Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

---

Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
Click To Tweet

---

In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

---

‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
Click To Tweet

---

There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

---

It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
Click To Tweet

---

I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
Click To Tweet

But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
Click To Tweet

What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?

I.

I have a recurring dream that goes like this: first shot, the absence of light. Cut to hospital corridors tinted peach at dusk, abandoned wards, the sun’s last rays flickering like a dying flame. Pan left along the windowed expanse: Manhattan’s inky skyline, the Hudson River, cherry trees unfurled and shaking. Cut. I enter with only my hands, outstretched, to guide me. Walk for years. Long shot: a bed-bound man. I can never see his face because he’s too far away, or because my eyes are closed. Maybe those reasons are one and the same. Monitors beep in the distance. Zoom out. The scene is filtered in the glow of evening light.

II.

Here’s the funny thing about myopia: it obscures in more ways than one. When I put on glasses for the first time, what stunned me wasn’t my sudden clarity of vision but the past ignorance this implied. How had I gone so many years without discovering my nearsightedness? Habituation no doubt played a role. I came to squint reflexively, accept blurred lines on the chalkboard as a matter of course—in short, I normalized an unclear world.

III.

I’ve struggled with social anxiety for as long as I can remember. Most people experience it at some point in their lives, but mine was debilitating. While pleasantries slipped off others’ tongues, I always seemed to botch them with my glassy smile and cluttered speech. My awkwardness turned me into a slightly robotic figure, skittish, the sort of person who only drew attention through absence.

Why? It’s become a well-worn exercise—probing my past in search of understanding. To this day, I have no satisfying answer. And in any case, an answer hardly would have changed my reality. It’s exhausting to live the way I did, perpetually on the lookout for exits, unable to uncage myself from overanalysis and self-recrimination. The problem with misery is that you think it’ll never end. This myopia is paradoxically the source of its power: it builds you up even as it wears you down, situating your feelings and impressions at the center of everything and erasing what lies on the periphery. It’s one of the many cruel tricks of mental illness.

The problem with misery is that you think it’ll never end.
Click To Tweet

To self-pity is to condition your sense of self on suffering, is to smash the best parts of yourself and clutch at the pieces. A friend of mine, speaking of his problems, once said: I’m not special. I’ll get through it like everyone else. And though I was incredulous at the time, he’s right.

I don’t mean to suggest that your troubles are insignificant if someone else has it worse. Unhappiness isn’t zero-sum, but the danger lies precisely in misery’s lack of bounds, its recursive nature. To justify its existence, you necessarily replay past humiliations and excavate old wounds. As a high school student, I’d think—almost as a mantra—I’m so, so alone. I thought about sitting alone at lunch day in and day out, emerging from the most trivial social situations flushed and overwhelmed, overinterpreting even the smallest acts of kindness. I thought about unironically googling “how to be less awkward.” I thought about these indignities and grew increasingly ashamed. Misery thinks only of itself. Misery wages a war of attrition, and the enemy is yourself.  

IV.

Shortly after my 18th birthday, the doctors said there might be something wrong with my heart. I don’t remember ever having been so afraid. Well, that’s not entirely right. There was one other time. Eight years old, visiting my great-grandfather in a nursing facility for the chronically ill. I still remember the welcome sign: COLER-GOLDWATER, block letters separated by a garish red heart. How my great-grandfather’s room had overlooked the Hudson River, Manhattan’s outline straining through the fog. There were elderly people, which was to be expected in a place like that, but some were only children. And it was the children from whom I averted my eyes. I’d understood, even then, that they would live out the rest of their days among the aged and the dying and the unbearably beautiful cherry trees. So it wasn’t the patients I feared, but the flimsiness of the human body. How it breaks down and ultimately betrays you.  

V.

Ten years after setting foot in Coler-Goldwater, I faced a health scare of my own. To have social anxiety is to be continually let down by the body. Certain tics—twitching hands, a propensity to cut myself off in the middle of sentences—reveal my discomfort. But when the root cause is psychological, there’s always some way to make it stop.

Controlling the body is a question of controlling the mind, however difficult that may be; convince yourself it’s fine, you’re safe, and you can still the tremor in your voice.

To have social anxiety is to be continually let down by the body.
Click To Tweet

Physical health is a different matter altogether. If there was indeed a problem, I could hardly tell my heart to fix itself. My primary care physician had referred me to a cardiologist, who ran a battery of tests. For a three-week period, I could do nothing but wait. I was scared of my helplessness and appalled by how oblivious I’d been. In my relentless misery, I’d failed to see just how lucky I’d been to be physically healthy, surrounded by people who cared. I’d taken my health, my family and my friends for granted, tarnished what should have been the best years of my life.

