Friday, February 14, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Discussing birth control with my mom
Mom: "Or you could try not using anything at all. I mean, you probably can't get pregnant anyway."
Me: "You know, it's really weird to try to trick someone into getting pregnant."
Mom: "No, it's not!"
Me: "You know, it's really weird to try to trick someone into getting pregnant."
Mom: "No, it's not!"
Friday, January 17, 2014
Livelihood, Part II of maybe III
Here’s how I came to give up on my parents’ American dream for me, the one they had worked so hard for. Since I was three, I had thought of myself as a writer. I was a prolific creator of “books”, which were stapled-together pages I had illustrated and “read” to family members as I turned the pages. My parents told me I recited them the same every time, and sometimes they transcribed or tape-recorded my words. I think the first book I actually wrote was when I was around five. It was a Nancy Drew mystery about a kidnapped judge, or as I wrote, a “Nasey beroo” mystery about a kidnapped “juj”. The judge was a woman, and I drew this picture of Nancy peeking through the kidnapper’s window and seeing the judge lying on a bed. It was a little racy because I had drawn her with her judicial robe open to reveal her bra, but I was a bad enough artist that nobody realized that. I got a lot of praise for this behavior from adults, that I would create stories with no prompting. I either loved it or I was just messing around. Before long I loved the praise.
I was praised by teachers for my writing all through school, even after I ditched the illustrations. It was part of my identity, and I was seized with anxiety during the increasing stretches of time in high school when I wasn’t writing. Aren’t I writer? Don’t writers write? During a long stretch in college I decided I needed structure to write, couldn’t do it on my own. One of the later writing classes I took in college was a fiction workshop, which would surely give me direction and motivation, I thought. I cried during my first workshop.
My first piece hadn’t received the generally glowing response I was accustomed to. Even with the praise I had always received, I was actually always very self-conscious of my abilities, whether they’d hold up in the real world. What propped me up was the feedback, knowing that so many others believed in me. Suddenly my feedback was predominantly critical with a couple glimmers of positivity when it used to be the reverse. In anticipation of the criticism, I began to write for them, my classmates and my professor. I heard their voices as I typed, judging everything that came out:
Nice word choice, idiot.
Cliché!
Lazy description. Show, don’t tell.
Writing wasn’t a joy. It was a chore, filled my head with voices that made my writing stilted and strange. Then I started wondering if I ever enjoyed writing. Maybe I had just enjoyed the praise. Maybe this “writer” identity was something that others had put on me. I don’t think I had ever been actually good, just good for a second grader or a seventh grader or a twelfth grader. And now I could barely hold my own in a college-level workshop of nonprofessionals. If I wasn’t even the best in the class, how could I make it as a writer in the real world?
You see, writing is a glamour profession. That means that it’s so desired, comes with such a coolness factor that people are willing to write professionally for free. They’re willing to pay to be a writer, as is evidenced by the numerous “become a writer” scams as well as full-time unpaid internships in expensive cities. Which is another kind of scam, in my opinion.
Just before graduating college, I asked my honors project adviser, a real writer, for advice on becoming a real writer myself. You know, just in case.
He suggested I stay away from MFA programs. To write, you needed a job that allowed you the time and mental space to do so. A serving job, an admin, a barista. The overachiever in me didn't like this.
“Writing isn't like physics,” he told me, “It's not time sensitive. You won’t lose your abilities as you get older.”
I talked to him about my career anxiety, told him I was also interested in social justice. I maybe wanted to work for an NGO.
"My wife does that. It's much more noble than holing up in your room and writing stories all day."
I told him I was going to Japan with my boyfriend.
"You're in a relationship?” he said, “That will endlessly complicate things."
I came to the practical conclusion that writing could never be my livelihood. I needed to find something else with a structure and a paycheck, but I had no idea what. I went to Japan as a teacher, but planned along the way to become fluent in Japanese, save some money, and figure out what to do with my life. Have you ever heard that saying that used to be on bumper stickers: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
If god were real, he would have been laughing.
I was praised by teachers for my writing all through school, even after I ditched the illustrations. It was part of my identity, and I was seized with anxiety during the increasing stretches of time in high school when I wasn’t writing. Aren’t I writer? Don’t writers write? During a long stretch in college I decided I needed structure to write, couldn’t do it on my own. One of the later writing classes I took in college was a fiction workshop, which would surely give me direction and motivation, I thought. I cried during my first workshop.
My first piece hadn’t received the generally glowing response I was accustomed to. Even with the praise I had always received, I was actually always very self-conscious of my abilities, whether they’d hold up in the real world. What propped me up was the feedback, knowing that so many others believed in me. Suddenly my feedback was predominantly critical with a couple glimmers of positivity when it used to be the reverse. In anticipation of the criticism, I began to write for them, my classmates and my professor. I heard their voices as I typed, judging everything that came out:
Nice word choice, idiot.
Cliché!
Lazy description. Show, don’t tell.
Writing wasn’t a joy. It was a chore, filled my head with voices that made my writing stilted and strange. Then I started wondering if I ever enjoyed writing. Maybe I had just enjoyed the praise. Maybe this “writer” identity was something that others had put on me. I don’t think I had ever been actually good, just good for a second grader or a seventh grader or a twelfth grader. And now I could barely hold my own in a college-level workshop of nonprofessionals. If I wasn’t even the best in the class, how could I make it as a writer in the real world?
You see, writing is a glamour profession. That means that it’s so desired, comes with such a coolness factor that people are willing to write professionally for free. They’re willing to pay to be a writer, as is evidenced by the numerous “become a writer” scams as well as full-time unpaid internships in expensive cities. Which is another kind of scam, in my opinion.
Just before graduating college, I asked my honors project adviser, a real writer, for advice on becoming a real writer myself. You know, just in case.
He suggested I stay away from MFA programs. To write, you needed a job that allowed you the time and mental space to do so. A serving job, an admin, a barista. The overachiever in me didn't like this.
“Writing isn't like physics,” he told me, “It's not time sensitive. You won’t lose your abilities as you get older.”
I talked to him about my career anxiety, told him I was also interested in social justice. I maybe wanted to work for an NGO.
"My wife does that. It's much more noble than holing up in your room and writing stories all day."
I told him I was going to Japan with my boyfriend.
"You're in a relationship?” he said, “That will endlessly complicate things."
I came to the practical conclusion that writing could never be my livelihood. I needed to find something else with a structure and a paycheck, but I had no idea what. I went to Japan as a teacher, but planned along the way to become fluent in Japanese, save some money, and figure out what to do with my life. Have you ever heard that saying that used to be on bumper stickers: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
If god were real, he would have been laughing.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Livelihood, Part I
They told us we would never have to starve, and we would never have to hate what we do in the long run.
Unlike most aspiring artists, my parents actually encouraged me. They had come of age during both a population and economic boom, when one could graduate college and work somewhere as a professional. When I was being instilled with this career-optimism as a kid, everyone seemed to have the idea that we were past depressions, past wars besides the distant, mostly secret ones that never had civilian drafts. Like a wide swath of middle class kids, I had my basic needs met, I was supported, and it was given that I would go to college then go on to some sort of career. And my parents hoped it would be in writing, probably because they had never gotten the chance to follow their own artistic dreams.
