Today as I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and packing for my upcoming move to San Francisco, I came across a “manuscript” of my writing that I compiled five years ago at age 17. It was just a packet of printed out paper, in Times New Roman, with a cover page that had a black and white picture of me drinking a beer on it. It was called “Resolutions and Revelations.” Most of the stuff in it was really just awful–I mean, some of the poetry actually rhymed. But one of the pieces I’d written was a chronology of essays about the boys I’d dated until age sixteen, and it was fascinating to revisit how I felt and thought about boys and sex at that age. It reminded me of a quote from An Education, which I watched for the first time last night and loved mostly because I completely related to it. “One of the boys I dated, and they were boys,” says Jenny after getting her heartbroken by an older man, “suggested that we go to Paris, and I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!” The twist is that she had already lost her virginity in Paris, she’d lost her youthful naivety in Paris, but in order to keep herself from hardening, she steels against that memory. Jenny retains some of that purity of youth by giving herself a “do-over” of sorts–this time she will have those experiences with boys, not men. Not all of us have that strength of will, but I admired that in her.
My mother has gone off of her antidepressants, and while I won’t tell her this, it has made me like her less.
“Since you’ve gone off of your medicine,” I start.
“Oh, come on–”
“No, just let me finish! Since you’ve gone off your medicine, you have more of an edge. You’re harder, somehow.”
She sighs. “I began to realize that the only thing Wellbutrin did for me was make me take shit from people when I shouldn’t.”
The notion that we have grown better because and not in spite of the pills we take every day is difficult to accept without feeling defeated, somehow. That the best version of me is possible only because of the medicine I take sometimes makes me want to cry. Each evening before bed, resigned, I take a blue pill in the shape of an oval. Each morning I wake up and I feel okay.
I don’t know how to explain the change in my mother. It’s subtle, which is what makes it so difficult to talk about. I watch her move defiantly from one room of the house to another. That it’s–there! She moves now as if daring you to challenge her; she has lived with the numbness of the medicine and refuses to go back there again. Simple questions evoke unnecessarily biting answers. My mother has gone off her antidepressants–suddenly, without tapering–and this has made her mean. It has been five weeks.
Our first date lasted three days. Before leaving my apartment to meet you, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my hands were visibly shaking. It was 11pm on a Monday night and I had class the next morning at 9am. “What am I doing? This is so out of character for me,” I told my roommate while smoking a cigarette by the living room window. There was a diagram taped to my bedroom door. It looked like this:
There was a dead bird in the fountain, but it barely looked like a bird anymore. The tips of its wings rippled with the current of the water, which flowed around its swollen body down an embankment and into a lower level where tired urban bikers dipped their feet. I used to come to this fountain when I was in high school and sit and will people to talk to me. Sometimes I would come with friends and we would laugh and listen to the live jazz that Temple students always played by the Southeast entrance of the park. Other times I would come by myself, seeking respite from my suburban angst, and sit on the fountain with my knees under my chin, smoking cigarettes I’d bought at the train station (the only place that didn’t ID me) and making hopeful eye contact with any person who showed a vague bit of interest in my presence. Mostly I spoke with people I’d never see again–a 300 pound black woman who, upon seeing my friends snapping pictures of each other, insisted we take some modeling poses of her; some trustafarians with expensive bikes; a man named Tom with a British accent who worked at the UN and with whom I fell instantly in love. Once I met a boy who I ended up kissing by the LOVE sculpture that same night. We dated for a few weeks before I left for Paris, but when I came back it was understood that something had changed in me and there was no point in seeing each other anymore.
The summer I was 15 I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, past Hearst Castle and Big Sur to Lompoc, so that my cousin could visit the wild horse sanctuary there. The gas in Big Sur cost $3 a gallon, and at the time I remember thinking that was incredibly expensive. Someone once told me that Grace Kelly died when she drove her car off of one of the cliffs that hugged the PCH; I still don’t know if that’s true, but it always seemed like such a glamorous death. I imagined a white scarf wrapped around her neck fluttering out of the convertible’s windows as the car tumbled into the sea.