While waiting for the results, I made vows on conditionals: if I’m okay, I’ll never be afraid again. Which is to say: I’d stop sending phone calls to voicemail, start looking people in the eye, listen to my therapist, subject myself to the mortifying process of understanding and being understood. I’d try, really try this time.

VI.

The hospital where I got my cardiac MRI was a worn, stately building with ivy creeping up its facade. Two technologists asked what I was there for, and I said a heart murmur, feeling strangely disconnected from the weight of those words. “It might be benign,” said the taller one: a laughably anodyne remark. I smiled, bobbed my head. They inserted an IV into my right arm, gave me earplugs and a set of headphones for music. “We’re going to take over your body,” they said. It was meant to be light-hearted, but there was an undeniable truth somewhere amid the levity. Inside a hospital, you forfeit all control: it’s the ultimate form of surrender, of letting go. And maybe that’s what spooked me at Coler-Goldwater all those years ago, even more than the prospect of frailty and decline. I’d never learned how to let go of anything. If given a choice between holding on and letting go, I invariably chose the former, even if that meant pain, even if that meant pyrrhic victory.

One of the technologists slid me into the tube, enclosed me in a semicircle of white, whiteness that just went on and on. I kept a tight rein on my thoughts, cleared my mind until it was blank as snow, because if I considered the possibilities I’d be going down a path from which I might never return. Breathe in, try not to worry, breathe out, hold your breath as directed. The technologists circled the machine like vultures. At some point I lost track of the eighties songs blaring through the headphones and let the clattering sounds from the MRI become white noise, signifying nothing.

VII.

A few weeks later, I returned to the cardiologist, hands folded nervously in my lap. When he entered the room, he smiled, and that’s all I could fixate on. He said something about a perfect heart, and I wanted to nod blithely, hold his patronizing kindness at arm’s length, but teared up instead. Until that moment, I’d put my life on hold. It had been—if not a still, at least slow-motion. I’d lost interest in concepts as tenuous as the future. Because what if I never got there? Why invest in uncertain days? Now I could hit play at last.

VIII.

Coler-Goldwater Hospital, that specter of my childhood, exists no more. A college campus has risen in its place, and people who know nothing of its past will trod those tree-lined lanes. A photographer deemed the complex historically significant before its demolishment, captured photo after photo of those haunting halls. Sometimes I click through each image and wonder if there was a lesson to be learned.

I’d lost interest in concepts as tenuous as the future.
Click To Tweet

It really is easy to forget. I’m now a sophomore in college, and the fear of that summer—as well as the promises I made to myself—are but a memory. A lot has happened in the two years since then. I’ve switched majors, backpacked a part of the Appalachian trail, taken a liking to coffee, met people who care for me far more than I once cared for myself. I’m more open about my anxiety. I tell myself it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and some days, I almost believe it. There’s a line from a French documentary that goes something like this: I can’t see very clearly, but I see. And I do, I finally do. The sun rises and sets; the days grow shorter and longer and shorter again; the leaves change color, wither, and die. And through it all, I’m still here. What else is there to be grateful for?

Some things remain the same: I still worry too much, fume over petty slights, pretend not to see people in passing because I don’t quite know what to say. But I’m no longer as distrustful of sentiment, no longer as scornful of hope—now I believe that everything will somehow be okay, that the world will carry me along instead of passing me by. And so, when I want to do nothing but hole up in my room, I put on my sneakers and go to the gym, or reach out to a friend, or walk downtown and take in all the beauty there is to see. There’s no time to dwell.

As a long-time Shirley Jackson fan, I was eager to binge the new Netflix show based on her book, The Haunting of Hill House. While I don’t love slasher films, give me anything in a creepy old house. The Shining wouldn’t be what it is without the Overlook Hotel. Settling in to watch, I expected to feel the usual emotions you feel viewing something scary—dread, fright, perhaps revulsion. But suddenly I felt an emotion wash over me that took me by surprise: anger. Anger over watching a character being forced to view the embalmed body of a loved one.

Told over a series of ten episodes, the visually stunning show is a reimagining of Jackson’s story, rather than a direct adaptation. Jackson’s group of strangers meeting in Hill House to take part in a paranormal study are now a nuclear family, the Cranes. Olivia and Hugh Crane purchase Hill House with the intention of remodeling it over the summer, then flipping it for a fortune so that they can build their “Forever House” for their family of five children. Hill House has other ideas however.

