PTSD + Abusive Clients
When you’re a freelancer, have a trauma condition, and you get burned by a client…it can be massively hard to bounce back
The story I am about to tell occurred well over a year ago.
It has not only taken me that long for me to wrap my head around the situation and learn to progress from it, but also to rectify my anger about the whole thing. Many other freelancers, especially seasoned ones, would likely be able to pick up their business and move on much sooner than that.
I found it nearly impossible, for months on end.
I am an audiobook narrator and voice actor. I find a portion of my work via a platform for indie authors and narrators, managed by Amazon. At the time of meeting a particular client, I had produced and turned in over 35 books through this service, over a five year period.
Many narrators can have a higher haul than 30-something books, over such a timeline. I had largely been a part-time narrator, working a full time “regular” job in my “regular” life. Then, I began transitioning my work into commercial and private voice acting, seeing a better rate of return for my time. Voice performance became about 50% of my overall work in my 5th year. I was justified in upgrading my microphone, software, and hired a coach to help me integrate it all during my workflow.
All that is to say: I was not a complete moron when these clients found me and requested me to audition for their book.
They were a writing duo. Two women, white, British. In the author bio, the first one mentioned she was a new author, but also a songwriter, something called a “bucket-lister,” and she seemed very excited about everything. The other author appeared more experienced, but not substantially so (she also appeared to be indie, unsigned, not previously published). I assumed she was the unofficial editor keeping the structure of the book together.
My surface research showed positive reviews on the book. It was a good sign it had reviews at all. Many solicitations I get are for books that don’t appear to sell and have no following, and the author only wants me to do the job for a stake in future royalties. In short, I have no incentive to narrate a dud project if the author is not offering to pay me any production fee.
If you’re offering to pay me a fee outright, fine. But if you want me to take a chance on book sales, your book has to have promise.
This author duo requested me to do their book, for royalty share only, because they had no budget. They spoke very highly of their book, how many fans they had, and how well it would do. They very much wanted me for my ability to do an American southern accent for the whole of the characters.
So, I had a specific skill set which they wanted. And they were asking me to do their book for no up front fee, on faith of future sales.
See, they had written a period novel, set in 1950’s Alabama. It was categorized as “romance.” The literal subtitle they gave the book called it a “bittersweet story about love.”
I accepted the contract and negotiated a timeline to work around my other projects. The book was fairly standard novel length. 70,000 words?
I’ll save us all some time. Let’s … >> fast forward >>
Over fifty of those 70k words in the text ended up being the word n___er.
There was a rape scene. It was shortly (very shortly) followed by a far-fetched raucous/magical sex scene involving the victim and her new lover, where everything worked out wonderfully.
The only named black character, framed as a possible protagonist in the summary and the first 3rd of the text, is used to elevate the actual main characters’ story… then murdered.
One of the main characters has severe white savior complex. She may have been referred to as an actual angel in the manuscript. I haven’t gone back to check. (Oh wait, she’s also the virgin who gets raped.)
None of this was disclosed to me before I accepted the contract. None of the plot details were noted in the posting on the narration site I booked the gig through, for other narrators to see. Nothing. Zero.
Now, you may be asking yourself: But Ainslie, can’t you review the book before you accept the contract?
Yes, technically I can do that. I have the right to request the full manuscript ahead of time. However, once I have a PDF document that is several hundred pages long, I can only do so much with it in an efficient length of time. I can word-search it to spot check it and see how “hot” the language is (handy for romance books) with words like cock/pussy/cunt, or certain phrases I know to look for.
However, the word “rape” won’t show up in a rape scene…which isn’t that surprising when you think about it. Word searches don’t show you the context of how a uniquely American racial slur from the 1950’s is being overused. Skimming the text doesn’t illustrate the offensive use of character arcs.
Here’s where part of my PTSD begins to poorly affect my decision-making: it is also absolutely within my right and my flexibility to contact the author and/or Amazon and ask them to dissolve the contract based on the new information I have discovered about the manuscript.
And I didn’t do that.
Part of my trauma history is having no one to rely on when I most needed it. I transfer that pain to my own sense of loyalty, and I stick around too long on promises I have made to others, even if it is massively bad for me. In short, I have trouble saying no.
Apparently, this is a normal trait for people with a history of being neglected, and those who form trauma bonds.
Therefore, after I made this series of discoveries about the book, I was going to let it all go. It’s their “art” or whatever, and if they want make themselves look dumb… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I decided to finish it, slap an alternate-alternate pseudonym on this piece of trash, and walk away. As in, a brand new name I was going to pull out of my butt. Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock.
Then, I ran into a personal situation that forced me to relocate my studio equipment into a new space. That was no one’s problem but mine.
