Tag: depression

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This is a Post about my Dumb Old House

I’m not even depressed this time! At least not any more than normal. Is this evolution?

This blog post started writing itself a few weeks ago, as I smeared joint compound onto the walls of my bedroom with probably the wrong tool, having something like a spiritual experience with plaster. Then this morning, a friend shared a piece of writing with me and it had a similar kind of cosmic impact on me – oh yeah, I really like to read and write personal essays.

Back to the walls, though.

It’s been nearly three years since I purchased my house – I still marvel at why anyone gave me a mortgage, but here we are – and my partner and I recently started another renovation project: fixing the first renovation project we did in January of 2021. Fixer-upper homeowners will maybe chuckle knowingly at that particular predicament. In short, we’ve learned a lot, and the bedroom needed some more love.

In peeling and scraping over a century of wallpaper and paint off the walls, we uncovered the original stencil work. The same thing happened when I did a half-assed wallpaper removal in my office last summer. I am very, very tickled by it and very, very said the walls are in such condition that I can’t put it on display for the next century.

As it always does, the project made the bedroom much, much worse than it did pre-project. Plaster pulled away from the lath, opening up deep, ugly, spooky holes in the wall. Century-old wallpaper glue stained the old paint streaky brown. There’s not an inch of the surface without a gouge, scratch, or scrape left behind by tools. And the smell! You know how old paper smells if you’ve ever browsed in a used book store – now imagine what spraying all those old books with water might bring to the surface. It smelled old, it looked god-awful, and each time we get another couple hours work in, our bodies ache top to bottom. It’s a labor that, halfway through, way too far gone, you wonder whether you should just bulldoze the thing and start fresh.

But the we got to the point where the walls were mainly free of debris, any remaining glue or gunk sealed up, and it came time to rebuild. Mudding, or patching plaster, is a task I find therapeutic and not terribly difficult, and so I tend to take the lead on that, my partner opting to sand it all down once it’s dried. Sanding makes me miserable beyond words, so this balances out well.

As I was packing a spooky, gaping hole in the wall with joint compound one night after work, I had a moment of gratitude. I looked at the tool in my hands, probably not very different from the one used to put the original plaster up in 1916, and probably not very different from the one used to build structures hundreds and thousands of years before me. My humble tub of plaster, too, probably hadn’t changed a ton over the years, not really. And as I used my caveman tool and my caveman mud to make my walls whole again, I couldn’t help but feel grateful that I was able to do it, to learn a skill that would help my house stand for years and years to come. To rebuild the room where me and my partner and the dog and many many people in the future will rest each night. To brush away crumbling plaster to make room for a new smooth coat to reinforce my old walls in my old house and make it safe and comfortable for me and my family.

It came as a profound, unexpected comfort in the midst of a project that was beginning to reach the “why did we do this?” point.

You’ll hear me begrudge my old house and all its ailments far more often than I am having these moments of gratitude. I work a nonprofit job where I make more or less a living wage. My house is charming but old, old but charming. It needs a lot of love and has received a lot of love since 1916. It is modest. Because I cannot dump money into contractors to do professional repairs and remodeling, my partner and I watch YouTube and go to the hardware store ten times in a single weekend and we learn to make it whole again ourselves. Even if we could pay a professional, I probably wouldn’t, because I’m a cheap ass!

I look at fixes prior owners made and wish I could hit them upside the head for half-assing it. The next owners will look at my fixes and wish the same. And then I hope they will have a moment of gratitude when they fix some shit I did not have any business trying to fix. I like to imagine generations like that living in this house, do-it-yourself-ers and broke people and potential-seers. If there is a god, may he never let a flipper come to own this funny old house!

For all the trials and tribulations and money-pit moments I have here, I do not often dream of a project-free home. I have friends who I could not pay to live in this house or to work on it the way that we have – they are not interested, and a project-free home is their ideal. No way I can fault them for that. I have other friends who would make quick work of other types of projects, the kind (like painting) that would make a huge difference visually but that for whatever reason I always leave for last.

A coworker and I, similar in age (and in so many other ways, we’ve started to keep a list) and with similar old crumbly homes, compare notes and gripe to each other every day about our projects. “The house has been standing over a hundred years, there’s probably nothing you can do that’ll make it tumble down,” I remind them regularly. They tell me, when I’m despairing, “When you finish, it’ll be like a brand new room.” And we go back and forth like that, probably as long as we both live.

When I daydream about finishing our renovations – the jobs are never done, of course, but we’ll come to the end of the list of things we can do ourselves – and selling the house someday, the house we buy after it is always in similar condition. Maybe even worse, now that I no longer fear plaster the way I did three years ago!

We watch videos of people restoring literal ruins, and while my partner and I are agreed we could never, would never do something like that, I still get the same little thrill at the prospect of rebuilding something from rubble. Someone’s hands placed those rocks there however many hundreds of years ago, building up a wall, and now some person on YouTube is showing us how they’ve made it a wall again. There’s something so beautiful about that to me, the rejection of the potential “disposability” of a place that has made a home for generations of people. When the Instagram girlies talk about romanticizing their lives, I’m not sure this is what they mean, but maybe it is. Something tells me the Instagram girlies are not going through tubes and tubes of Working Hands every winter to combat the plaster wounds and dryness, but the grass is always greener.

Sometimes I think I will find the point of a post by the time I reach the end. Most often I probably don’t. Today I don’t think I have. But I’m grateful to write a post that is not driven by anguish, to have read something a friend wrote that energized the part of my brain that loves reading and writing. In any case, I have sanding to do. This stinky old house won’t fix itself!

With gratitude and scuffed up knuckles,

Lexie

This is a Post about Hm, Some Things Have Occurred

So, the last time we chatted we were in a sexy little pandemic but I found something to be twee about. Shortly after, some more crimes occurred, and I’ve been sad, and my community has been crushed and vibrant and hopeful and crushed and vibrant and hopeful again, every day, on repeat.

On top of that, the pandemic is decidedly worse, and it’s a First World Problem, but my apartment is SO hot. Petunia and I have been melting for about two weeks, depressed and sweaty.

I’ve had a few ideas since I last wrote that I thought might make nice blog posts. The first one was about the little dog I used to walk for my neighbor Madeline as a child. The second was about that same era, when my other neighbor, Nancy, would gather the kids on the block a couple times every summer to make ice cream together. We’d eat it with raspberries from the patch in her backyard, although we griped a lot about the whole ordeal of actually picking the berries. We called the blackberries “black caps” and I don’t know why.

I did a quick search and I guess they’re a little different, but it was always funny to me as a kid.

Anyway, now I’m 24 instead of 23 which feels like a big deal because 23 was such a god-awful wreck for me. To try to turn a new leaf in 2020 is pretty funny, but I guess I’ll try anyway. I am very privileged in that things aren’t so bad for me right now, which makes it easier for me to try to do my part to make things less bad for others.

I wrote my brother-in-law earlier tonight that, in the last couple months, I’ve gotten a greater sense of community here in the Twin Cities than I’ve had anywhere else after any amount of time. I’m sad it took a pandemic and a recession and another tragedy, but I think people really show their best selves when things are tough. The efficacy and spirit of mutual aid—though infuriating, when I think about it within the broken structures in place that cause the plight people face—has really been moving. I have emailed my city councilman so many times I think his assistant is tired of hearing from me. I wonder why I never did it before and I guess it’s because I never cared before, or didn’t care enough, or didn’t know how I could show I cared. I think that’s the case for a lot of people, especially my age, and it’s heartening to see people learn how to show up meaningfully for their neighbors. White people have dragged our feet for a good long while and maybe I shouldn’t be relieved to see us pick up the pace now, but Now feels better than Later. We’re moving, anyway.

Today I saw this June Jordan poem (it’s her birthday) and, though I’m not much of a poetry reader and had never heard of her before, it really knocked me on my ass:

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR
I WANTED
NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES!
I WANTED
NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK!
I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR
KNEES!

