Happy

It's one month until my birthday.

Unless you are blissfully out of contact with me outside of this blog, you probably know that I love my birthday. I love my birthday the way a five year old loves her birthday. I get excited for it months in advance. I buy a new birthday dress for my parties. I would wear a birthday crown if someone got one for me without any sense of irony whatsoever.

And, let's be honest. My birthday is at the end of September, but I pretty much treat the entire month--from Labor Day until the day after my party--as one whole ohmygodgiantparty. I'm serious. My current calender for the next month has me busy every weekend doing things I adore from star-gazing at a cabin to staying in a yurt drinking wine and singing Skinny Love to standing in the National Museum of Health and Medicine looking at the bullet John Wilkes Booth fired at President Lincoln and thinking about freedom and self-determination. All, of course, concluded with an immense party at the end of the month.

I love my birthday because 364 other days of the year I feel completely unremarkable. I mean, for God's sake, I've spent a significant portion of my life hoping to be recruited to the X-Men, of course an ordinary life doesn't measure up. I'm reasonably bright, but I'm never the smartest person in the room. The only times I'm the prettiest girl in the bar are the times I'm the only girl in the bar. I work hard, but I needed to install Procrastinator to keep myself from going off on web tangents. My birthday is the one day out of the year where none of that seems to matter.

I love my birthday.

***

I don't feel crazy. 

I seem to be having all of my brainstorms while making the bed. Perhaps my mother was on to something for my entire adolescence when she tried to get me to make it before school. I smile a little bit as I tug the quilt straight. I don't feel crazy.

A year ago, I told Kerry that I thought I needed to go into therapy. Stress had caused all of the undiagnosed anxiety and depression to flower into OCD years earlier, which had been getting progressively worse when added along with sheer loneliness. 

A year ago I finally realized that I was so crazy I could barely fake sanity anymore. 

It's this morning, making the bed before going to work that I realize it. 

 I'm not faking anymore. 

***

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question actually catches me off guard. I've been trying to explain the fizziness I've been carrying around in my chest lately. I can vaguely remember being this person. The person whose enthusiasms took over her life, whose passions and interests were a little eclectic, but always pursued to mastery. Who, among the right people, was the human equivalent of a bottle of champagne. I remember this person. I loved this person.

I don't trust this person.

Why should I? She abandoned me when I needed her, badly, when I moved to the North Country. She left me behind and went off to party with her friends, only showing up when I needed to go to the Cities or to see my graduate school friends, and even then she was relatively more reserved.

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question is still lingering. It is normally this is the kind of question that is calibrated exactly to instigate an emotional shut-down for me. I don't like presumption, even on the part of my friends, and I really don't like when they say something even remotely insightful that I haven't considered myself.

It's the kind of question that would normally have me sign off of chat, or feign a phone call from my mother and say my goodbyes. It's the kind of question that makes me pause and reconsider a friendship. It's the kind of question that, more often than not, makes me push someone back to an arm's length away. And I don't know if it's the physical distance or the confessional nature of a friendship conducted via a keyboard and computer screen, but when Preston asks, I don't blow him off. 

I don't answer either.

Instead, I say a silent prayer of gratitude that we're not video-chatters and reach for the Kleenex box.

Yes. 

***

The fizz hasn't evaporated yet. Part of me keeps thinking that it will. 

This is probably all birthday excitement. I tell myself. You'll go back to being an ohmygodunbearablecrazybitch on September 29th. My OCD symptoms, which are entirely gone now, will flare up again. I'll withdraw into myself and let loneliness and self-doubt become my constant companions again. 

But there's a tiny part of my brain, the part that exists somewhere between the effervescence and the moroseness that reminds me to think about last year, who cajoles me to remember what I wrote about how birthdays mark the passage of time, they celebrate the goals we've accomplished, they remind us of the work we still have left to do. 

Regardless of the fact that that Kelly was crazier than a shithouse rat, she was right. There's something about birthdays that makes them(or should make them) magical things. They're the day out of the year when you can put on your party dress and feel like the prettiest  girl in the room. Where you best a friend in an argument and bask triumphantly, momentarily, erroneously in the satisfaction of being the smartest person in the room. It should be a day when you don't think about having never exhibited a mutation or the relationships you've failed in over the past year. 

