A Tribute to the Memory of Robin Williams

Robin Williams died by suicide five years ago today. I will never forget sobbing, curled up in my crappy post-college bed, clutching my knees to my chest. I’d never been so affected by the death of a celebrity and it was the anniversary of the worst few weeks of my life. I think it broke my heart. I wrote this then: 

—-

My Captain, my Peter. 

My heart is terribly heavy at this colossal loss. I'd list his credentials -- but you already know. How many of our hearts has he touched? I'd venture to guess a lot of the people reading this right now remember the Genie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Peter Pan, and countless others. I keep remembering how, when I was a little girl, I would watch Hook and think -- that's what stories can be. They can be ours and they can change us. I watched What Dreams May Come and it changed me, kept me awake at night, endlessly dazzled by possibilities of what I could do one day with my very own words. What a gift his masterful acting was to me, just a little kid. 

All that joy, all that laughter. 

And I want to say this: open your heart to someone who needs it because you never know -- you never know -- what even your silent, listening presence can mean to someone.

My life was saved by a group of supportive friends and a loving family when I was in dire straits. A wise girl once told me that life was worth living. 

And she was right. 

"To live. To live would be an awfully big adventure." 

Rest in peace, Robin Williams. 

—- 

What I would add today is to urge people to push through the awkwardness of reaching out. Push through being uncomfortable. Reach out to people. You never know who needs it — and you never know who will reach right back to you.

On Art, Chaos, and Trying

I never expected to live this long. 

Though memories of childhood and adolescence are hazy at best and gone at worst, I know that I did not envision a life for myself past college. I could not fathom it. What it might look like. Who I might be, what I might do. My biggest heroes were dead artists, and most of them had gone gentle into that good night before people noticed their work. I used to joke that the best career move would be to die. I don’t make that joke much anymore. 

A few days ago, I cried into my fiancé’s chest at 3am, clutching his shirt with panicked hands. Caught breath, ugly-sobbing, asking if I was a bad person, that’s my secret isn’t it, I do my best but really I’m no good at all, right? It doesn’t matter that I try because it isn’t enough to try. I am a bad person, right? right? He reassured me that I am good in my heart. That I will be okay. 

That the demons in my chaotic, chemically fucked brain will not always win. 

Hard words like “always” and “never” as they relate to mental health are cause for pause. But I struggle with that. When I’m still awake at 4am, riddled with thoughts of my past, traumatic memories and imagined horrors flooding my brain, it is so hard to remember that moments, days, weeks, months like that do not last forever.

I have thoughts which are considered suicidal ideation. No fixed plan, but a feeling in my chest that is both painfully tight and hollow that I would be better off dead. But when I interrogate that thought, all I want is relief. Peace. A quieting of my storm-tossed ocean. If I die by my own hand, I will not know the taste of peace. 

We romanticize mental illness in the world of artists. Hurting people create beautiful things. That romanticization tells us artists are like little birds: free but fragile. Lovely but not long for this world. There and gone again. 

But mental illness is not romantic. It does not have a soft, muted filter. It is raw and ugly and painful and yes, good art does come from these things, but we must not gloss over the very real lives of our artists. I am exhausted by posts on social media with well-meaning links to suicide hotlines. I am tired of a tossed aside “I’m here if you need to talk. No matter who you are.” Are you? Are you really? Because some days, I don’t “got this” and that’s how it is. See my broken days. See my bad days. They are part of me. And so too they are part of my art. 

Mental illness is fucking hard. I haven’t written anything new for months. Whenever I pick up my pen and notebook or laptop — I freeze. My stomach falls. Thoughts that I thought I’d buried crawl up my spine, up my neck, down my throat. I am suffocated and stalled with abject terror. I am not good enough, these thoughts say. Worse: I will never be good enough. If I was good enough, wouldn’t I have written something worth writing by now? These thoughts ring like a tinny bell in my ears: I am not good enough and it is foolish to try.  

But that’s not true. 

I am here to remind you that healing is non-linear. It follows no path. There is try. Fail and fail again until you fail up. Fail your best. 