I WANTED YOU
I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL
AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND
DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING
OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT
TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING
OF THE PEARL

YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME

AND I HAVE BEGUN
I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE
MAYBE YOU DO

I AM TASTING MYSELF
IN THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SUN

So many things have been knocking me on my ass lately, but in good ways, I think. My friends and family and colleagues and I have been having conversations that make us uncomfortable, and better, and when I look in the mirror most days I don’t hate the person I see. I can see that she’s trying, I’m trying, harder than I have for a long time—maybe harder than I’ve ever tried—to be a person worth being.

I’ve got four books in progress right now, scattered and splayed open in different parts of my apartment because I can’t focus on much for long. They are: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (of course), and No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July. They all ache. I read them and I think, I can’t believe someone did this on a page. I can’t believe they did it for 100 or 500 pages. They’ve been making me think about writing, the way reading always does.

With a new friend I’ve revisited some of my previous blog posts and found myself feeling proud. For years I’d look back on what I’d written and feel ashamed, maybe not horrified sometimes, but mostly like I couldn’t believe my brain produced that and thought it was worth writing down. Undoubtedly I’ll have that feeling again, but I guess the difference now is that I’m writing from a place that feels really vulnerable and unpolished and in the years it’s taken me to accept that part of myself I’ve maybe grown a little affection for it. I think I’ve written before that it doesn’t do me or anyone else any good to hate myself. So there!

I don’t know what to do about this pandemic and all the suffering it’s exacerbated. It feels really miserable and hopeless. I live 2 blocks from the capitol here in Minnesota, which has been surrounded by ugly chain-link fences since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, and I think, what the fuck are you doing in that big marble building? Nobody’s in there, I know, but the symbol of it makes my stomach churn. Hundreds of people are living in encampments in city parks in Minneapolis while something called a “governor’s mansion” exists and an enormous, plush building sits empty and the people who normally work there wring their hands about what’s “pragmatic”.

Meanwhile it’s a whole election year and it feels laughably stupid, just unbelievably ridiculous. I can’t tell you how much I don’t care. After a truly gut-wrenching, miserable 2016, I feel so far separated from federal government I wish I could fully opt out without being racked with guilt. That’s maybe why I’ve got my city councilman on email speed-dial. Can’t he do something? Can’t I? Can’t anyone? I invoke The Lorax at this point.

As a teenager I had something in my MySpace bio about being a misanthrope and I thought that was pretty cool and tough of me. Frankly, at this point in my life, I’m so soft, I’m beyond bleeding-heart liberalism and just full on—what? Lefty Play-Doh, maybe? Socialist Silly Putty? It’s too easy to be angry and not do anything about it, not ask why I’m angry. I’m angry because people suffer needlessly at the hands of overpaid suits who feign progressivism. I’ve had enough of it. I’ve gotten sick on the fake sweetness of “Midwest Nice”. I think most people have also had enough, and especially in places outside the Midwest, so perhaps we’ll move the needle now, finally. I don’t know what “move the needle” even means and I suspect it’s not enough. But I guess it’s a start. I want to pull a Mom and, instead of just threatening, actually pull the car over on the side of the highway and demand changed behavior. I demand a reckoning and I know I’m not alone. I know that watching—secondhand—the Third Precinct burn felt like Something.

So I’ll hang onto Something for a bit, until it snowballs into Something More, Something Big. You should, too. It feels good.

Lexie

This is a Post about Petunia and the End Times

Uh, hey!

It’s been a minute. But if you thought you wouldn’t hear from me in the midst of this shitshow, you were mistaken, and I wonder, really, whether you know me at all!

So, last time we talked (and, probably the time before that and the time before that) I was Regular Depressed. Since then, we’ve had a sexy little economic collapse and pandemic outbreak! I suppose it tracks that now I am Apocalypse Depressed. Truthfully, I did have a couple weeks of that, and of course it’s not over, but what’s become the New Normal has set in a little bit and I have found reasons to laugh and smile and get out of bed, so right now I am doing okay.

As COVID-19 was unfolding in the eastern hemisphere and felt lightyears away, I started getting serious of my longtime desire to adopt a dog and, as it happens, that process—and the spread of a virus—moves pretty quickly!

Wednesday, March 11, my colleagues and I celebrated a huge organizational milestone and went home exhausted and happy with little else on our minds. By the time we got to the office the next day, closures began in the U.S. (including at the location in Houston where we’d had our celebratory event on Wednesday). In the Midwest, we were—and still are, to some degree—a couple weeks behind the devastation. But as the DOW collapsed along with loads and loads of public infrastructure at the hands of capitalism, it became clear that our little, though internationally-reaching nonprofit needed to make some quick changes.

So, like every other business, we got a plan in place to limit staff time in the office. On Sunday I met my dog and her foster for the first time. Monday at work we discussed our plan moving forward. Wednesday evening, after my first day working at the office with only two other people, my dog came home to me. Then before the next week was through, we realized our plan was insufficient.

Fortunately, my first few days with my dog went smoothly. Like most rescues, she’s a little skittish but eager to please, and her favorite thing is to sit on my lap and sleep. So while the world outside started to crumble a little, I was lucky to have a funny little friend to lie on my chest like the world’s most effective weighted blanket.

Our first weekend together I finally broke down. Friday we learned of layoffs at work, and cuts in hours with the ultimate goal of staying afloat while all this goes on for who-knows-how-long. Though layoffs were happening everywhere already and I knew they were a possibility for my org, losing a quarter of our staff in an afternoon was a horrible kind of reality check.

Though baseball season has been indefinitely postponed, my boss called me in as a utility player, and I am so grateful to still have the job I love so much. I am fortunate to work somewhere that leadership is making impossibly hard decisions that will hopefully make it possible to come out on the “other side” of this viable. I am heartbroken by the sacrifices that were made to make it possible and I’m fearful that more sacrifices will be made along the way—I know I’m next in line for potential layoffs, and I am trying very hard not to fixate on it.

My dog’s name is Petunia. After I met her (and learned her admittedly horrible capital-W-White Girl rescue name) I created a longlist of potential new names. Tuesday night, before she was to be dropped off with me for good, I lay awake brainstorming giddily, unable to sleep.

I called my mom Wednesday morning to check in and catch up. The weekend prior, we had planned for my mom and siblings to visit on their spring break, and they’d have left Monday, would have met Petunia with me.

Anyway, I was talking to my mom and telling her that she’d be coming home Wednesday and she asked about a name. I said I still hadn’t decided, and she chatted for a while about wanting to get another family dog someday, and how a name she liked wouldn’t be a good fit for a German shepherd because it was too delicate. My great grandmother on my maternal grandpa’s side once had a scrappy little dog with that name and my mom had always liked it. The name was serendipitously on my list: Petunia. So that felt like a sign.

I am confident that without Petunia my mental health could not withstand the stress of this global pandemic business. The breakdown I had that first weekend we were together was rough, and as I sat bawling on my bedroom floor over the state of the world I kept looking at her little face and feeling grateful she was there. It’s not only obligation, but love for her that lifts me up enough to get out of bed and keep moving forward. She’s also very funny, and it feels good to laugh now that I have limited contact with my friends and family and coworkers.

Settling into the New Normal has been so, so strange for me and for everyone else. We are concerned about being creative enough or productive enough with all this new free time while also trying to figure out how to pay our bills and feed our families. There’s a presidential election on, somehow, that is both extremely critical right now but also feels impossible and frivolous while everyone on earth does damage control. We need change now—or, better yet, years and years ago—but we can’t get the changes we need until we make the Big Change, and that becomes less and less likely as our entire institution breaks down. It feels very bleak.