Birthdays should be the day of the year (month in some of our cases) that you feel that you've accomplished something in the preceding 364 days. Where you feel like whatever it was about the past year--whether it falling into/out of love, moving, keeping the same job you've had for years, is maybejustatinybitremarkable.  

At least, that's how I plan to celebrate this year. 

Lines

My best friend does not know I'm dating someone. 

Granted, she lives in London, but this is still unusual for us. I try not to think about what it means, why I haven't said anything to her. I also try not to think about what means that my roommates don't know I'm seeing someone, that I won't introduce him to any of my friends, that we only see one another after long nights out when my house is empty. That every time we do see one another I feel awful when he leaves. That sometimes when he's angry and yelling it frightens me. And how often he's angry and yelling.

I try not to think about it.

I need some comfort but he's screening my calls. I never expected to be this person. The woman who keeps calling back. Who leaves angry and sad voicemails. The type of woman who hears Ain't Too Proud to Beg in her head on a regular basis. The kind of woman who regularly recognizes the pleading note in her voice, and who sometimes thinks I don't love you and who recognizes this is not how we're supposed to treat one another, but who just can't stop calling back.

It is one of what feels like a thousand fights. One of the late Friday nights after an angry voicemail has sparked off angry texts from him and apologies from me until suddenly he's there and screaming on a street corner and I'm trying to walk away.

It feels like we have done this a thousand times. It feels like we will always do this.

It ends the way it always ends. I'm crying in public, something I hate, and he conjures up a cab and just wants to make sure I get home safely. And in the cab it's his turn. He starts to plead with me. You're crazy. It's not like that. I promise. You're crazy. That's stupid. Why would you think that? And when we get to my house, softly, I'm sorry. 

That's all it takes, I guess, because I don't know whose hands are whose and which of us is pulling the other up the staircase. And in a few minutes in the dark I hear I told you that you were crazy and I wonder how we ended up here, again.  

After he's gone (he never stays), I will say These are the shitty things we do to one another. It helps, a little, to draw lines around what just happened, to make it both of our fault. Saying these are the shitty things we do to one another splits the fault. Some of it belongs to him, but I'm sure most of it is mine.

These are the shitty things we do to one another. 

 I will say it again and again and again until the sun comes up.

***

My Mother is Concerned.

We're on vacation as a family for the first time in years, and I'm in a particularly bad mood. Something on television the night before set me off, and I can't seem to pull it back together. I'm driving her to the grocery store and she's listening to the lyrics to a song I've restarted twice since we've been in the car together. She asks, tentatively, "What is this song about?"

I don't mean my voice to have a hard, bitter edge to it.

"The shitty things men do to women."

She's quiet, I'm quiet, and the album plays to the next track. When she speaks her voice is softer than I'm used to hearing. 

"You know not all men to shitty things to women, right Kelly Marie?" 

I want to be able to tell her yes.

***

I put lines around the relationship. I mark its beginning and where it went wrong and after the fight on the corner or the one at my house or the one I leave a party to have over the phone I say This is the end. I'm putting a line here. This is enough. 

Even after I've said enough, enough hurting one another, enough of doing shitty things to one another, enough tearing one another to shreds, I still leave voicemails. We still text and fight. I still cry, frequently, and he still comes over and whispers in the dark You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. And I feel crazy. For the first time in my life, I feel like there is something deeply wrong with me.

I draw lines around it. I try not to think about it.

When he leaves (because he never stays) I wonder what will need to happen for it to finally be enough.

***

Even with years of retrospection, I take blame for things that weren't my fault. I say here are the shitty things we did to one another. Because saying here are the shitty things you did to me is too hard, too painful. It is too true to say you hurt me. Intentionally. Deliberately. And with great satisfaction. You hurt me and you loved it.

So I draw lines around it. Because it is too big to process.  And I think that I've drawn the lines successfully until I wake up screaming nonononononononono from a nightmare. I think those lines are keeping things in place until I try to ask someone out and am relieved when he says no so that I won't have to worry about drawing the lines in the right spot this time.

I realize this isn't staying behind the lines. And that I am so tired of redrawing those lines.

You hurt me. 

Lists

My life is governed by  lists.

