[self-portrait]

Did I ever tell you about the time I checked into Hotel Crazy? No? Well, there’s no time like the present, and it helps that I care less and less every day what other people think of me.

Let me preface this by saying I’m still kind of nuts (obvs). (Also, I’m not one who usually uses “obvs” or “totes” or any of those slangy cuteisms, maybe because when I do it I generally feel like I’m being a fake version of me.) But back to the nuts: I have to say, that just because I am not currently checked into Hotel Crazy, it doesn’t mean I’m a better person. Just like losing weight doesn’t make you a better person. Crazy fat people are just as good as supposedly sane thin people. However. Calming your crazy down—just like losing weight—has much to do with feeling more at home in your head, in your skin, in the world. And that can be a really good thing.

It was early November about four years ago, and I wanted to hurt myself. And in small ways, I already had. I had also gained over 30 pounds in about three months. I was in over my head at a new job, still feeling the after-effects of family drama, and on top of it all, I was just innately depressed as I had been off and on for years . Only this time it was worse. I lived alone in an apartment that was very nice but relatively distant from my few friends in town. I had no boyfriend, no hobbies other than eating too much fast food while watching The Biggest Loser, and on the weekend there were times when I went two days in a row without speaking to another living soul, except maybe a cashier. I was also over $40,000 in debt.

Life looked like shit, and if it hadn’t been for one of my best friends at the time and my own primal instinct for survival, who knows what would have happened. I was already playing little paper-cut games. I didn’t want to die, I told myself. I just sometimes wished I hadn’t been born. In short, I was not appreciating the Gift of Life. I felt this rage and helplessness build up inside of me as I sat there alone in my apartment, and I desperately needed some kind of outlet. I’m terrible at expressing anger effectively; instead I turned it viciously inward and was generally messy and moody and relentlessly cruel to myself.

One evening my friend decided she was too worried about me to let things continue this way. We drove to the mental hospital and the woman who assessed me recommended I check myself in. I was utterly exhausted at this point. I didn’t care about the cost. I couldn’t see further than the constant menacing darkness obscuring my view. I said okay.

They took away all my sharp objects, and I slept in a plain dormitory-style room with two beds in it that was located in a locked-down part of the hospital. The mattress was rubbery and thin, and orderlies with flashlights made rounds twice an hour, but I slept as I hadn’t in ages. I slept, and dreamt about nothing. The next day I called work and said I was sick, and didn’t think about it very much for the rest of my stay.

And that was really what the mental hospital gave me: a rest. The therapy, frankly, was mediocre and harried. Too many crazies, too little time. They decided I was some version of bipolar based purely on my accrued debt, and changed my meds. I dutifully swallowed. They made me go to art therapy, where I wanted to laugh as I stuck stickers on a piece of paper. I sat surrounded by catatonics who needed help sticking the stickers and schizophrenics who kept repeating themselves and the manics who couldn’t stop chattering excitedly. I wasn’t laughing at them; I was laughing at myself, laughing at my presumption that I was truly crazy, when compared to my fellow inmates I was just having one really long bad day.

I thoroughly disliked group therapy. Watching other people cry and talk about their personal horrors made me uncomfortable for them. Hearing about suicide attempts and psychotic episodes did not cheer me. Perhaps I was not as empathic as I’d always fancied myself. There was little dignity in group therapy, just snot and messy feelings splattered all over the floor, which should have made me feel Less Alone but instead made me want to grab a mop.

On the second or third night, I got a roommate. I’d had the relative luxury of a room all to myself up until then. For better or worse, though, we did not become co-conspirators or confidantes. In fact, she spent most of her time in the bathroom squatted down, crying and rocking back and forth.

The food was mediocre, and I couldn’t go outside, but I didn’t want to. It was November, gloomy and chill. I was one of the lucky patients who had visitors, which was nice because I was still in a head space where I couldn’t understand why anyone would give a damn about me.

I was in the hospital for five days, at which point the reality of the thousands of dollars I was spending on my “rest cure” hit me and I figured I was well enough to check out. Fortified with Lamictal, Effexor, and the phone number of some anonymous doctor in a local behavioral health clinic, I checked out.

The Crazy House didn’t fix me, but it jolted me enough to realize that sometimes a dramatic decision like checking in interrupts the flow of your insanity long enough to open your eyes. What happened in the next year was this: One morning two months later, I got in my car without warning and drove across the country back to my parents’ house, leaving the job, the apartment, all of it behind. The drive took two days, and I drove through snow and dark and strange highways and tried not to think too much. When I arrived, I cried a lot and slept too much. This lasted weeks. My parents were very kind to me.