A couple weeks before All This happened, I went to the Bernie Sanders rally in St. Paul, and it was so wonderful. I listened to local leaders—nurses, teachers, and farmers!—talk about how badly we need to improve our social safety nets and support people who provide essential services and how our only hope of moving toward doing that is Bernie. Thinking back, it feels like sick foreshadowing, though at that point we were aware of the situation in China but still felt pretty invincible, I guess.

The next week, the St. Paul Federation of Educators went on strike to secure more resources for students. The district moved quickly to make sure kids could still get bused to school for meals. Not long before, a group of healthcare providers in the Twin Cities were on strike to negotiate new, fairer contracts.

Both groups made agreements eventually, and the world proceeded to implode on itself. Now, workers from Amazon and Instacart and WholeFoods and a variety of other services deemed essential are on strike to demand hazard pay and safe work conditions. If not now, then when? But we are also in the midst of economic collapse, so these people risk a great deal (financial security, insurance coverage, etc.) and are, it goes without saying, heroes.

I’m not sure what I set out to do by writing this, but I knew I had to write something, at the very least to get it out of my system. My feeble attempts to uplift are made even weaker by the state of the world but I hope that you know that I am still, as always, on your team.

This is an opportunity, if nothing else, for all of us to be better for one another, to pause and consider how our actions (now as innocuous as going to the grocery store) may impact those around us, and consider what small things we can do to help mitigate the inevitable suffering of our neighbors.

It’s a chance to be kinder, more thoughtful, more generous, gentler with ourselves and others. We are living in unprecedented times, and every single person and community will be changed by this experience. Despite our frustrations that wealth and resources are being hoarded and deliberately withheld by those in power, everyday people are acting selflessly and generously to help one another along. No, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and so I think it’s okay to be humbled by and grateful to see it.

I really believe that the only way out of this is through, together. Much of the damage control happening right now is because people are choosing to do the right thing, whether governors or mayors or presidents are making the right call at the right time. I think it’s because we love each other, and we know we need each other, and we are doing our best for each other. I am grateful for that.

In any event, it’s April. The snow has all melted here—knock on wood—and with all this free time, lots of people are out walking and appreciating the sunshine. When I take Petunia on walks around our neighborhood, or when I go in to the office to ship packages to customers so we can carry on as an organization, I feel that we’re finding ways to keep moving forward and that has to count for something. If we keep doing that and taking note of who is showing up for whom, we’ll come out the other side ready to make real, tangible change.

As we know, the peak of this pandemic is yet to come in the States, and things will get worse before they get better. Kind neighbors can only take us so far. Please, if you aren’t already, think long and hard about the ways our federal leadership has failed us. If this awful situation has not opened your eyes to the need for universal healthcare and the destruction of capitalism, I don’t know what will. Clearly, our current systems are not sustainable, and they are being stress tested at the absolute worst possible time. This is not normal, or healthy, or functional, or conscionable. The main reason things have spiraled this wildly out of control—besides gross incompetence and hubris—is because capitalism rewards the hoarding of wealth and resources.  The money for the change we need is there, but it’s in the wrong hands, and the wealthy are proving they will not “rise to the occasion” to use their wealth for good. We cannot go on like this, and we do not need to be fighting over the resources that we know are plentiful, just out of reach. I hope you see that. I say this out of extreme tenderness and desperation. It does not need to be this way.

In closing, a few thoughts to carry with you as we find ways to carry on:

  • You’re doing a great job.
  • I am thinking of you.
  • Nobody is being as productive as they were Before, and if they are, it won’t last long. We will all burn out, and that’s okay.
  • Relax your shoulders and un-clench your jaw.
  • Breathe in the spring air and pause to feel the sun on your face.
  • Be kind and be patient.
  • Ask for help when you need it. We all need help.
  • Take care.
  • I love you.

Lexie

This is a Post about my Big, Dumb Heart

As a child I went through a phase for a couple years where I couldn’t fall asleep without praying. I was very consciously not praying to god, because I had been bucking against my catholic upbringing pretty aggressively, but I wanted someone to keep an eye on things for me. This was my prayer:

“Please bless my family, friends, teachers, pets, home, and self. Thank you.”

Not really a prayer, but something similar that ten-year-old me felt covered my bases without lying to god’s face about believing in him. And if I didn’t say it, I couldn’t fall asleep, even when I got a little older and thought it was kind of stupid and wanted to kick the habit.

I’ve been having a rough go of it lately and remembered that and it reminded me of who I am and the condition of my heart and why I have such a difficult time just being sometimes. I have a very big heart, I think, but my brain chemicals are all unbalanced most of the time and so my brain tells my heart to be hard and small and shriveled like the Grinch and I forget how to be cared for. I don’t want to need to be cared for. People ask me how I’m doing and I want to beg them to stop asking because when they ask I have to acknowledge that I’m having a really hard time and my head thinks my heart sucks and my heart is just like oh okay with a cartoon frown tattooed on it.

Anyone who follows me on social media knows my philosophy for a depressive spell is to over-share my way through it. If I yell really loudly that I’m SAD and feel BADLY about myself then everyone knows and it can’t sneak up on me anymore. In theory. So that kind of behavior naturally triggers concern from the wonderful people who care about me, but the exercise is for me and me alone to say I AM BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN MY SADNESS! And so for people to acknowledge this chest beating thing I’m doing makes me bashful and embarrassed and fearful that I am really and truly doing it all for attention when I know I just cope like a clown.

I have to keep reminding myself that just because I’m sad and overwhelmed doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong. Change is really hard, and I could insert the lyrics to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac here but that would just put me over the edge again and probably drag a few others down with me too. And everyone the world over has been so sweet to me, just overwhelmingly lovely and supportive and kind, and all I want to do is push them away so that I can feel miserable in peace and wait for it to pass. The rest of the world marches on, though, even when we’re grieving.

I’ve been bad at blogging because I’m trying to be good at being alive, or at least just being alive. And that’s not to say I wish I were dead—I’ve been there but SSRIs have since done the diligent work of keeping me afloat—but just that carrying on when you feel like your existence weighs a billion tons is really very exhausting. This is not a cry for help. It’s an explanation. I feel the need to explain myself, which is not something anyone can rid me of, so I’m trying to do that because that’s what I need to do.

It’s also a reminder to you and to me too that everything can be very heavy all at once even when everything was very light just yesterday. It certainly doesn’t help that all the pretty leaves are falling and the temperature is dropping and I keep forgetting to start my car early so it’s warm when I drive to work. Sometimes the shivering feels appropriate though, like my skeleton is rattling around in my body because she is anxious and sad and jangly and the cold is a good excuse to get it out of her system. Out of my system.

I always know I’m really at a low point when I get desperately homesick. My relationship with my family is complicated and strained, so our distance has been mostly a blessing, a cooling-off space between holidays. But I keep calling my mom just to chat, and I really have nothing to say, except that I want to hear her voice and crawl into bed with her like I’ve just woken up startled from a nightmare. And I want to pet my dog and lie in the leaves with her and bicker with my little brother and sister and have my dad make me a sandwich because that’s his love language.

The people who love me have a way of saying “I’m worried about you” that makes me wish I could just vaporize on the spot. It comes from a place of love and concern—I know that. But it’s an entirely unhelpful thing to say to someone who is mentally ill or maybe just Regular Sad. It says, “Your feelings are making me feel bad, and uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to be around you.” Fair enough. But for someone who may or may not be worried about themselves, it’s like asking them to get better quick so that you can feel comfortable again, even if that’s not what you mean.

Truthfully I’m not worried about myself, because I’ve been through worse depressive episodes and made it out the other side mostly unscathed. I haven’t thought about suicide since high school, so jot that down. I’m just sad for myself, because the excitement of starting over is getting squashed under the weight of being sad about it and what it meant to get here.

