Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  It took a minute, but then I figured out what had happened. I’d called my own answering machine in Chicago. On my voice mail were the messages I had meant to leave for my mother. That meant I had listened to my own voice—“You’ve reached Megyn and Dan. Leave a message, and we’ll call you back”—then left messages for my mother. Twice.

  It was a little bit like coming to consciousness covered in blood, standing over a dead body, so startled was I by how checked-out I’d become. Clearly, I was operating in a kind of fugue state. My body was out there, moving around in the world, but without much of a connection to my brain. I was dissociated from my own life. It was in that moment that I knew, with total certainty, that things had to change. I had to improve my life. Sitting in that restaurant near the racetrack, I had to admit to myself: I wanted to leave the practice of law, just as that man in the taxi had predicted. I hated the anger. Hated the hours. Hated what I’d become.

  Yes, I was making money. I had friends at the office. But I had to sacrifice everything else: family time, time with Dan, reading books, seeing friends, travel, giving back. I felt like I’d lost so much time. These should have been wonderful years, but they weren’t. I knew I had so much more to offer: I enjoyed talking with other people, hearing and telling stories, solving problems, traveling. I wanted to do something creative. Not just argue, dodge, provoke, and compete. The verdict was in: the money and prestige were not worth the sacrifices.

  That night, back at my mother’s, I sat on her couch and wrote in my journal:

  I am more exciting than this! I am more interesting than this! I am more interested than this! I need more out of life!

  Then I wrote down one of the most important commitments I’ve ever made to myself:

  I will be out of the law by this time next year.

  I knew this time that I didn’t need to move to another firm, or to another city. I needed to move to another profession. That is a watershed moment for any professional person. I’d spent seven years pursuing an education that would let me do this job. And more than seven actually doing it. I knew I was going to make partner at Jones Day at the youngest age possible. That meant a lot to me. It was a feather in my cap. But I knew I couldn’t stay just to get that feather. For one thing, it would be taking the opportunity away from someone else. For another, I knew that if I took it, I’d have to stay at least a couple of years. I simply didn’t have that kind of time left in me at that job.

  Everything in my life looked great on paper. I was a lawyer. My husband was a doctor. He was kind and supportive. I might not see much of him, but I knew he cared for me. We had great friends. It was more than anyone had ever hoped for me. How could I not be happy? How could I not feel whole? But I wasn’t. And I didn’t. I felt miserable. And I thought to myself: “Hurry up, you’re dying.”

  Around this time, I found myself mesmerized by midnight reruns of Oprah. Eating microwaved Lean Cuisines after yet another endless day of brutal litigation, I would watch her talk about living our best lives. It was almost as if her words were coming to me from another planet, so little did my frantic, empty life resemble the considered one she described. She spoke about how we are all one decision away from changing our lives.

  Then, one night, her guest, Dr. Phil, said something that made me drop my fork: “The only difference between you and someone you envy is, you settled for less.”

  It was as if he were describing my exact situation. It looked from the outside like I had everything anyone wanted, but I knew in my heart that I was settling for less—less than I had to offer, less than I deserved. I wanted love and freedom and creativity and adventure. I wanted friendship, time to think and feel, a sense that I was making a difference in the world, food that did not come out of a frozen box.

  It was so simple, but so clear to me—this was the moment when I realized I could change my life. I did not have to settle for less. I could settle for more.

  It took many years for me to see my father’s death as anything but a burden. But in that moment sitting on my couch in Chicago, I realized that his death had given me a gift: the clear awareness that I couldn’t afford to waste a second. The value of hard work, that other tentpole of my existence, had stood me in good stead up until that point, but it had taken me as far as I could go without a new value: meaning.

  None of us knows how long we have on this earth. And while hard work is meaningful, we can’t waste our time here constantly at the office, much less immersed in strife and conflict. I had to change horses. I heard my father’s voice, singing: “Today while the flowers still cling to the vine . . .”

  We only get one life. The lights twinkle on the tree, and then . . . it’s over.

  I can’t be contented with yesterday’s glory.

  I can’t live on promises, winter to spring.

  Today is my moment. Now is my story.

  I’ll laugh, and I’ll cry, and I’ll sing.

  I knew suddenly, and with no doubt, that it wasn’t my fate to be so unconnected to my fellow human beings. Or to spend my life taking faulty-tire depositions. I was meant for something else. Something more. Now, I just had to figure out what.

  9

  “Who’s Here?” “Me!”

  The problem with an epiphany is that, no matter how big it is, you can’t necessarily change your life as soon as you have one.

  Six months had passed since I’d resolved to leave the law, and here I sat, February in Chicago, frozen in every sense of the word. I knew I wanted out, but I still had to find an escape route. I had to go to the firm day after day, even though my heart was somewhere else.

  After some time and consideration, I decided to become a journalist. In making the choice, I thought about the envy I had often felt seeing reporters pursuing careers that seemed exciting and full of purpose. That envy, it turned out, was a gift to me—direction from my conscience on how I could become more fulfilled. I wanted to give it a try. Now that I had nine years of legal practice under my belt, I felt like I had some skills that would transfer. There was only one problem: my only real experience in the field was that two-day internship when I was a teenager. I also wondered if at the ripe old age of thirty-two, I was too old to enter a new profession, especially one with an on-camera component. I started to look for lines on my face.

