Journal entry, 7/30/90 new boss

7/30/90 Jim Caroll is my new editor at The Paper, and I’m nervous—especially after our darkroom interchange. Awkward. I’ll have to tell him how I feel, and then get over it. It is my problem that I’m so uneasy around him, but when he said I couldn’t use the darkroom after saying that I could, it was awkward. I felt like a fool caught doing something wrong.

Now that Tom Roth quit as the editor, Jim is it. Lisel says he’s great to work with, etc., it’ll be fine. I told Simone Wilson how uneasy I was. Am I the only one acting like a cat before an earthquake? I guess it’s because I’m not sure of the ground rules. No trust. I don’t know where I or they stand and I don’t know how to act. It’s like an actor missing her cue lines. Oh my God, I’m in the wrong play! Already I am missing my old editor Nick Valentine.

I want to stay in this frame of mind to understand and analyze it, so that I can learn from it. What buttons of mine have been pushed to make me feel and so incompetent, worthless, and unsure of myself? I’m not afraid of feeling this way. It’s a gut-level reaction which makes it more complicated because my gut is a very accurate barometer. Why must I exercise such caution? Why can’t I just be myself—a capable human being. Why am I being so sensitive?

Anyway, other than the darkroom misunderstanding, Jim has been perfectly civil to me. He even said that they sold lots of issues on my arts article. People said they liked the article and thanked him and owner John Boland (formerly of KQED), for doing a fine job on the censorship issue. So now I have cart blanche in the writing arena, something I’ve always wanted, and I’m balking. Probably because regardless of who’s at the helm, when shakedowns occur, someone gets axed. In the past it was always me, though last time I refuse to be fired. My therapist was rather amazed by my tenacity and willingness to fight for my job, but it took its toll, making me feel so awful. I’ve always been on the fringes, a stringer, a contributor and I’m moving more into the writing arena than photography, my former area of expertise. Growing pains.