I make a to-do list every single day, whether I'm at work or hanging out around the house. I make them on the weekends. I make them when I go on vacations. I write them down on legal pads, on scrap paper, on checklists on my phone. I get an incredible feeling of satisfaction from crossing things off the lists. I am uneasy when that to-do list still has all of its items listed on it at the end of the day.

I make immense lists of the books I want to read, the historical sites I want to visit, the films I need to watch, the pieces of writing I'd like to do. I keep these lists on my desk at work, with a photo of them on my phone so that if, say, I'm at the library and I can't decide on a book to check out, I can whip the list out of my purse and think Oh yeah, I never did read The Glass Key. Or, Oh God, what was I thinking? I'm never going to read Moby Dick and I have to come to terms with it.

I love lists.

***

This week I crossed something off my bucket list.

I haven't been great about what's on my bucket list. There are the big things I want to achieve: write a book about the Scopes Trial, go to Gettysburg, see The Royal Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet. But as far as the smaller things, things like "Seeing the Dred Scott Courthouse Site" don't occur to me until afterward. I've always wanted to see General Sherman's graveside, but it was never on the bucket list. More than that, I put a ton of things on the list that don't actually matter to me, but are reflections of . . . the people I'm dating? The friends I've made? I don't know, but they don't belong there. So usually when I "cross something off my bucket list" it's because I've decided that it shouldn't have been there in the first place.

This was not one of those. This was an actual ohmygodIcan'tbelievethatactuallyhappened moments. I'm pleased there's photographic evidence of it happening because I'd be tempted to think that I dreamed it otherwise.

I met my favorite author.

I've met a number of authors that I admire throughout the course of my life. It's the gift of going to a college that takes bringing in writers to talk about writing very seriously. I remember all of the questions I asked them, what they said to me as they signed my books. Sarah Vowell and I talked about the Kennedy assassination. I told Billy Collins my mother hated my poetry but loved his. I laughed so loudly from the second row of a David Sedaris reading that he shot me a look. 

This was different. It was, simply, too intense to describe. I can't even remember what this man said to me when I said hello and told him what I had to tell him. I can say that he was very, very kind to a sweaty, shaky, stuttery, earnest young woman. And that when I made it back out to my car I cried. And I walked away deeply grateful for this man and his work. 

When I got back to my bucket list on Tuesday afternoon I looked at it for a long moment before reaching out to scratch the item off. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

This week has been a messy, emotional one for me. In the space of seven days, I flew to St. Louis, attended one of my good friend's wedding, spent the 4th of July at the site where Dred Scott was tried, visited a ton of Civil War graves, flew back to Minnesota, met this author, came back up to the North Country and packed the rest of my house. I'm not complaining. It was a really good week.

But now that my entire life is in boxes, now that the internet has been disconnected, and my clothes have been sorted into vacation, second vacation, need after first move, can be stored until after second move suitcases, now that I've read literally all the books left in my house I find myself with a little too much time on my hands. 

Of course I would use that time for unproductive self-reflection. 

I feel like a failure. 

I confide this to exactly one person during the course of the week in a moment of profound vulnerability that I hate myself for later. 

***

I'm slinking out of the North Country.

I'll admit it. This place whupped me. The winters were too dark, too cold, too snowy. The summers (ha!) were brief and cool. The people were (with a few notable exceptions) distant. The goddamn roads have potholes that could take off your front wheel. 

When I moved here two years ago, I didn't know if it was permanent, but I anticipated leaving with some indications of success. A boyfriend (or at least, a relationship that lasted longer than my normal six months), a hugely successful professional tenure, I was going to write my book, figure out how to be a spiritually fulfilled adult without being Catholic, finally learn to play my harmonica . . .

I did not succeed here.

More than that, I suspect I could have succeeded here. I could have made this city work, these people open up to me. I could have adapted to snow and darkness and cold. I could have done it. I could have done it if I had gone to see a therapist earlier. I could have done it if I had started taking anti-depressants. I could have done it if I just learned how to be happy. 

But I didn't. I didn't accomplish any of those things on my North Country list. And now instead of leaving amid tearful going away parties, poetic break-ups, and enormously lucrative counter-offers, I am sneaking out of town with as little fanfare as possible. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

I feel like even more of a failure for opening up the way I did this week. For getting shaky and struggling not to cry while I said "This book saved my life." For admitting that this part of the country pushed me right up to the brink and left me mess that I've been slowly sorting out. For saying out loud "I couldn't make this work."

