All That Is Bitter and Sweet (69 page)

Having been offered TV shows for years, I had begun to take the idea of doing a cable series seriously. But I rejected the idea of network, however lucrative, however fantastic the writing in this new golden age of television, however flattering the entreaties. A hit network show would consume nine months of the year for five to seven years of my life—and I would have to make that commitment before knowing whether the show was a hit. I would have to opt out of doing international feminist social justice work, resign from all the boards on which I served. I was unwilling to give up the life I had made for myself, to deny myself the chance to meet another Ouk Srey Leak, to have an old woman with whom I pick rubbish to call me her granddaughter. I remember a labor slave in India whose lair I visited, and the moment when our eyes met in a shard of mirror. I had said to him, “Mohammad, when I see you, I see a beautiful child of God.” Holding my gaze, he replied, “I do, too.” A deaf mute woman I met in a brothel in Kinshasa, Congo, came to mind.
She was still there
. When the networks call, I say thank you and no thank you, and I have watched beautiful, talented women sweep acting awards for shows I declined. I smile, and bless them, and some I email, cheering them on. I DVR the series I enjoy.

I read scripts for several proposed series on cable. One was about adoption. I perked up. That fit my interests, confronted all sorts of salient social themes, and would allow me to be polemical with a smart character. I would be interested in such a show, but my agent called back later, saying it was a nonstarter. Another script came along, and to my surprise, I loved it. I had been talking with producers who pitch me material about my preference to film in middle Tennessee, and surprisingly, most have been very willing to accommodate. If am going to be on a show for four to six months a year, I would like sleep in my own bed. It would be too much to keep up my current pace of international travel and film something in New York or L.A.

Then, I read a movie script with a lot of buzz, an action thing, written all male, but they sent it to me to read, asking if I’d like this flashy supporting role to be written female. I lied and said yes. Someone associated with the director emailed me to schedule a Skype call with him, and I became more honest with myself. I called my agent and said, “I hated that script.”

The tens of millions of dollars I have left on the table rarely crossed my mind. I still pull my weight in the marriage, which is a 50–50 financial partnership, but I long ago stopped participating 50–50 in the posh extras. I chip in what I can for vacations, but for private travel and such, my contribution is nowhere near what it used to be. The days of hopping on a little private plane to attend a UK basketball game are long gone. When I meet with my financial planner, I realize she may assess me as an “under earner,” given my potential. She is a counselor, in addition to being one of the top financial advisors in the country, and in her own 12-step recovery. Ted, she, and I talk about the feelings that come up around money as well as the dollars and cents. My feelings are almost uniformly positive, and I live in a sense of abundance. I have no regrets, and that is freedom.

I continued to sleep well, almost twelve hours a night. I enjoyed the weight of my worn daily meditation readers in my hands every morning, and had resumed reading the
End of Sorrow, Bhagavad-Gita for Daily Living
where I left off. Ekneth Easwaran, the great teacher who inspired my meditation practice, would have said I had a golden opportunity to take my practice deeper than I ever dreamed possible, but that it takes consistency to ride the waves of consciousness to arrive at the still, deep ocean floor, where the rubies and diamonds are. But I still felt very sick, and not over the reentry. I decided to see a psychologist I knew in town. After we spoke a while, she offered that what she was observing in me was mostly grief, not trauma, and reminded me of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She said “You are still grieving, Ashley, and sometimes you sound like you are in the bargaining, too. And the only way out is through. I imagine you’ll kick whatever is making you feel like you are sick, when the emotional part is purged.”

Her words were all it took for the dam to break. I began to cry. I could not stop. The force of it propelled my chest forward, which came to rest on the tops of my legs. I sat that way, folded over, limp but for the sobbing, for a while, until the old shame crept up on me, the lie that my feelings are a burden. I began to fear I was wasting her time, excoriating myself for driving forty-five minutes to pay someone so I could cry on her sofa. I glanced up and apologized for being a dork. “You’re doing good, Ashley. You are doing so good,” she said softly.

I sensed there was double meaning in her offering: the work abroad and taking care of my grieving self within the work. Touched by her encouragement, I let go for good, and cried it out. This was the woman, after all, who after my very first trip with PSI all those years ago, had said, “You know, the little girls are always going to get to you.” Though my eyes had filled spontaneously with tears, I had been baffled by what she said.