I know now that I won’t be a writer. For nearly thirty years I’ve been struggling to be anyone. Now I just long to be an adult who works and eats and is minimally crazy.
Along with that swath of middle class kids, I was fed the notion that if I worked hard enough I could achieve anything, that the best thing I could do is follow my dream. And even after seeing countless artistic depictions of people stuck in miserable, dead-end jobs, I didn’t consider that there might be something to that. That it was a trope because nearly everyone had to come to that, to see their dream then scale down their expectations, scale down, scale down, until they’re just surviving.
You only have to work hard. My grandparents had been through the depression and the second world war. My parents came up from scrappy working-class to lower-middle-class backgrounds. My mom was the first woman in her family to go to college. Both of my parents had artistic inclinations--my dad as a painter and my mom as a writer. My mom was more of a dabbler, but my dad was different. I’ve written about his art before. He was great, like he was at most non-athletic things he tried. But the draft put his dream on hold; it took a deferral to attend medical school to keep him from going to Vietnam.
Becoming a doctor is something to be proud of, among the highest aspirations of kids coming from the lower socioeconomic rungs of the ladder, not that my dad was particularly low on that ladder. If you talk to ambitious teenagers who aspire to be first-generation college attendees, becoming a doctor or lawyer is the most commonly cited ambition. They answer this regardless of their unique talents and passions. Ultimately, they want to be successful. Then hopefully the next generation can do what they really want.
My dad told me that he dreams of nothing but medical procedures--bodies floating by on a grocery store checkout conveyer belt, and he has to operate on them quickly before they fall off the edge.
He’s not even an emergency room doctor or a surgeon. Most of the time he’s dislodging clots from the arteries of old people. Still, he came back from work every day shrouded in gloom, exasperation. My mom tried to train us to tiptoe around him, to be good, the source of zero stress for him because his work is terrible and he only does it for us. If I ever asked him about his work he would put on his calm-but-quick doctor voice and describe complex procedures with a sense of adeptness, an air of enthusiasm barely breaking through his expression. But asking him whether he liked his work was usually met with a deep sigh, and a weary, “I just can’t stand being around sick people anymore.” He can do everything right and something can still go wrong. Sometimes people sue him. Sometimes they die.
Cancer was my dad’s first hiatus from work.
He went through six courses of chemo, then six weeks in a hospital bed in which they plugged him into poisons to kill all the lymphoma cells they could for days at a time. They took out his stem cells through a tube in his jugular vein, pumped him full of more poison, then put new stem cells back in.
When I saw him months after his stem cell transplant, his complexion was ashen and he couldn’t walk much without becoming dizzy and winded. Sometimes he vomited. Sometimes he fell. He still hadn’t grown his hair back, and he loudly snorted mucus through a nose that just wanted to slick it out since it didn’t have any hairs for resistance. We thought he might be dying, that his stem cells would kill him.
In spite of this all, while he was still snorting and vomiting and wheezing, he told me that his six months of cancer treatment had been less stressful than going to work every day.
He didn’t die, and after a year of treatment and recovery he went back to work. When I asked him again, he told me he still preferred cancer.
To be continued in Part II.
Unlike most aspiring artists, my parents actually encouraged me. They had come of age during both a population and economic boom, when one could graduate college and work somewhere as a professional. When I was being instilled with this career-optimism as a kid, everyone seemed to have the idea that we were past depressions, past wars besides the distant, mostly secret ones that never had civilian drafts. Like a wide swath of middle class kids, I had my basic needs met, I was supported, and it was given that I would go to college then go on to some sort of career. And my parents hoped it would be in writing, probably because they had never gotten the chance to follow their own artistic dreams.
I know now that I won’t be a writer. For nearly thirty years I’ve been struggling to be anyone. Now I just long to be an adult who works and eats and is minimally crazy.
Along with that swath of middle class kids, I was fed the notion that if I worked hard enough I could achieve anything, that the best thing I could do is follow my dream. And even after seeing countless artistic depictions of people stuck in miserable, dead-end jobs, I didn’t consider that there might be something to that. That it was a trope because nearly everyone had to come to that, to see their dream then scale down their expectations, scale down, scale down, until they’re just surviving.
You only have to work hard. My grandparents had been through the depression and the second world war. My parents came up from scrappy working-class to lower-middle-class backgrounds. My mom was the first woman in her family to go to college. Both of my parents had artistic inclinations--my dad as a painter and my mom as a writer. My mom was more of a dabbler, but my dad was different. I’ve written about his art before. He was great, like he was at most non-athletic things he tried. But the draft put his dream on hold; it took a deferral to attend medical school to keep him from going to Vietnam.
Becoming a doctor is something to be proud of, among the highest aspirations of kids coming from the lower socioeconomic rungs of the ladder, not that my dad was particularly low on that ladder. If you talk to ambitious teenagers who aspire to be first-generation college attendees, becoming a doctor or lawyer is the most commonly cited ambition. They answer this regardless of their unique talents and passions. Ultimately, they want to be successful. Then hopefully the next generation can do what they really want.
My dad told me that he dreams of nothing but medical procedures--bodies floating by on a grocery store checkout conveyer belt, and he has to operate on them quickly before they fall off the edge.
He’s not even an emergency room doctor or a surgeon. Most of the time he’s dislodging clots from the arteries of old people. Still, he came back from work every day shrouded in gloom, exasperation. My mom tried to train us to tiptoe around him, to be good, the source of zero stress for him because his work is terrible and he only does it for us. If I ever asked him about his work he would put on his calm-but-quick doctor voice and describe complex procedures with a sense of adeptness, an air of enthusiasm barely breaking through his expression. But asking him whether he liked his work was usually met with a deep sigh, and a weary, “I just can’t stand being around sick people anymore.” He can do everything right and something can still go wrong. Sometimes people sue him. Sometimes they die.
Cancer was my dad’s first hiatus from work.
He went through six courses of chemo, then six weeks in a hospital bed in which they plugged him into poisons to kill all the lymphoma cells they could for days at a time. They took out his stem cells through a tube in his jugular vein, pumped him full of more poison, then put new stem cells back in.
When I saw him months after his stem cell transplant, his complexion was ashen and he couldn’t walk much without becoming dizzy and winded. Sometimes he vomited. Sometimes he fell. He still hadn’t grown his hair back, and he loudly snorted mucus through a nose that just wanted to slick it out since it didn’t have any hairs for resistance. We thought he might be dying, that his stem cells would kill him.
In spite of this all, while he was still snorting and vomiting and wheezing, he told me that his six months of cancer treatment had been less stressful than going to work every day.
He didn’t die, and after a year of treatment and recovery he went back to work. When I asked him again, he told me he still preferred cancer.
To be continued in Part II.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
A stupid eighteen-year-old writes a poem about being a stupid-sixteen year-old thinking about death
I am sixteen years old, and in less than forty minutes, I’ll be dead.
Omen number one:
Flew alone from Paris to Rochester,
tired, sweaty, jetlagged.
It should be 4 am, but the sun glares outside
in all its defiance
over the field of all-American
winged metal birds of prey.
