Here is a doctor’s note from September 2015.
From the backstage wings of the Paley Center in midtown Manhattan, I could see Lady Dame Carol Burnett adjusting her microphone across the way.
Reader, I had been asked to interview this American icon and international legend for an evening of comedy that fateful night in September. I could not believe my good fortune. Carol Burnett is a personal hero of mine, and the fact that I had been asked to write my own questions for this interview was electrifying. This is a prize that people would enter a lottery to win. I had come up with dozens of questions, and I was looking forward to the evening with an excitement usually reserved for Graeter’s ice cream.
And then I woke up two days before the interview unable to move my right hand.
What in the—I thought to myself as my toothbrush slipped through my fingers.
You’ve got to be—I started to think as I couldn’t tie my own shoelaces.
Well this is just the—I almost screamed as I was unable to snap along to “Walking on Sunshine” on the commute to work.
We had begun filming the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt several weeks earlier. Having not worked since we wrapped the first season the previous winter, I was still getting used to the longer hours. I wasn’t sleeping particularly well because my usual bedtime of 8:15 was suddenly being pushed to 11:00 or even midnight, my face was irritated from all the makeup, and I was breaking out in styes every third day. Then, this invitation to interview Ms. Burnett arrived and I felt like dancing! Unfortunately, my body had other plans. Than dancing.
I had woken up with my damaged hand on Monday, and I asked production to give me a later start on Tuesday so that I could see a doctor. “I swear this isn’t some ‘lame’ excuse to get out of work,” I joked to our assistant director, Chris.
But the joke was on me.
“It looks like your hand has gone lame,” Dr. Tompkins at Weill Cornell informed me several hours later. “You’ve got a lame hand.” This was the clinical term for my condition. “I’m not really sure why,” the doctor concluded. I looked at this man and I realized that I, too, could have been a doctor.
• • •
Reader, this was not the first time that I had allowed stress to take over my body and my mind. Throughout the course of my life, I have had a tendency to bolt out of the gate a tad too hard, leading to my own inevitable physical and/or mental decline before the race is yet complete. Allow me to elaborate.
When I started my new school in seventh grade, the curriculum felt intense from the start. The school day at John Burroughs was much longer than it had been at Ladue Junior High, beginning at 8:10 in the morning and stretching until 4:20 in the afternoon. I thought that I could handle it. I thought the wildness of this new school schedule could be tamed. But even though this endless day included an unheard of forty-eight minutes for lunch, I was beginning to feel the strain.
John, who was in ninth grade at Burroughs, urged me to calm down. “It’s only the second week of seventh grade,” he cautioned me. “You are going to burn out.” I looked at John, French textbook casually propped up on his knees as he watched Home Improvement, and the envy surged within me. Dit-Moi!, read the title of his textbook. Tell Me!, I was finally able to translate four years later. Yes, tell me! Why can’t I be as laid-back as John? My brother had the ability to keep things in perspective, and I did not. I wanted to ask him exactly how he maintained his sense of balance, but I had a report on Far and Away1 due the next morning, and I had yet to write the first word.
The second week of seventh grade gave way to the third. After that, the weeks kept giving way until it was Thanksgiving. And then Thanksgiving gave way to the Monday after Thanksgiving. And this is when all Life Science students received an assignment to track the growth of some kind of plant. I can’t remember what kind of plant it was, but that really doesn’t matter here. What matters is that I had to fertilize this plant with a dry powder called “blood meal.” The blood meal was gray, and the blood meal smelled bad. But that wasn’t all. The final blow delivered by this massively stinky fertilizer was the fact that it was made from the blood of slaughterhouse animals. Try waking up to a yellow bag of slaughter powder every morning—and then try having a decent day.
I would quietly descend the stairs to the basement before the rest of my family was awake. I knew that once my siblings were up, I would never be able to get my work done; between Billy’s three-year-old babbles and Carrie’s daily blast of Madonna’s “True Blue,” my seventh-grade mornings were not exactly peaceful. I had set up my plant by a sliding glass door just outside the furnace room. Our basement wasn’t actually underground, so the sun could shine through this sliding door and reach the plant and its blood meal, and I could record the growth.