Creating is the same. I know that some can easily exorcise their demons onto the page with no problem. Some others can do it but have to force themselves to find that rhythm. But sometimes those people are not you. Just like healing, creation is non-linear. A year of solid creating of art followed by an empty lull you don’t understand and hate so desperately will be followed by a day you find yourself in the right place again.

This is a reminder for my self and for you to keep on trying and failing and trying again because you have gotten through every day of your life so far. 

Be gentle with your spirit. I’ll try if you will. 

An Abbreviated List of Things Men Have Told Me About Myself

Age 5. I am told for the first time that I cannot do something because I am a girl.

Age 10. My best friend tells me that some boy asked her if I combed my hair. (I probably didn’t.)

Age 15. I am told I should try wearing makeup.

Age 24. You look better without makeup. (I was wearing makeup.)

Age 25. A man asked me, confused, if girls pissed through their vaginas -- after watching an episode of Orange is the New Black.

Age 26. That same man told me I was hard to love.

Age 26. On my first date out of that relationship, a man spent the first 20 minutes texting his fiancé -- he was polyamorous -- that I was someone he’d met online, and not an old friend, which is what he had told her. Then he mansplained playwriting to me. I am a professional playwright.

Age 26. A man stood me up -- for the second time in a row -- and then I ran into my ex’s mother on the metro platform. She pretended not to cry. I never heard from him again. I went home and cried.

Age 27. A man told me derisively that he associated hairlessness with femininity. I am neither hairless nor particularly feminine. This was before he fucked me, poorly. His cat was cute, though.

Age 27. A man told me with a sigh, after I read him a poem I’d written for him, that I “just wasn’t a back of a Prius girl.”

Age 27. A man on Tinder named Gavin asked me what it was like to look like Sinead O’Connor with AIDS.

What do all these things have in common, though. You might ask. Well.

I listened. I let these words worm their way into my heart and I said nothing. These quotes haunt the marrow of my bones like ghosts. I wish I’d made them up.

And you know what? The hell with that.

Age 28. I started to learn to take up space. To stop allowing people to explain myself to me. I started to step on or through man-spreaders on the metro.

Age 28. I started to share my stories onstage, online, to friends -- and found so many people similarly haunted.

Age 28. Sometimes my muscles remind me to be small again. I hunch my shoulders and stare at my clenched hands in my lap and I ignore the men on the metro who say things to me.

Age 28. I have resting melancholy face.

Age 28. But I wear short skirts and shorts and tight dresses that show off my hourglass figure. I get called Thick Thighs.I get told to smile, baby.

Age 28. I don’t.

Age 28. I took a chance on a young man.

Age 28. He tells me he loves me and he means it, just the way I tell him. We are equal and we listen to each other and we turn on lights for the darkness that we both hide in our hearts.

Age 28. We are not perfect.

Age 28. And that’s okay.

Age 28. I meant for this to be funny.

Age 28. I don’t know how this story ends. But I’ve always been better at beginnings than endings.

THE INVENTION & DESTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE

I have been thinking a lot about language lately.

Those of love. Those of grief and pain and loss. The language of our bodies. The languages that exist within silence.

I have never had a knack for learning the kind of language useful for when you visit some beautiful elsewhere.

But I can read you like a book. The lightest testing-the-water brush of shoulder on shoulder. A certain held gaze between people who have just lost the description of stranger. Smile lines etched into skin from the laughter of lifetime. A shy, sideways glance. Wild, uninhibited gesticulation. In short: poetry.

Then there is the language between people. I speak specifically here of romantic love. Or people who have romantically loved. Moments, days, years of definitions given to common words. I feel the loss of the most recent language I spoke freely, fluently, deeply in my heart. That language is dead now. The two people -- the only two -- who created it effortlessly, who spoke, heard and felt it every day?

They live on. Beautifully. Happily. Better.

But that tiny language-universe is dead. That intimate language is no longer. A thing that once existed no longer exists. It can’t.

So I have been thinking of language.

I am finding myself there — new, raw, more questions than answers. Little words for infinite things and moments and gestures. I am learning my own language. I am re-inventing it. And with it, myself. I speak in poetic device, in wordplay, in banter, in the caress of a rough chin covered in stubble at 3am.