All boarded the flight to Kansas City
sat and waited, when it came time for takeoff
Engines roared, sparks flew
coast, sputter, stop.
Voice over the intercom:
Crack in the engine.
Everyone get off and wait
for a new plane.
I am sixteen years old and in less than forty minutes I’ll be dead.
Omen number two:
Finally made it to Kansas City
more tired than before
The sky insists that it’s night
in what should be early afternoon
There’s a storm coming.
That’s what they keep saying
but outside I see nothing but dark
a little too calm, maybe.
One by one
all
flights
canceled
but mine, from Kansas City to Cedar Rapids.
Maybe they thought it was short enough
that it would all be okay.
I am sixteen years old and in less than forty minutes I’ll be dead.
Omen number 3:
We walk out into that strange dark
to board the tiny plane.
Not many people flying to Cedar Rapids
so late at night.
All sit down, duct tape on my armrest
my window
This plane is old.
Start engines, begin to move
All of a sudden
Blaring alarms
Red lights flashing in the cabin
Everyone jumps, pilot switches alarms off
apologizes.
I begin to shake. An overwhelming sickness,
a bad feeling is consuming me.
I can’t stop shaking.
I want off, I don’t want to be on this plane anymore.
I don’t feel safe. My mouth tastes like a penny.
I can’t get off.
My dad is expecting me at the airport
in a little over forty minutes.
Epiphany:
In the air, I can see the storm.
We’re right in the middle of it.
Lightning flashes every two seconds,
right outside my window
I can see its tiny metallic teeth
dangerously close to the wing
that flails in the tumult of the rain
like a piece of cardboard.
The plane is shaking, being tossed through the air
sometimes feels perpendicular to the ground.
We’re shaking. I look toward the pilot.
There’s a curtain, I can’t see his expression.
Jesus Christ, just tell us if we’re going down!
I’m going to die.
And my mind clears.
I’ve never thought so logically about my own death before.
Now I know what people think about.
Now I know I’m not so above
the clichés of humanity
of those mindless sputtering pleas
that people always offer
at the moments before death,
as if they were so important.
Will my parents identify my charred remains?
No, they’ll just use my dental records.
What would be said at my funeral?
What could be said?
Nothing, except she died too young.
Had potential but didn’t do anything with it.
God, and I was such a bitch most of the time.
What would life be like for my parents after this?
For my sisters?
Would I be canonized
in the minds of those who loved me
like so many youthful dead girls?
Would I create a special hole
in the hearts of all the friends
I would have lost touch with anyway?
It’s weird how normal this is
how routine, how average death is
how utterly easy to come by
It doesn’t happen to saints
but girls like me
who are just going home
who step in the wrong plane
at the wrong time
for no particular reason.
Bargaining:
Dear God
I know I don’t believe in you
but maybe I should
You’re the only one who can do anything
In a situation when logical action doesn’t matter
like in war and Kafka.
I know I’ve taken my life too lightly
Entertained too many suicide fantasies
Wallowed in depression and self loathing
Said too many times it didn’t matter if I died
but it just doesn’t make sense that I should die here
I always thought I would die alone
in a hotel, in my mid-forties
face down in vomit,
like all the most accomplished writers.
I haven’t written a single book yet!
I haven’t made my mark on society
like I always thought I was meant to do.
I know now that it’s not that easy
that you hold all the cards
that life is something you can rip away
at any given second.
I’ll use my life now
I’ll build churches—
no, but I’ll write, I’ll fight injustice, I have ideas!
Let me live this once!
If I don’t accomplish anything, kill me!
Please! I want to live!
Landing:
I don’t know how
but we hit the ground safely
I love the ground.
I love home.
I love being alive.
I meet my dad, and don’t tell him I almost died.
For weeks after I was inspired
my veins pulsing with the celebration of life.
Then later I was disturbed
that I almost believed in God
that I felt like I was spared by divine intervention
and I settled back into my regular misery
and the mundane.
Now the event has lost its impact
attributed to emotions run wild, delusions.
But every now and then
I feel the cold finger of death
shivering up my spine
and I can’t help glancing over my shoulder
as if waiting for divine retribution
for the other shoe to fall.
Omen number one:
Flew alone from Paris to Rochester,
tired, sweaty, jetlagged.
It should be 4 am, but the sun glares outside
in all its defiance
over the field of all-American
winged metal birds of prey.
All boarded the flight to Kansas City
sat and waited, when it came time for takeoff
Engines roared, sparks flew
coast, sputter, stop.
Voice over the intercom:
Crack in the engine.
Everyone get off and wait
for a new plane.
I am sixteen years old and in less than forty minutes I’ll be dead.
Omen number two:
Finally made it to Kansas City
more tired than before
The sky insists that it’s night
in what should be early afternoon
There’s a storm coming.
That’s what they keep saying
but outside I see nothing but dark
a little too calm, maybe.
One by one
all
flights
canceled
but mine, from Kansas City to Cedar Rapids.
Maybe they thought it was short enough
that it would all be okay.
I am sixteen years old and in less than forty minutes I’ll be dead.
Omen number 3:
We walk out into that strange dark
to board the tiny plane.
Not many people flying to Cedar Rapids
so late at night.
All sit down, duct tape on my armrest
my window
This plane is old.
Start engines, begin to move
All of a sudden
Blaring alarms
Red lights flashing in the cabin
Everyone jumps, pilot switches alarms off
apologizes.
I begin to shake. An overwhelming sickness,
a bad feeling is consuming me.
I can’t stop shaking.
I want off, I don’t want to be on this plane anymore.
I don’t feel safe. My mouth tastes like a penny.
I can’t get off.
My dad is expecting me at the airport
in a little over forty minutes.
Epiphany:
In the air, I can see the storm.
We’re right in the middle of it.
Lightning flashes every two seconds,
right outside my window
I can see its tiny metallic teeth
dangerously close to the wing
that flails in the tumult of the rain
like a piece of cardboard.
The plane is shaking, being tossed through the air
sometimes feels perpendicular to the ground.
We’re shaking. I look toward the pilot.
There’s a curtain, I can’t see his expression.
Jesus Christ, just tell us if we’re going down!
I’m going to die.
And my mind clears.
I’ve never thought so logically about my own death before.
Now I know what people think about.
Now I know I’m not so above
the clichés of humanity
of those mindless sputtering pleas
that people always offer
at the moments before death,
as if they were so important.
Will my parents identify my charred remains?
No, they’ll just use my dental records.
What would be said at my funeral?
What could be said?
Nothing, except she died too young.
Had potential but didn’t do anything with it.
God, and I was such a bitch most of the time.
What would life be like for my parents after this?
For my sisters?
Would I be canonized
in the minds of those who loved me
like so many youthful dead girls?
Would I create a special hole
in the hearts of all the friends
I would have lost touch with anyway?
It’s weird how normal this is
how routine, how average death is
how utterly easy to come by
It doesn’t happen to saints
but girls like me
who are just going home
who step in the wrong plane
at the wrong time
for no particular reason.
Bargaining:
Dear God
I know I don’t believe in you
but maybe I should
You’re the only one who can do anything
In a situation when logical action doesn’t matter
like in war and Kafka.