Because it was the Christmas season, I would play a cassette tape of Handel’s Messiah as I worked. I had hoped that the triumphant notes would push me forward in my task; after all, I held the holidays sacred, and though I wasn’t sure I should be combining work and pleasure together in such a showy way, I figured it would help to have some sort of balm to protect me from the stress of this Life Science project. John has Tim Allen, I thought to myself as I grimly measured another stem. I have Hallelujah. But I was wrong. Not even Handel could help.
After my botanical growth stats had been recorded, I would emerge bleary-eyed from the basement and join my siblings for breakfast. The Blood Meal Project, as it would come to be known, happened to coincide with a time in my life where I ate a Sara Lee Honey Bun for breakfast just about every other day. I’m not sure if there had been a sale on honey buns, or if Sam’s Club had recently entered my parents’ lives, but for whatever reason, we had a ton of these microwaveable buns in our freezer—the big freezer, in the garage. But there was a problem with this Honey Bun. I could never get it to heat exactly right. If I put it in the microwave for only one minute, it was still frozen in the middle. If I put it in for two minutes, the outside ring would melt. Because I figured I could eat frozen dough more quickly than I could wait for melted dough to cool, I opted for the minute-long microwave time. One morning, as I glanced up from that day’s Sally Forth strip in the Everyday section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, crunching on frozen dough, blood meal grit embedded in my fingernails, I knew that something had to change. Otherwise, I was going to burn out.
Later that same morning, Mr. Mayer announced to our Life Science class that our take-home projects would no longer be due before winter break. Instead, he told us, we would have until January to complete the assignment. My jaw nearly dropped to the floor. Winter break was the light at the end of the tunnel, and now Mr. Mayer threatened to stamp out that light. He threatened to take my two weeks of sleep, and rest, and nonstop Messiah—and force me, instead, to continue to measure the stems.
At Burroughs, there was an unofficial rule that teachers were not allowed to assign homework over the major breaks: Thanksgiving, Winter, and Spring. Prolonging the Blood Meal Project would violate this rule. So, after lunch that day, I marched straight to the office of our seventh- and eighth-grade principal, Ms. Breza. I sat down across the desk from her, and I said that we should not be allowed to work on our Life Science projects over the upcoming winter break. Ms. Breza listened closely and then leaned in to ask me a question.
“Ellie,” she said. “How much work would this actually require?”
“Ms. Breza,” I replied, holding her gaze. “More work than is legal.”
Ms. Breza pointed out that this was not, technically, an area of legality, and I shook my head. “You are missing the point, Ms. Breza,” I said, feeling energized. “It’s the principle.” I paused. “And you are the principal,” I added, with a smile. I knew that, even though this was a serious topic, there was always time for a joke. Ms. Breza suggested that I ask Mr. Mayer why he had given an extension to us; perhaps this was meant to help us feel less pressure, not more.
When I did get a word with my Life Science teacher after school that day, it turned out that Ms. Breza was right. “You should definitely turn in the assignment before the break if that’s easier for you!” Mr. Mayer told me. “Some of the students were worried that they wouldn’t have enough time. So please do whatever you prefer.”
And so I did. By turning in my Life Science project before vacation, I had not only narrowly avoided a nervous breakdown, but I had also successfully avoided purchasing additional blood meal. I vowed never again to allow my work to come so close to taking over my life.
Unfortunately—like rules, or Doritos in a sandwich—sometimes vows are made to be broken.
• • •
Years later, in 2004, I worked at a cupcake store called Crumbs. I had been living in New York for a year, and I realized that it was going to take more time to break into commercials than I had originally planned. I began my job at their Upper East Side location that July.
I was excited to work in a bakery because I have always loved baked goods and, in particular, cake. During my junior year of college, my mom baked, packaged, and mailed her signature chocolate cake with mocha icing to me for my birthday, and I still consider that day to be one of my finest on Earth. So you might understand why I was devastated to come up against an unexpected obstacle during my time at this bakery: a complete and total inability to memorize the ingredients in the two dozen or so different cupcakes of Crumbs.
