Fuck It, and Other Forms of Inconquerable Optimism

Some days I wake up, usually around three in the afternoon, and think “Oh, fuck. One of those days. At what point would it seem socially acceptable for me to take a nap?” Usually the answer is either “Never” or “9:30.” I once had a therapist (oh God, how gross that looks written out) lean forward during a session, after I had finally loosed the great floodgates of disappointment and listed out all the things that were bugging me at the moment, and look at me, after an extended uncomfortable pause, with the earnest, faux-warm (faurm?) gaze only professionals are capable of and say “You know, sometimes, the best thing to do is just go to sleep.” Yeesh! I mean, really! Although, to be fair, I guess she was sort of on the right track because on some days (days like today), when things feel weirdly dim and everything seems hard to stomach for both no reason at all and every reason fathomable, I do want to “just go to sleep.” Preferably for about a decade. Paycheck earned, madam!



I think days like this day, those days, are familiar to everyone on the planet. You open your eyes and can tell immediately, in the lean of the calendar on your wall or the way even the news' anchor's hair looks mussed, that things just aren't going to go the way you'd like. It's the sort of feeling that suggests its best to stay indoors and avoid open flame. If you funnel any liquids from one container to another, you're likely to wind up with a spill. If you try to negotiate a peace agreement between two arguing friends, you're likely to end up somehow admitting that yeah, you think they're fat. It is, put simply, like finding a black fly. In your Chardonnay.



My Dad came up to me earlier offering an Oreo. Just an Oreo, a singular cookie, as a sort of silent gesture of encouragement. It was helpful, although I was full. I guess he could sense my foul mood. I'd imagine the first clue was when I let the pot of noodles I was making boil over about three times before finally bowling them up and eating silently in my room. So Dad offers me the Oreo and I say “Thank you,” and think “Eh, fuck it.” I'm prone to moping, and, well, fuck it. I've grown accustomed to my cases of these days and I usually end up just sort of fucking it and doing something else. Quietly. I like to make lists, too. Yes, lists. When I'm feeling down in the dumps or—whatever, I make lists of things I like. Nice things. Like red-flavored things. Popsicles, ring pops, packets of Kool-Aid, anything with that special bite that may be named cherry or strawberry or watermelon but in reality is just vaguely—red-flavored. I like those things. I also like going to the grocery store at night, and songs that sound fun and jingly but whose lyrics are unmistakably sad. There are lots of little things I like; meeting strangers through their dogs and tacky old jewelry and cleaning the bathroom. Yes, cleaning the bathroom. I like that. I like making people take me for drives and leaning out the window like a Labrador, just to feel the air and I like the way, when you look at someone when they're not thinking, you can easily imagine the little kid they once were. I like the entire, seven-minute video for Mariah Carey's “Honey.” I like taking naps. And the rest? Well, fuck it for now.

Old/New

Not too long ago, someone that had once been important to me contacted me, after a fairly extended silence, over the internet and out of the blue. It was weird. Exceedingly, uncomfortably weird. I would have never contacted them of my own choice, I dreaded the possibility of running into them at the grocery store or the movie theater or any other number of innocuous locations where we'd be forced to make polite conversation, and then, poof, there they were again. No explanation. And, well, I guess that was fine. The message they sent was polite and fluffy, the subtext saying both “I miss you” and simultaneously “I'm a liar.” I didn't know how to respond. I didn't respond. I found myself wishing, with surprising desperation, that I had something stunning to report. That I had won a prestigious award. That I had a book being published by a top company, and forecasts suggested it was going to be a hit, both critical and monetary. That I was engaged to someone startlingly attractive and rich, or at least startlingly intelligent and fun. That I had a life. I did not, in fact, have any of these things. Not even close. Suddenly, with that single, unexpected communication, I felt separated from myself, and when viewed from outside, my life's horrible shabbiness snapped into clear focus. What was I doing? What had I done? For years I had insulated myself carefully, working earnestly on my writing, surrounded, for the first time, by like-minded individuals, it seemed I was, perhaps, not so terribly mediocre as I often feared I was. My parents were constant supporters. Their pride that I was in college, that I was going to finish college (one of the only people in my extended family to have done so), had been such a constant, buoying force that, for the most part, I brushed aside questions of whether I couldn't be doing something better. Somehow, this brief message erased all that. I could count the number of times I had been outside of my home state on one hand, on half of one hand. I had never visited another country, had never even been on an airplane, or seen the Pacific Ocean. For God's sake, I couldn't drive.