I know I’ve taken my life too lightly
Entertained too many suicide fantasies
Wallowed in depression and self loathing
Said too many times it didn’t matter if I died
but it just doesn’t make sense that I should die here
I always thought I would die alone
in a hotel, in my mid-forties
face down in vomit,
like all the most accomplished writers.
I haven’t written a single book yet!
I haven’t made my mark on society
like I always thought I was meant to do.
I know now that it’s not that easy
that you hold all the cards
that life is something you can rip away
at any given second.
I’ll use my life now
I’ll build churches—
no, but I’ll write, I’ll fight injustice, I have ideas!
Let me live this once!
If I don’t accomplish anything, kill me!
Please! I want to live!
Landing:
I don’t know how
but we hit the ground safely
I love the ground.
I love home.
I love being alive.
I meet my dad, and don’t tell him I almost died.
For weeks after I was inspired
my veins pulsing with the celebration of life.
Then later I was disturbed
that I almost believed in God
that I felt like I was spared by divine intervention
and I settled back into my regular misery
and the mundane.
Now the event has lost its impact
attributed to emotions run wild, delusions.
But every now and then
I feel the cold finger of death
shivering up my spine
and I can’t help glancing over my shoulder
as if waiting for divine retribution
for the other shoe to fall.
Friday, July 12, 2013
An unsent email to Ashley who was crying at the bar
Dear Ashley,
Here's the conclusion to my crying in public story. So it was on the senior booze cruise, when my college paid a riverboat to ferry our drunk asses around the Mississippi for an evening. My friend V had just had a tryst in the bathroom with a girl she had a crush on who turned out to be straight and pretty drunk. Quite a few people ended up being aware of this tryst as well, because some girls had walked into the bathroom at the time and shared their findings with everyone. Anyway, shortly after at the end of the cruise there were buses waiting for the students to make sure masses of drunk seniors didn't drive places. We had all loaded into the bus we were supposed to be in, but had to wait because straight girl was missing and her friends had to find her on the boat. They found her and brought her back, the entire bus loaded with patiently waiting drunk college students, and she proceeded to sob loudly the entire way back to campus (about twenty minutes). I was sitting next to V, who had just performed oral sex on this girl (her first time with a woman), and the girl was sobbing uncontrollably on an otherwise completely silent bus. Even if you've had some bad experiences, I suspect you haven't had someone, right after having sex with you, cry hysterically for twenty minutes in front of forty other people who knew you two had just had sex.
So that was my story. But I wanted to let you know that you're the shit, and you shouldn't be sad about things. The end.
Here's the conclusion to my crying in public story. So it was on the senior booze cruise, when my college paid a riverboat to ferry our drunk asses around the Mississippi for an evening. My friend V had just had a tryst in the bathroom with a girl she had a crush on who turned out to be straight and pretty drunk. Quite a few people ended up being aware of this tryst as well, because some girls had walked into the bathroom at the time and shared their findings with everyone. Anyway, shortly after at the end of the cruise there were buses waiting for the students to make sure masses of drunk seniors didn't drive places. We had all loaded into the bus we were supposed to be in, but had to wait because straight girl was missing and her friends had to find her on the boat. They found her and brought her back, the entire bus loaded with patiently waiting drunk college students, and she proceeded to sob loudly the entire way back to campus (about twenty minutes). I was sitting next to V, who had just performed oral sex on this girl (her first time with a woman), and the girl was sobbing uncontrollably on an otherwise completely silent bus. Even if you've had some bad experiences, I suspect you haven't had someone, right after having sex with you, cry hysterically for twenty minutes in front of forty other people who knew you two had just had sex.
So that was my story. But I wanted to let you know that you're the shit, and you shouldn't be sad about things. The end.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Making Plans: A Family History (Part II)
Trigger warning: Discussion of suicide and self-harm ahead
My older sisters and I were each born with ten fingers and ten toes and above average intelligence. We were raised to be articulate and well-mannered with adults and instilled with an internal moral compass independent of church. We each spent different periods of our lives being utter nightmares. I was a mess as a kid, but a pretty easy teenager, Beth was an easy kid but an awful teenager, and Robyn was sort of a different story. She was the first of us to be detected as having psychiatric issues. Even as a little kid, there was something different about the far-off look in her eyes and the way in which she seemed to withdraw inward in social situations. Early on she would hum to herself and pace around with the occasional skip thrown into her step--my dad would later refer to this as her fairy dance--and once she could read, her face was constantly buried in books at inappropriate times. If given the chance, she would happily tell an adult all the facts she knew about lizards, but she couldn’t fit in with other kids. Her first diagnosis was ADD, then ADD and depression, then bipolar disorder, then schizoaffective disorder, then Asperger’s. ADD alone never quite explained how different she was. She didn’t have any friends until college, unless you count friends of Beth or me that included her in our activities.
Robyn was incredibly sheltered. First, she was taken out of the mainstream school system to a private school where the kids were allowed to learn what they wanted and sit under the tables. Then for high school she was shuttled through a half-day special program at a smaller public school than the one Beth and I attended. She passed her GED in ninth grade, but continued high school until the regular graduation date, even though she didn’t have the credits. She was never made to work for money or keep her room clean, and generally got what she wanted. She went to college nearby where my mom called professors on her behalf and helped her keep her assignments in order. Even through high school, Robyn was generally a sweet kid who didn’t cause much trouble. My mom dragged her everywhere with her since she didn’t like being alone and Robyn was a compliant companion. Starting in college, things started to change, though. She was finally meeting some people and growing up a bit, developing a belated rebellious streak. First she was just unusually mouthy and disagreeable with my parents. After she had a manic episode that sent her to the psych ward, she became more committed to her crazy. She became recalcitrant, self-centered, and at times downright rude.
It happened over the course of five years. After graduating college with an art degree, my mom allowed her to move into a small rental house that my parents owned. My mom had outlined vague conditions that she had to work or volunteer somewhere to live there, but Robyn didn’t comply and my mom didn’t press the issue. They filled her bank account with money for food and medication and that was it. Robyn slept all day and spent all night on the internet--message boards, blogs, her livejournal, whatever else she was up to. Her life went to sleep for five years.
I saw one of Robyn’s livejournal entries she’d forgotten to lock me out of: Sitting here, I look at that string of black beads hanging from my bedpost and all I can think is how I’d like to wrap those beads around my neck and squeeze until everything goes away.
I showed the entry to my mom, who she didn’t forget to lock out. My mom read it with a look of knowing concern. “She’s threatened to lie down in the middle of Mt. Vernon Road before,” she said. Then she printed the entry.
Somewhere along the way Robyn became angry. The damage surrounding the divorce had left her full of rage toward both of my parents, which she didn’t even try to hide. When I visited home she would glower at my mom or dad during meals. She was easily set off and would spit hatred at them from across the table. The divorce was how the anger started, but it wasn’t the only reason. She also became angry with my parents for failing to prepare her for work or life. For letting her sleep her life away for five years, for giving her everything she needed except the tools to do things for herself. It became more pronounced the more my family struggled financially. Robyn first moved in with my mom. Together they were toxic. Eventually she got in from the waiting list for public supported housing, where she continued to sleep and internet her days away and meet with a social worker once a week. She was powerless and angry, didn’t know how to change her situation. Days were for sleeping and nights were taken up by pills and the internet. I remember Beth once saying to me in a lowered voice, “If I were her--with the way she lives-- I wouldn’t want to be alive, either.”