I think remembering my ragamuffin prayer as I tried to fall asleep last night, sniffling and soaking my pillow with tears, was a reminder that my heart is okay. It’s not a Grinch heart. In fact, it might be three sizes too big. My big weird heart had me cobbling together prayers to a god I didn’t believe in because I wanted my family and friends and teachers and pets to be blessed and safe and warm. There’s a sweetness to that I simply can’t deny myself, and I know I’m capable of it again when I am not so caught up in feeling sorry for myself.

It seems like I’m always signing off by saying I’m doing alright, whether the post is happy or sad, but the truth is that writing it all out gets me to an alright place, if I wasn’t already there. I’m having a hell of a time but I’ll come out the other side safe and sound, because I always do. (And you can and will, too.)

Thanks for listening,

Lexie

This is a Post about Who Knows What

I haven’t written a long post in quite a while and in that good long while I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel like I don’t have anything to say. Pretty consistently the first few months of this blog endeavor I had a great many opinions and plenty of words to get them out to whoever might read them but now I feel like I’m coming up short.

Fall is kind of a funny time for me. Maybe for other people, too. It’s my favorite season, limited though it is. The Midwest will come ablaze with autumnal colors over the next several weeks and it’ll feel as though maybe the long miserable winter to come will be worth it for this fleeting view.

The body remembers trauma even when the brain tries to suppress it. Saturday night I had dream after dream of my mom treating me cruelly in a number of ways, seemingly out of nowhere. We visited over Labor Day weekend and had a nice time; I have no reason to feel jilted. But the five-year anniversary of my assault and all the things that fell apart in the aftermath—including the 2016 election—is coming up and so maybe the tension in my muscles is my body and my brain bracing against it.

I haven’t felt quite like myself for the last few weeks. I’m not exactly in a depressive episode but I’m not not depressed. Again, it’s like my brain is telling me it’s gearing up for a Big Bad One and it’ll be ready when I finally succumb. I feel overdue for a rough patch but maybe that’s just because the last few months have been good after nearly half a dozen very rough years.

(In the spirit of full disclosure: I had a whole entire emotional breakdown a few hours after writing this post. Like, cried so hard I got a nosebleed. Anyway.)

Another indicator I’m not quite right: I got a new tattoo and forgot to mention it to my partner. We woke up Saturday and he said, “Did you get a tattoo?” Huh. Not really a huge deal, but maybe a sign I have been distracted.

Anyway, I love fall but it doesn’t love me back and so I’m having a hard time focusing on anything but the sense of inevitable dread like bile in the back of my throat.

It’s back-to-school season, which means my partner is starting his second year of teaching and I am two years out separated from first-day-of-school jitters. I miss it a lot. I keep in touch with professors and friends from college but of course it’s not the same. I suppose I felt like as long as I was on campus I was not totally a grown-up yet and was still free to be angsty and make mistakes or whatever. School is kind of like a security net for someone who always enjoyed being there.

I have a couple small comforts, which is not to discount the constant big ones but to acknowledge the few good things that come with fall. We have cooler weather which means I can wrap myself in soft blankets and cozy sweaters and clean sheets straight from the dryer which is a kind of comfort I don’t think anyone ever outgrows. Being able to drink hot coffee again without overheating helps, too.

I’ve also been reading more again, which isn’t something I ever really stopped doing, but I go through spurts like I imagine most people do. I’ve had the same two books sitting on the coffee table, half-read, all summer, with little desire to get back into them. I like them both—Watchmen by Alan Moore and This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherrie L. Moraga—but anything I don’t zoom through from the get-go is hard to get back into. I don’t like reading to feel like a chore, and pushing through a book like it’s an obligation rather than a treat is no fun. I’ll revisit them someday, I’m sure.

But what I have been reading has re-energized me, so thank goodness for that. For those curious:

An Orphanage of Dreams by Sam Savage

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

I even had a successful trip to the bookstore this weekend. And for book people, it’s almost impossible to have a bad trip to the bookstore, but having felt crummy and uninspired by what was already on my shelves at home, I really needed a win. A bookstore is a good place to get one. I picked up three books on my miles-long list that I hope will help me maintain this fresh momentum:

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (out in November)

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Another new development: I have a pen pal. I grew up writing other kids from all over the world and enjoyed it immensely. As an adult I never really had an outlet to scratch that itch until I was reminded of programs designed to pair people who are incarcerated with pen pals on the “outside” or refugees and asylum-seekers who could use kind words.  I researched a few different programs and was eventually paired with a man who is incarcerated in Texas. In his first letter to me, tapped out on a typewriter, he closed with “Take care of yourself, will you please,” which I didn’t know I needed to hear but which jostled something in my chest. I suppose it’s a reminder we can all use, whether we’re feeling shitty or not.

I promised myself I wouldn’t post a blog entry for the sake of posting and that I’d let the blog die when I ran out of material. I don’t know how people spend years and years blogging, but I admire the commitment. I feel like I’m already starting to repeat myself, and I can’t imagine reading week after week about feeling defeated by the world and mental illness is fun for anyone. This isn’t to say that I’m quitting blogging—please don’t let me get away with being dramatic about it when that inevitably happens—but to say I’m feeling a little stuck. Mentally and emotionally congested, maybe. Leave your fair-trade, cruelty-free, homeopathic remedies below.

Take care of yourself, will you please.

Lexie

This is a Post about Baby Fat

My mom used to tell me that as a baby she had a hard time getting me to nap. When all else failed, she’d load me into the backseat of the car and drive around until I zonked out.

Driving home today I realized the same thing is still true, and it made me wonder whether things like that carry over a lifetime. 

I’ve never been a napper, not even in college when I was supposed to have picked up a penchant for it. I only ever really nap when I’m really sick, but under the right circumstances I catch myself dozing off in the car (as a passenger!)

There’s a scar on the top of my right foot and nobody knows where it came from, even though I’ve had it as long as I remember. The same goes for the scar on the inside of my left pinky finger. I like the idea that mystery scars and birthmarks—I have the remnants of a raspberry on my left shoulder—are wounds from a past life. If there’s any truth to it, in my past life I got into the world’s strangest scuffles.

The older I get the more false memories I figure out, like the one where the bus crash in Simon Birch actually happened to me in the woods near my grandparents’ house.

As a kid I had a lot of imaginary friends, too, who I would walk home with from the bus stop and tell all about my family and my dogs and my school, where they were the new student. I wonder if imaginary friends and false memories and mystery scars and déjà vu all intersect on some plane where they come together meaningfully. Do kids still have imaginary friends? Is it a symptom of loneliness or a normal imaginative exercise?

Something anxious people joke about online is playing out “what ifs” in their heads at the worst possible times, like when we’re exhausted and trying desperately to fall asleep or we’re at work and have a deadline in an hour or something. Is this another iteration of imaginary friendships, this exercise in mental gymnastics of imagining if I said this clever or stupid thing to my friend or family member or colleague maybe things might be different or better or worse and oh god why didn’t I think of that superb comeback when someone said that shitty thing to me eight months ago? Anyone? Bueller?

I guess what I’m getting at is that I live in my head, like, a lot. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it’s an anxious thing. As a “writer”, when I decide I am one again after months and months of not bothering to try, sometimes I think if I write a short story or micro-fiction I can get it all out of my system, like maybe putting it in kind-of-nice words will get it out of my stupid brain and make it just some other story. Maybe those imaginary friendships I wish I had, even in adulthood, can exist and comfort me in fiction. Maybe not.

Was I just a super anxious baby and now I’m a super anxious adult baby? An anxious 23-year-old-infant who feels thirty? What could be worse?

Growing up—which, yes, I’m absolutely still doing—the concept of baby fat followed me around for years beyond the normal limits of what’s considered baby fat. I have a fast metabolism, I was a really active kid and teenager, and I have always been what doctors consider a “healthy” weight. Being tall helps. But eastern European women are built, as Lucy Dacus croons perfectly, “all soft shapes and lines / shape-shifting all the time.” I inevitably inherited the Polish baby-bearing hips and the broad, strong (lol) shoulders and the big feet and the tendency to carry weight in my trunk. Add onto that the luck of being tall and I look much like a goofy misshapen pear.