***

Somehow, despite never having added "Surround yourself with kind people" to a list, that is exactly what I've managed to do. When I stutter out what I want to say to the author he pauses and reaches out for my hand and lets me give him a hug. While I'm mentally slapping myself for admitting to failing here in the North, I receive a thoughtful, insightful response that burns me with its compassion.

I'm never going to be able to shake the habit of writing out lists for myself, like I'll never be able to stop measuring success by what I've managed to cross off. But I hope that I've finally managed to learn to put the right things on the list. 

Alone Awake

And still I know that love is never free.

It bows your head and bends your knees. 

-Dessa 

I'm never more grateful to be with someone than on Sundays.

Sunday is my favorite day of the week, the day that I guard fiercely. The week is for work and errands. Friday is for opening the pressure valve in whatever way. Saturday is for crossing things off the to-do list. Sunday is for doing nothing. It's for long, relaxing bike rides. It's for lazy Sunday brunches, coffee with the paper on the porch, lounging in your pajamas.

And being with someone on a Sunday? Well, it's a bit like that old song, isn't it?

This Sunday is both different and not different. This past week was emotionally vampiric and the weekend was wonderful and exhausting. I traveled over the weekend, as I've done most weekends lately. I saw a movie that was deeply satisfying on a level I didn't realize until much later. There was a live concert that has left my voice scratchy. There were irritations too, the inability to find an apartment, the lack of sleep for three nights running, but those were mild. And now they're being quietly soothed away.

It's a bit after 9:00 and we've just gone to bed. I'm wiped out from the weekend. He recognizes that while I came home happy today, my feathers were a little ruffled from too little sleep and too much socializing. I'm also just a touch nervous about what's coming down the pike for us. Whatever we're doing, we both know that it has an expiration date. We knew it when we met for that first game of Scrabble.

 Neither of us could possibly care less.

So we've set the alarms and have crawled into bed. It's hothothot, that sticky, damp, late summer heat that makes me glad I've recently cut off all my hair and anxious to move back north. It's too warm to sleep curled together, but he's reading to me from a historical fiction novel and slowly twining my curls around his fingers.  I make a tiny, quiet noise that's somewhere between longing and contentment and somewhere in my drowsy mind I think Iamtooyoungtoappreciatethismoment. And I am right. But for now, his voice reading quietly and his fingers in my hair are the last thing I know until the alarm beeps at 8:00 am.

'Cause I didn't come to play it safe.

I came to win or lose with you.

-Dessa 

What do you give up?

I can't stop asking myself that question lately. I ask it when deciding between a ten mile road race and a duathalon in September. I ask it when packing my suitcase, thinking about the lovely cool weather I'm leaving here in North Country.

I ask t it while I'm standing in the middle of a crowd at First Avenue, watching as one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite musicians takes the stage and brings the house down.

I wanted part of this essay to be about that show. And what it was like to see an artist I admire in a venue and a city I love, with people I treasure. And I think I could have written it, if I had not trusted the intervening 48 hours to help me solidify my thoughts on it. But the more I try to write about it, the more I am frustrated by the slipperiness of words and experience. 

I am a different person after the show.

It's sounds rather grandiose. Like you should automatically dismiss everything that comes before and after because the person writing is obviously the hysterical type, and cannot be trusted to give an accurate account of what happened. She's the worst kind of unreliable narrator.

Fuck off.

It is the purpose of good art, good writing, is it not? To squirm its way subtly into our heads and hearts. To hit us across the face with a two-by-four and change how we look at something. To quietly devastate us and leave us trembling and moved and profoundly, deeply different.

But there's no sword without an edge

And I sleep uneasily when you're not in my bed. 

-Dessa

What do you give up?

I ask it while watching my friends fall in love, thinking to myself what dreams, ambition, ideals are you giving up to be with this person? Are they worth it?

And do you ever really know?

I only live alone awake,

'Cause every night, yeah, you pass through. 

-Dessa

How can it be 8 am already?

