. He never hangs up.

  He’s silent.

  He’s waiting me out. This is a contest we engage in frequently. Finally, as always, I speak first.

  “I do not want to be on television. Ever,” I remind him. “Never. Ever. For any reason. No one needs to see me. Why would anyone need to see me when they could be seeing Kerry Washington?”

  I believe this deeply. Have you seen Kerry Washington? Kerry Washington is extraordinary.

  “Kerry Washington just had a baby,” Chris reminds me.

  Right. Kerry is quite rightly taking some much-needed bonding time with her new baby. Mother to mother, I feel solidarity with her on that. Damn.

  “Tony then! Or Bellamy! Bellamy is amazing!”

  I start calling out the names of Scandal actors. Chris takes a deep breath. Then he lists all the reasons why I should be on TV. These reasons make no sense to me. He may as well be speaking German. Because I don’t speak German. Or that really cool Khoisan language in Namibia that is just a series of clicks.

  “I do not understand a thing you are saying!” I holler. “Why would I want to be more recognizable? That is the exact opposite of what I want to be!! Make this go away!”

  Chris is now likely contemplating whether it will be more satisfying to sew a suit made out of my skin or to simply scatter the chopped-up pieces of my corpse in the ocean.

  Maybe he’s just thinking about hobbling me, Stephen King Misery–style.

  I wouldn’t blame him. I’d fight him, but I wouldn’t blame him. I mean, I am screaming at him. I am actually screaming at him in a hysterical voice. Fear is taking over. I’m losing it. I can feel myself losing it and a part of me wants to hobble me too. Because, dude: when you become a person with any kind of power, don’t ever become a person who screams. Even in hysterical fear.

  The things that you can do when you are at the bottom of the ladder change as you move up. At the top of that ladder, doing many of those very same things makes you an asshole. I’m being an asshole. A very scared, very shy asshole.

  Chris is quiet for a long, long, long moment.

  He’s going to place my head in a box like that guy did to Brad Pitt’s girlfriend in Seven. I know it. I don’t want my head in a box. My head will not look good in a box. I listen nervously to the silence.

  But when he speaks, his voice has the calm tone of power and triumph.

  He’s going to win. And he knows it.

  Here’s why:

  “Shonda,” he says, “I thought you were saying yes to everything. Or was that just big talk?”

  Damn.

  Checkmate.

  Maybe I can put his head in a box.

  yesyesyes

  I thought saying YES would feel good. I thought it would feel freeing. Like Julie Andrews spinning around on that big mountaintop at the beginning of The Sound of Music. Like Angela Bassett when she’s Tina Turner and she walks out of that divorce court and away from Ike with nothing but her name in What’s Love Got to Do with It. Like how you feel when you have just finished baking double-fudge brownies but you have yet to shove one into your mouth, starting the sugar rush roller coaster that won’t end until you are curled up in a ball on the sofa, rocking back and forth while scraping the crumbs of the empty brownie pan into your mouth and trying to talk yourself into believing that maybe the ex-boyfriend you dumped wasn’t so bad after all.

  Like that.

  This YES does not feel like a post-baked, pre-eaten brownie.

  I feel forced into this. I feel like I don’t have a choice. My obligation to my network plus my obligation to my stupid Year of Yes idea has trapped me.

  My paw is caught in a trap. I can try to chew it off and run away. But if you think I am whining now? Try me when I’m down a paw and have just a bloody gnawed stump to deal with.

  The tears.

  The drama.

  The wailing and moaning.

  The cross I would be nailing myself to would be so pretty and brightly lit. Oh, my cross wouldn’t be missed by anyone! You’d see my cross from space.

  The numbing fear is starting to creep over me. This is going to be a terrible experience. It’s going to eat me alive. My left eye starts to twitch. I tell myself that it’s okay, because it is twitching only in what I am sure is the tiniest, most unnoticeable way. Nobody can tell it is
twitching but me.

  “Wow, your eye is really twitching,” Joan Rater, head writer at Grey’s Anatomy, informs me with great authority. The whole writing staff crowds around to peer at my eyeball jumping around in my head.

  “Honey,” my toddler, Emerson, takes my face in her hands and gravely informs me, “your eye is broken. It’s busted, honey.”

  This is not going to be okay.