  Dan and I talked about my options. His take was that I should be happy, and broadcast journalism sounded perfect for me. He was a little concerned about the financial hit we’d take (I was making a healthy paycheck by this point, and I’d been mostly supporting the two of us thus far), but he knew that eventually he’d be making money, and that I was a smart bet. He used to say I was the stocks, and he was the bonds. I felt supported in my quest for change.

  Still, I couldn’t figure out my next move. I tried cold-calling a couple of agents, but none would take unsolicited clients. I called an agent named Kenny Lindner in LA, whose book Broadcasting Realities I had just read. The receptionist hung up on me.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to improve my life with small pleasures, the greatest of which was a weekly guitar class. At first it was just a stress reliever. Then it became something more.

  There were about eight of us, and we met every Sunday. We’d laugh at our missteps and share tips for nailing the elusive F chord. Sitting around in a circle playing music and singing together is a wonderful way to bond with fellow human beings. It made me aware of how much I craved connection and creativity in the rest of my life.

  One day some of us were sitting around talking after class.

  “Why weren’t you here last week?” I asked my favorite classmate, Meredith.

  “I was working,” Meredith said. “I’m a freelance journalist. I had to cover the space shuttle Columbia disaster.”

  “Meredith!” I practically shouted at her. “You’re in news?”

  It was like a miracle, a sign from God—or maybe from my dad, whose guitar playing ultimately landed me in that class. Here was this woman I saw every Sunday, and sh
e was the one I liked most in the class. We had never talked about our jobs before—on Sundays it was all about the music.

  “I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee,” I told her.

  “That sounds like someone with a career change on her mind,” Meredith wisely surmised.

  I told her I was a lawyer, and that indeed I was restless.

  Saint that Meredith was, she said yes to my request for a coffee date. And that cup of coffee changed my future. Meredith told me how local news worked—how they hired and assigned, and what kind of training I would need to get my foot in the door.

  It was fascinating! I had never heard such things! No résumé needed? Just a tape? What is this magical thing, and how does one get one? Should I get a master’s in broadcast journalism and then apply for a job somewhere?

  “Journalism is more of a trade than a profession,” Meredith explained. “Reporters learn by doing, not by reading.”

  Check, skip the master’s. Then she went further: she told me she would help me make that tape. This was huge. Huge. How else could I possibly have made one? This was far beyond my wildest expectations. She was like an angel.

  Meredith was working freelance at WMAQ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Chicago, and said she’d introduce me to a star cameraman there, Bond Lee. She couldn’t promise that he’d shoot my tape, but at least he’d meet with me. It was all happening so fast.

  One night she told me some WMAQ folks were going out for drinks. I ducked out of Jones Day early that evening and joined them. Even though I was just meeting people at a bar, I prepared as if I were arguing before the US Supreme Court. I learned everything I could about the station and read all the newspapers cover to cover. What was in the news? What might come up? I needed to be in the know.

  When Bond introduced himself to me, I felt as though I’d been hit with a spotlight. This was my close-up. And I was ready.

  “So you want to be on TV.” He sounded skeptical.

  “I think I’d be good at it.”

  “So does everyone.”

  “But I really will,” I told him.

  “Tell me a story in sixty seconds or less.”

  I thought he’d never ask. I banged out a minute on the preppie murderer Robert Chambers, who was about to be paroled several years after murdering a young woman in Central Park. I did not stumble, the storytelling was there, and I nailed the sixty-second mark. Everyone in the group silently turned to look at Bond.

  “You’re gonna be on TV,” he said, smiling.

  Bam, we were off.

  He agreed to help me shoot an audition tape. And so for the next few weeks, whenever we could find time, we would go around town shooting footage of me pretending to report live from various scenes. We would set up on a bridge over the Chicago River, and I would talk into a microphone about some story of the day while he shot the tape and gave me pointers.

  Meredith also hooked me up with some of the station’s reporters, who would let me tag along while they were on assignment. I’d sneak in front of the camera when they were setting up a live shot to give it a whirl before the real reporter took the mic.

  It was harder than it looked. In ninety seconds’ time I would have to catch the viewer’s attention, deliver the information, and come to a conclusion, all without saying “um” too many times and without ever starting over. It required supreme concentration. Looking into a blank camera and trying to speak as though you can see the person listening is absolutely a skill. The pros make it look simple; trust me, it isn’t. I had so much to learn, but I was also feeling something I hadn’t in years—a sense that I was learning fast and couldn’t get enough.

  Bond introduced me to a professor at Columbia College Chicago, Roger Schatz, who let me audit his broadcasting class. I was about a decade older than all the other students, who typically sat with their combat boots hiked on the desks, laid-back and half-asleep. I’m sure I drove them crazy with my enthusiasm: “Isn’t learning fun? What an opportunity we have here!”