I know, in theory, that these are not the things which necessarily make a person interesting, or signify success. I know that Emily Dickinson wrote some of the most sophisticated poetry in the English language and barely left her home. I didn't have to feel inadequate because I wasn't some extraordinary figure who did extraordinary things. I didn't have to look good on paper. In theory. That's not how I really felt, though, not how I really feel. Graduation gaining close, I felt suddenly suspended in the ether. I was too old not to have done something better, or at least to have a clue how to accomplish the things I wanted. I was, at the same time, too young. I was too young for anything, too young to feel defeated or tired. And I did feel weirdly tired. “I don't want to be a dried up old cunt” I said to a friend, and I felt I was in immediate danger of becoming just that: a dried up old cunt before the age of twenty-three. I spent so much of my time tucking myself away to work on my creative pursuits, and for what gain? It all felt, suddenly, very silly. Very small.



Then nothing happened. Or rather, lots of things happened, quotidian, minor, occasionally beautiful, but not record-breaking. No one offered me a book deal. No one gave me any awards. I graduated, and then I came back home to my parents. I moved into my old room. Cleaning and re-organizing at the beginning of the summer, I found all sorts of strange detritus, perfectly preserved. Drawings from my sophomore year of high school. Old notes. Some things, the more uncomfortable remembrances, I threw away, quietly and without ceremony. Most things my mother insisted we keep. My mother seems to have been preparing my entire life, saving every evidence of my creative urgings, for an unnamed future where I will be famous and far away. All I thought, digging through notebooks and piles of sketchpads, was that I did not feel any different than I did at seventeen. It seemed as though circumstances had shoved me back into the approximate position I was in during high school, the same players on the board, the same location, when I was endlessly confused and felt impossibly, conspicuously out of place. And now, several years along, I still felt endlessly confused and out of place. Reading over my old writings, I thought about the person I thought I would become. I was nowhere near that sophisticated. I had imagined myself turning into a woman of immense confidence. I knew I would never be a great beauty, but I pictured myself gaining a sense of poise. I would walk into a room with all sorts of bangles on my wrists (I always imagined myself as the sort of lady who would wear great, exotic silver bangles on her wrists) and people would want to know who I was. They would know I was someone, they would sense how smart and funny and cultured I was, and would pass glasses of nice champagne into my hand. Here I was though, sweaty and thirty minutes away from the nearest town, peeling through old magazines on my hands and knees.



To tell the truth, what I have right now is an absurd luxury, and I am grateful for it. What I have right now is time. Time to sit around and write about things and think about them and analyze. College seemed such a brief, shocking interlude, an extraordinary dream. I pull my diploma out of its hiding place occasionally so that I can run my fingers over its lettering. Yes, it was real. I have the time right now to do that. To breathe. It's funny to be back here again. It's funny the way everything has changed and yet nothing has; I am still five-foot eight-inches tall, still awkward at introductions and confused by directions. I like the quiet here, away from the hustling world. There is time, now. I listen to the sounds of my mother canning beans in the kitchen. In the afternoons, I notice the growth of the hibiscus. I miss you. I'm a liar.

Desperately Funny

My mother worries. It's a nearly palpable force. She frets over my happiness, my health, how best to feed the dogs. Sometimes she says it out loud, when I seem particularly quiet one day or a burger looks too pink in the center: “I worry.” In our family, we refer to the syndrome as “being a Braithwaite Mother,” named for my great grandmother, the font of all concern, feeler of hot foreheads. I've inherited the trait. I think about the shocking unfairness of the world, wonder at the unkindness of humans. I fear for the safety of my friends and loved ones, spend inordinate amounts of time considering all the ways in which things could go wrong. I wake up in the middle of the night to check that my dog, a pug who occasionally suffers from seizures (not uncommon in the breed), is still breathing normally. For the most part, all of my concerns fill my head so densely they end up just sort of—balancing out. It becomes a dull hum, what I like to think of as a general sense of even-keeled malaise, but I worry. Sometimes, I worry too much.