The new space, however, was a shared space. In a black family’s home, who have young children. Okay?
I told my new hosts about the book, immediately. Their first reaction was that if someone was using the word that much, they wanted to. They must have a deep need to get it out. But wait. What was the context, anyway? They were deeply curious.
Honestly? It was all over the place. Sometimes, white characters were yelling it at black characters in derogatory ways. Sometimes the black character was using it to describe himself, calmly. Sometimes, white people used it in a benign way towards the black characters. Sometimes, it was said between white people during casual dialogue, seemingly to illustrate what a common-use word it was, for the time.
And honestly, I think it may have been as simple (stupid?) as that. This pair of white non-American people wrote a book set in 1950's southern America, and felt the need to pepper it with a racial slur that was common at the time, simply because they read somewhere that that’s the way people spoke.
However, they gave no thought to whether or not they should do that, if it was necessary, if it added/subtracted anything to the story, or if it was even accurate. Did they interview anyone before writing this? Historians? Researchers? Actual Americans? People who lived through it?
Oh, and considering if the writing was distracting or offensive in the final result. You know. That.
I was confused as to how no reader had been perplexed so far by the content, and commented as much in any review. So, I went back to the postings. And I froze.
Over the course of my accepting the contract and working on the audiobook, the text had apparently been picked up by some additional readers, and even an online book club. It was getting panned on Goodreads.
FFFFFF.
Upon revisiting some of the older, original reviews on the book’s public listings, I noticed many of them briefly mentioned something about “free copy” or “beta reader.” This strongly implies they are friends and family of the authors. Positive reviews stacked up in favor of the text, to impress potential buyers and people like me; to influence us.
We were approaching the final deadline, and the authors reached out to me for “updates,” even though they could actively listen to uploaded completed files on the back-end as they were completed by me. This warned me of general impatience.
Remember, they hired me for $0 up front. They requested me to do their book on faith it would sell, and I would be compensated in the form of royalty payments. In general, communication and understanding of production terms on both ends is the name of the game on contracts such as this one.
In response to their request for "updates,” and no less than several weeks prior to the deadline, I very directly tell the authors that my studio needed to be relocated into a black family’s home. Therefore, for obvious reasons, I need a certain amount of privacy when I record their book due to the explicit content. This limited the hours I could record the material. I saw the production schedule needing to be extended because of this.
They do not address the issue I have brought up at all. They do, however, ask for an exact date when it will be finished. I cannot give an exact date, but I say it will be less than certain amount of time. I may have estimated three weeks.
They do not respond, and therefore I keep working. No one asked me to stop, and they did not tell me the extension was unacceptable. The deadline passed, and no one cut the contract. The authors allowed me to continue uploading audio chapters of their book to the back-end of the platform we were working through, which they could review at their convenience.
Six days past the deadline, I was coldly asked for another update.
I clarified, once again, the very specific and unique circumstances we were in, partially due to their manuscript content. I explained, once again, that all completed material up to this point was already uploaded for their review. Not only did this take care of their “update” question, but gave them something to review. Lastly, I confirmed that the finished project would indeed be delivered within the original window I quoted in my last message, though I cannot give an exact date of delivery (mostly because I am not psychic, and also because the new setup and situation was being adapted to day by day).
My response did not hide that I was a) repeating myself and b) calling attention to the fact that part of the issue was the manuscript content. I expected that to be taken into serious consideration, as I was attempting to problem-solve on my end, on the fly, and to be sensitive to the family who had invited me to work in their home.
The author duo did not like any of this, and took massive offense to it. But, they said nothing to me. I only knew how offended they were because of what came next.
Lets >> fast forward >> again.
Seven days later, when I was one final chapter edit away from finishing the entire book (roughly 24 hours), I received an automated email from Amazon saying my contract with the authors had been dissolved. The project was being removed from my queue. I was no longer responsible for turning it in. It was over.
But.
But I had just spent ten+ weeks of my life struggling over this book. I had moved my studio — in a rush — for this book. I had screamed racial slurs, first in my home and then in a black family’s home, for this book. I had narrated my first (and hopefully only) rape scene. I had recorded over 10 hours of finished, edited audio of this piece of trash. The labor that typically goes into that is x 3, and that’s if things are going well.
Within hours, I was on the phone with Amazon. I was convinced that they could not do this without speaking to me first. According to my trauma-drenched brain, I had put my time into this horrible and offensive project, and therefore I deserved the right to finish it.
In purely logistical terms, the author duo had cleared me to keep working past the deadline without stopping me, after they had been notified of the delay. The official policy on situations like this, according to Amazon, is that nothing needs to be contractually modified as long as “all parties agree” via the private message system. This appeared to have happened when I alerted them prior to the deadline, told them of my studio move, quoted the first delay, and they allowed everything to continue.