The women in my family have struggled my whole entire life with body image. Very openly. Very loudly. Very emotionally. The men in my family are lean and strong and unconcerned with how they look because, one, media doesn’t dictate that they should and, two, they get the job done. The powers that be cast me somewhere in between that lean and strong silhouette and the softer feminine one and so I have a whole host of body image issues where my upbringing and my feminist mentality are at odds.

Being a thin, white woman bitching about boy image is nothing new and not interesting or radical but in many ways, for me at least, it ties into my Midwestern identity and my issues with my family and with myself. It has always been a part of me. Watching my mom and grandma and aunt yo-yo diet my entire life was sure to lead to some kind of mental turmoil, given my cool genetics, right?

There was a summer in high school where I’d eat a shitload of ice cream everyday—not, like, a binge, I don’t think, but probably not a great idea for anyone—and obsessively weigh myself. I never purged or anything, and I don’t think I necessarily worked out any harder as a result of what showed up on the scale, but I knew as I did it something was wrong. I was a cheerleader in high school, so I burned off all the calories I ate and was strong and my body looked good and I had a mostly healthy relationship with my body, except that summer was probably after I was injured and couldn’t compete in the winter and felt terrible all the time.

My siblings were small when I was in high school and so I took them to the beach often—the one I wrote about in RIVRGRL—and when it was an especially hot weekend my mom and aunt might come along too. I have a visceral memory of sitting on beach towels with them, people watching, and listening them comment on which women were wearing swimsuits they “shouldn’t be wearing”. And it wasn’t really malicious, I think, not intentionally at least, but a defensive reflex that said, “I hate my body, but at least I know I should be ashamed of it and hide it even when it’s 90 degrees out.”

It broke my heart and pissed me off, like most things do.

By this point I was coming into my own as a young woman and a feminist and I remember asking, “Who cares? Who gives a shit? What are you doing?” And I think it made them feel bad, but the nasty comments stopped for that day, at least. A small victory.

So much of my experience of womanhood has been centered around my body and what it looks like and feels like and how it compares to others’ and a deep hatred for traditional exercise to complicate the whole thing. It has been defensively, at eleven or twelve years old, insisting the skin—not fat!—I could pinch around my middle was just “baby fat”. It has been, in high school, wondering seriously if I was experiencing my weight in a disordered way and whether it counted as body dysmorphia. It has been, in college, looking back on cheerleading pictures and gazing at what my legs once looked like, long and lean and strong.

Now, it’s being very conscious about the way I speak to my siblings, who have both been coerced to diet. It’s looking at myself before I get in the shower and not cringing because, even if I want to, I know it’s not doing me any favors. It’s ignoring the imaginary notion that I should be ashamed of how I look because…what? Looking a certain way is good or bad depending on what the media says? Trying to look at my body and see a functional organism that lets me swim and ride a bike and cook and whatever else is a conscious effort constantly at odds with my reflex to pinch my “baby fat” and step on the scale and look at pictures of celebrities and wonder if maybe I ate more spinach I might look more like that. I fucking hate spinach! Whenever I get stupid enough to buy some, it always goes bad before I can eat it!

I look absurd in jumpsuits because I’m little-ish on top and weirdly wide on the bottom, and I need to learn to not give a shit. If I want to wear one—if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t, because imagine the potential for poop emergencies in one of those things—I can and I should. My body is my body and although I don’t necessarily have to be proud of it or whatever, I can’t punish myself for the way my bones and muscles, configured from my family members way way back in the old country and having to, like, squat and milk goats or whatever, look now in the 21st century. It’s stupid. Who cares?

I suppose this is all to say that I started writing and things got buckwild again because all the weird shit I thought when I was a kid rooted itself deep in my brain and has bloomed in stupid, meaningless anxieties in adulthood. Fun! Your body is good. It’s doing its best. The lumps and bumps and stretch marks—or lack thereof—are good because they’re yours. You’re, like, super hot, if we’re being honest here. And I’m not being corny. It’s the truth.

It’s your body and it’s a good one. Go jump in a puddle or something.

Lexie

Recommended listening/ reading/watching for “This is a Post about Baby Fat”:

“Shrill” on Hulu (based on Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

“My Mother & I” by Lucy Dacus

“Juice” and “Tempo” by Lizzo

“Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon” by Patty Lovell

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

“Here’s the Thing: Body Dysmorphia is the Worst” by Sophia Benoit

This is a Post about Self-Sabotage

Every six months or so a list of the “20 Drunkest Cities in America” makes the rounds and every six months I am overcome by anger and sadness over it.

It’s posed as a joke, and shared as a source of pride. Most of the cities are in Wisconsin, and all but one is in the Midwest. The city I use to explain where I’m from is on the list. I don’t know how accurate it is, if it’s based on any evidence at all, or where it came from, but outlets like Barstool Sports love to share it over and over again among the other asinine content they post.

People from my high school—and plenty from college, too—love this stuff, wear it as a badge of honor.

Maybe it’s because I’m a curmudgeon or maybe it’s because I’ve been forced to get to know all the worst parts of myself, but I can’t help but wish for a little more self-awareness. When I think of the Midwest, I think of all the idiosyncrasies that make it special, but also the complicated bits that make it, like any other region, unique. And I think it’s the complicated stuff that bears mentioning here.

The Midwest has a lot of fun nicknames: the Bible Belt, the flyover states, America’s Heartland, the Breadbasket, the Grain Belt, Middle America. They all conjure imagery of charmingly dopey farmers, too nice and very simple and maybe even a little primitive in nature (and totally ignorant of the skill and knowledge it takes to farm successfully). Those nicknames gloss over the sociopolitical and metaphysical complexity that makes the Midwest just like any other region of the world, and I think that does us a great disservice.

In Watchmen, there’s a passage from Hollis Mason’s book about his childhood in Montana. And although Montana is more West than Middle, I think the observation applies.

One of the things that [my grandfather] took great pains to impress upon me was that country folk were morally healthier than city folk and that cities were just cesspools into which all the world’s dishonesty and greed and lust and godlessness drained and was left to fester unhindered. Obviously, as I got older and came to realize just how much drunkenness and domestic violence and child abuse was hidden behind the neighborly façade of some of those lonely Montana farmhouses, I understood that my grandfather’s appraisal had been a little one-sided.

I wanna talk about climate.

Everyone knows people who live near the North Pole suffer through stretches of time where there’s nothing but darkness, day and night, and that wreaks havoc on their mental health. The same is true, to an extent, for people who endure long, harsh winters. As far as I can tell, seasonal depression is as common an undiagnosed epidemic as anxiety. There were days last winter where my partner and I were physically confined to our home, either because it was dangerously cold outside or the snow was up to our waists. For nearly a full week school was cancelled and I was working very few hours, so we sat in the apartment and went stir crazy while plows tried to clean things up and the sun fought to warm us a little. It was miserable. It was easily the hardest winter of my life, and we didn’t even get the worst of it.

When the sun finally came out in the spring, even thirty degrees felt like a gift. When we got an April blizzard just like the one that crippled us the year before, I thought I might have a serious mental break. I couldn’t stand to look out at the gray skies and filthy snow anymore. I hated feeling like every time I got in my car I might skid out of control into oncoming traffic.

Then, when we were finally in the clear, all that snow and ice meant disastrous flooding, wiping away any relief some people had because they spent all spring bailing water out their basements and fighting with insurance companies and incurring debt over the whole thing.

To my mind, there’s no way people can go through this cycle year after year—and generation after generation, the weather becoming more extreme as time goes on—and not suffer some kind of blow to their mental health. Add onto that the financial stress of property damage—or even medical bills to treat depression!—and you’ve got yourself a solid eight months of misery. I’ve been on antidepressants for years, so I can’t imagine how shitty I’d have felt without that extra serotonin to help me out.