It's the first thing that pops into my mind as I reach blindly for the alarm, quietly cursing and brushing my long hair our of my eyes. It's just there, under the fictionalized account of Thomas Cromwell's life that I fell asleep reading, which is just beyond the pillow I fell asleep wrapped around. I'm a little groggy, the result of an OTC sleeping pill and nearly twelve hours of deep sleep. But when I stumble out of bed, I'm smiling. As I'm getting ready for work I try to decide what possible significance July 1st can have that dropped me out of bed in such a good mood. It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg? No, that's not it. One week until I meet Neil Gaiman? Possibly,  but there's a lot going on between now and then. My impending trip to St. Louis? No, I've still got to pack and travel, that seems impossibly far off.

Fully dressed and humming an Etta James song to myself, I grab my keys and my work bag and head out the door. Whatever pleasant dream or memory was there in the moments before I woke up this morning, I'm in a good mood on a Monday. I'm not about to give that up.

Actually, It Started

In May my friend Lauren wrote a post about God hitting her upside the head.

I started thinking about it today, right after the Universe was smacked me upside the head with its own two-by-four

***

This blog started last week when I sat down to try to write a post about moving back to Minneapolis/St. Paul. Oh right. You may not know about that because I never managed to write the fucking post.

I'm moving back to Minneapolis/St. Paul.

It scares the hell out of me.

When I moved to the North Country two years ago, I always suspected that the move was, well, probably not permanent. I liked the work I was doing well enough, but I didn't know how I felt about living in a place where it snows over eighty inches a year. And I didn't know how I felt about living hundreds of miles away from people I loved. And the longer I stayed here, the more apparent it became that I didn't quite fit in. I don't kayak or canoe. I like running, but not when I have to use YakTrax to do it. I would rather get papercuts on my corneas than go skiing in any capacity. But I stayed. I told myself I was staying because I wanted to learn to be on my own. I wanted to learn loneliness and how to live with it. My Daddy didn't raise a quitter.

And those were . . . well, they were part of the reason I stayed. The bigger reason, I suspect was because the North Country became a convenient excuse. My love life is rotten? The guys here are awful! Having a difficult time with anxiety? The sun is barely out for five hours a day in the winter! All those professional goals you have for yourself? Well, they're overly ambitious and now I can scale them back and not set myself up for disappointment!

A few weeks ago I interviewed for and was offered a new position, one for an organization I adore doing work that I love. It's a big job. It's a job that it's a big deal for me to have as early in my professional life as I am. It's a job that excites me and scares the crap out of me in (almost) equal measure.

I almost didn't take it.

My life here in the North Country, while it isn't particularly satisfying, is completely comfortable. I can be single here and not wonder if I'm not trying. I have a job I'm pretty good at, whose rhythms and quirks I understand really well. Here in the North Country, no one can see how terrible I am at adulthood. How I forget laundry in the dryer for a week, how my bathroom constantly looks like a group of frat guys spent the night.

The thing was, if I took this job in the Twin Cities it would be entirely unknown. It would be difficult and rewarding in ways I honestly could not fathom. And if I couldn't make a relationship shake out in the Twin Cities, surrounded by interested, engaging men, I wouldn't be able to make one work anywhere. And God knows a move South wouldn't magically make me into a grown-up.

In the end, I took the job.

***

Actually, this post started sometime earlier this year, when I wrote a post about writing dangerously. 

For the past--holy shit--almost a year already, I've been walking around feeling like my skin is inside out. Feeling like I have a bad sunburn and people keep poking it or making me take a scaldingly hot shower. 

It's been wonderful.

It's been terrible. 

Writing about what's going on in my head when I'm alone, writing about who I want to be and who I'm afraid I actually am, exposing all most of what's going on in my head and my heart has made me feel so vulnerable there are days when I'm afraid I won't be able to stand it. Writing about my mental health issues has convinced me that I'm never going to find a partner if they happen along this blog first. Who would want to be a part of this mess?

Writing about obsessive-compulsive disorder, writing about depression and anxiety has left me wondering ohmygodhowcanthisdoanyoneanygood? And there'snopointinselfflagellatinginpublic. Every time I write something about mental health I consider trashing the whole blog, of just deleting it straight off. Because it hurts to write these things, and it's really fucking hard to risk my family and friendships on something when I wonder what good it could possibly be doing.