In Lompoc we settled in a crappy seaside motel that reeked of fish oil. I slept dreamlessly on a fold out couch with a stain in the shape of a starfish. The next day we visited the wild horses. My Aunt worked for In Defense of Animals and was friends with the owner, so we got a private tour. My cousin Amelia was seven at the time, and as we walked out onto the pasture her face lit up with glee. I was terrified of the beasts that surrounded us. They were powerful and majestic, but there was something menacing about the way they could strike out at any time. These were wild horses, not domesticated. “Try not to make any sudden movements,” our guide told us, “We don’t want to startle them, or it could get ugly.” I was frightened and couldn’t wait to leave. The only thing I took away from the trip was that Hillary Duff was the celebrity protector of the horse sanctuary. At the time I really liked Lizzie McGuire, so I thought that was pretty cool.
Friday night was my last in New York, so after some tearful goodbyes I took a cab over the Brooklyn Bridge by myself. I cranked Cat Power way up on my iPod and swiveled my neck to watch the Manhattan skyline fading behind me. Due to the humidity and the onset of spring, the air was sweeter than it usually is in the city. It was 1am and I was in a cab to Brooklyn to see a friend and it was my last night in New York and for a handful of minutes I felt 18 again. Feeling 18 is the same as feeling overwhelmed with possibility, as if there is light coming from your fingertips and sparks erupt with the lightest touch. On the bridge I watched the blinking lights fade and I sobbed uncontrollably. It just seemed like something I needed to do.
My therapist’s office is exactly what you might picture if you were to conjure up a vision of a New York therapist’s office. It’s in a large building off of Broadway that houses other offices and apartments, and a preschool on the ground floor. The building is even named after a Saint, which I always thought was fancy but also kind of strange for such an ordinary structure in Manhattan. The security guard is from Cote d’Ivoire and on good days he and I like to speak French together. On bad days I give him a perfunctory wave and head up the spiraling stairs to the second floor office. The floor’s bathroom needs a code for entry, as if the doctors don’t trust that patients can’t enter it without killing themselves. There’s a white noise machine near the door of the office, and one of the doctors who shares the space with mine is named “Margot Tenenbaum.” Really! Every time I go I want to take a picture on my phone but I somehow always end up forgetting.
I started seeing this therapist last summer when I was going through a bad breakup. My medication was off and I was having one of those intense depression spells where I couldn’t really do normal things like get out of bed in the morning or go to work without crying. These dark patches of my life are characterized by things like: the simplest tasks feeling incredibly exhausting, losing huge chunks of time to sleeping and sobbing hysterically, and making about ten calls a day to my unimaginably patient mother. They strike rarely, but when they do, they’re debilitating.
I can still clearly remember a time when I considered anything East of Astor Place very, very far away. Manhattan itself is such a tiny island, but it’s easy to let your personal universe here become even tinier. It’s odd, but that’s one of the things I absolutely adore about this city. Small as it is, Manhattan is still divided into very distinctive neighborhoods, and within those neighborhoods exist hundreds of communities that are constantly jostling against each other. I’ve lived in the East Village for the last two years, and so I’ve grown accustomed to this kind of melange living: within a handful of blocks you can move from a string of Ukrainian restaurants to a neighborhood with signs almost entirely in Spanish, passing hipsters and punks and colorfully dressed children along the way. The East Village isn’t even its own little world; it’s its own universe.
As with most neighborhoods, the East Village has its celebrities. Because it’s Manhattan there are the actual celebrities: Chloe Sevigny, for example, or Katie Holmes, who’s been living in the American Felt Building on 13th between 3rd and 4th avenues recently. But there are also the local celebrities that you start to recognize if you’ve been around long enough. Though he left the city a few months ago, let us not forget the Spiderman pedicab driver who used to draw so much attention on St. Mark’s. Another one of my other favorites is the lanky, scraggly-haired dude who walks around Tompkins screaming at the musicians and skateboarders. The other day I was reading there and a skater kid chased him out of the park with the deck raised above his head. The guy kept screaming about how, in the 70s, his skateboard was a piece of plywood with a roller-skate attached.
I think I was the only one who looked up from my book to watch. I’ve lived here for four years, but I guess that’s not long enough to have perfected effortless nonchalance the way practiced New Yorkers have.