Then, when they pressed me for an update later, I reminded them that the manuscript + my recording environment = the same answer they got before. Since they didn’t care for that answer, they decided to flip their shit. They stormed up to Amazon and decided to pull the contract out from under me, making sure I received nothing. I had nowhere to turn anything in and no one to turn it into. It was clear this was a punishment.
Insanely, I found myself arguing in favor of me turning in this racist, horribly written book. All because I had worked so hard to fit it into my life and work schedule over the previous two months, for these two horrible women who were now making it their main mission to hurt me. They had turned me into a cheerleader for their project.
The Amazon rep I was eventually elevated to (after explaining to the first rep that this was not a joke, and I would surely end up in the hospital if they did not reverse this decision) apologized to me over two days worth of phone calls, but said he could do nothing. The decision was made, and he said the authors were “within their rights” to pull the contract because I hadn’t delivered within the original deadline.
I further had the rep clarify that even if I had turned in a completed product just one day late (with the author’s prior approval in the messaging system), that they still could have said “Fuck you,” and pulled the project for any reason, and cited that it was for being late. I had no actual rights, even if I followed Amazon’s stated rules and guidelines.
On the rep’s advice, which I knew was fruitless, I sent the authors an invoice for roughly $30/hr worth of labor, estimating my time spent on the project.
As expected, I heard nothing from them. Except…
The authors wrote about me on their Facebook “fan” pages, as they like to pretend they have a following and try to engage their audience. They claimed I had been difficult or had caused some sort of problem, and they were happy to be rid of me. They claimed they would look for a new narrator immediately. (As of the writing of this essay, there is still no audio release of that novel.)
I, on the other hand, was reeling from the lost time and financial equivalent I had poured into the project. Regardless of the content, I had stuck with the contract and essentially seen it through to the end. The time and energy spent on that, and neglect of other actual work I had on the table at the time, was huge.
I lost at least 15 pounds. Maybe 20. It became difficult for me to shower. I was hugely gun shy in taking new contracts. I blamed myself for not asking enough specific questions.
Should one of my pre-contract questions be “Does this story have rape in it?” which honestly seems nuts to me. I don’t feel like I should have to ask that. And, no. Rape does not appear in most stories. Therefore, the writer should simply divulge it as a plot point up front. In this world where we now have trigger warnings on Instagram posts, how god damn specific do I have to get when I ask a client what type of violence their 100k-word novel contains? They’re the ones who wrote it. They should disclose these type of plot points in the full summary, the same way they should make requests for accents and dialects.
More than that, honest answers will not follow other types of subjective questions like: Is this book racist? Is this book edited properly? Is this book confusing for the reader? Does the narrative flow properly? Are you an experienced writer?
This is often what comes next:
MY BOOK IS ZOMGAMAZING. IT’S WAS TOP 10 ON AMAZON IN ITS FIRST 4 HOURS ON SALE. ALL MY BETA READERS (parents) LOVE IT. I’M DOING SO MUCH PROMO FOR MY BOOK IT WILL SELL SO MANY COPIES PROMISE. IT HAS “VIOLENCE” I GUESS BUT IT’S NECESSARY TO THE STORY. I HAVE 50GAZILLION TWITTER FOLLOWERS AND I DIDN’T BUY ANY OF THEM FOR $75 i SWEAR.
Here’s another question you may be asking yourself: Hey again Ainslie, why don’t you just read the stupid book before you say yes? Wouldn’t that save you a lot of pain and aggravation?
Yes. But it wouldn’t save me precious time.
If I literally read every book (or book series) that was offered to me to narrate, I would spend a significant amount of time reading books that I won’t ever take to contract. Time that no one is compensating me for.
Instead, I try to spend my time working for commercial clients, making actual money. Or, I work outside performance jobs, unrelated to voice acting (but again, for actual money). Or I’m marketing my businesses, cleaning my home, doing my laundry, or sleeping. I’m not negotiating in vain with would-be clients with no money and terrible manuscripts.
But Ainslie, wouldn’t you get some pleasure reading/screening some of these books?
Actually, no. No, I would not. Most of these books are written by very inexperienced people, and are not good. And I wouldn’t be reading them for pleasure. I would be reading them for the reasons we’re discussing. Content. Proofing. That’s not pleasurable. Therefore, I need the writers to be candid and clear when pitching their project to me. It will save us all a lot of time.
Hiding the true nature of their content, giving me a deceptive sales pitch, and making their book look better than it actually is, makes everyone’s lives more miserable and complicated. Don’t you hate when you buy a product, only to get it home and realize it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to?