  This is not what YES is supposed to feel like.

  If it is, this is going to be the longest year of my life.

  Later that same week, I’m sitting on the soundstage at Grey’s Anatomy. Cranky as hell. It is not enough that my eyeball is still twitching merrily away. It’s Season Ten. Sandra Oh is leaving the show. As we move closer to her final episode, every scene with her begins to feel more and more special. We are all very aware that a rare talent is soon going to be walking out the door. I’ve come to set for the rehearsal of a big scene.

  To help close out Cristina’s story line, Isaiah Washington has returned to do us the honor and favor of scrubbing in as Preston Burke. Right now, in this scene, Preston is telling Cristina that he is giving her his hospital—like Willy Wonka giving away the Chocolate Factory. It’s the biggest moment of the show for Cristina, the culmination of ten seasons of character growth. She stands face-to-face with the man she almost destroyed herself loving. She’d once lost herself in his orbit, revolving around him, desperately in need of his sun. She’d made herself smaller to accommodate his greatness. Now she has surpassed him. And he is paying his respects. He has come to praise her. The Chocolate Factory is hers if she wants it.

  One half of the Twisted Sisters is getting her fairy-tale ending: she’s being offered what she has earned, she’s being recognized for her brilliance and she is being rewarded with her dreams come true. It may not be the fairy-tale ending anyone else would want or would want for her, but Cristina does not give a damn. Frankly, neither do I. Cristina deserves her joy.

  This is what joy looks like to a woman with genius.

  And as I watch Sandra Oh’s face tell a whole story as she brilliantly gives nuance to the moment Cristina realizes Burke is handing her the keys to the kingdom, I realize why Cristina’s journey can end. I realize why it is time to let this character go and be happy for her.

  Cristina has learned what she needs to know. Her toolbox is full. She has learned to not let go of the pieces of herself that she needs in order to be what someone else wants. She’s learned not to compromise. She’s learned not to settle. She’s learned, as difficult as it is, how to be her own sun.

  If only real life were so simple.

  But my eye stops twitching.

  And I pick up the phone and I call Chris.

  “Janet Jackson Boob,” I tell him. “Fear-snot. Chicken bone.”

  There’s a long silence while Chris perhaps worries that I have had a stroke.

  “Huh?”

  “It can’t be live. I will do Jimmy Kimmel. But it can’t be live,” I say firmly.

  I can hear Chris breathing in and out. He’s going to eat my kidney and liver with a fine wine.

  “Let me get this straight,” he says tightly. “You will be on Jimmy Kimmel LIVE. As long as it is not LIVE.”

  He says this as if speaking to a crazy person. And maybe he is.

  But I just watched Cristina Yang get her Chocolate Factory. I’m feeling bold. I’m not compromising. I don’t need to settle.

  “Exactly,” I tell him.

  If I have to be on TV, if I have to do something as scary as Kimmel, we’re going to do it my way or we don’t do it at all.

  See, I’m keeping all my pieces.

  I don’t want brownies.

  I want a whole damn Chocolate Factory.

  YES should feel like the sun.

  yesyesyes

  I have no idea how it happened or what conversations took place or whose baby he had to steal or what favor I now owe to what stranger or which warlord I am now betrothed to.

  I do not know. And I do not care.

  Chris did it.

  The man made rain.

  Which is how, the week before the Scandal finale aired, I found myself sitting on the set of Pope & Associates with Jimmy Kimmel filming an hour-long not-live special called Jimmy Kimmel Live: Behind the Scandalabra.

  Jimmy was incredibly nice to me. He told me funny stories and asked me about my children while we waited for the camera to roll. Before every take he patiently told me what was going to happen next and then he told me the very same thing again, like he knew I had the brain of a very demented senior citizen who could only remember two or three words at a time. He kept asking me if I was okay. And if he thought it was weird that I became a block of solid wood and could not seem to both walk and talk while the camera was rolling, he kept it to himself. He simply arranged it so I never had to walk and talk at the same time. In fact, he made it so I barely had to talk. I’m serious. Go online. Watch it. What am I doing?

