the habit of being

It’s weird. It’s as if I just woke up one day and realized that everything is fine. I know that isn’t really what happened. In fact, it took an absolutely absurd number of good things happening to me, one after another after another, to get me to even entertain the possibility that maybe my life isn’t awful, that I’m not perpetually stuck in the shithole that was 2002, that my life isn’t Ruined Forever.

But it feels like one day, maybe last week or the week before, maybe yesterday, I just woke up and everything had changed. I can’t say which day it was, because that didn’t happen, and in fact just last week or the week before or yesterday I was crying and feeling terrible. But it’s like that doesn’t even matter, because right now I can look at my life, my whole life as it is, and say: this is good, this is as it should be.

Normally, I can’t see this at all. At most, I can, even from the mud of my self-pity, force myself to admit that at least one thing is going alright: At least I live in New York. At least my boss thinks I’m smart. At least my mother loves me. At least I’m not ill. At least my fish hasn’t died. And my favorite: I am so lonely and so miserable, so damaged and untouchable, but at least I’m not boring. The problem is that I can’t even look at one positive aspect of my life without weighing it against that seemingly unbearable load of all my baggage and problems, such that the good thing seems so tiny and feeble in comparison that it’s no longer worth acknowledging, let alone celebrating, at all.

When I was 11 or 12 or smaller, I really thought depressed people were fascinating. They wrote all the really moving stories and had all the intense feelings and they seemed so honest and so interesting. And I knew I had some of this stuff in me too, so I played it up. I wrote the kind of stories that depressed girls wrote, and I wore the kind of clothes that depressed girls wore. But, somewhere, for years, even as the sad stories started coming true, in the back of my mind I was worried that maybe it was all just pretend. Maybe I was only pretending to suffer so I could be edgy and cool.

But the suffering got worse and worse and at some point I decided there was just no way it couldn’t be real. Not only was it real, it was everything I had. My suffering became who I was and what my art was about and what made me make art in the first place. To know suffering, I thought, was what it meant to really get it in life.

In a lot of ways, I still believe that. I believe that if you can really go deep into what hurts you, you can learn to understand much more than your personal sadness: you can understand why the world is in the mess it’s in, why people sometimes do horrible things, why religions exist, all sorts of things. I fully believe that suffering is the way to compassion, and that compassion is essential.

But now, I also know I wasn’t wrong when I was 11 or 12. This whole notion of worrying about being a “poseur” is something that seems so adolescent, so immature. And it’s supposed to be some triumph when we stop worrying about whether we’re really being who we really are. But maybe that worry is a real insight. Maybe, even now, my suffering is just pretend.

By “pretend” I don’t mean it’s worthless or it’s dishonest or it’s fake. I just mean it’s something I made up. Pretending about sadness really can lead to real sadness. My reality has always been something I made up. I’d like to think that there’s some outside of me reality, some essential truth or whatever, but I don’t really know. Maybe someday I will feel more sure about that. But for today, I’m just going to pretend to be happy instead.

Nothing is really any different. It’s just that I have this amazing job and this warm, supportive family, and I have this healthy body and these brilliant friends and I live in this endlessly fascinating place, surrounded by beauty, everyday, and my mind is capable and flexible and compared to all that, a little pain, even a lot of pain, just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

(Two more)

1. When I was a child, I was very particular about my socks. The thing was that I didn’t like to feel them. My mother had to align that little line across my toes just exactly right, had to pull and shove my heel into place, pat everything down and smooth out every crease. She sat on the floor with me, with a pile of balled-up pairs. I kicked and pulled them off. She tried another if the first wouldn’t work. If there was a bump in my shoe, I screamed. A thread between my toes sounded like a knife blade. Sometimes she gave up took me to daycare, unshod, apologizing to Miss Diane. I just couldn’t get them on her. Good luck, if you want to try it. Miss Diane thought it was because she let me go barefoot too long.

2. My problem with escalators is that I’m afraid of falling. I hesitate about stepping on. I want to hit the first step dead center, and there’s only a small window. I usually let one or two steps go by, trying to get the timing right. This is embarrassing when there are strangers waiting, but my friends are worse. They’ll realize I’m a few steps behind, gripping the rail, and say, Oh yeah. I forgot about you and escalators. Then they think it’s hilarious to jump around, to show off how unafraid they are. They walk from step to step, get close to me, turn around with no hands, tell me how they’ll block my fall. And I always say Stop it, That isn’t helping, It isn’t funny. They seldom stop. If my center of gravity ever shifts at all, a wave of nausea runs all the way down me, so I clinch all my muscles to my bones and keep my breathing shallow. They have to laugh at me all the way down, and then they take too long getting off, and I’m afraid of banging into them on the bottom. And then they forget about it, until next time, when they say Oh yeah.