This weekend I was sitting outside with some friends. I can't remember how it came up, but it came out that I write this blog. A friend had never read it, never heard of it, and I made some offhand comment about how it's mostly silly, mostly me bitching about my love life and being crazy. Rather unexpectedly Jacob sushed me and even more unexpectedly got really, really gushy about my writing. And it was uncomfortable. And it was sweet. And at first I chalked it up to sun and lawn games and beer and expected he probably wouldn't remember being quite so enthusiastic the next day. Until something tumbled out of his mouth.

"Her writing made me want to be a better writer." 

At this point I actually had to get up and go inside to refill my water glass. Because, well, shit. 

Three days later and I still can't articulate a response to that one. 

***

Actually this post started this morning, when I was up early writing and listening to the new Dessa album. 

You know where this is going.

There was that song. That song that suddenly becomes my new obsession, the song that I've listened to on repeat all day today. The song that is the perfect song for this part of my life. And, as always happens, it was the lyrics and really knocked me out.

Around here we don't like talk of big dreams

To stand out is a pride and conceit. 

To aim high is to make waves, to split seams.

But that's not what it seems like to me.

I wanna try, I wanna risk  .

And I don't wanna walk, rather swing and miss. 

And suddenly there was the Universe, wielding its two-by-four, swinging straight at my forehead. 

The only two things I have ever wanted to do are big things. I've always wanted to change the world and be a writer. And by grace or divine intervention or sheer blind luck, I am finally doing both. In two years I've raised nearly half a million dollars for organizations that are trying to improve the lives of girls and women. Over the past year, I've written some things for this blog that I'm really proud of. There are days when I leave work crying over some depressing statistics that I read or heard. There are days when I've written something that's too hard, too much of myself, and I don't want to share it. And these things are risky and have left me vulnerable and open in ways I couldn't have anticipated. But this morning, spellbound by this Dessa song I realized that these crazy, difficult, risky things I'm doing are helping be the person I've always wanted to be. And that I can either stay stagnant, stay comfortable, stay in the North Country and write small, obtuse poems that don't mean anything to anyone but me. Or I can take the risks, do the work, and possibly bite it, hard, but put something out into the world that means something. That makes someone rest a little easier, get a mental health diagnosis a little sooner. 

Who am I kidding? I made this decision a year ago , with that first post, when the Universe first started eyeing up my forehead. 

Pretty

My favorite moment in Firefly comes in Heart of Gold.

Don't get me wrong, I think Our Mrs. Reynolds is the best episode, hands down. It's funny, it's smart, it has Christina Hendricks, but my favorite moment in the entire show, the moment I find most relatable, comes during a conversation Kaylee and Wash have.

Kaylee: Everyone's got somebody. Wash, tell me I'm pretty.
Wash: Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion.
Kaylee: 'Cause I'm pretty?
Wash: 'Cause you're pretty.

When I first watched this episode with my roommate Maggie (who introduced me to Firefly) I made her rewind that particular bit of dialogue about five times. It became shorthand for us, the thing I would text here when I was feeling fat or ugly or was on my way to a date and need a confidence booster.

Wash, tell me I'm pretty. 

***

Over the weekend, I had an hour long conversation with a friend about boobs.

I fall into the category of women who are euphemistically called "busty." Busty would be a great word if we still all wore corsets and clothing made to, you know, make the most out of a large chest, but in a world where I can literally spend an entire eight hour day looking for a button down shirt that both buttons up over my chest and doesn't look like I'm wearing a circus tent, I prefer the truth. 

I have enormous boobs. 

***

Back in December, I wrote a post about having beautiful friends and what that does to a woman over time. And it was popular. People liked it and what it said and the way it was written. But, as I do with this blog, when I told a truth, I only told half of it. Here's the rest. 

There is no part of my body I have not thought "Huh I could use (insert cosmetic surgery)" about. 

Teeth Invisaligned? Where can I sign up? Jaw reset so it stop clicking and I actually have a chin? I could do food through a straw for a few weeks. Scars from bike accidents and teenage acne removed? As long as it doesn't leave more scars, yeah, let's go. 

