Unemployed. Employed. Homeowner. Unemployed. Self-employed. Then… cancer.

The story starts before cancer. That matters.

By 2010, the production company where I had worked for years was dying. The decline had been visible for a long time. People were leaving. The hallways that had once been busy went quiet. By the end, there were only three of us left inside a two-story, 24,000-square-foot building.

It felt like a ghost ship.

I kept answering the phone. I kept booking the studio. I kept talking to clients as if the business were still alive while, behind the scenes, I was trying to figure out whether anything could be built from what was left.

Starting a business overnight

The first thing I did was call my best friend and tell her I needed an attorney because I was about to make what felt like a deal with the devil. Whatever I did next, I needed to protect myself legally.

Then I went to my bank and told them, essentially, “I’m starting a business overnight. Can you help me?” By the next day, I had an LLC, a merchant account and a business license.

Keeping the doors open was another matter. If I wanted phones, internet and power, I had to bring the basic services current. So I paid past-due bills left behind by the old company and kept paying the building’s basic operating costs until the property went into receivership.

Making a dying building look alive

The building was already run-down. The air conditioning had problems I could not afford to fix. Circuits in the studio lighting grid went out. Offices had been abandoned in the slow collapse, and the place looked exactly like what it was: a company that had died.

So I started cleaning.

I took a broom, a shovel and several dollies and went room by room trying to make 24,000 square feet look alive again. I would arrive around eight in the morning and sometimes leave at ten at night. I cleaned floors, put ceiling tiles back, knocked down cobwebs, emptied a refrigerator full of rotting food and climbed studio ladders to deal with whatever had stopped working next.

Then I went downstairs into the guts of the building and called the technician who had maintained our phone system. We had twenty-one lines. I asked him to teach me what I could disconnect, what I had to keep and how to shrink a system built for more than forty people down to one person and the occasional client.

That became the job: make a dying building look alive, make an oversized operation mechanically and financially small enough for one person to carry, and never let the client walking through the door see how close to the edge everything really was.

The battlefield behind the front door

The pressure was not only mechanical. Past-due vendors showed up at the door. Some were furious. The Sheriff’s Department came with notices to vacate. I was trying to present a functioning studio while evidence of the collapse kept arriving in person.

I also needed renters. I could not carry a building that size by myself forever, so I brought other people in. As the property moved through receivership, more rooms were rented and the studio became increasingly contested. What had once felt like my building slowly became a place where several people were trying to build their own future around the same space.

It was draining. It was also clarifying.

“When you’re going down in flames, you quickly find out who you want in battle on your side.”

The moment it became real

Many former Artisan clients were afraid to book with me at first. I understood why. They could schedule a studio day and reasonably wonder whether I, or the building, would still be there when the date arrived.

But a few clients trusted me, and that trust helped keep the business alive. Much later, one of the former clients that had initially been afraid to do business with me booked the studio again.

That was the moment I knew I had something.

The company had a website. It had a presence. It had clients willing to come back through the door. At that point, I was not going to give up.

And this was still before cancer

By 2013, I was out of that building and running my production company from home. The business had survived the building. I had survived the building. Four years later, in November 2017, I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. By April 2018, it was stage 4.

That is why this story cannot begin with cancer. Cancer changed the rules again, but it did not introduce me to survival. I had already been practicing it for years.