There's really nothing all that extraordinary about my neuroses, or what I consider to be their more vicious, unkind manifestation: my recurring periods of major depressive disorder. A silly, rather vague and distant term, that: major depressive disorder. From what I've learned, what bored doctors have told me, it is essentially being miserable beyond common gauges of unhappiness, clinically worried, for periods lasting longer than three months. Major depressive disorder is likely to repeat itself, meaning, to appear, mysterious and angry, after months or years of wellness. I have read statistics which suggest that, with each resurgence, major depression grows more likely to end in suicide. Not a very hopeful outlook, to be sure. What really rubs me the wrong way about being depressed, about being a person who struggles to see the light in things, is the way it seems to be viewed as somehow glamorous. Even worse, I'm creatively inclined. What has always been for me a fact of life, a hovering beast, gets somehow tangled up with the things I do and becomes magical to certain outside viewers. I'm not cold and shut off, I'm mysterious. I'm not nauseatingly unhappy, I'm artistically tortured. The truth of the matter is, I have always felt about this uncontrollable facet of my character, more than anything else, embarrassed. It's embarrassing to be bedridden with an enormous, inexplicable sadness. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a demonstration of unspeakable selfishness. It's hard for people to handle these periods of depression, and the infuriating helplessness that results. For every acquaintance who can view these moments from a distance, who see the inescapable malady as a strangely romantic, soft-lit occurrence, who imagine the scene of Virginia Woolf's suicide as a quiet, dignified and mysterious, if tragic affair, there are the loved ones who must deal with the day to day reality of the matter. The less sensitive ones wish you would snap out of it, as I often do, too. The more familiar caretakers grow grim and accustomed to their duties. Making sure I eat. Clearing the medicine cabinets. Shoving me out of bed.


I'm not sure where our fascination, cultural and personal, with chronically unhappy souls comes from. I read a lot of articles about the topic, and the seeming connection, little understood, between depressive disorders and creative tendencies, trying vainly to make sense of the thing, or find some purpose to it. Mostly, my own experiences with depression seem boring and gruesome, encounters I would not like to repeat. I don't like who I am when I'm depressed, and I doubt anyone in their right mind likes me much either. It terrifies and bewilders me, then, that anyone would find any of this interesting, much less desirable. I mean, I read my share of depression literature, I love sad songs as much as the next guy. Christ, I even have a tattoo from a Sylvia Plath poem, but I've never wanted to be sad. I spend a lot of my time actively thinking about, worrying over, being happy.


What that yearning for contentment translates into, in my experience, is humor. Meaning a sense of humor; a refined awareness of the inherent absurdity of even the most terrible moments. Feeling rather disenchanted one day recently, I asked my best friend and fellow in clinical mood disasters “Do you think that we're funny because we're miserable?”

“Oh my yes.”

Meaning, not that people who are happy can't necessarily be funny, but that there's something about being on the wrong end of the sphincter that is despair, that great orifice of life constricting tighter and tighter around you until the very air you breathe tastes of the fecal residue of hopelessness, that makes you more able to appreciate the humor of, well, despair. In fact, I would say the majority of people who don't know me well wouldn't guess that I have been, on more than one occasion, very seriously depressed. Pessimistic? Sure. Sarcastic and cynical? Unquestionably. Seriously depressed? No way. And I much prefer it that way. I'd rather be wisecracking, verging on mean, than an object of pity, or concern. Quite frankly, this is the only good thing I can see coming out of familiarity with the heavier side of life: the ability to find the humor in things, to step back and say “Oh god, we are fucked. I am fucked. The whole planet is fucked. Oh my god I cannot even believe how fucked we all are. That is absurd! One would not think I would have the ability to be as fucked as I currently am! By god, that is hilarious!”