...
Beth was a perfectionist and lived on praise. She kept her room orderly and symmetrical because she couldn’t stand asymmetry. Even in elementary school she took care of her appearance, learned how to style her hair herself as well as match her clothes and do her own laundry. She was the good child, and she demanded recognition for it. She didn’t get enough from my parents, who were busy dealing with her decidedly more challenging sisters. What she didn’t get from my parents she got from teachers and other peripheral adults, impressed with her perfect grades and charming behavior.
By middle school she already had growing insecurities. I was just two years younger and had been getting more recognition for my writing, which had been her area. Then her academics started to slip and her approval reserves were running dry. She turned most of her energies to being a sycophantic non-central member of the popular crowd, which caused her grades to drop even further. By high school she was fully in the grips of depression, lost the popular crowd and began failing classes. She was always sick and missing school. I don’t know how long she was active in her eating disorder, since it’s hard to tell when that begins and ends. I only know when we found out and she was getting treatment, around her senior year of high school.
It must have been before anyone knew about the eating disorder that she was prescribed wellbutrin. It’s generally never prescribed to those with histories of eating disorders because of the increased risk of seizure. One night she took too much “by accident”. She woke up in the middle of the night to a mouse staring at her from the corner of her room then running away. Then two more mice appeared on the carpet. Then, looking at the ceiling she saw it was covered in spiders that began to drop on her upturned face. She leapt out of bed and woke my mom, frantic, telling her about the mice and spiders in her room. My mom went downstairs with her but didn’t see anything. She asked Beth what she had taken.
It was much later that we found out that this overdose was no accident. The truth came out at some point during her treatment. Not only that truth, but that she had also been spending her time in her room drinking pilfered liquor alone and choking herself until she passed out.
But that night, Beth’s world had become a phantasmagoria of spiders and mice that clawed and bit, could be brushed away only to regenerate. At one point as she was lying down with her eyes open, and translucent, electrified mouse ghosts began floating up and over her, giving her tiny static shocks as they touched her skin and disappeared into the ceiling. My mom sat up with her for the rest of the night, assuring her that she was safe and the mice weren’t real. It wasn’t all bad. She had also seen the videos on the shelf doing a choreographed Latin dance.
Beth had wanted to go to school the next day because she’d already missed so many classes--“If I see a mouse, I just won’t say anything”--but my mom made her stay home. She eventually recovered and told Robyn and me the story, talked about the mouse ghosts and how ever since they touched her she was electrified. She held up her hand and asked me to hold mine to it without touching her. As she moved her hand toward mine, there was an energy between our skin that never touched, like two positively charged magnets pushing against each other.
...
Walking back to the dorm, I read the word “OK” at the top of my paper and I wanted to fuck myself up. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. I was one of two first years in this small upper level class, and I was struggling to run with the pack. It wasn’t just this class. All year I’d been slipping. I’d worked hard to get into a selective school and was faced with a cohort where nearly everyone was incredibly gifted. I was disappearing into the scenery, I was becoming average. That “OK” was just the catalyst for what came next. I wasn’t trying to die, but wanted to be not me. Maybe have a break from reality for a bit, a foray into Beth’s world of tiny ghost mice.
I knew what an overdose was technically, but wondered about an overdose overdose. I searched on the internet, found various sites and message boards that asked, “Technically, what is an overdose?” and the response was always the same: “Are you okay?”
I saw Beth’s name on instant messenger and typed her the question: How many wellbutrin did you take when you overdosed?
Her answer was similar: Why? Are you okay?
Me: Yes, just wondering.
Her: Well, if you’re really okay, just for your information, I took fifteen.
I don’t know how much of my effexor I took. I took a few, waited, didn’t feel anything and took a few more. I just know that at some point, I started to search for the effects of effexor overdose. I found brain damage, coma, and death. I got scared.
My friend was with me when we were in health services with the EMTs. I had wanted to go to the emergency room, but the taxi wouldn’t take me for insurance reasons. The ambulance came to health services rather than my room for my privacy. They took my vitals, asked me questions. I calmly explained, like a sane person, how, silly me! I’d thought I’d forgotten my pills but when I counted them I realized I’d taken them twice, and it was just a day after I’d decided to increase my dosage because they weren’t working, and my mom had told me that it was acceptable to increase the dosage of your medication on your own. They discussed my vitals to each other for a while, determined I wasn’t a significant risk of seizure or coma and let me go.
Walking back to the dorms, my friend said, “I thought you’d actually tried to OD. I’d’ve been so pissed!”
She had heard my calm, rational lying to the authorities. “Yeah,” I laughed a little. Later, I was curled up on the bathroom floor, skin tingling, head swimming, my body beating against waves of something very wrong.
This wasn’t a plan. This was just me being self-destructive. I could still proudly raise my hand at family gatherings and announce that I’d never had a suicide plan. Then a long bout of unemployment in my mid-twenties happened and I’m not sure what I can say.
Every day I was staring at my own failure. Every day of an empty inbox felt like rejection. I continued the process of gradually knocking down my expectations and my belief in my abilities, lowering the threshold of what I would accept as a way to live with each job I was rejected from. I couldn’t be an administrative assistant at a nonprofit or social services agency, fine. Could I case manage women receiving government assistance? Could I “volunteer” for a $900 a month living allowance with a nonprofit or social services agency? Could I be a receptionist at a law firm? Could I be a receptionist at a dental office? Could I be a receptionist at a tire company? Could I work the front desk at a mid-range hotel? Could I work at a book store? Could I be a server anywhere? The answer to all of these, according to the applications and resumes I sent out, is no. I was less than all of these. Every person working the front desk anywhere was an infinitely more valuable and competent person than me. I spent my days stuck in my brain, stewing, regretting, and every now and then making dinner for Colin. I didn’t even think about how at one point an “OK” scrawled on the top of my paper had pushed me over the edge.
Then one night, lying in bed awake with Colin breathing softly beside me, the wave of hopelessness welled up inside me. It had been rolling quietly underneath my surface every day, and this time I rode it. I saw my life stretching in front of me, not just one, but any possible life that could occur from that point forward. One was filled with days and days of never finding a job, of giving up on becoming an effectual human, accepting being supported by others. Another saw me eventually getting a job, something mundane like being paid nine dollars an hour to do a repetitive task at a desk, and doing it for forty years. In another I got my teaching license and, after years of struggling to find a teaching position, became an unstable, disillusioned elementary school teacher leaking bitterness onto my students. I decided I wanted no part of this life, of any of these lives. I started to make plans.
I couldn’t inflict my death on Colin--he needed to move on, forget about me. I would become so terrible that he would leave me, I decided. Then I would live alone, in isolation until Colin and most others forgot about me, and I could die with less guilt. But what about the cat? He was curled up on my pillow at the time. I couldn’t live those weeks or months without my cat, but someone had to take him once I was gone. Who would find him in time? How could I arrange for someone to discover me quickly (discover the lone cat quickly) who wasn’t a friend or family member who would be forever scarred? I tried to work this out, but couldn’t. I drifted into sleep, wondering, “The cat, the cat, the cat...”