Soon, indeed, I began to feel better. A sense of something invisible being lifted occurred, and I was no longer dragging around, pushing myself, struggling to stay upright. I flew with Dario to his race in Pocono, and on his bus did some laundry from previous races. I paused, though, and registered in my body how it feels to do two loads, separated by color, with chosen water temps, and custom spin cycles,
on a bus
. I was physically better, but I retained the awareness of, the sensitivities to, the ridiculous abundance of our lives. When it came time, I could not put our clothes in the dryer. I just couldn’t. I took them outside and spread them on chairs. I wondered how Dario would feel when he came back from qualifying and all the wash was hanging in plain view of the driver’s paddock, a veritable neighborhood filled with racing drivers, their families, team members. He is a natural boy, I suspected he wouldn’t mind.

I heard the cars on the track, and I wanted to watch. In spite of trepidation, I decided to experiment, and walk to the pits. If it was too much, if I could not be kind and patient, if I wanted to explain to everyone who asked for an autograph, “No, but have you heard of Rwandan genocide? Are you aware there are more slaves today than at the height of the nineteenth-century slave trade?” I could just return to the bus.

I made it to the pits, and the absurdity, the insane luxury, of putting so much time, attention, and hundreds of millions of dollars into being .001 second faster than the next car—the sums, hundreds of thousands of fans pay each season to sit and watch cars go in a circle could provide school for … I couldn’t finish the sentence. I put it out of my mind. This was my husband’s life. In my sleep that night, I found another way to look at it, to frame it as one of the many extraordinary things humans can do with their potential when we are freed up beyond merely surviving and reacting to violence, hunger, disease, trauma.

On Saturday, we took a rare race-weekend hike after Dario’s practice. There was a beautiful state park nearby, and we enjoyed each other’s company and the many waterfalls that dampened sharp rocky outcroppings, carefully picking our way along the terracing of creeks. Occasionally, there were deep pools into which the creeks rushed in and out. I cannot resist a good creek, and I paused, looking both ways on the trail. My husband knew what was coming, and made his usual and always futile protestations. I sneaked off my clothes and plunged into a cold mountain pool, exhilarated, needing this, thinking of my Uncle Mark who baptizes in the creek, feeling how water cleans, refreshes, promises, transfigures. I heard, and duly ignored, Dario’s insistent pleas of “Babe! BABE! You’re a nutter!” because I knew he wouldn’t be mad for long. Submerging my head again and again, opening my eyes to see the world under the oxygenated bubbles of moving water, I recognized that something deep inside me had settled, had sorted itself out. It’s like an internal click, and it comes when it comes, and it cannot be hurried, the moment when I know I am okay, that deep inside I have always been okay, and when I don’t feel okay in the future, I will somehow have a process I can trust, that promises I will be okay again. The click. I stepped naked from the creek, smiled at my husband, began to put clothes on my damp body. I was ready to face the world again.

n June 2, 2008, trembling just a bit with healthy fear, I used my voice to bring the sacred narratives of the vulnerable and mute to the world’s most expansive stage: the United Nations General Assembly. As a board member of PSI, I had been invited to speak about the scourge of human trafficking and to promote the solutions that I had seen at work in the field. I used this opportunity to describe the insidious enmeshment between poverty, illness, and gender inequality and how that triad sets up the exquisite pain and degradation that is sex and labor slavery. And, as always, I did it by sharing the stories of the poor and the vulnerable, the disempowered, and the exploited people I had met in my travels, those to whom I had made my one keening vow: I will never forget you, and I will tell your stories. So the representatives of 196 nations were introduced to the transgendered sex slave in Cambodia whose face had been mauled by her rapist’s dog; to Natasha, the literate, high-priced “call girl” in Mumbai who could see no way out of the netherworld of sex trafficking; and the children born in a squalid Indian brothel, collateral damage of sex trafficking, who wrote their names for me on dirty scraps of paper: Aadarshini, Yamuna, Nabhendu … And I reiterated the basis of my faith: that every human life is of inestimable worth and that when we save one, we save the whole world.