***

While writing this post I have, no fewer than eight times, paused to consider deleting the whole damn thing. Because I'm not trawling for sympathy ohmygodkellyyou'retotallybeautiful. (Ew.) But moreso because I hate admitting that the one thing I'd change about myself is my looks. And it's true. If I had two buttons sitting in front of me, one that would increase my IQ 25% and one that would make me 25% more beautiful, most days I would push the button to make me more beautiful. 

It seems I've already got the attendant shallowness down. 

***

When I was in college, my roommate Krista used to give me advice before I went to parties. 

Just fake it, Kel. 

Fake being comfortable in a large group of people. Fake the ability to talk to strangers. Fake being the chatty, outgoing person that you want to be. Fake confidence and eventually you'll have it. 

It is, as I discovered, pretty standard advice to people going into socially uncomfortable situations or job interviews. Fake confidence for long enough and you'll eventually have it. 

I am really fucking good at faking it. 

I can make offhanded comments Oh, it must be so hard to be around a woman who's bright and beautiful and funny fairly frequently. It seems to work. Or it seems to work in groups. But the second someone pulls out a camera, I instinctively wince and think "I will be untagging this picture on Facebook" or "Oh, God, I need to shift around so no one can see my chins!" Or "Shit, a picture at breakfast? What the hell is the matter with you!? Can't you see I'm not wearing a bra?" On one very memorable occasion, I got into bed with a guy I had been seeing still wearing my bra. Have you ever tried to sleep in an underwire bra? Probably not. You know why? It's really fucking uncomfortable and no woman in her right mind who is dating someone will do it. 

And, somehow, those aren't even my low points. When I'm home alone I only look in the mirror when absolutely necessary. I realized recently that my medicine cabinet is almost always open so that I don't have to look in the mirror until I'm actually ready to do it, until I've . . . I don't know screwed up the courage to do it or something ridiculous. 

Just fake it, Kel.

***

I hate my chest with all of the intensity of a star going super-nova. 

I have very few good reasons for hating it so much. Yeah, a big chest makes buying clothes that fit sort of tricky, but I don't have any back problems. My boobs don't make it difficult to go running or biking or do any of the things that I enjoy doing. I just don't like them because I just don't like them. They're not trying their best. They're not working hard to ensure that we're a package deal. Nope, they're just there, apparently doing their best to undermine all the work my brain and my personality and my intellect are doing.

The thing that frustrates me the most about my boobs, about my body. the thing that makes me (yes, occassionally, so sue me) hate it beyond reason is the fact that the genetic lot I got stuck with is just that: the genetic lot I got stuck with. I'm always going to be five-foot-three-and-three-quarters. My thighs are always going to touch. My hair is always going to look like a madwoman's and I will never, never in my life learn how to flip it seductively. 

I'm comfortable enough with myself intellectually to know that if I don't know something I can always go out and learn it. And, yeah, I'll never understand complex mathematics, but I write well and I can think through arguments, and I have a weird propensity to remember things I've been told in the form of a narrative. I can't raise my IQ, true, but I can fake convincingly enough that I manage to believe it myself. 

Our hour long conversation about boobs isn't really about boobs as much as it's about breast reduction surgery. About the pros and cons of losing two pounds on each side of your chest (believe me, they're mostly pros.) Really, it's about whether or not with a smaller, different, better body part I'll actually be happier.

The answer is, of course, no. My insecurities, my desire to be pretty have very little to do with with my actual component body parts or even the whole that they make up. Just like losing weight, buying new clothes, getting a new hair cut, etc ad nauseam are never going to make me stop saying Wash, tell me I'm pretty.    

Headache

When I arrived home from work today, the very first thing I did was dash around to the front of the house.

Today, you see, is a very special day. 

Today is Ocean at the End of the Lane Day. 

I came relatively late to the Neil Gaiman party. I'd heard of American Gods, and had friends who mentioned that he lived in Minneapolis and would talk about his books constantly, but I never read him. Because no one ever suggested that I should. When I finally got around to reading him, I was hooked within the first twenty pages. I devoured everything I could get my hands on that he had written. His short stories. His novels. The graphic novels made out of his novels. The audiobooks. His young adult fiction. I read everything of his that I could borrow from the library or steal from one of my friends or find the cash to buy out of my tiny monthly book budget. 