  1. Smiling.

  2. Trying really hard not to look directly into the camera.

  3. Laughing at Jimmy’s jokes.

  4. Holding a really big glass while Scott Foley pours wine into it.

  5. Looking directly into the camera even though I’ve been told not to A LOT.

  6. Laughing at Jimmy’s jokes some more.

  Jimmy did all the work. I didn’t have to do anything. And yet. He made it SEEM like I did stuff. Everyone thought I did all kinds of stuff. So he did all the work and I got all the credit.

  Like when a baby poops.

  Everyone fawns over the baby. Now, who is the one cleaning up the poop? Not the baby, I can tell you that. But no one is fawning over the person carrying that smelly diaper to the trash.

  I think I just likened myself to a pooping baby. But you get my point. Jimmy did all kinds of amazing things to make me look good. And because Jimmy does his show all the time and is always amazing, everyone just nodded and smiled at him. But because there was a very good chance that there would be fear-snot and chicken bones surrounding me, I got a standing ovation from everyone I know.

  I got calls. I got emails. I got tweets and facebooks and all the other social media things people get.

  The next day, I also got the biggest delivery of red roses ever.

  EVER.

  Like “horse winning the Kentucky Derby” big.

  They came in a giant silver vase. A vase so huge and heavy that it took three men to carry it into the house. My daughter Harper tried counting the red roses but lost interest after ninety-eight.

  The dozens and dozens of red roses were from Jimmy.

  He wasn’t proposing marriage.

  The ratings had come out. Jimmy Kimmel Live beat The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for the very first time ever with that episode.

  That was the nicest thing.

  Kimmel beat Fallon. Which meant Kimmel was right to keep asking me to be on the show. And Chris was right to force me to do it. And I guess I was right to ask that it be taped. Because I do not know if the results would have been the same if I’d been unable to come out on live TV because I was having a full-scale meltdown in the corner of the Jimmy Kimmel Live dressing room.

  But none of that mattered to me. Not really. I mean, I was grateful that Jimmy was happy. I was grateful that I hadn’t messed up one of his shows. But overwhelmingly, I could only think about one thing:

  I did it.

  I said yes to something that terrified me. And then I did it.

  And I didn’t die.

  There’s a crack in the pantry door. A sliver of light coming in. I can feel a bit of warm sun on my face.

  I wander over to Chris.

  “Thank you,” I mumble.

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  “THANK YOU.”

  Chris grins. Triumphant.

  He heard me the first time. You know he did. I know he did. We ALL know he did. But I don’t mind.

  Fear-snot. Chicken bone. Adele Dazeem. />
  What do I care? It happened. I did it.

  And I kept all my pieces.

  YES does feel like the sun.

  Maybe I’m building my own damn Chocolate Factory.

  5

  Yes to Speaking the Whole Truth

  Early in 2014, I’m invited to join a small private women’s online network. It quickly becomes a lifeline for me. It’s full of smart women who do interesting things, and I look forward to its missives. Fascinating conversations fly back and forth all day over email. New to the group, I mind my Ps and Qs and keep my mouth shut. I’m an observer, a listener. I wander on the outskirts. Rarely do I consider even joining the conversation.

  On May 29, about a week and a half before I am due to stand at the podium at Dartmouth College and deliver the required twenty-to-thirty-minute commencement address to an audience of what is now a roughly estimated sixteen thousand people, I write the following email to the group:

  FROM: Shonda

  TO: The Group

  RE: My Death

  So it’s happening soon. My commencement speech. And (shocker!) I haven’t written a word. I got totally paralyzed. The paralyzing moment happened when I was brushing my teeth and listening to NPR and heard someone on there (someone I love and admire) say that one of the speeches they were most looking forward to discussing was . . . mine.

  No pressure. No pressure at all.

  Apparently now, these speeches are filmed and streamed and uploaded and tweeted and dissected and NPR has a WHOLE site dedicated to dissecting them.

  People don’t faint when they give these speeches, right? That has not happened?

  Do you see what I said there?

  I said that I have not written a word.

  And it is true. Less than two weeks from the day.

  I have not written a word.

  NOT ONE SINGLE WORD.

  I wander around feeling white-hot terror searing all creativity out of my brain. The fires of failure are whipping around, burning down any ideas I may have had.

  It’s a writing apocalypse up in my imagination.

  I lie on the floor of my office. I drink red wine. I eat popcorn. I hug my kids. I prepare for the end of days.