Every morning, Jae, the manager of the Crumbs at Seventy-Eighth Street and Third Avenue, would drill me. “Blackout,” she would say. “It’s chocolate,” I would answer, slowly. “It’s chocolate with . . . ganache?” Jae would shake her head. “There is no ganache in the Blackout,” she would tell me, sadly. “There is only chocolate drizzle.” Embarrassed, I would look away, catching the eye of a fancy lady customer poised to ask for some cupcakes. The fancy lady would quickly pretend not to see me, looking instead for another Crumbs employee to take her order. And who could blame her? I knew not what was in these cupcakes.
My shift was 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. When I left for the day, I would go home to study the menu. I even made flashcards in order to quiz myself. Good Guy, I wrote on one side of an index card in black Sharpie. Vanilla cake with rainbow sprinkles baked in, filled with vanilla buttercream frosting, and topped with vanilla cream cheese frosting covered with rainbow sprinkles and chocolate drizzle, I wrote on the reverse side.
To this day, I’m not really sure what was so “good” about that “guy.”
My frustration only grew, especially knowing that I was an actress whose very job description included memorization. Why was I having so much trouble with these ingredients? Did I simply love the final product too much to get bogged down in the details?
I failed to make any friends at the bake shop. I found it difficult to connect with the customers. I was allowed to eat any baked good leftover from yesterday that I wanted, sure, but even that did not make up for the stress I was experiencing. Jae was relentless. “Are you ready, Ellie?” she would say, taking out her clipboard and standing next to the display case.
After three months of working there, I gave Jae my two weeks’ notice. I had just booked a commercial for Aquafina, I told her, and I had decided to devote more time to my improv shows and finding a theatrical agent. “We’ll miss you, Ellie,” Jae told me. But I’m sure part of her was relieved that she was now free to find an employee who could correctly remember the ingredients in her cupcakes.
In the end, it was Crumbs itself that burned out. The bake shop chain would go bankrupt in 2014, and soon after that, close entirely. They flew too close to the sun, I thought to myself as I read the headline in that day’s amNewYork Their elaborate cupcake wings got scorched. I felt grateful that I had escaped Crumbs just in time—but I knew that I could not keep running forever.
• • •
Back in the Weill Cornell office from the beginning of this essay, I looked down at my lame hand and sighed. I’ll tell you one thing: I sure could have used a Good Guy cupcake right about then. I didn’t even care—or know—what would have been in it. I just wanted sugar, was the point. I was depressed! There was neither a diagnosis nor a treatment plan for my hand in place, and I had a goddamned interview with one of the most elegant ladies in America the very next night.
I went about those two days as best as I could. I held props in my left hand. I asked Ali to tie my shoes. Luckily, I had finished typing up my questions for Ms. Burnett over the weekend, so my lame hand would not interfere with my preparation for the interview. I left work in Brooklyn on Wednesday evening and headed straight to Midtown. I was still in my Kimmy wardrobe; in my hurry, I hadn’t had time to change at work. I ran into the Paley Center, found a restroom, and quickly began putting on my dress and shoes. The heels were easy because there were no straps.
But then—the dress. There was a zipper on the dress.
I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. Move, I commanded my right fingers. Grasp the zipper that you might fasten the dress. But my lame fingers refused, and I began to panic.
You are going to burn out, my brain warned me.
You are stronger than the burn, my extensive SoulCycle training kicked in.
And with that, I emerged from the restroom. I asked the first person I saw—a teenage girl sipping a Coke Zero—if she wouldn’t mind zipping up my dress. And, Reader? She pretended not to hear me. So then I asked the security guard standing not too far from that teenage girl if she wouldn’t mind zipping up my dress. And, Reader? That security guard did.
A half hour later, Carol Burnett was giving me a thumbs-up and a big smile. I tried to return her thumbs-up, but I could not get my right fist to clench, so I focused on giving her a big smile. And then she and I walked out onto the stage together.
1 I know I just mentioned that this new school was more challenging than my old school, but the one exception was that in my Western Civilization class, we actually watched Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in Far and Away as an assignment.