I was late to the Neil Gaiman party, but once I arrived I put on my party hat, threw a fistful of glitter in the air, got wasted, and insisted everyone sing Call Your Girlfriend and dance with me. 

Right. Ocean at the End of the Lane. 

When I skittered around to the front porch there was the box, as promised. I barely responded to my neighbors, sitting out front enjoying the sunshine. I snatched up the box, hurried into my house, and very nearly burst into tears. 

Yup. I was very nearly crying over a new book. A book I hadn't even read yet. A book that was still in the packaging. If anyone saw me, they'd wonder if I needed to have my head examined. 

***

It was, inevitably, a comic book that saved my life.

Depression isn't about sadness. It's not the blues. It's not feeling bummed out. Or morose. Or dispirited. Or just plain old unhappiness. In fact, depression, for me, was never about feeling. We laugh (I laughed) at the depiction in Twilight of Bella Swan sitting spaced out in a chair as months rolled by, but I am deeply ashamed to admit that that is exactly how I experienced depression. 

Depression was never about feeling. It was about not feeling. It was about numbness. About day after day of sheer, grinding, nothingness. If I felt anything it was anxiety or worry.  I think I would have taken getting worked up into a lather about something just for the change. But I just . . . couldn't. Instead I went to work, came home, and sat for hours in front of the television, not reading, not thinking, not writing, not doing anything I enjoyed because if I just sat there I could shut off my brain and not think about why I wasn't feeling anything. 

My mental health issues had been building for years. I was always an anxious kid, and my parents would tell me constantly to just stop worrying. As if it was a choice. As it was, I spent most of my life with gradually building anxiety and depression that were never addressed. They built up so slowly that before I realized it, I had tucked my heart away inside of a glass jar. And it was fine in that jar, no one could hurt me as long as it was in there, but I couldn't feel anything and worse--I couldn't remember a time when I had felt something.

It was, quite simply, terrifying.

I was deeply, borderline desperately, unwell. But I didn't know it. I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who would contemplate suicide, but suddenly there I was, standing on just the other side of the line separating me from that level of despair.  Now, writing this, for the first time I realize how unwell I was and how fucking good I was at hiding it. Depression was insidious. Its onset was so gradual that I couldn't talk about it, couldn't recognize it for what it was. And I couldn't make it better. And I couldn't imagine a future where I felt anything.

So, the winter of 2011 in the North Country. The lack of sunlight is enough to make anyone a little potty, but added to loneliness, depression, and anxiety, and I was a fucking disaster. And I was very, very good at hiding it. On the outside I was a successful, put-together, well-liked, respected young professional. Inside I was just a mess.

And for whatever reason, I decided that the thing to do during that period of my life was read Neil Gaiman's Sandman. 

What a stupid idea. 

Sandman is many things, like all of Gaiman's writing. It is layered and witty and sad and funny and deeply frightening. It is not a wintertime comic. It is not a comic to read while you're suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression. 

I read it anyway. 

I fell apart. 

I went to pieces during the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes. During a scene in A Hope in Hell I set the comic down and wept. I cried for longer than I had cried at any one time in years. And when I was finished, when the hiccups I had given myself settled down, I picked it up and kept reading. I finished the whole series in the course of a week, more reading than I had done at any one time during the previous year. 

It sounds silly and dramatic and sophomoric to say that a comic book saved my life. I know that. But I also know that when I read that one specific line in A Hope in Hell and started crying during a completely mad, fantastic, absurd story, that I felt something for the first time in months. I wouldn't have my real Come to Jesus moment about my mental health for another nine months but reading Sandman put microscopic cracks in the jar where I was keeping my heart.

***

The highest compliment that I can give a television show, a book, a movie is "I cried so hard I gave myself a headache." It's the experience I had two years ago, sitting on my bed reading A Hope in Hell and feeling something for the first time in months. 

I finished Ocean at the End of the Lane between when I started writing this blog and now. And it was brilliant. And beautiful. And deeply moving. And completely mad and terrifying and a thousand other things that I've come to expect from Neil Gaiman's writing. And I cried so hard I gave myself a headache. Partially, I expect, because it's that good.

It's also, I expect, because these days many more things are making me cry. And that's a hopeful thing.