I wanna talk about vice.

So the mental health thing is a factor, for sure. And when it goes untreated, or even when treated, it very often leads to self-medication of some destructive kind or another. For a lot of people it’s drinking. It warms the bones when it’s cold out and it dulls the sharp edges of stress and it makes you just hazy enough to feel good or maybe not feel anything at all. It’s an escape from what’s shitty. And on top of that, it’s addictive, so it feeds into a cycle of financial and mental health and physical health and employment problems. Do you see where I’m going with this?

It’s not always drinking, of course. A lot of people gamble, especially since the Midwest is home to a ton of different indigenous groups whose main source of income comes through casinos. (I don’t even have the time or knowledge to touch on the ways indigenous peoples suffer here in the Midwest and all over the world.) So gambling feeds into those financial and mental health problems and the escapism that so quickly becomes destructive to people who don’t know how to or simply don’t want to address how they feel.

Then there’s the opioid crisis, which plagues people all over the place regardless of race or status or creed. Addiction doesn’t discriminate, but especially in places lacking in resources, it runs rampant.

I wanna talk about agribusiness.

The Breadbasket and America’s Dairyland have changed dramatically and in such a way that has left family farms decimated by corporate buyouts or the struggle to compete with huge agribusinesses. John Steinbeck wrote whole novels about how the corporatization of agriculture ruined the people and the land where he grew up in California, and the same is true here in the Midwest.

Similarly, the once booming automotive industry in Michigan is now just starting to recover from economic collapse, and paper mills across the Midwest and Canada are shuttering rapidly. Logging and mining in the Upper Peninsula, once driving the economy, have all but disappeared and left sad, lonely towns in their wake.

I’d be foolish to act like any of these industries could have gone on as they were into the 21st century without any repercussions. We know now that clear-cutting entire forests is disastrous, and that mining is wildly dangerous and unsustainable, anyway. But where once generations lived and died and raised their families around these industries, they’re now left with nothing. The work has been shopped out overseas because it’s cheaper, or to South America where our government seems to think we have the right to exploit resources. What once sustained millions of families has both drained our region of resources and left families on their asses. Whether it’s the result of a lack of foresight or unchecked greed or both, it’s the reality here, and you can still see it in hundreds of ghost towns across the Midwest that were once bright and thriving.

I wanna talk about the sociopolitical divide.

It’s nothing new, although sometimes it feels like folks are more emboldened now than ever before. The Midwest is funny because it’s full of blue-collar, hard-working people who just want to be treated “fairly” and take ownership of what’s theirs, but who have been so brutalized by politicians that they’re left pointing fingers at each other. When once the democratic party was that of the working man, the idea of liberty and justice for all—yes, all—seems to have become too radical for a lot of Midwesterners.

And I hate it, but I get it on a level that I think comes from understanding the Midwest very deeply.

I wanna talk about resources.

By now you’ve seen the maps Turning Point USA has shared about the Electoral College. In an attempt to explain why the Electoral College is good, the maps actually do a terrific job of illustrating why it makes no fucking sense. Anyway, the idea is that boatloads of people live on the east and west coast in tiny little geographical sections of the US, while a similar number of people are spread over the Midwest and the plains and everywhere that’s not New York and LA. Because all the largest, most profitable industries are in those coastal cities, that’s where all the wealth and resources are amassed, leaving the majority of Americans with little to nothing.

Certainly, big metropolitan areas have their fair share of resource problems, but the idea is that the resources are there, just inequitably shared. That’s true for the country as a whole, except instead of a neighborhood plagued by poverty and teeming with gentrification, it’s whole enormous states full of people struggling to get by because their industries have been sold out for cheap labor and nobody wants to move to and invest in those places.

America has, like, shitloads of money. For the most part, all the top universities are on the coasts, Ivy Leagues full of people whose families have had shitloads of money for generations and generations, and have given shitloads of money to very wealthy Ivy League and companies schools for generations and generations, where those resources are needed least. And for generations and generations, Ivy League grads have started hedge funds and tech and online shopping companies that make shitloads of money off the backs of working people and redistribute next to none of the wealth to said working people. Then those hedge fund and tech company owners give their money to the political candidates who make it possible for them to keep paying pennies for the labor that made them exorbitantly wealthy while also not paying taxes to see that their laborers can, like, go to a doctor. See the problem here?

And the problem here, aside from all the exploitation, is that these working people can’t just leave and find a better job. They work these jobs because they pay the best, even if the best isn’t a livable wage. They have kids to feed and bills to pay and, for many, cannot risk going somewhere they’d be treated less shitty for lower pay. And it isn’t because they’re not smart or because they made bad decisions—it’s because some jackass born in Connecticut wants another boat and has zero fucking humanity. This business practice of employing desperate people and keeping them desperate ensures that those people’s families for generations and generations will never be able to challenge jackasses from Connecticut. It all but guarantees that a factory worker will not be able to afford to send her child to college, so that child will spend his life earning minimum wage doing jobs that are considered “unskilled” because he doesn’t have a degree, and the same will probably happen to his children. So, no, the promise of jobs, like the ones Foxconn was supposed to bring Wisconsin, is not enough.

I wanna talk about fear.

When basically nobody has a pot to piss in and everyone is working themselves to the bone and the majority of us are suffering from mental illness and addictions as a result, it’s no wonder we start feeling shitty about ourselves and others. When the problem is really with bosses paying low wages and offering terrible medical benefits to save money for themselves, people start to look at their peers and wonder why they’re doing a little better than themselves even though they’re in the same situation. Instead of asking, “Why is my boss allowed to pay me pennies?” people find themselves asking, “Why does my neighbor get food stamps but not me?”

It becomes a matter of pride. We come from generations of mostly eastern European farmers and peasants who probably came to America in hopes of a “better life” for their families. And coming from war-torn countries and backbreaking work, they passed along the ailments of hardship: depression, anxiety, addiction, pride, intergenerational trauma. The American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and working to make the life you desire is just that: a myth. And the inequity is not among our peers, but at the top. Somehow, many Midwesterners fail to see it. I think they would rather believe their neighbors are liars than cheaters than believe that they have been manipulated by people in power.

And so we’re left with this concoction of bitterness where we can’t say “I’m sorry” or “I need help” or “I was wrong.” This is where it’s gotten us, but still nobody seems willing to try something different. Something’s gotta give. We’re suffering by our own hand, while the shithead president gets to go on television or Twitter while he’s pulling the strings on our arms and ask, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

Because, as you may have noticed, my writing is often influenced by my reading, I’m going to start including some recommended reading with my posts. Take a peek at previous posts for my reading recommendations. For this week, check these out:

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Self-Sabotage”:

Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli

Watchmen by Alan Moore

“When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before’” by Clint Smith

“The Harvest Gypsies” by John Steinbeck

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

This is a Post about Being a Young Woman in 2019

Note: Yeah, I forgot to blog last week. My partner and I spent the better part of five days driving all over the state to spend time with our families, and with gloriously limited access to the internet, I dropped the ball.

It’s no secret that egging women on to try to “have it all” is, like, everyone’s favorite activity. Second wave women’s lib icons have all done the whole “why can’t we have it all?” bit time and again, but they rarely reveal their secrets.

Here’s why, at least as far as I can tell: there is no secret. You just do it. Usually because we have no other choice.

My mom would say, “Well, Lex, it isn’t that simple.”

And she’d be right, I guess, because she’s had experiences I haven’t and is much wiser than I am. But the advantage I have over her is the kind of stupid, blind ambition and faith that universities throw in with a liberal arts degree.

