Eat the Damn Cake

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So the truth is, about a month ago, I was pretty depressed. I hated most things about myself, including my toes and other things I usually like. I was almost positive it was only a matter of weeks before all of my friends stopped talking to me. Everything felt overwhelming, including loading the dishwasher. I had a panic attack that lasted for HOURS. For two days, I lay on the couch watching Hulu, and feeling like if I moved, my fragile life might shatter into tiny fragments that would then embed themselves in the soles of my feet and cause infections. I didn’t really write about it, then, because I was embarrassed. And also because I was willing to bet that I’d never feel like writing again.

I am writing about it now in order to send an important message to myself and other people: you shouldn’t be embarrassed.

I don’t know what caused the depression (lots and lots of little things building up?). It fell on me, like a heavy piece of old furniture that’s been looming there in the corner for way too long, but no one wants to try to move it. It became immediately clear that I was terrible. That I had failed at everything. That I would continue to fail at everything, forever. There was all this math involved. And for the first time in my life, I understood it perfectly.

Let’s see…

Everything in the world=nothing. It sucks.

My goals+ my age + the chubbiness of my arms – irrelevant things I’m good at like cooking gumbo (the impressive accomplishments of everyone else)= I suck

My pathetic, scrabbling efforts to make something of my life X my utter lack of valuable skills/knowledge= yeah, the same thing. Sucking.

The things I should do before I think about having a baby+ the things I really want to do before I have a baby+the things I’m afraid I won’t be able to do after I have a baby(my total naivete about what it’s like to have a baby and what one is able to do and not do at that point)- the amount of time I have before I am no longer able to have a baby(the number of babies I might want to have if greater than 1)= sucking now and then sucking later, at being a mom, because I failed to get my stuff together before I had kids.

A pattern emerged through the fog of complicated equations. A simple, elegant pattern, that to the mathematical mind might have even been considered beautiful, for all its terribleness.

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I don’t own a scale. I do own a bright turquoise bath mat that I refuse to put in the bathroom because it’s too pretty.  I recently ordered it from Crate and Barrel with a gift card someone got us a year ago. Getting married is good for Crate and Barrel gift cards. I am bad at remembering where I put them.

My parents own a scale, and, with its dark powers of seduction, it drew me to it and suggested in a sly, beguiling whisper that I should put my feet on its smooth surface. So I did. And then I came back the next day, for more. And again, the day after that. And over the course of that time, which happened to be the long weekend of Thanksgiving, I watched the numbers gently rise.

I pretended that I didn’t remember my heaviest weight. I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks about this kind of thing. I want to have records in my head of important stuff. The periodic table, maybe. A detailed map of lower Manhattan. All of the best words of the English language and a bunch of useful phrases in Spanish. Instead, it seems like the stuff that got priority is a catalogue of American dog breeds (memorized when I was ten), a little over half the state capitals, a litany of Most Embarrassing Moments, including the time I said “‘wroten’ instead of ‘written’” into a microphone in front of a hundred people, and blatantly unhelpful information about my body, like my heaviest weight.

“Heaviest weight!” bellowed an evilly gleeful voice in my head, the moment I stepped onto the scale on the third day. “HEAVIEST! BAM. You’re at it again. How’s it feel, being the HEAVIEST? Whatcha think about that?”

“Hmm,” I said aloud, tilting my head thoughtfully. “That number looks familiar…Where have I seen it before? It can’t be my heaviest weight, can it? I can barely even remember…” I stepped daintily off the scale. “Nope. It’s completely slipped my mind!”

LIAR.

YEAH, YOU.

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As usual, my mom had a game plan.

We were sitting at the Thanksgiving table, eating a lot. Bear, me, my two brothers, the girlfriend of one of my brothers, my parents, my aunt and uncle, and two grandmas. And my mom had read this article in the New York Times about being grateful. There was something in it about how we don’t feel grateful enough, and something about, oh I don’t even remember. And she wanted to do something about it. So she asked us to go around the table and share the story of a time we were there to support someone else’s success. And then to go around the table again and talk about someone in our past who we’re thankful for.

Awkward.

I played with the strings on my shirt.

Here we go.

My mom likes to make things emotional. OK, she likes to make things meaningful. It’s kinda her thing. She hates it when people talk about which TV shows they like for more than five minutes. If there are a bunch of people sitting around together, she sees an opportunity for communal bonding. I usually see the food they’re congregating around.