Besides the cat, I’m not entirely sure what stopped me at the time. It might have been getting accepted into graduate school, which gave me both affirmation, some sense of belonging and something to do. I was only okay with myself for one semester of grad school. The second semester, first year. I had gotten my grades back, was delighted with my A in statistics and some good feedback I’d gotten from my regression analyses, and thought maybe, maybe, this was me, maybe I was a policy person who could crunch a few numbers and be competent in economics. But I applied to so many internships to do over the summer, internships that I’m embarrassed I even considered now because I know I don’t have the quantitative chops. All my rejections brought me back down. And then the second year, my final year, I became frustrated and anxious, even angry. I began to think that policy school wasn’t me at all, and these people had just taken my money.
It was a fluke that after graduation that I got that internship in DC. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it, even though I ended up finding out it was less a skill-building internship than an illuminating experience on social capital. Then everything began to fall apart. I knew my internship wouldn’t turn into a job. I checked postings every day, and there were so many beyond my reach that didn’t even pay enough for me to rent a studio and eat. Plus Colin decided to dump me after nine years.
I’ve already talked about crossing streets and hopefully imagining being hit by cars. I took the metro a lot too.
There were a couple times when I was sitting in the metro station, waiting for the train home late at night. I noticed there were few people around, and thought about how it was an opportune time to leap in front of the train. The situation had come--I had become so terrible that Colin had left me. The cat was safe in Minneapolis. I could leave my bag on the platform and step off. They could identify me from my ID and inform my family. It would traumatize the driver and the few people waiting, but would save the people I love from having to discover me.
Therapists later would ask, “What stopped you?” I’d generally reply something like, “What am I, impulsive? Like I’d kill myself spontaneously without making a plan.”
***
We already had the metaphor of mental illness as cancer in our minds. The therapist had brought it up when I was voicing my anxieties about going back to work: “What if I can’t handle it, what if my thoughts take over again and I can’t function?” It was only a couple months after the train, and I was back in Minneapolis. I had been offered a job, of sorts. They didn’t know that I was crazy enough to go to day treatment.
The therapist replied, “What if you were trying to go back to work after cancer treatment and after a while discovered you needed another round of chemo?”
It all sounded reasonable. Our conditions were real and serious. We shouldn’t feel weak if we needed to step back for another “dose.”
Then a new woman came in. She was middle-aged, divorced a couple years ago, in an unhealthy relationship, mother of two reportedly successful twenty-something daughters. She had three suicide plans. That’s why her therapist recommended her to come. She was bipolar, and said at this point she was only staying alive for her mom. Her daughters? Better off without her, she said. She explained, if you see someone with terminal cancer, do you recommend they go through a series of painful treatments to string them along for another couple months, or do you medicate them up and let them go? “That’s how I feel. This is terminal, just let me go.”
All of us patients, with mental illness as cancer already implanted in our heads, nodded eagerly along with her. This is terminal, let us go. And that’s why a room of mentally ill people is not necessarily a helpful therapeutic environment.
***
I was talking to my mom about writers and stories. I referenced David Foster Wallace and she didn’t know who I was talking about. I tried to describe him: “He wrote Infinite Jest, he killed himself a few years ago...”
She interrupted me, almost disgusted. “That’s really... not nice.”
“What, killing yourself?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s really rude to kill yourself.”
And that’s the way we have to see it in our family. Killing yourself is the height of rudeness. I think we had all independently decided at some point that we wouldn’t kill ourselves. For some logistical reason or another, we couldn’t. For me, I think it was when I thought of my sisters. I remember sitting side by side with Beth as we were at the table in my tiny apartment, chopping herbs and meats for dinner. We were sharing the most recent developments in the mental health saga of my family. I said, “Man, if anyone in our family kills themselves, I’m going to murder them. I’m going to haunt them from my grave.”
Beth nodded silently. I was talking about her as much as I was talking to her.
My dad periodically says, whenever my sisters or I talk about any mental health or medical difficulties, how he and my mom should have never had children. I’m not even bothered by the fact that I was an accident, but for some reason, this bothers me. He says it a lot, like he’d never said it before; your mom and I should have never had children.
There have been several points in which I felt like my life was hopeless, an utter disappointment, and I should just quit. Then I would think of Beth and Robyn. At those times, they had it so much worse than me. But would I want them to kill themselves? No. Of course not. If they told me, I would talk them out of it. I would tell them what beautiful, promising people they were, how the world needed them and I would mean it.
Sometimes I felt resentful of Beth and Robyn for being my reasons for not offing myself. I’d think, I have to suffer through forty more years of this shit, just because you’d be sad? But I always have to remind myself of what I would tell them. And think that maybe, if I could show myself a fraction of the compassion I would show for my sisters, friends, even a stranger, maybe I could forgive myself, maybe I could come up with a good reason to live.
The funny thing is, my family is the result of generations and generations of natural selection. We’re very smart, maybe even moral, we maybe even want to help the world, but we’re not so sure if we want to be alive. We fail the ultimate human test: the will to live.
***
It was late December, before Christmas in the year 2012. I was on the phone with my dad talking about travel arrangements for the holidays. It was the same year that idiots had been convinced of the Mayan Apocalypse, that the world would end on December 21st. As a sort of joking sign-off, he said, “Good thing the world didn’t end Friday.”
“Meh, whatever,” I responded.
He said, “Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have minded the end so much myself.”
My older sisters and I were each born with ten fingers and ten toes and above average intelligence. We were raised to be articulate and well-mannered with adults and instilled with an internal moral compass independent of church. We each spent different periods of our lives being utter nightmares. I was a mess as a kid, but a pretty easy teenager, Beth was an easy kid but an awful teenager, and Robyn was sort of a different story. She was the first of us to be detected as having psychiatric issues. Even as a little kid, there was something different about the far-off look in her eyes and the way in which she seemed to withdraw inward in social situations. Early on she would hum to herself and pace around with the occasional skip thrown into her step--my dad would later refer to this as her fairy dance--and once she could read, her face was constantly buried in books at inappropriate times. If given the chance, she would happily tell an adult all the facts she knew about lizards, but she couldn’t fit in with other kids. Her first diagnosis was ADD, then ADD and depression, then bipolar disorder, then schizoaffective disorder, then Asperger’s. ADD alone never quite explained how different she was. She didn’t have any friends until college, unless you count friends of Beth or me that included her in our activities.
Robyn was incredibly sheltered. First, she was taken out of the mainstream school system to a private school where the kids were allowed to learn what they wanted and sit under the tables. Then for high school she was shuttled through a half-day special program at a smaller public school than the one Beth and I attended. She passed her GED in ninth grade, but continued high school until the regular graduation date, even though she didn’t have the credits. She was never made to work for money or keep her room clean, and generally got what she wanted. She went to college nearby where my mom called professors on her behalf and helped her keep her assignments in order. Even through high school, Robyn was generally a sweet kid who didn’t cause much trouble. My mom dragged her everywhere with her since she didn’t like being alone and Robyn was a compliant companion. Starting in college, things started to change, though. She was finally meeting some people and growing up a bit, developing a belated rebellious streak. First she was just unusually mouthy and disagreeable with my parents. After she had a manic episode that sent her to the psych ward, she became more committed to her crazy. She became recalcitrant, self-centered, and at times downright rude.