To be fair, I haven’t always felt this way, and it’s not as if I feel stupid and brave all the time. Starting around junior year of high school I fell deeply in love with The Bell Jar, particularly the fig tree metaphor. And I still love it, so much so that when I turned eighteen, I got a fig tree tattooed on my ankle, the closest I could get to my Achilles tendon (spoiler: this is all a big metaphor for weakness!). Here’s the passage for those of you who aren’t familiar:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

That single paragraph struck me immediately the first time I read it, and more and more each time after that. I wanted to have a family and I wanted to hook up with a bunch of hot foreign guys and I wanted to get famous writing angsty YA fiction and I wanted to be the editor of a cool magazine.

It was a feeling I had grappled with and tried to articulate for years; I thought it was a rarity and that everyone else had one concrete idea of what their life would look like when they grew up. How had Sylvia Plath gotten it so right? (It was probably the depression.)

I think it’s because this is the struggle of every woman: to want everything within one lifetime and being forced to make a decision one way or another, forever wondering “what if?”

Unfortunately for Plath, the journey of having it all—or even choosing to settle on a few of the figs—felt impossible. And while I thought the same for more time than I care to admit, I think now, more than any other time in history, it’s doable, or at least feels like there’s less to lose.

Something I think about a lot is my future in the context of sociopolitical upheaval and climate change. I worry that, though I want to have a family and a career I love, maybe I’ll only get to have a career because it’s unconscionable to have children and give them this planet to inherit.

I’ve always wanted to have children. In high school when I was especially depressed, I went through a phase where I thought, If I don’t even want to live on this planet, why should I make my kids do it? Bleak, I know. But it was—and in many ways still is—a real concern for me.

In addition to a genetic goldmine of mental health issues, children I have can expect to fear gun violence in their schools, food scarcity, unchecked pollution and destruction of biodiversity, unstable job markets, and astronomical higher education expenses.

Do I have my kids in a hospital like my mom did, or do I go to a birthing center, with a midwife and limited drugs? Do I circumcise my sons? Do I let my kids discover their identities all on their own or conform, at least loosely and initially, to the gender binary to avoid confusion and conflict? Do I let them use my iPhone to watch Baby Shark on repeat or let them only play with primitive wooden toys?

There are multitudinous parenting philosophies, but do any of them even touch the concerns we have at this exact cultural moment? I think I asked a lot of these questions in a linguistics course in college and my professor told me I should chill out. But I can’t!

If my partner and I decide to go for it and start a family, I want to do it right, but I constantly worry that maybe what we think is right could be damaging for our kids. I know that we are both loving and kind and open and so I hope we would make great parents, but doesn’t everyone? Haven’t we all seen our fair share of shitty parents? Don’t most of them think they’re doing just fine?

Does any of it matter if the planet is collapsing at the hands of capitalists anyway? In the infinitely wise words of 90’s punk band Sum 41, “I don’t wanna waste my time becoming another casualty of society / I’m never gonna fall in line, become another victim of uniformity.” And I don’t want my kids to, either.

I saw a tweet about this distinct anxiety the other day that hit the nail on the head:

“@Imani_Barbarin: Hey people dumping on millennials, It’s not about avocado toast, or coffee drinks or little trips. It’s about a lack of confidence in the future which makes us believe that saving for it is a waste of time.”

And should we decide to have kids, what if we can’t? I’ve always had this horrible fear that I’m infertile and won’t be able to have kids. That fear notwithstanding, I’ve seen the way reproductive healthcare is going. When Trump was elected, internet circles I follow were recommending people with uteruses look into long-term birth control, such as an IUD, which would prevent unwanted pregnancies for four-plus years and could not be easily taken away.

When I told my doctor on campus—a true-blue hippie who I loved and trusted—I was considering this course of action, she told me she thought we should “wait and see.” At the time, I reasoned that it made sense to think on a decision like that, but when I told my big sister, she said, “What the fuck?” and that made sense to me, too.

But kind of like the good faith to eventually have kids and hope things will turn out alright, I didn’t look into IUDs any further, although I still think about it a lot. Getting birth control has always been a pain in the ass, for me at least, so pursuing a long-term option makes sense. I guess maybe I’m just subconsciously clinging to the notion that things won’t get that bad. But with Trump threatening more than just eight years, what the fuck do I know? Everything feels outrageous and surreal.

I’ve read and watched Handmaid’s Tale, though, and I don’t think Atwood and the producers are very far off track of what’s at stake and what’s possible. This question of what motherhood and parenthood look like in the future is one that, for me, is built on what-ifs rooted in fear. If I were in June’s place, would I just end it? I like to think I’m tough and brave, but I don’t know that I could bear all that. I hope I don’t ever have to think on it harder than that. I hope I don’t have daughters who see it all unfolding like Margaret Atwood predicted thirty years ago.

Last year during the Kavanaugh hearings I felt like I was reliving the aftermath of my assault over and over again every day, and I was miserable especially because I knew nearly every other woman in this country was feeling the same way.

I even shared an essay I’d written in college about my assault in a desperate attempt to explain to my family why I was in so much pain. You can read that here if you haven’t already and would like to.

On one particularly tough day in the fall I expressed the desire to drown my sorrows, so my partner grabbed his keys and said, “Alright, let’s go get a chocolate shake.”

As we drove through downtown in our relatively new home, we noticed a small cluster of folks on a street corner holding signs in protest of Kavanaugh’s appointment, smiling and waving to passing cars. I nearly cried.

I know there are people in the world, and in positions of power, who are doing what they can to undo violence against women and people of color and other minorities. I know there are everyday people actively practicing kindness and generosity to narrow the divide Donald Trump has very purposefully cleaved in this country. I know I am doing my best to do the same. But sometimes it feels like it isn’t nearly enough, that the bad guys win this one, and that we don’t get a happy ending. It’s not a great feeling.

So I guess when I try to define “having it all” things have become a little muddy. The glass ceiling is fogged with pollution and the smeared, desperate fingertips of the rapist in the Oval Office and all his cronies. The prospect of having a fulfilling career is muddled by the fear that someone might not like the work I’m doing and bring a gun to my office to punish me and my colleagues.

Although I know better, it feels as though things have gone off the rails very quickly. As I come of age and into adulthood, my once-chemical anxieties have taken root in reality. With a new job, I feel like my life is starting to take shape, but that victory has merely made room for more real worries—when before I was racked by depression at being unfulfilled, I now work someplace meaningful and can redirect my idle time to worrying about the Great Big Ugly Future. Our parents didn’t worry about shit like this, did they?

In solidarity, always, no matter how anxious,

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Being a Young Woman in 2019”:

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ed. Cherrie L. Moraga

This is a Post about Identity

If you haven’t already heard, today is the first day of my new Big Girl Job. I wasn’t sure how to write about this because, aside from it being exciting news, I don’t have much to say yet. But then I had a tiny little epiphany and a blog post came to me.

In the midst of signing my formal acceptance and consenting to a background check and all the standard stuff, the hiring manager asked which first initial I wanted to use for my company email address, A for Alexis or L for Lexie. Professionally and academically, across the board, I’ve always gone by Alexis, although I grew up with everyone calling me Lexie. (Although I bristled in high school whenever anyone less than a best friend shortened “Lexie” to “Lex”.)

As an adult it seemed like it was time to shed my childhood nickname in favor of my legal name, which I guess I think sounds more professional. It always felt impersonal and foreign to hear people call me by my given name, but eventually most people got around to calling me Lexie anyway when we got to know each other well enough. Y’know…how nicknames work.

At my job in retail, I used Alexis as a defense mechanism, purposefully impersonal because I didn’t plan to stick around long. Go figure, the longer I was there, the more people started calling me Lexie. It kind of felt like that meant I’d been there too long, but really it just meant I was making friends. Not that serious, dummy. But that’s how I felt, and this job offer came at just the right time to get me out of a place I never planned to become familiar.