Eventually I started walking for a few minutes here and there on the treadmill, joined Weight Watchers, took on some light freelance work. I gingerly began to pick up the pieces as I filed for bankruptcy and lost about twenty-five pounds of fat representing my dread and anxiety and fear. After about six months, I thought I was ready to return and be on my own again, this time without the high-pressure job and debt.

It turns out maybe I wasn’t quite ready, as I continued doing private battle with the bad voice inside my head. Not an actual voice, but a hiss through my neurons that prompted me, ironically, to alienate the friend that had been my saving grace and to close my world up tight around me once more. I gained the weight back. But still, I fought.

You have to fight, you guys. You just have to! There’s nothing for it. Last year I very slowly began the process of breaking down a tiny chunk of the Great Wall of Fear, and let someone in. He has become closer and more dear to me than I ever dreamed was possible. But now it’s time to take another step forward. The Fear Pounds are weighing me down and remind me on a regular basis of the bad old days, even though the worst days are long gone. I want to drop them like the heavy stones they are, leaving them behind me and never look back.

Sony’s foam city shoot in Miami transformed the streets . . .

Airy magic . . .

I still love bubbles. In college, during the summers in Houston when I was dead broke, I would sit on the front steps and blow bubbles and my hands would get all sticky as I watched them glint and slowly sink in the humid air.

It’s pure alchemy, when you can transform the dreary mundane into something fragile but beautiful.

This morning, MC and I took the bus downtown to the weekly farmer’s market. We bought delightful little things: a container of strawberries, fresh-picked and juicy; almond-scented handmade soap; and a small but bright bouquet of flowers, a riot of colors that made me smile all the way home.

I think sometimes that there’s a secret code to the world beneath the world we see everyday, and if I could just decipher it, even the pain I feel some days would sparkle. Broken glass can be diamonds if you look at it just right.

Things I dig this week: 

* Dinner with my dad, who was in town earlier this week! Hamburgers . . . yum.

* Sunshine. There hasn’t really been any this week :(. But I still love it and can’t wait for it to return.

* Plans for the future, like going back to school.

* Anime, especially The Wallflower. The other day when I was watching it, MC observed, “The characters just seem to scream at each other all the time with wide open mouths.” True, true. They’re just very excited, what can I say. This anime series is about a reclusive and gleefully ghoulish goth girl whose aunt is trying to transform her into a girly girl with the help of four hot guys. Heh. In one of the first episodes, one of the guys called his friend a “man slut.” It was awesome.

* National Poetry Month! Go ahead and sign up for the poem-of-the-day email.

[A Contented Skull by Chiho Aoshima]

Today a colleague told me that I’m one of the smartest people she knows.

To which I responded dryly, “Thanks, but you probably need to get out more.”

I was just teasing, because I was very, very flattered and yet oddly shy about the compliment.

Honestly, it kind of made my day.

The thing is, some of my friends in undergraduate college weren’t just smart; they were brilliant. By the time I graduated in 1999, I was quite humbled and felt that certain areas—especially in the realms of science and technology—weren’t worth pursuing, because I would never be one of the best and therefore, to my way of thinking, wouldn’t have anything to contribute. I opted out of those areas and focused my attention to detail on the literary/editing side of things, because I love words and I understand them and feel relatively secure in that knowledge.

The idea of exploring a master’s degree in Information Studies (the twenty-first-century version of librarian school) is exciting to me because I could work with new technology emerging in the field and hopefully implement these ideas in a really tangible way when I got my degree and pursued employment. Hey, I’m 30 years old . . . I was bound to stumble upon some sort of career concept eventually.

Speaking of smarts: Leslie at the Weighting Game recently posed this would-you-rather question: If you had to pick, would you choose (A) to be 40 pounds overweight and smart or (B) thin but unintelligent? (She stipulated that if you picked A, you couldn’t then also add that you’d be smart enough to hire a personal trainer and lose the weight.)

You know which one you’re supposed to pick, right?

Well, I was in a particularly surly mood on the day I answered the question and picked B. Because as I’ve mentioned before, there’s apparently a positive correlation between intelligence and unhappiness. And as a medium-brainy person, I also happen to have come face to face with the big black pit time and time again. Maybe if I dropped a few IQ points, I could mellow the hell out. Who knows?

I’m not condoning ignorance; not by a long shot. But ignorance is something mutable, something that can be changed, whereas your baseline level of intelligence doesn’t change dramatically in a lifetime. Unless there’s a study I missed?

It seems to me like it’s all relative, and it all depends what you want out of life. If you want to find the cure for cancer, intelligence is necessary. If you want to be happy . . . well, I think sometimes intelligence, despite its capacity to broaden and liberate your mind, can also serve as a source of endless “what-if” misery. The acquisitive, constantly searching intellect inspires new inventions . . . and causes torments of despair.

It is what it is. Would-you-rather games can be fun, but I’m bad with them because issues like our bodies and brains are full of shades of gray.

Today, for example, I felt happy to be smart. I’m glad I’m not God, if God exists. Because I would change my mind every day and no one would ever know which way was up!

Yes, that is a Music Man reference. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

For the last little while, I have been entertaining the idea of becoming a librarian. That is, obtaining a Master’s in that field and then becoming a librarian.

Is that insane? Is the position of Librarian an increasingly archaic one? Aren’t libraries run by robots now? Bah.

I love books. I love libraries. Moreover, being a librarian is much more about “managing information” than it used to be. I’m a research geek. You would not believe some of my link collections. Information for the sake of information.

I enjoy writing, it’s true. I suppose the kids would call that “content generation”—a modern and somewhat depressing way of describing the process. And part of that enjoyment has to do with my own deep respect for the writers who create the content that changes our minds and our lives, or at the very least expands them.

When I was 19, I spent hours in the university library creating a lexicon of the etymology of the slang in A Clockwork Orange. A little obsessive. Who creates dictionaries in their free time, and sits around pouring over Slavic word origins? I wonder what ever happened to that notebook.

In my 20s, I accrued years of experience in the publishing field at places ranging from big name houses to a digital textbook start-up. I wonder what all those books look like, professionally speaking, on the other side of the equation?

So yesterday I just. Couldn’t. Do. It.

But today, despite the chronic cough and lack of sleep, I am going to do the Friday version of Things I Love Thursday. Because it’s never too late to be Thursday, or something.

A couple short but very important things I love:

* Mi madre—it was her birthday this week! My mom is the cutest toughest specialest most-unfazable mother in the universe and I’m crazy about her :).

* Squeeworthy happy news in a good friend’s life. YAY!

And then a big one:

* Inspiration, thoughts, advice, and quotes from others. I hope I am never too proud to admit the positive influence other people can have on my state of mind, and on the way I see life. They make life the kaleidoscope it is, refracting light from seven million different angles . . . one of them is bound to dazzle your eyes even on the worst of days. Below are a few examples of articles and snippets and passing phrases that caught my eye recently.

“Like a rainbow on Mars!” —slogan painted on the coolest toy store in town

“It is time to put feathers in your hair and dance like a monkey on Demerol.” —my sweet MC

“the sweet pea that has run wild” —Boris Pasternak

“I call architecture frozen music.” —Goethe

Advice from Wide Lawns’ Aunt Janey:

Always do exactly what you want to do and don’t worry about what anybody else says. You be brave in life and don’t let people stop you from doing things just because they want to bully you and boss you and try to make a fool out of you to make themselves feel big. You want to drive a tractor, you go on ahead and drive a tractor, and make sure you live your life with a little flair in the process and you tell everyone else to kiss your ass Pinky. And let me tell you something, there’s a shade of pink to suit everyone. You just have to find yours and when you do, ain’t nobody, not some fiancé, not some boss at work, some trampy girl that stole your man, and not nobody else on this planet is gonna be able to get in your way.

And last, but not least: 39 Ways to Live, and Not Merely Exist

Quick hit quote:

“Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.“
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I’d like to feel less like this:

[Art by My Dead Pony]

And more like this:

[Art by Anneli Olander]

First off, a few quotes from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Regarding the “hotel” where he briefly had a room in the bowels of Paris:

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

He doesn’t shy away from a thorough discussion of the bugs, the boredom, the hunger, and the abject discomfort of poverty. Still:

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. . . . And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.

Have you ever noticed that when you were actually, as Trent Reznor would say, “down in it,” things weren’t as petrifying as they were when you were considering the worst from a relatively comfortable height? Have you ever experienced something you never thought you could cope with, and found that you managed to carry on in spite of it all? Maybe this is because, frankly, you were too busy getting by to worry about other people’s opinions, or certain conventions, or the kind of existential angst you’re normally prone to wallowing in. Choices are taken away from you in such instances, and the world suddenly zooms in on just a few small concerns, whether they are finding a place to stay, digging for change so you can buy some Ramen, or touching base with the friends who can keep you sane.

When I think of the incidents in my own life I’ve gotten through, I should draw from them as a well of deep, abiding strength instead of viewing them as failures or black spots on my life’s report card. Because you know what? I got through it all. And so have you. In a way I feel sorry for people who haven’t been down in it. I wonder if they’re more frightened than I am of the abyss, having never known it well.

All that cheerful nonsense being said, here’s a Pulp video. Because, let’s face it, in the end I’m pretty sure I have a lot more in common with the insufferable (and naive?) girl from Saint Martin’s College than I do with the narrator of “Common People,” so I should probably just shut my trap. It’s very important to be able to make fun of yourself, comrades!

Because that Peep Show image the other day amused you guys so much, here’s a link to the Peeps Diorama Contest sponsored by the Washington Post. Vote for your favorite!