Someone taught me the French word for “the perfect word’, which is: mot juste.

But I love, too, the imperfect words. The messy and the ugly and the tangled.

I think I could spend the rest of my life learning these languages. Inventing, discovering, sharing, and keeping them between me and a kiss.

I know some will be destroyed.

Sometimes I will do the destroying.
Sometimes I won’t.

And yet. The more I think about the loss of these private languages, the less right the word “Dead” sounds.

There are words that will always mean something to me.

Maybe there are archives of these tiny love languages. Rows and rows of them so far back you could never find the end in a lifetime. Miles of words and letters and moments and the first brush of new fingertips on electrified skin.

The language of my particular heart has been replaced by a new one. Perhaps, someday, years from now, an overheard conversation will make me ache for the language I knew so well in my youth. Perhaps that memory will warm my heart rather than breaking it.

This is not sad, she said, reminding herself.

Well yes — sad — but also: life.

The nature of life is to keep going.

The nature of the world is spin forward.

There are words that become perfect in their meaning between people. Lovers, friends, communities. We invent secrets to whisper to one another:

“You too?”

“Me too.”

I am finding, in the turbulent wake of locking up a heart-language, that I am discovering a new one. Plural. The capacity, I am finding within myself, for learning.

New words for old things. Old words for new things.

The old languages will eventually be tucked away in a little corner of my heart, when they are good. Carved away with time and patience when they are not. And they will fade in their silence. In their unspeakable way. In my inability to communicate them, having lost the person with whom I communicated. In their no longer belonging to this world.

I am a tower of Babel.

I am an archive of the beautiful and the arcane.

I am becoming. I am. I have been, and I always will be. I am myself, fluently.

The Lying Disease

Hello there.

Sorry for the hiatus. It’s been a bit of a time.

I want to talk about this depressionanxietyadhd thing -- specifically, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Although I’ve mentioned it before.

This disease? It lies.

“You are worthless.” it says.

“I know.” I say.

“No one has ever loved you. No one ever will. You know that, right?” It says.

“Yes.”

“You take up too much space. Every inch of you is just too much. Hunch over, slump those shoulders. You’re too tall. Be smaller. Be smaller. Avoid eye contact. Oh yes, ignore that phone call. Pretend it never happened. Hyperventilate about that voicemail. Good girl.” It says.

“Okay.” I say.  

“You have wasted thousands of dollars trying to get rid of me. But I’m your shadow. You can’t get rid of your shadow. A shadow can only exist by the existence of something physical. And that’s you, baby. That’s you. I’ll always match you, step for step. And you will always be looking over your shoulder for me. I’ll be there. Don’t worry.”

“I want you to go away.”

“You know exactly how to do that.”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“I’m so, so tired. Why doesn’t the medicine work? Why don’t I ever feel better? Am I ever going to feel better?” I say.

“Darling, would you even believe it if you did feel better?” 

And I know. I know these things aren’t true. There is a very, very small but clear voice in my heart that somehow manages to hold me together, no matter what. I am thankful for that voice. Some days that voice is all I have when the chemicals in my brain echo in my head: you’re worthless, you’re nothing, you are a burden.

I have proof that these things aren’t true. I have friends, family, a certain someone who never fails to make me laugh -- even through tears. These are people who, on good days, I know love me. But on bad days … well. It’s a lot harder when this shadowthing is determined to deafen me to a kind word, a gentle touch, a friendly smile. This shadowthing darkens these affectionate gestures with paranoia and terror and desperate sorrow.

I try to ignore the shadow. How I try.

Often, my genuine self-confidence and optimism and certainty bubbles to the surface and I have whole days and weeks where I think I’m okay. Maybe even better than okay! That I am doing a good job, making a difference, that I am kind and empathetic and worth the time of day.

It is for those days that I push and I push and I push through the bad days . It’s just, you know, sometimes it is hard to push through a shadow.

I’ve been a little less plucky in the face of the tough for the past while.

But I’ll be okay. I will get through it. I always do.