My paternal grandparents’ house, on the outskirts of a quiet Southern town, was called New Coton Hall, and the name of the place was a subject of many meaningless rambling conversations among their children and grandchildren and nephews and cousins and second-cousins-once-removed, who sat in the whicker rockers drinking lemonade and iced tea on the endless front porch overlooking the pond and the ducks and the swans. The swans were a bit much, it was whispered, and so was the name, but once the gin came out the idea of being able to holler after the house if it should ever run away was sheer genius, a punch line worth laughing at once a year at least. The explanation that the house’s name was not a misspelling of “cotton,” which would’ve made sense, and the reminder that there had been an old Coton Hall somewhere in the depths of History One Ought to be Familiar With circulated with as much regularity as the lemonades and the cocktails, and I always forgot again, and asked again, what the name was supposed to mean, anyway.

New Coton Hall contained many halls of its own, most of whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with family photos, diplomas, deeds of sale and aerial photographs of the Land, and calligraphic genealogies, with the outstanding names on limbs in bold - General Robert E. Lee, for example, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The halls lead to rooms filled with antiques, to cabinets with shelves that were lined with nothing but hand-carved marble chess sets, to closets packed with vintage dresses on soft hangers, to rugs with heads on them.

One year in late 1980’s, Easter Sunday found me, still a girl, jumping on the trampoline out back of New Coton Hall with endless cousins whose names I’d never learn, decked out in the reddest flapper dress from the upstairs closet, fringe and beads flying as I attempted the Swivel Hips (my father was uncontested master of this jumping stunt) and avoiding the old women who were always trying to teach me to dance the Charleston. A massive egg hunt was orchestrated out in the fields and among the grape wines, with dozens of real hard-boiled eggs we’d dyed ourselves that morning and one plastic one, the Money Egg, containing a $5 bill. Dinner, a marvelous spread for a family gathering of what must’ve been at least 50 people, was rung in with a bell and served by a black woman who’d been with the family since my father was a child.

My best girlfriend in elementary school was a Mormon with long blonde pigtails and blue eyes. We got matching notes on our report cards saying we were great students but that we Talked Too Much. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that having nice hair-ribbons was really important. Becky always had nice hair-ribbons. Nicer than mine. So nice no one could tell she lived in a trailer park. Not even me.

In middle school, we both played the flute. We would call each other up on the phone and practice, taking turns listening and playing into the receiver. She was better at it than I was. When we did our duets for Solo and Ensemble competition, she always played the top part while I played the bottom. At concerts, I was third chair, while she was second. (The first chair girl, Olivia, was not our friend. She was some red-haired Flute Goddess from another planet.) In the gifted program, QUEST, we wrote a paper together, about Cleopatra. We confessed to one another our fears of Being Fat And Ugly.

She gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon once, with some of the good parts hi-lighted and sticky-noted. She said I didn’t have to read it or anything, it was just something she had to do for her church, and it was because I was her friend. I didn’t think Mormons were any stranger than any other Christians, except the part about not being able to drink Coke, and I went to potluck dinners at the LDS church with her sometimes. When, around age 13, I confessed to her I was not only Not Christian, but a Wiccan high-priestess in an online coven, she was fine with it. Though I knew she was more than a little annoyed about her family’s strict rules about dating and caffeine, when Joseph Smith would later came up in our US History class, Becky was the first to raise her hand and proclaim without a shred of embarrassment that she was a Mormon and that polygamy wasn’t allowed anymore by the church’s constitution.

By freshman year in high school, I’d started wearing all black, and she’d joined the cheerleading squad. I was listening to the Sisters of Mercy, and she was listening to Celine Dion. I spent all my free time on the Internet, and I don’t know where she spent hers, because I’d pretty much stopped hanging out with her outside school altogether. We were both unpopular enough that we relied on each other to Sit With At Lunch, but whatever it was we’d had to talk about so much in elementary school, we definitely didn’t have anymore. She had a reputation at school for being stuck-up and snotty, but when it came to the downfall of our friendship, she was neither and I was both. She never cared that I was wearing fishnets and feather boas and pentagram necklaces to school, but I cared that she was doing anything but. Before long she stopped taking all honors courses and traded in band for chorus, and we barely communicated except to write long notes in one another’s yearbooks come May.

I formed much stronger friendships in the latter years of high school, but Becky and I still hugged and cried at graduation. I went off to New York, while she, despite her Dream of Becoming a Broadway Singer, stayed in Statesboro and enrolled at the local school as a music major. We never spoke again.

Last night I Googled her name and found her email address. She wrote back immediately. It turns out that she hated being a voice major, just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, is dating a professional poker player, and will be moving to Las Vegas in a month. I asked her how long her hair is now, and I really, honest to God, am dying to know.