The last time I was majorly depressed was during my sophomore year of college. Desperately unhappy, I finally gave in and went to a counselor. The school counselor. My visits to therapists have never been very successful. I'm not comfortable talking about myself, by which I mean I would rather throw someone over the railing of a building than be forced to talk about how I genuinely feel about something, so my experience with mental health professionals has usually consisted of half an hour of uncomfortable, silent staring. And so it was with the counselor, a terribly, uh, well-meaning, woman who insisted I call her Bethany (not a very comforting name for a therapist). Well-meaning Bethany heard enough of my worrying to shuffle me along to a doctor, to be prescribed anti-depressants which I had, until that point, steadfastly refused. And so I found myself sitting on the examination table, being asked about how long I had been feeling sad while Lou Bega's “Mambo No. 5” blasted through the in-office speakers. I mean, blasted. Fuck.


Not too long after, I went home for a break. My parents were, understandably and characteristically, worried. We went to Wal-Mart one afternoon, the three of us. It was the first time they would let me out of their sight. I sort of wondered around the store, zonked on Wellbutrin, low on sleep, until I stopped in the middle of a back aisle. There was one of those displays they sometimes do for something new, or popular. It was this plush, robotic, hot pink pony, standing in its own plastic paddock. Jesus Christ, I thought. Jesus Christ, what the fuck is this? I looked at the price tag. I think it was somewhere in the $500 plus range. Oh, Jesus, I thought, my slow, sleepy brain churning, this is fucking terrible. This is the worst thing I've ever seen my life. Somewhere, a parent is buying this. Right? I mean, right? Why else would it be in the middle of the fucking aisle? People are buying this. I looked down. Attached to the—fence—by a plastic tether was a plastic carrot. I read the sign next to it. Apparently, the pony was supposed to mime eating the carrot. I held the thing up to the pony's nose. My God, I mused, shoving the carrot at the pink mouth, some poor kid out there just wants to be with their parents, just wants to ride a pony at the goddamn petting zoo and those rich bastards won't even make the time to do it. They Won't. Even. Do it. They'll buy the fucking robotic pony instead. By the time my dad found me, I was disconsolately jabbing the carrot into the plush head again and again. I turned and my eyes welled up with tears. The whole thing seemed terribly poignant “I can't--” I choked “I can't get the pony to eat.”

That's a funny story right? I think so. Really, I do. It's so silly, so over-the-top absurd, but that's genuinely how things looked to me then. I can see the funny now because I remember the intensity of the feeling then. I can recognize both how genuinely sad and how genuinely strange the moment was. And I am thankful for that. I feel as if I'm not thankful for a great many things, or not thankful enough. Ingrateful. I am, however, grateful, not to have been unhappy, but to have come out of it. Though I often find myself worrying, “being a Braithwaite mother,” feeling sorry for myself, I can see the humor of it, too. You laugh or you cry, right? Sometimes both make sense. And anyway I can step back from things, sometimes, and see the moment crystallized, perfect. I can look at the fall day and say to myself “Oh, this is nice. I will remember this. I will be grateful for it.” All too often, I worry. That's a part of me that's next to impossible to change. And, I don't know, fuck it: I worry. Let's smoke a joint or something.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be

I really, desperately want a job. I think. Mostly I want all the things that having a job represents, the whole glamorous, big girl lifestyle: an apartment, shiny, smiling friends I'd regularly share meals with at classy and interesting ethnic restaurants (sometimes I would even pick up the tab with a laugh!). My fantasy vision of what my post-collegiate life would or should look like seems based, strangely and almost exclusively, on a very '90's state of mind. I seem oddly stuck in a Gen X frame of reference that, in this year of the lord two-thousand and ten, is desperately out of date and likely non-existent. Within the sillier, dreamier corners of my ever-cynical mind, I can't help but cling to these little visions. My brain seems convinced, in spite of itself, that there are essentially two options for the future, I will either A) get a low-paying job at record shop/used book store/small and progressive gallery, have a smallish apartment, decorated with a lot of door beads and Bush posters, retain my artistic credibility and be fairly happy, if still fundamentally existentially confused or I will B) get a better paying job, on the fast track to being a very high-paying job, in the more business oriented sector, working in the record industry/publishing/large and established art museum, have a smallish apartment, with sleek lines and gleaming white cabinets, not have enough time for personal art creation and be fairly happy, if still fundamentally existentially confused. I will be either Ethan Hawke or Ben Stiller. The choice is mine.


