Eat the Damn Cake

Bear woke up at 2 am. “It’s burning hot in here,” he said. “I have to turn on the air conditioner.” The giant floor unit wheezed to life as he fiddled with it.

“I have to open a window,” he said.

I was barely awake. “Just not too much,” I mumbled. “Minute…” I didn’t want the cat to jump out the window. Do cats even do that?

Bear was lumbering around, sleep-haired and bleary-eyed. “I need cold water,” he said. “I need really cold water.”

“OK, honey, OK,” I said, pulling myself out of bed. “There’s water on the counter.”

“I need it to be COLD.” He sounded desperate.

“There’s ice in the freezer…”

He was already opening a bottle of fizzy water, and I knew it would spray everywhere, because the last one had. “Wai–” I said. It exploded. He jumped back, making a furious sound.

Great. Here it comes.

“Why can NOTHING go right?” he cried. “Why is everything terrible?”

Continue Reading »

Feeling bad the way I do sometimes– the bad egg kind of bad- it doesn’t go away completely. It just lies dormant under the surface for a while. And then suddenly, it’s back. It can come back ferocious, hungry, clawing, like it just broke out of prison, where it had plenty of time to think about how to destroy me.

And then I feel sorry for Bear.

I feel apologetic. I feel sorry about marriage not solving all of my problems, as though if only I could just calm down and let it, it would. I feel like I’ve let marriage down.

Sometimes I think that marriage actually makes it worse. I mean, being safe and secure and loved and sexed and having my man dream come true makes it clearer that this is not all there is. Before I had Bear, when I was in a relationship with a guy who was being tormented by what seemed like an army of his own personal demons, I could feel bad about that. It was obvious what I was supposed to feel bad about. I also felt like I really needed to get good grades in college or my life might be terrible, but that feeling was secondary to the emotional trauma of my romantic relationship.

In a way, that’s what relationships were for. To distract me from the things I was really worried about. To distract me from the fact that I might feel bad, anyway, even if they were gone or great.

After being tormented by the tormented guy, I was in a relationship with a guy I wasn’t in love with, and I felt conflicted and anxious and stubborn and frustrated and helpless about that.

And later, whenever I felt bad during the time I was single, I felt scared and tiny and hopeless, because there was a chance I would never find someone.

There was always such an easy reason. Such a plain target.

And now, I have checked so many boxes. I have things I never thought I would get a chance at. I stare at my own reality in dumbstruck wonderment. I pinch myself. I stare some more.

But then, when I feel bad, it isn’t as easy to find a place to put it. So the badness rushes to my career. You’re failing! You haven’t accomplished anything in the past year! Everyone in the world is more successful than you! And they have better hair! And your teeth look a little yellow! And you’re not making enough money because you are a failure!

I feel sorry for Bear because I want to be happy for him. I feel like that was part of the arrangement. We were going to make each other happy ALL THE TIME. That was going to be marriage. When I’m unhappy, it makes him unhappy, and sometimes this feels like pressure to be happy.

(we should always look like this. especially the red hat)

Continue Reading »

(source)

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.

Continue Reading »

(Note: Scroll down to the bottom of this post for new cake shots from readers! They continue to be amazing)

I’ve been depressed for the last two days. The kind of depressed where Bear is like, “What’s wrong?” and I’m like “Nothing.” Because everything feels wrong, even the tiniest, most stupidly meaningless things, and it would be impossible to describe and I don’t understand anything and “nothing” is the only word I can even remember how to say.

“But seriously, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” My mind is a black hole. It’s amazing, really, that this word has surfaced from the depths. Good job, mind. Someone should give me a prize. Someone should put me back in front of the TV so I can watch yet another episode of Terra Nova and continue to wonder vaguely why everyone in the future is white. Except for the evil tribal leader who lives out in the jungle. She’s black.

I was going out last night. I had a thing at 7:00. So I decided to get serious. To stare the black hole in its black hole face. I went out and bought some red lipstain. Yeah. I did.

So now you know that I didn’t have any before. I had red lipstick, but that always ends up on my teeth.

It cost nine dollars. Isn’t that a lot? I always think that makeup is way more expensive than it should be.

I  felt like I looked stupid buying it. I was depressed. I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that had something to do with football that I’d stolen from my dad. My dad is a very broad, muscular man. I am not. I felt like the woman behind the counter was judging me. She might have been thinking, “Seriously, honey? Good luck with  that…”

Continue Reading »

Penelope Trunk keeps telling me to write shorter posts. She yelled at me (over email) about how long the Salon.com one was. That was not my fault. But this stuff is, so I’m going to try:

I think I almost had a panic attack the other night. Which is lame, because it wasn’t even. It was just almost. But almost, for me, is pretty bad.

I don’t know what happened. That’s the thing. I really don’t know.

The Salon.com piece had just gone live. My bio wasn’t on it, and I upset, because WHY WASN’T MY BIO ON IT? There were only fourteen comments so far. WHY WEREN’T THERE MORE? I wasn’t even reading the comments. I knew they’d mostly be angry and mean. But I wanted them anyway. What if it flopped? What if no one read it?

Continue Reading »

It’s not all about confidence.

I am tired of people saying, “Just feel good! It makes you look good!”

It might be true, but I don’t like it anyway, because it’s too much pressure.

I know the confidence people have good intentions. They want to make beauty more accessible. They’re trying to do what I’m trying to do with this blog: point out that beauty is available to all of us, all the time, we already are it. But since I’m not already glowing with self-esteem, I have to find another way.

(source)

Continue Reading »

I am having one of those days. Rosh Hashanah starts tomorrow, and I’m going to be standing behind a podium in front of hundreds of people. They are going to all look at me at the same time. And then I’ll sing. A lot. In Hebrew. Which I am used to, because I’ve been doing it for ten years now. But I’m not used to it, either, because it’s really hard to get used to singing in Hebrew in front of a lot of people.

Once Rosh Hashanah gets started, there’s no stopping it. Thursday and Friday will be spent in the synagogue, my eyes skipping ahead on the printed outline of the service that sits on the podium in front of me. “Oh, shit. Here comes the ha-melech…I never get the melody exactly right. I never remember to take a big enough breath before the high part…”

(the huge, heavy High Holiday prayerbook I chant from. You wouldn’t believe what that thing does to your wrists after you hold it up for awhile)

I am having one of those days. It started yesterday, actually, when I was frantically shopping for a white skirt, because it turned out that nothing fit right or looked right, and I have to wear white for the High Holidays. No one is selling white now. There’s a rule. It involves Labor Day, which already happened. I was in the dressing room, and I looked bad from every angle. Every time I looked at myself I could think of ten things that were unfixably wrong with me. “No woman could ever make that neck work.”

Continue Reading »