Even if I don’t stay at this job for my entire career, I feel so lucky to have found what feels like the perfect place to start. It’s a nonprofit, so the people working there are doing it for the love of the job, not to make big money. It’s reading and literacy focused work, which is the exact kind of thing I want to be doing. There are a dozen people on staff, including me, and they eat lunch together outside when the weather is nice. As far as I can tell, none of them are republicans. And they are as excited about me as I am about them. It’s an amazing feeling.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, except that I’m grateful this job found me when it did, because I was feeling ready to give up (again). The job hunt was hard on my ego, and especially so thanks to a brutal winter that ramped up my depression ten-fold. Like I did when I graduated high school and was anxiously preparing to go off to college, I feel like I should be blasting “Shake it Off” by Florence & the Machine and dancing around my bedroom.

This is a short post and I’m glad for it. It’s refreshing to share good news and leave it at that.

Tomorrow is my 23rd birthday. I feel good.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Identity”:

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

This is a Post About Joy in Grief

The last Christmas my paternal grandma was alive, she leaned over to my sister and I at the dinner table and said, kind of quietly but with the confidence only old people have, “These noodles look like vaginas.”

I’d heard her say plenty of naughty things over the years, but never vagina. Jesus. The three of us—and everyone who overheard—lost it. What an unbelievably inappropriate and true thing to say on the day of our lord, grandma Gretch. She was fun like that.

I feel like I’m getting to know her better now that she’s gone, which is a shame. But I think it’s because I’m becoming more and more like her as I get older, and I’m told I look like her, which is great because she was a fox. She was funny. Maybe I’m funny!

One of my most vivid memories with my Grandma Gretch is sitting on the daybed at her house eating mindlessly from a massive bowl of potato chips and watching hours and hours of Land before Time. Grandma would sit in a glider and fall asleep, and then she’d fart and wake herself up and blame the fart on me. 

When she died I was a junior in high school and on the brink of a mental breakdown. I think maybe her death triggered my stumble into clinical depression, or maybe it was just coincidental. I was very sad and anxious and refused to go to her wake, which upset my sister a lot and probably others in my family. I would say I regret it, but I don’t, because that decision taught me a lot about grief. My maternal grandpa’s death taught me a lot about grief, too, and so did working at a funeral home, but those are stories for another day.

Maybe I should have gone to my grandma’s wake. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to see and remember her in a casket. It wasn’t because I’m an asshole and a terrible granddaughter. I just…didn’t want to go. I was sad, and so anxious that I felt sick, and going anywhere—especially somewhere explicitly sad—would not have helped me grieve or feel better. My family honoring that choice, though it was a battle hard-won that made me feel terrible initially, was a good exercise in autonomy and listening to my gut.

Most religions have pretty strict—or at least faithfully followed—death rituals. I was raised Catholic which meant there’d be a wake, where we’d all look at the body of the deceased and be sad about it, then a funeral the next day where we’d do pretty much the same thing, but with a mass and then a burial and then a sad, weird lunch in a church basement.

I hate funerals. Most people do. They don’t bring me closure. They don’t make me feel better. They feel arbitrarily ritualized and very rarely do a good job of honoring the deceased (more on that another time). It feels performative, but necessary, and bucking against those rituals feels sacrilegious and rude. I guess maybe it is.

So I skipped my grandma’s wake, and I’m sure nobody really cared all that much in the end. It wasn’t such a big deal. Grandma sure as shit didn’t care. She’d just as happily have had me at home eating potato chips and watching a cartoon if that’s what I wanted.

I didn’t even know my grandma was sick until she was really sick. Because my parents had divorced when I was very young, I rarely saw my father’s side of my family as I got older. Grandma and Grandpa came to visit and drop off magazines for my mom from time to time, and always sent a birthday card, but I didn’t spend nearly as much time with them as I wish I had. My big sister was closer with that side of the family, so she knew Grandma was in the hospital and that things weren’t looking good, and then she had to come home from college for the funeral.

I remember two things about my grandma’s funeral: first, that my grandpa cried very, very hard during the burial and I’d never seen him cry before (he cries a lot now, whenever he talks about her) and second, that after the luncheon everyone took home gallon Ziplock bags of leftover Polish sausage, and the Polish sausage was, like, the best I’d ever had.

What I remember more clearly is my Aunt Mickey’s funeral, which was a few years before Grandma Gretch’s. I was young when Mickey got sick and I didn’t know her terribly well, but she was silly and full of love and joy just like my grandma. Her daughters were my big sister’s age, and I used to go with my grandma when I was little to play with my cousins while grandma vacuumed and dusted with unmatched precision. (I think of her whenever I see crisp vacuum lines in a carpet.)

At Mickey’s funeral, the priest tripped over a rug on his way in, a member of the band made many horrible mistakes, and several other inconsequential but startling mishaps distracted us. I don’t remember who, but someone—my aunt Pam, probably—leaned over to me and whispered, “That’s Mickey,” in reference to all the ways things had gone off the rails. Of course, I thought. Her last gift was to make us laugh at her funeral. Like I said, I was raised Catholic. I don’t really know what I believe in now, but I believe in that.

What a lucky thing to have a family full of funny ladies who take care to make you laugh when you feel your very worst.

When Grandma Gretch died she left a shitload of costume jewelry for us to dig through. On that side of my family are five granddaughters, of which I am the baby, and one year at Thanksgiving or Christmas the five of us filed down to the basement to root through Rubbermaid totes of Grandma’s stuff to decide what we wanted to keep.

This death ritual—the doling out of the deceased’s belongings among family members—has always felt strange to me, but I guess it’s nice when there’s no bitterness about who gets the good crystal, or whatever. Anyway, I had little use for costume jewelry, so I got one of Grandma’s big chunky gold rings—which I never once remembered seeing on her arthritic hands—and, more importantly, an old pin with two Scottie dogs on it.

The pin is extremely ugly. It’s plastic, and it was once red but has since faded to a kind of dusty dark orange, and the heads of the two Scottie dogs spin 360 degrees, for some reason. I used to have it pinned to my backpack, but the pin part fell off—revealing several layers of superglue that had been applied to fix it once or twice before—and somehow I didn’t lose the little dogs. Now it lives in my purse, and it gets transferred from the fall/winter purse to the spring/summer purse with my wallet and tampons and hair elastics and all the rest. When I feel shitty I like to look at those two ugly dogs and think of my silly grandma and where in god’s name she would have possibly worn a pin like that.

It’s funny the things we remember about people when they’re gone. My memories of my grandma remind me of the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ character is talking about his late wife:

“One night her fart was so loud it woke the dog up, she woke up and said, ‘Was that you?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her. […] She’s been dead two years and that’s the shit I remember, wonderful stuff. These are the things I miss the most, these idiosyncrasies that only I know. That’s what made her my wife and she had the goods on me too. She knew all my peccadillos. People call these things imperfections… that’s the good stuff. “

When I think of my maternal grandpa, who I’ll write more about another time, I remember very vividly how he’d squeeze the back of my neck—affectionately, but always too hard—and ask, “Whaddaya know, Lexer?” And because I have always been an introvert and poor conversationalist, I’d say, “Not much” or “Nothing” and he’d laugh. I also think about the time I wandered around the yard pulling all the little leaves off the ferns in the raised beds because the way they slipped off in my hands felt so satisfying. When my grandpa saw the stripped fronds I could tell he was furious, and he asked me why I’d do something like that. I didn’t have an answer, of course. Nobody ever scolded me for it, which leads me to believe my grandpa kept it to himself (or at least told my mom and grandma to leave it alone), understanding that sometimes kids do dumb stuff for no reason. Like my grandma Gretch, I think of my grandpa when I see crisp, perfectly parallel lines of freshly cut grass.

Maybe what I’m getting at is that grief looks different to everyone, and in many ways I think I’ve been able to summon joy from it. Those idiosyncrasies, the funny, offbeat memories we have of the people we love are special. And though it shouldn’t take losing someone to reflect on and enjoy those memories, it sure helps when you’re missing them.

Here’s to the ones we miss. May your thoughts of them be full of whimsy and silliness.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Joy in Grief”:

Gilead by Marianne Robinson

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez