So Sad Today (14 page)

I asked the men who they were. I don’t know what compelled me to ask. That was the second miracle.

The men told me who they were. The third miracle is that I followed them into the church.

I have not had a drink or a drug since.

I’m not going to tell you exactly who these people were, because I’m not a spokesperson for them. I will say that they got me sober and continue to keep me sober. I will say that they are most likely in your town or city too. I think that you probably know who they are. If you can’t figure it out, and you really want to know, you can email me directly at [email protected] and I will tell you one-on-one.

After I got sober, I stopped going into withdrawal every morning and no longer felt like I was dying within twenty minutes of waking up. But my anxiety was still triggered, from time to time, by the new hyperclarity of the world. When I experienced my feelings deeply, I thought that I was going crazy. The only frame of reference I had for contextualizing emotional experiences was in terms of drugs. Now, when I felt a shift in my feelings, I could no longer attribute the change to drugs and alcohol. So I assumed either I was losing it or was dying.

I’m still very scared of my feelings and never wholly convinced that they are not going to kill me. But the panic attacks are no longer daily occurrences. Rather, they come in cycles. I’ll be feeling okay for a number of months and think that I will never have one again. Then I’ll have a really bad one and get scared of having more, thus triggering a cycle.

Also, I don’t really get panic attacks when I’m alone anymore, only when I’m with people. My fear among people is that I will be judged for revealing what is going on inside me. I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.

One panic attack I had like this, which was almost psychedelic in nature, was the night before my wedding. I was at a dinner with my family and my soon-to-be husband’s family, but my parents were late to get there. My soon-to-be mother-in-law was talking about pepper. I was going out of my mind. I just couldn’t understand how this woman was talking about pepper so casually when I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird it was that we were real, seated around an object, wearing cloth over our bodies, and had no idea why.

When my parents finally arrived, I took one look at them and started crying. I felt a comfort in seeing their faces that I had never felt before. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I wept and wept. Looking back, I think that I felt grief about leaving one stage of my life and entering a new stage. It had been more than ten years since I had lived under their roof. But there was something primal and archetypal about the transition from woman to wife. It was bigger than me.

After I cried, I felt better. I was able to return to the table and function like a human being without wondering what that meant. I think it was then that I first made the connection that underneath my anxiety was a great sadness. When I suppressed the sadness, I practically shook with existential fear over simply existing. I was fighting myself. But when the tears flowed, I felt better.

A few years later, I went through a particularly harrowing cycle of panic attacks. This one went on for months and simply wouldn’t abate. I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to “keep it together.” I would sit at my desk at work literally vibrating, and none of my usual fixes—the steps for combatting attacks I’d found in an ebook I’d relied on, my psychiatrist upping my meds—were working.

A friend of mine recommended that I go see a shaman she’d been working with. The idea of a New York City shaman sounded nuts. Also it cost a lot. But I was
desperate. Also, I trusted this friend when she said that the work they were doing was releasing shit in her that had been blocked for years.
You can heal
, she said to me.
I used to think that I could heal a little bit or heal some things about me but not the deepest, darkest shit. But I’m discovering that you can actually really heal the worst stuff. So it’s gone for good.

The thing that scared me most about going to see the shaman was that it would be an intimate, one-on-one experience with a stranger, for many hours. At this point, my anxiety was so intense that I was scared to be one-on-one with anyone who might get close enough to me to see what was really going on. I was scared she would judge me. But I went to her little office on the Lower East Side. It was filled with stones and crystals. Also there was a cat. I was relieved by the cat, because it was something to hold.

The shaman was Irish. She asked me some questions about how I’d been feeling, physically. I told her that right at that moment, I felt like the area from my rib cage to my neck was going to explode. It wasn’t a heart attack–type sensation. More like a balloon full of mourning. I could not say what I was mourning.

The shaman said,
That doesn’t sound like anxiety to me. It sounds like depression.

Then she turned off the lights and said some prayers.
She spoke with some of the archangels. She asked me to close my eyes and to speak to them as well. I was like,
What the fuck?
But I was paying a lot, so I did it.

I chose the archangel Michael. I didn’t know anything about him. To this day I don’t particularly feel that attached to him. He was just the one who came into my head.

She asked if Michael could go down into my body. I was like,
Okay
. She asked me to go with him. She asked me to report what I saw. She also said to suspend any doubts I might have about possession or being inhabited by foreign bodies or beings. She said we all contain foreign bodies or beings—things that are not ours and not our soul within us. She said we sometimes pick them up from other people. Like there are things we are taught that aren’t ours. Or they are curses. She said that every time a parent yells at a child that it is a curse.

The shaman, Michael, and I found a bat, two rats, and a shield-shaped being inside the walls of my sternum. She asked Michael to give them a boat to heaven so they could leave me.

The bat and the rats left easily. They hadn’t even known they were inside me. The shield-shaped being, I discovered, was passed down from my father’s family. He was full of biting sarcasm and believed he was there to protect me. The shield-shaped being was trying
to protect my soul orb, a snow-globe-type thing that lived behind my rib cage. The problem was that while the shield-shaped being was protecting me from hurt, no light could get in either.

The shaman talked to the shield-shaped being in shield language, which turned out to be English. She let him know I was not his home and gave him permission to leave me. He cried as he left my body.

The shaman said I was now vacant of beings. She said my core would not stay empty. I would repopulate with me.

When I left the shaman I felt like I could breathe again. But I didn’t feel like that for long. I can’t say whether the bats, rats, and shield I saw were real or unreal. Like, I think what I saw were archetypes. I think I entered a hypnotic place between sleep and waking where you can suspend your disbelief. But if the shaman is right—that the ideas and pains we acquire from outside ourselves are actual beings—then I think she missed some. I still feel very much populated by them.