Of course, I realize that life never was and never will be quite this simple. Even in more profitable days, I know that the slow and gruesome transition to adulthood was a messy business, that Ethan Hawke in real life cheated on Uma Thurman (one of the most beautiful women in the world!) and Ben Stiller is a big jerk. The truth is that the 90's are just the home of my most comforting memories. I have a brother and a sister who graduated from high school in '93 and '94, respectively, and so the movies and the music that seem most familiar, most calming, and, in some strange way, most real are those that my siblings had around when I was a kid. In my head, those were the days of endless, easy possibility. There is part of me that still sees my sister as an impossibly glamorous creature, burning incense and listening to the Black Crows in her room, sneaking off to smoke joints with my cousins in the woods. And my brother, who mourned the death of Kurt Cobain with conviction, and took me for rides in his car, blasting Alice in Chains, will remain, in some part of my imagination, an edgy, cool character, funny and without a care.

The truth of them both is, of course, much more complex. My sister was pregnant with her son when she was younger than I am now, my brother was living on his own, with a serious girlfriend, by the age of 24. Still, I cling to these images, to the imagined world that died before I could take part in it, because to me there seemed something special about that time, something essentially hopeful, and, despite my play at vicious pessimism, I remain hopelessly hopeful. As I once heard Aimee Mann say in an interview "I consider myself an optimist. That's why I'm constantly disappointed." And, indeed, though Generation X seemed to define itself by moping, perhaps even bitterness, all that angst and ennui was really just disappointment. The culture of Gen X was all about longing for something better, and to long for such a thing indicates an unstoppable belief that there was, in fact, something better to be attained. While the 90's was guilty of navel-gazing, of an excessive and increasingly unfashionable deadly earnestness, my own generation seems, as a whole, well, a hole. A big black hole of nothing, tired of everything. To be cool is to be an ironic portrayal of a vapid culture that may or may not be tongue-in-cheek to begin with, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection until it seems impossible to tell what is genuine feeling and what is not. The joke is that there is no joke.

So I look for jobs, although probably not as hard or with as much zest as I should be looking, and I apply for some, although nothing has yet turned up. I pick through the offerings in D.C.,the nearest city to me, close enough to commute. It's a city I don't particularly like, and the offerings I find don't encourage me much. I don't want any of these jobs. I find myself feeling as if, were I called tomorrow and offered one of them, with benefits and a decent paycheck, I don't even know if I would take it. Of course beggars shouldn't be choosers, and the offer as yet has not happened, though if it did, if it does, I will take it. You see, I have hopes to move somewhere else, and that takes money. More specifically, I have hopes to move to the Pacific Northwest, to Portland or Seattle, places I have never even seen but I view, foolishly and unrealistically, as rainy paradises. I imagine these to be places where the things I like about the 90's still magically hang around. Places where people are shockingly earnest about their music and their art and riding bikes to work. Silly, really, to think that any place is perfect, but I imagine if I can make it out there, I can have the life I imagine, with the beaded curtains and the decent job, the smiling friends in the restaurant.

So, what does it all mean? What does it mean that I, and many others I know, yearn for a bigger life, spend lots of time envisioning existence in some other place, where things will be easy and good? Does my generation feel an unearned world-weariness? Are we confronted by the feel of a world winding down, falling apart, or do we just selfishly fancy ourselves to be more sophisticated, aware and worthy than we actually are? Well, fuck if I know. I figure being young is pretty much all about being stupid and confused and sure that your feelings are more clear, meaningful and deep than anyone who has ever lived before, and that's nothing new. I do know that I'm lucky, though. I'm lucky I have a family willing to let me move back in and slouch around jobless. I'm lucky I have parents I love and who humor me when I say I'm writing a book, just so I can feel like I'm doing something. And, anyway, things will come together somehow, perhaps not in the way I imagine or long for, but they will come. I hope.