It happened over the course of five years. After graduating college with an art degree, my mom allowed her to move into a small rental house that my parents owned. My mom had outlined vague conditions that she had to work or volunteer somewhere to live there, but Robyn didn’t comply and my mom didn’t press the issue. They filled her bank account with money for food and medication and that was it. Robyn slept all day and spent all night on the internet--message boards, blogs, her livejournal, whatever else she was up to. Her life went to sleep for five years.
I saw one of Robyn’s livejournal entries she’d forgotten to lock me out of: Sitting here, I look at that string of black beads hanging from my bedpost and all I can think is how I’d like to wrap those beads around my neck and squeeze until everything goes away.
I showed the entry to my mom, who she didn’t forget to lock out. My mom read it with a look of knowing concern. “She’s threatened to lie down in the middle of Mt. Vernon Road before,” she said. Then she printed the entry.
Somewhere along the way Robyn became angry. The damage surrounding the divorce had left her full of rage toward both of my parents, which she didn’t even try to hide. When I visited home she would glower at my mom or dad during meals. She was easily set off and would spit hatred at them from across the table. The divorce was how the anger started, but it wasn’t the only reason. She also became angry with my parents for failing to prepare her for work or life. For letting her sleep her life away for five years, for giving her everything she needed except the tools to do things for herself. It became more pronounced the more my family struggled financially. Robyn first moved in with my mom. Together they were toxic. Eventually she got in from the waiting list for public supported housing, where she continued to sleep and internet her days away and meet with a social worker once a week. She was powerless and angry, didn’t know how to change her situation. Days were for sleeping and nights were taken up by pills and the internet. I remember Beth once saying to me in a lowered voice, “If I were her--with the way she lives-- I wouldn’t want to be alive, either.”
...
Beth was a perfectionist and lived on praise. She kept her room orderly and symmetrical because she couldn’t stand asymmetry. Even in elementary school she took care of her appearance, learned how to style her hair herself as well as match her clothes and do her own laundry. She was the good child, and she demanded recognition for it. She didn’t get enough from my parents, who were busy dealing with her decidedly more challenging sisters. What she didn’t get from my parents she got from teachers and other peripheral adults, impressed with her perfect grades and charming behavior.
By middle school she already had growing insecurities. I was just two years younger and had been getting more recognition for my writing, which had been her area. Then her academics started to slip and her approval reserves were running dry. She turned most of her energies to being a sycophantic non-central member of the popular crowd, which caused her grades to drop even further. By high school she was fully in the grips of depression, lost the popular crowd and began failing classes. She was always sick and missing school. I don’t know how long she was active in her eating disorder, since it’s hard to tell when that begins and ends. I only know when we found out and she was getting treatment, around her senior year of high school.
It must have been before anyone knew about the eating disorder that she was prescribed wellbutrin. It’s generally never prescribed to those with histories of eating disorders because of the increased risk of seizure. One night she took too much “by accident”. She woke up in the middle of the night to a mouse staring at her from the corner of her room then running away. Then two more mice appeared on the carpet. Then, looking at the ceiling she saw it was covered in spiders that began to drop on her upturned face. She leapt out of bed and woke my mom, frantic, telling her about the mice and spiders in her room. My mom went downstairs with her but didn’t see anything. She asked Beth what she had taken.
It was much later that we found out that this overdose was no accident. The truth came out at some point during her treatment. Not only that truth, but that she had also been spending her time in her room drinking pilfered liquor alone and choking herself until she passed out.
But that night, Beth’s world had become a phantasmagoria of spiders and mice that clawed and bit, could be brushed away only to regenerate. At one point as she was lying down with her eyes open, and translucent, electrified mouse ghosts began floating up and over her, giving her tiny static shocks as they touched her skin and disappeared into the ceiling. My mom sat up with her for the rest of the night, assuring her that she was safe and the mice weren’t real. It wasn’t all bad. She had also seen the videos on the shelf doing a choreographed Latin dance.
Beth had wanted to go to school the next day because she’d already missed so many classes--“If I see a mouse, I just won’t say anything”--but my mom made her stay home. She eventually recovered and told Robyn and me the story, talked about the mouse ghosts and how ever since they touched her she was electrified. She held up her hand and asked me to hold mine to it without touching her. As she moved her hand toward mine, there was an energy between our skin that never touched, like two positively charged magnets pushing against each other.
...
Walking back to the dorm, I read the word “OK” at the top of my paper and I wanted to fuck myself up. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. I was one of two first years in this small upper level class, and I was struggling to run with the pack. It wasn’t just this class. All year I’d been slipping. I’d worked hard to get into a selective school and was faced with a cohort where nearly everyone was incredibly gifted. I was disappearing into the scenery, I was becoming average. That “OK” was just the catalyst for what came next. I wasn’t trying to die, but wanted to be not me. Maybe have a break from reality for a bit, a foray into Beth’s world of tiny ghost mice.
I knew what an overdose was technically, but wondered about an overdose overdose. I searched on the internet, found various sites and message boards that asked, “Technically, what is an overdose?” and the response was always the same: “Are you okay?”
I saw Beth’s name on instant messenger and typed her the question: How many wellbutrin did you take when you overdosed?
Her answer was similar: Why? Are you okay?
Me: Yes, just wondering.
Her: Well, if you’re really okay, just for your information, I took fifteen.
I don’t know how much of my effexor I took. I took a few, waited, didn’t feel anything and took a few more. I just know that at some point, I started to search for the effects of effexor overdose. I found brain damage, coma, and death. I got scared.
My friend was with me when we were in health services with the EMTs. I had wanted to go to the emergency room, but the taxi wouldn’t take me for insurance reasons. The ambulance came to health services rather than my room for my privacy. They took my vitals, asked me questions. I calmly explained, like a sane person, how, silly me! I’d thought I’d forgotten my pills but when I counted them I realized I’d taken them twice, and it was just a day after I’d decided to increase my dosage because they weren’t working, and my mom had told me that it was acceptable to increase the dosage of your medication on your own. They discussed my vitals to each other for a while, determined I wasn’t a significant risk of seizure or coma and let me go.
Walking back to the dorms, my friend said, “I thought you’d actually tried to OD. I’d’ve been so pissed!”
She had heard my calm, rational lying to the authorities. “Yeah,” I laughed a little. Later, I was curled up on the bathroom floor, skin tingling, head swimming, my body beating against waves of something very wrong.
This wasn’t a plan. This was just me being self-destructive. I could still proudly raise my hand at family gatherings and announce that I’d never had a suicide plan. Then a long bout of unemployment in my mid-twenties happened and I’m not sure what I can say.