One thing that the shaman gave me was the ability to call what I was feeling depression. I had never called it that before. When I told my psychiatrist about the shaman, I was like,
She said I had depression
. The psychiatrist was like,
Oh yes, you definitely do
. I was like,
Um, it would’ve been cool if you had said something to me before
.
I guess she thought I knew that when we spoke of my anxiety we were also speaking of depression.

I was still struggling a lot, particularly at work. But I did find something else that helped a little bit. When I felt like I was dying, I began tweeting anonymously from an account that I called @sosadtoday. I was mostly tweeting into the abyss. I followed, like, three people who I had admired on weird Twitter but who I didn’t follow from my personal Twitter account. That was it.

But there was something about the visceral impact of sending what I was feeling out into the universe that felt different than just writing in a journal. It gave me relief. Maybe it was just the dopamine of hitting Send, but I felt like things were starting to move and clear out of me. Then people started following, in rapid numbers. The account grew and grew.

Then a really weird thing happened. I began to come out of my all-consuming anxiety and depression. But what I found was that there were always daily sadnesses to tweet about. I had never acknowledged this before, how sad things were. I guess I had always felt that to admit to myself that I was sad meant it was real. It made me feel like a loser. Who wants to be sad? But all of those sadnesses, unacknowledged over time, were pushing up against the Band-Aids I put over them. As anxiety and depression, they were screaming to get out.

As I mined my feelings for the account, which grew bigger and bigger, I felt like the opposite of a loser. I felt popular. I felt popular based on my truth. I began to celebrate this sensitive part of me—the things that I thought were most despicable: my need for constant validation, disappointment, feeling gross and fat and ugly. Also more essential things like, Why are we here? And what’s the point? The more real I was, the more people could relate. It seemed like there were a shitload of people who were scared of life and death, also people who were disappointed when they tried to partake in activities to cover over these fears and the activities didn’t work out, and they were forced once again to return to their primal sadnesses.

There were other Twitter accounts in this vein that seemed stupid to me. There were accounts where people were saying,
If you’re depressed or sad, just get up and dance
. That’s a crazy fucking thing to tell a depressed person. I felt that in the reality of what I had experienced, it was a lot more helpful to just lie there and share experiences with others who understood. What worked for me was to maybe make myself laugh about my plight, and through the grace of the Internet, make other people laugh.

The experience of being alive, its
is
ness, maybe in relation to the future
isn’t
ness of death or maybe
independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes. Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die. I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.

Why aren’t we all walking around and acknowledging this all the time? Maybe we can’t afford to. Maybe when we’re not in the fear and sadness, we run from it. We don’t want to think about it.

I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue—a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn’t someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn’t someone have said, “Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it,” so I didn’t have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says,
I’m alive and it’s real
. It says,
I’m going to die and it’s real
.

With a name like So Sad Today, I feel pressure to write the perfect essay about anxiety and depression. But it’s the illusion of perfection that catalyzes my anxiety
and depression. Perfectionism turns a minor shift in body temperature, a missed breath, into a full-fledged panic attack, especially when I am in the company of people for whom I feel I need to perform. The beginnings of a panic attack—the shortness of breath, the tightness in my chest, the unreality—are simply sensations. They will escalate or dissolve based on how fearfully I respond to them. Thus far, I’ve usually responded fearfully.

Perfectionism, of course, is not the sole culprit in my anxiety and depression. There is also chemistry, sensitivity, history, nurture, DNA, and questions existential and mystic—questions I have been discouraged from thinking about too hard, like,
Why am I here? What is all of this? Am I going to die? Am I going to die right now? If I die right now, is that all there is? If I don’t die right now, is this all there is?

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like,
Yo, what the fuck?

In the name of perfectionism, I have tried to stick to a linear narrative in describing my history of anxiety and depression, as it is a trajectory that most of us can follow in our surface comings and goings. Hopefully I was able
to transcend it just a little. Maybe you relate to my
what the fuckness
and feel a little better about your own. All I want from you is to be liked. Of course, that is a scared woman’s way of saying what I really want, which is to connect with you on a deep and true level while I am still on this earth, and maybe even after I am off it.

Love and thanks to:

Sara Weiss, for bringing me on

Karah Preiss, for moving and shaking

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, for being more than an agent

Libby Burton, for edits on fleek

Jonathan Smith, for VICE cool and unexpected kindness

The first SST followers, for finding me in a dark corner of the Internet

THE TEENS, I love you most of all!!! <3 <3 <3

Liz Pelly, Jenn Pelly, Brandon Stosuy, Gabby Bess, James Montgomery, Preteen Gallery, Hazel Cills, Nimrod Kamer, Simon Vozick-Levinson, Safy Hallan-Farrah, Sky Ferreira, and Dev Hynes, for blowing my shit up

Brad Listi, for dreaming big. Bush did 9/11. #chalupa

Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, for publicizing a publicist

Carolyn Kurek, best copyedits ever

Roxane Gay, Jami Attenberg, Molly Crabapple, and Bethany Cosentino for being lovely and early responders

Geoff Kloske, for Meredith (and also just being nice)

Kristen Iskandrian and Lorian Long, for witchin’ out

Tyler Crawford, ilysm bae

Hayley, for going through it all with me, I love you

Mom and Dad, I love you (and sorry)

Nicky, for the comprehensive love package and keeping it the most real

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others. Thanks to
VICE
and
The Fanzine
, where some of the material in
So Sad Today
first appeared in a different form.