#metoo
As I was coming to terms with this entire situation, particularly as I spoke more with the Amazon rep, it became abundantly clear to me what kind of passive position I was in as a narrator. It wasn’t just the platform and the format in which I was working, but with my career as a whole.
I was at the mercy of too many other people when it came to being given material that I was about to put my name and voice on. Although I had told myself I was okay with being a romance narrator, I often had no idea how truly X-rated a manuscript was until after I was hired. This made it almost impossible to manage the direction of my brand and choose the quality of the work I did.
I nearly had a panic attack when I had the sudden, stark realization that I had ended up as a sex worker for the second time in my life, just a very different type than I had been before. And this time, it had happened without me even realizing it. But… that ball of yarn is another story for another time.
To remedy the situation, I almost totally stopped working on the Amazon platform in question. I greatly backed away from audio books, as a whole. I restructured how I approached my audio work, and how I wanted to make my money as a voice actor.
I now mostly do freelance commercial work, which is non-erotic.
I am grateful this experience helped me further define myself as a business owner and performer. It highlighted the huge confidence gaps I had in my career, where I wasn’t valuing myself properly, asking the right questions, or telling people what I needed. For all that, I can be glad that it occurred.
However, being put through these experiences, as someone with PTSD, is massively debilitating. I am preoccupied with vengeance, and get distracted by the fact that these people don’t seem to understand what they did, either to me with this contact, or with their book material as a whole.
I lost days to this circus of a situation in the days that followed the contract cancellation, possibly weeks. It brought back my dormant condition of anorexia, because I was rapidly losing control of a situation and began to panic. I still have not regained the weight (nor do I plan to, honestly), and my first meal of the day often comes after 2pm. Old habits die hard.
But, as I touched on, there is good coming from such a major mental health relapse such as this one. This was not the only severely negative thing that happened for me last year, nor the only relationship that fell apart. I was able to turn many of these situations inwards as I was breaking down, and reflect on them with my medical team.
Why do these patterns happen? How do I habitually deal with them? How are my thoughts and behaviors different or similar to how they were 10 years ago, and what have I learned?
I have mostly reached a point where I have left this experience behind me, roughly 18 months later. I have visited a few of their social media accounts a few times — a bad habit of mine when leaving traumatic relationships — and it is clear they hold themselves in a very fragile place, in terms of needing validation and thinking they are victims. They often post memes about mental health, supporting fellow women and respecting different people, and other things that directly contradict the entire interaction that I had with them.
It’s blood boiling.
Some of my other relationships that moved out of my life around the same time involved people I knew in “real life” saying very genuine-sounding things to my face in moments of crisis, then backpedaling at a later time. Why? They couldn’t keep up the façade of being a sweet, caring person all the time. More importantly, it wasn’t who they really were. Other people are better at keeping up that façade all the time, but in private interactions, they can’t fake it.
The authors were the latter. But on their public platforms? They’re pretty good at looking likable, liberal, open-minded, fun, free-spirited (They’re just also bad at marketing and have no talent, so they’re not actually popular). They just can’t maintain it in one-on-one situations, particularly when problems come up. Which is why I got shoved off the way I did.
What these two groups of people have in common is the trait of two-faced misrepresentation in order to get what they want. Personally, I have found myself hugely confused by people like this, as I can’t understand who they really are or what they want.
My PTSD seems to curb my ability to read subtle cues, such as subtext. I don’t know what people are really trying to say if they don’t come out and say it. When people like these authors come through my life, I tend to get more linear and matter-of-fact the more confusing and aggressive the situation gets. This almost always angers the people I’m dealing with, or results in gaslighting. Ex. “That’s not what’s happening! What are you even talking about?”
I now realize it’s likely because my problem-solving approach is an attempt to cut through the veils of bullshit, which otherwise takes away their power. And that’s all these people have. That’s why they get furious, and in turn often try to punish me.
I get fired. My things get taken away. My money gets stolen.
In my work, at this time in my life, I feel most lucky to have stayed independent. I do not have an agency or a manager. That means I control where I go and what I do. For me, this is what is working best right now, and for my trauma history. For some, it may sound counterproductive to isolate myself from people, since I obviously have trust issues.
Essentially what I’m illustrating, though, is this dangerous and accidental setup in the world of certain personality types instinctively taking advantage of those of us with trauma background who do not instinctively know how to protect ourselves. We have to take time to learn.
And until I have certain skills under my belt, I had to pull back from certain projects, some platforms, particular career paths, and certain communities. I’ll keep reaching back out as I grow more, and become more prepared.
I hope you can, too.
Ainslie Caswell is too many things, including a voice actor, writer, and creative model. Visit her at www.ainsliecaswell.com.