Every day I was staring at my own failure. Every day of an empty inbox felt like rejection. I continued the process of gradually knocking down my expectations and my belief in my abilities, lowering the threshold of what I would accept as a way to live with each job I was rejected from. I couldn’t be an administrative assistant at a nonprofit or social services agency, fine. Could I case manage women receiving government assistance? Could I “volunteer” for a $900 a month living allowance with a nonprofit or social services agency? Could I be a receptionist at a law firm? Could I be a receptionist at a dental office? Could I be a receptionist at a tire company? Could I work the front desk at a mid-range hotel? Could I work at a book store? Could I be a server anywhere? The answer to all of these, according to the applications and resumes I sent out, is no. I was less than all of these. Every person working the front desk anywhere was an infinitely more valuable and competent person than me. I spent my days stuck in my brain, stewing, regretting, and every now and then making dinner for Colin. I didn’t even think about how at one point an “OK” scrawled on the top of my paper had pushed me over the edge.
Then one night, lying in bed awake with Colin breathing softly beside me, the wave of hopelessness welled up inside me. It had been rolling quietly underneath my surface every day, and this time I rode it. I saw my life stretching in front of me, not just one, but any possible life that could occur from that point forward. One was filled with days and days of never finding a job, of giving up on becoming an effectual human, accepting being supported by others. Another saw me eventually getting a job, something mundane like being paid nine dollars an hour to do a repetitive task at a desk, and doing it for forty years. In another I got my teaching license and, after years of struggling to find a teaching position, became an unstable, disillusioned elementary school teacher leaking bitterness onto my students. I decided I wanted no part of this life, of any of these lives. I started to make plans.
I couldn’t inflict my death on Colin--he needed to move on, forget about me. I would become so terrible that he would leave me, I decided. Then I would live alone, in isolation until Colin and most others forgot about me, and I could die with less guilt. But what about the cat? He was curled up on my pillow at the time. I couldn’t live those weeks or months without my cat, but someone had to take him once I was gone. Who would find him in time? How could I arrange for someone to discover me quickly (discover the lone cat quickly) who wasn’t a friend or family member who would be forever scarred? I tried to work this out, but couldn’t. I drifted into sleep, wondering, “The cat, the cat, the cat...”
Besides the cat, I’m not entirely sure what stopped me at the time. It might have been getting accepted into graduate school, which gave me both affirmation, some sense of belonging and something to do. I was only okay with myself for one semester of grad school. The second semester, first year. I had gotten my grades back, was delighted with my A in statistics and some good feedback I’d gotten from my regression analyses, and thought maybe, maybe, this was me, maybe I was a policy person who could crunch a few numbers and be competent in economics. But I applied to so many internships to do over the summer, internships that I’m embarrassed I even considered now because I know I don’t have the quantitative chops. All my rejections brought me back down. And then the second year, my final year, I became frustrated and anxious, even angry. I began to think that policy school wasn’t me at all, and these people had just taken my money.
It was a fluke that after graduation that I got that internship in DC. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it, even though I ended up finding out it was less a skill-building internship than an illuminating experience on social capital. Then everything began to fall apart. I knew my internship wouldn’t turn into a job. I checked postings every day, and there were so many beyond my reach that didn’t even pay enough for me to rent a studio and eat. Plus Colin decided to dump me after nine years.
I’ve already talked about crossing streets and hopefully imagining being hit by cars. I took the metro a lot too.
There were a couple times when I was sitting in the metro station, waiting for the train home late at night. I noticed there were few people around, and thought about how it was an opportune time to leap in front of the train. The situation had come--I had become so terrible that Colin had left me. The cat was safe in Minneapolis. I could leave my bag on the platform and step off. They could identify me from my ID and inform my family. It would traumatize the driver and the few people waiting, but would save the people I love from having to discover me.
Therapists later would ask, “What stopped you?” I’d generally reply something like, “What am I, impulsive? Like I’d kill myself spontaneously without making a plan.”
***
We already had the metaphor of mental illness as cancer in our minds. The therapist had brought it up when I was voicing my anxieties about going back to work: “What if I can’t handle it, what if my thoughts take over again and I can’t function?” It was only a couple months after the train, and I was back in Minneapolis. I had been offered a job, of sorts. They didn’t know that I was crazy enough to go to day treatment.
The therapist replied, “What if you were trying to go back to work after cancer treatment and after a while discovered you needed another round of chemo?”
It all sounded reasonable. Our conditions were real and serious. We shouldn’t feel weak if we needed to step back for another “dose.”
Then a new woman came in. She was middle-aged, divorced a couple years ago, in an unhealthy relationship, mother of two reportedly successful twenty-something daughters. She had three suicide plans. That’s why her therapist recommended her to come. She was bipolar, and said at this point she was only staying alive for her mom. Her daughters? Better off without her, she said. She explained, if you see someone with terminal cancer, do you recommend they go through a series of painful treatments to string them along for another couple months, or do you medicate them up and let them go? “That’s how I feel. This is terminal, just let me go.”
All of us patients, with mental illness as cancer already implanted in our heads, nodded eagerly along with her. This is terminal, let us go. And that’s why a room of mentally ill people is not necessarily a helpful therapeutic environment.
***
I was talking to my mom about writers and stories. I referenced David Foster Wallace and she didn’t know who I was talking about. I tried to describe him: “He wrote Infinite Jest, he killed himself a few years ago...”
She interrupted me, almost disgusted. “That’s really... not nice.”
“What, killing yourself?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s really rude to kill yourself.”
And that’s the way we have to see it in our family. Killing yourself is the height of rudeness. I think we had all independently decided at some point that we wouldn’t kill ourselves. For some logistical reason or another, we couldn’t. For me, I think it was when I thought of my sisters. I remember sitting side by side with Beth as we were at the table in my tiny apartment, chopping herbs and meats for dinner. We were sharing the most recent developments in the mental health saga of my family. I said, “Man, if anyone in our family kills themselves, I’m going to murder them. I’m going to haunt them from my grave.”
Beth nodded silently. I was talking about her as much as I was talking to her.
My dad periodically says, whenever my sisters or I talk about any mental health or medical difficulties, how he and my mom should have never had children. I’m not even bothered by the fact that I was an accident, but for some reason, this bothers me. He says it a lot, like he’d never said it before; your mom and I should have never had children.
There have been several points in which I felt like my life was hopeless, an utter disappointment, and I should just quit. Then I would think of Beth and Robyn. At those times, they had it so much worse than me. But would I want them to kill themselves? No. Of course not. If they told me, I would talk them out of it. I would tell them what beautiful, promising people they were, how the world needed them and I would mean it.
Sometimes I felt resentful of Beth and Robyn for being my reasons for not offing myself. I’d think, I have to suffer through forty more years of this shit, just because you’d be sad? But I always have to remind myself of what I would tell them. And think that maybe, if I could show myself a fraction of the compassion I would show for my sisters, friends, even a stranger, maybe I could forgive myself, maybe I could come up with a good reason to live.
The funny thing is, my family is the result of generations and generations of natural selection. We’re very smart, maybe even moral, we maybe even want to help the world, but we’re not so sure if we want to be alive. We fail the ultimate human test: the will to live.
***
It was late December, before Christmas in the year 2012. I was on the phone with my dad talking about travel arrangements for the holidays. It was the same year that idiots had been convinced of the Mayan Apocalypse, that the world would end on December 21st. As a sort of joking sign-off, he said, “Good thing the world didn’t end Friday.”
“Meh, whatever,” I responded.
He said, “Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have minded the end so much myself.”
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