Edith

About a year ago, my life changed drastically. The person who had served as a romantic ancillary-surrogate (who helped carry me out of my divorce in that capacity for months) couldn’t take any more of me and left. It was a confusing and severe rejection. It was also the first time in seven years that I was abruptly forced to live entirely on my own—without catering to someone else’s needs, whims, desires, and moods—thrust upon me in the midst of all manner of upheavals.

It so affected me that I started planning my last suicide attempt. I didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t get off the couch. I wouldn’t burden others by reaching out for help. I thought I was done. The only things that stalled the plan were my dogs. I couldn’t die without them having a safe and loving home. So, I texted my sister one day, and made up some cockamamie story about a retirement will that I was receiving through work. I asked if she would be willing to take on the task of caring for Lionel and Coleslaw, should I die unexpectedly. She feigned ignorance, but my sister has known my inner waves and recessions for a long time now. She knew what I was getting at. She pretended to comply; meanwhile, she corralled her husband and called the police to perform a welfare check on my home. When she and the cops showed up, I was deeply embarrassed, and entirely morose. Yet, I was thankful for her quick thinking. At that point, I was scared and lost. I needed someone to help drag me from the keel of life to which I’d found myself stuck. I was lucky she understood the dance of depression, and could spring into action upon her nagging intuition. Because of her resourcefulness, I was able to go back to work, increase the rate of my talk therapy sessions, and switch to a medication that has worked well to elevate my mood.

After my father died this past summer, I realized that writing about my depression as it happens invites a plethora of well-meaning responses and questions that are, ultimately, overwhelming for me. So, I’m glad I gave myself the space of time to process this one without discussing it too much. This year has seen its share of turbulence, but this post is not intended as some massive, proverbial hand slapping my latissimus dorsi for coming out the other end of it. I’m still a massive fuckup in enough ways that would make some humblebrag seem even more ridiculous and arrogant than humblebrags, by nature, already are. 

I guess this is just a note of gratitude for the people, like my sister, who love me despite my best efforts to screw it all up. Thanks to her—and Marc and Peter and Lori and Asilia and Steig and Tamara and Bianca and everyone else who is patient enough to listen to and understand the complicated parts of me—I’ve slowed down and learned how to better care for myself. I’m in a safer place now. Cliché alert: change is fucking terrifying, but sometimes it’s necessary. Thanks to all y’all who help to carry my imperfect ass through it. I love you.

New Year. Same Phone. Who Dis?

I allowed myself--for a brief stint--to regress into a predictable, boozing, money-wasting, man-hating sex fiend. As a result, I feel like I'm now more of a cliché than I have been in quite a long time.

This past year and half has seen me through a lot: change in my self, change in my marital status, rejection from an ancillary-albeit-undeserving presence in my life, transformation in the way I conduct myself professionally, the death of my father, a silencing, going underground, emerging only to rehash the basest remnants of my life's coping mechanisms.

Can I see sunlight? Will I beat my wings against these suffocating walls until my heart gives out?

I don't know if I have already relented. I was exhausted. Now I've rested and have no clue where to go.

I want to be not constantly overwhelmed. I want to hide. I want to be comforted. I want balance.

Maybe my rest is not finished.

The Only Person Who Reads These Is Me

And that is fine.

Trying to get through a bout of low-level depression.

This loneliness is a lake I'm floating in, mostly underwater.

Two Ziploc Bags of Pancake Batter

I'm trying to avoid doing work at all costs. So, here I am--writing where no one will see.

I don't know if it's because I've been teaching M. Butterfly for the past week, but the idea of relational performativity has been on my mind constantly. I keep wondering: Is everything we do a performance? Is there any act--I'll just say of mine, but I'm applying this to the world at large--in which I behave that is purely my own? Or do I always anticipate, or crave, an audience? How am I manipulating my thoughts, my memory, my words? Is my entire existence just a string of scenarios in which I am I censoring parts of me, or exaggerating others?

I guess some of it boils down to trust. Trust implies interaction with another person, and an assumption that the person possesses an essence of sincerity or authenticity. But what if they don't? What if every act is exactly that--an act? So many speech acts are ultimately futile. From the people in meetings who love to hear their own voices, but rarely achieve any meritorious labor, to the men who pantomime vulnerability in order to fulfill their get-laid-quick schemes--what is the point? 

What am I not understanding about the world and my place in it? I spent my entire life working myself numb, so that I could achieve the love, the recognition, and the comfort I so desperately wanted. I did whatever I could to make myself (what I believed would be most) lovable in the eyes of someone--anyone--I desired, and it almost killed me. Now, I have all the things that I thought would make me lovable to someone--things that would earn me a person who would want me and understand me. And now, I'm more isolated than ever. I have the job, the home, the physical beauty, the capacity to love myself and someone else. Those took me literally decades to achieve. But now, also, it's like I've stepped into my own life's camera obscura--where everything has been flipped upside-down and inverted. Having achieved the goals has only placed me in a more rarefied stratosphere, near which very few of the type of people who I want would ever venture to go. And the people who are here? They don't understand me. 

The ones who might be able to understand me now think I'm just some privileged priss who's always had it this good, so they approach me suspiciously. And the more I try to tell them that I've spent 90% of my life in the same place they are, the more I just come off as a panderer. They stop listening to me. I'm two-dimensional to everyone, but for different reasons. I'm either the strange, white trash chick who managed to roll under the closing garage door into the fancy party just seconds before being crushed to death, or I'm the chick who can afford to pay for an overpriced lunch, so I must have no clue what it means to struggle. I don't have a solid place in this world. 

To be honest, I have no clue how to navigate it. The full-time teaching job I have now pays five times what my first full-time teaching job did just six years ago. I don't know how that happened. I just kept working my ass off; one day I woke up and was financially secure. I went from scrambling for low-income housing, living out of my car, engaging in survival sex, and sleeping on piss-stained futons--to this. And the opposite of my endgame happened. Instead of finally being accepted as a result of my hard-earned achievements, I'm more outside of anyplace to call a community than ever before. Look, I know there are far worse problems to live with. I just feel lost, and pretty lonely sometimes. Oh well. Whatever. 

Thanks. I'm Trash.

Another night in which I should be doing work for my job or on myself, yet I'm just catatonically gazing at the blank television screen and forcing myself to write.

These are thoughts that have been floating in my sad brain lately. I'll probably give them greater page attention later, but I want to document them for now:

1. Dave Chappelle's most recent special confirms my suspicion that he is a sexual assault survivor who clearly feels incredibly uncomfortable with other survivors who vocalize their own struggles. From the rhetoric to the identification with the abusers, it's all there.

2. Since my father died, I've noticed I have much less rage directed at men. I no longer feel the injustice I did before--where I felt like they all should perform at my level of strenuous relationship effort, and none of them could come close. Now I just don't care. I feel guilty for seeking out people who, I knew, couldn't provide me with what I needed emotionally--only to turn around and chastise them for what they weren't capable of. I've also kind of given up on exerting any effort. I think that all this time what I really wanted was to be single and free, but I didn't know how to articulate that to myself (let alone anyone else). So, I entered into unsatisfying relationships in which I either buried essential parts of myself, or experienced the freedom at intervals of consistent breakup periods.

3. My Aunts theory has resurfaced. Men are protected from the hyper-surveillance that socially obedient women/non-men reserve for the less gender conforming among us. So yes, patriarchy is the worst; but men have conveniently found enough women to fight other women on their behalf. These men don't really have to get their hands too dirty, so to speak, because there are droves of women seeking their approval who will do the work for them. So, really, the worst perpetrators of patriarchy--the ones who maintain its omnipresence in society (and my life, more specifically)--comprise this class of largely heterosexual women. They flex their surrogate gender dominance by (as I just mentioned) interfering in the personal lives of their female foes, by flaunting their martyr-of-the-month behavior, and by finding strength in numbers. I hope this makes sense.

4. I'm so tired of being anxious and depressed. I wonder what I would willingly do never to have a depressive episode again.

That's all for now, to be returned to at a later date.

The Joker: A Eulogy for Robert Wayne King

Imagine you’re Batman, and the Joker dies—not by your hand or anything. He just dies. Maybe he gets melanoma, and you wonder, “Why hasn’t he gone on a crime spree lately?” Or maybe he has a quick and sudden aneurysm in his sleep. Either way, Alfred mentions it at breakfast one morning: Sir, your nemesis, he’s dead.

You mull it over. So many of your works—the benevolent acts for humankind you have accomplished—have been fueled by a vengeful hatred for this very person. You’ve spent so much of your life becoming his antithesis, trying to improve where he has wantonly gone astray. In a very immediate and real sense, he has been your raison d’etre. It is your desire to eradicate the world of cruel and confounding people like him that has made you who you are.

What do you do? Sure, you could invest the one percent of your hate that’s been leftover this whole time to focus entirely on thwarting lesser villains. But really, how long would it take to end people like The Riddler, The Penguin, or Poison Ivy? An afternoon? A whole day? Then what? Batman moves to Boca? Ridiculous.

You never even got to have the full-blown, climactic crescendo of a standoff that would once and for all have slain this enemy. You don’t get to spend the rest of your life in a smug denouement of reflection on how you triumphantly defeated your most formidable foe. You don’t get to pat yourself on the back for the rest of your days, or feign humble gratitude every time a townsperson thanks you for killing the juggernaut.

You didn’t even get a fucking apology from the guy at the moment of his demise. You didn’t get to stare into his eyes and see a twinge of near-death, epiphanic clarity. He never got the chance to realize the error of his ways. He never begged your forgiveness, for giving you no choice but to pursue a life of conflicted do-gooding. You wanted to be a celebrated writer whose stories got made into movies, for Chrissakes! Not some goddamn brooding antihero trying to help people who mostly ended up just shitting all over your soul, the way he did.

As if it’s bad enough that he didn’t apologize, none of the villains do! The Penguin doesn’t send a wax-stamped correspondence expressing his condolences. Catwoman doesn’t call and say, “Dude, Batman, that’s so fucked up. I’m really sorry. And I’m sorry for all the similar shit I put you through. I’ll chill out on the crime capers for a minute. Let me know if you need anything.” They just go about their fucking business, annoying the fuck out of you with their self-absorbed disregard for literally everything. 

It’s all infuriating at first, but then you realize: he’s dead. He’s gone. You spent so much of your life plotting justice against this asshole, that you didn’t take much time to think about why you were doing it, or what you could be doing instead. That thought forces you to look inward. You realize that beneath the anger and betrayal, which have been propelling your achievements for so long, lie exhaustion, loneliness, and sadness. These are feelings you’ve yet to conquer. They’re the foes that The Joker has been a stand-in for this whole time. No amount of crimefighting or justice-seeking will take these away. So, what do you do, but devote this next life’s chapter to overcoming them? But how—and, most terrifying of all: Will you stop being Batman if you do?

Dead Dad Dad Dead

Some of the more interesting responses to my telling people that my dad died last week:

"I'm sorry. Please let me use this as an opportunity to name drop my own dead acquaintance who has been in the news all week and pivot to a discussion solely on that."

"Hm. Sucks. Can I come over, use your washer/dryer, and bone? But, like, no dead dad stuff. That's too much for me right now."

"I know I disappeared all weekend the second you mentioned your dead dad, and posted shots of me on social media hanging out with other chicks right after I said I wanted to be exclusive with you, but you didn't text me either, ya know."

"I know we were supposed to hang out and I totally flaked/freaked out on you, but you're a fucking bitch because now there is the potential for you to make me look bad in front of your cool, pro skater friend I've been trying to impress."

People are wonderful.