  We would go down to the frigid South Michigan Avenue sidewalk at night, look into Schatz’s TV camera, and pretend we were delivering real reports—sixty seconds or less. I remember standing out there, freezing from head to toe, holding the stick mic and thinking, Please, God, don’t let anyone from Jones Day walk by right now.

  Every week Schatz gave out what he called the Fendrick Award, in honor of a woman named Fendrick who once became so freaked out doing a sidewalk report that she hailed a taxi and took off. It was given to the student with the best report that night. The award was a baking soda box with a picture of a taxi pasted on the front of it. I coveted mine, and keep them to this day. (On rough days, I admit I look at them and think, Was that fleeing woman onto something?)

  Thanks to Meredith and Bond, my tape had come together okay. I was convinced it was my ticket to my new life. Then, a curveball: Dan got an offer to begin a pain-management fellowship at Johns Hopkins. For him to take it, we had to move to Baltimore.

  I was spending my days working full-time at Jones Day Chicago, and my nights and weekends learning TV journalism and loving it. Between learning from Meredith and Bond and Schatz, some positive momentum was starting to build. The WMAQ reporters were letting me shadow them. It felt like an unofficial internship. How could I find that in another state? Unfortunately, my choices were limited. There was no way Dan was turning down Johns Hopkins, and there was no way we were living long distance again. Jones Day agreed to transfer me to their Washington, DC, office. That light at the end of the law firm tunnel grew dimmer overnight.

  Baltimore was challenging. Our place was severely rodent-infested. We killed twenty-one mice in one year. And it was in a rough neighborhood (they shot scenes from HBO’s The Wire outside our front door). We were new to the town. We knew no one and had no family nearby. I felt removed from the life I wanted, the one I had been building in Chicago.

  I looked at the help wanted ads, and every job required at least three years’ experience in news. I felt certain I was never going to get hired as a reporter in the Baltimore or Washington, DC, market—they were too competitive. I needed Peoria. I was trying to settle for more, but without a clear path, I felt pessimistic. My new TV dreams felt like they had been dashed.

  My friends Andrea and Rebecca from Chicago encouraged me. So did my friend Marla. “If anyone can do it, it’s you!” Andrea said. “I know you’ll be great, keep at it,” Rebecca told me. My mom said the same but wanted me to hedge my bets, saying, “Don’t leave Jones Day until you know you can support yourself.”

  Then one day, home sick from work, I turned on Lifetime TV, which happened to be airing the 1995 documentary Intimate Portrait: Jessica Savitch, about a contemporary of Sam Donaldson and Peter Jennings who became one of the first women to anchor a network’s evening newscast. Jessica looked a little like me, had grown up middle class, and had reached the top of the TV news business through sheer will and determination. Her father had died when she was young, changing her forever. She had a shell of confidence, with fear underneath.

  “I often wish I was perfect,” she’d written in her diary. (There were pictures of her personal effects, and some of her diaries were read in a voice-over.) She had a great voice, a compelling on-air delivery, and had made it in what was then almost entirely a man’s industry.

  I was hypnotized. If she could do it, so could I. Even better, she didn’t get her first network job until she was thirty. I felt a bizarrely profound connection to her—like she was somehow messaging me, present-day. As if she knew I was watching that show, and wanted me to do something as a result. I found her story inspiring, except for her tragic end: she had an embarrassing drug-induced on-air meltdown, and later that year died along with her dog and boyfriend in a horrific car accident. But I saw how she had made her own success, and I was more determined than ever to do the same for myself—though, I hoped, with a happier ending.

  Armed with my audition tape, I started cold-calling news directors from my Baltimore ro
dent motel. After a steady stream of rejection, I finally got someone on the phone: Bill Lord, who ran the small local cable station NewsChannel 8 in Washington, DC. I called him, thinking NewsChannel 8 might be an option, and discovered the man ran the damned ABC affiliate, WJLA-TV, too—what luck! The number eight market. I got him to let me drop off my résumé tape in person, a meeting I knew I could parlay into a chance. And that was all I needed. I went out and bought a killer Dolce & Gabbana dress for the occasion.

  “Only you would spend a thousand dollars to interview for a job that pays seventeen thousand a year,” said Dan, with a laugh.

  “It’s an investment,” I said.

  And it was. I went in there, and the interview went great. There simply was no way I was walking out without a job. As Bill would later put it: “She walked in and threatened to put a stiletto in my eye unless I put her on TV.” Perhaps it wasn’t that direct, but I did think to myself, I argue for a living. If I can’t argue my way into this job, I’m not very good at what I do.

  Sure enough, Bill offered me a part-time position: one day a week at $176 per day. I was over the moon. (I had offered to work for free.) We joked that I was moving from one ill-respected profession to another. I told Bill my next target was used-car sales.

  This was starting to happen. At first I worked for Bill just one day a week, and at my law job all the other days. Then Bill offered me another shift, and another after that. Eventually I asked Jones Day if I could switch to part-time.

  My fellow lawyers were baffled. The head of litigation told me that I would absolutely make partner barring what he called “this TV thing.” He even went so far as to say that if I decided after six months of doing both that I wanted to return to my full-time law practice, he would put me up for partner that year. It was a generous offer, and a good safety net, but I was already gone. I knew I had found my real calling.