I have a lot of arguments against making things meaningful.

They go like this:

Maybe we don’t want things to be meaningful. Maybe you’re forcing it. Maybe you have one idea of what’s meaningful, and other people have a different idea. No fair– you totally already thought of the answers to those questions, and we’re all scrambling to come up with something now. Does this have to be a performance? Can’t we just eat?

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A friend of mine was saying, “No one seems very thankful around Thanksgiving. Everyone just seems grumpy. Maybe it’s a bad holiday. Maybe it’s got this negativity because the settlers ate dinner with the Native Americans and then killed them all. Bad vibes.”

“Also,” I said, “It’s not really a harvest festival, because everything’s already gone. Like, the vegetables in the grocery store are already starting to get mealy.”

I’ve been eating a lot of butternut squash. Which is not mealy. I’m gonna stop talking about harvesting and vegetable growing, because I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

But when I thought about it, I liked the idea of trying to think about what I’m thankful for. But I wanted to think of  some of the non-obvious stuff, because that’s more of a challenge (note: I’mfirstlythankfulformyfamilyandBearandmyfriendsandbeingabletowritealotandbeinghealthyandthepeopleIlovebeing,forthemostpart,healthy. There). Ready? Here goes:

I’m thankful for the occasional juicy pimple. They are really fun to pop.

I’m thankful for not getting into that grad school that I thought was the only school for me, even though I sat on the floor by my bed and cried for two days when I got that rejection letter and wrote a sad song on guitar even though I’m bad at playing guitar just because I literally couldn’t get up and go to the keyboard. Because if I had gone to that school, I wouldn’t have come to NYC and I wouldn’t have met Bear. And I wouldn’t be living between two enormous bridges on a cobblestoned street in Brooklyn.

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This is to families everywhere:

I want to ask a favor of you. All of you.

Please stop deciding which girl in the family is the prettiest. Stop deciding when she’s two, or four. Stop talking about her appearance when the family gets together. Stop trying to predict  what she’ll look like when she grows up. Stop comparing her to women who are famous for being sexy. Stop describing her features in detail. Stop complimenting the way she plays with her hair or walks or smiles. Stop asking her if she wants to be a model or a movie star when she grows up. There are a few more options. Even for very beautiful women.

Please stop pointing this girl out in photos where she’s standing with her sisters or her cousins. “But look at that one! Gorgeous! Look at that smile!” There are other girls in the picture. You don’t mean it that way, but you are suggesting that somehow, they are worth a little less. That somehow, their smiles are not as important.

I know women who grew up as “the pretty one.” Sometimes they struggled to be perceived as smart. Sometimes they are still struggling. That’s still a thing.

I know women who grew up as the sister or the cousin of the pretty one. They felt smaller. Like they didn’t matter in the same way. Sometimes they still feel that way.

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Occasionally, I like being reminded of how unimportant I am. Because otherwise, I start to think I’m really important.

And then I start to think that other people are probably paying pretty close attention to me, because I’m really important. They are definitely judging me. They are thinking things like “How come she doesn’t have a normal job?” They are thinking, “Wait, that girl got plastic surgery? How come her nose is still so big?” And they might also think, “Why is it that that girl can’t move her leg in one direction while her arm is going in the other direction?”

This is true, and it’s embarrassing. I know, because I once took a Zumba class with my bonus mom (MIL). She is training to be an instructor. As in, she is awesome at it. I am out of shape. In addition to having to sit down between dances, wheezing and gulping water, I think I hit the woman next to me at some point, with an incorrect and overenthusiastic leg motion. “Was she OK?” asked Bear, when I told him. “I don’t know!” I said. “I had to try to catch up with the next move!”

But because I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll die a young, terrible death if I don’t get some exercise soon, I tried to follow one of those dance exercise DVD routines on Netflix last night.

You know, the ones where the really fun woman in half a shirt and tight pants is doing fifty things at once while she chirps, “You’ve got it, ladies! Shake that booty! Here we go now! Four, three, two, one! To the left! And back! And front and right! And now left and front and back and right and arms up! You’ve got it now! When your legs go left your arms go right! When your legs go back your arms go front! Alright now! Turn it up! It’s gonna get a little hotter now!”

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