The Cranes are haunted not only by their experiences that summer, but by the lasting devastation of grief. Director Mike Flanagan tells their tale in present time mixed with flashbacks that reveal how they became the fractured adults that they are. The show has received mainly positive critical reviews, and is currently the most popular user rated Netflix series.

Living a life damaged by grief is something I understand well. When I was eleven, my sister died. I usually just tell people that she died in a car accident, which is sort of true, but really, she drowned. It happened in Colorado, during the spring thaw when the melting snow on the mountain peaks turns peaceful, meandering rivers into dark, raging torrents.

Living in a tiny coal mining town, restaurants and teen-age entertainments were both in small supply, so one April evening, she and a few friends decided to drive a few towns away for pizza. The driver lost control of the car, and in the mountains, when that happens, you either drive into the side of the mountain or you plunge off the other side, over a cliff. He swerved to the cliff-plunging side that had a spring-swollen river at the bottom. I don’t know if my sister drowned in the car or was thrown from the car into the river. I suppose it doesn’t really matter—the outcome was the same. She was seventeen.

In the Netflix series, Shirley (Crane sibling #2) is a mortician, running her own funeral home with her husband as the business manager. In the first episode, we see her counselling a child named Max, who does not want to view his dead grandmother lying in her coffin. Max has been seeing the ghost of his grandmother at night, who shows more signs of decay with each visitation. Shirley tells Max that viewing the open casket of his grandmother will give him the opportunity to say goodbye, to have closure. Shirley tells him that she has “fix[ed] her, that’s what I do.” She will “look just like you remember her — just like she’s supposed to.”

These reassurances do not work on Max, as we see in episode 2. At the funeral, Max is still firm in his resolve to not view the open casket. “I don’t want to,” he insists. But for some reason, he must look. Shirley tells him, “If you don’t, you’ll be upset later. I promise. This is a good thing, and you’re a good boy.”

We don’t learn if Max does view Grandma or not, but most likely he was forced to do so. The show at this point flashes back to Shirley as a child, at a funeral, unwilling to view her mother’s corpse. Young Shirley gives in, and is amazed at how her mother looks lying against the satin. “You fixed her,” she says to the funeral director, highlighting the seminal moment to her becoming a mortician. (Likely the kittens and her need to control played a role as well).

Watching these scenes with Max resurged feelings of frustration and anger that I thought I had long let go of. Why won’t anyone listen to him? Why does he have to see his Grandmother’s dead body? Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?

Like Max, I was very certain that I did not want to see my sister lying in a coffin. I did not want that to be my final image of her. Like Max, none of the adults around me listened to me either, believing that they knew what was best for me. “You need to say goodbye to your sister. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” “She’ll just look like she’s sleeping.” “It’ll be okay.”

Unlike the dramatic, stylish gloom of Shirley’s funeral parlor, the one in which my sister’s casket was displayed had bright white walls, her burgundy carpeting, gold detailing, and multiple blinding flood lights; there was nary a shadowy nook to be found. No spaces for lurking specters. No place to hide from well-intentioned spectators. Bouquets and wreaths of flowers lined either side of the room. The peppery scent of lilies was so thick, you could taste it; to this day, I am triggered by their smell.

Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?
Click To Tweet

While I wasn’t physically dragged to the coffin, and absent of support from any adult, the continual emotional pressure eventually broke down my defenses. I finally was a “good girl” and went to see how the mortician “fixed” my sister.

She lay on white satin, in a white dress. You might have thought she was sleeping, if you viewed her from a distance. But up close, no amount of pancake base or pink blush could cover the green and purple bruises. She was swollen, caused either by drowning or embalming. The glue used to keep her eyes shut was visible. Her face was in a grimace, and nothing about her looked peaceful.

As I stood beside her, the hope that it was all a horrible practical joke and she might sit up — alive — all dissolved when I clasped her folded hands. Hands that had brushed my hair a thousand times, turned the beloved pages of hundreds of books, and caught lizards just to make me laugh, were now the icy hands of mannequin.

As my delusion shattered, a fellow mourner came up beside me and said, “Oh, look at her! She looks like a sleeping angel.” Unable to face such obvious posturing and lies, I ran outside to wait on the steps until it was time to drive to the cemetery. I didn’t say goodbye, because she was neither there nor gone for me.

The act of burial — placing a dead person in the ground with intention — is indisputably traced back 100,000 years to a group burial in Israel and possibly goes back 250,000 years, to a Homo naledi find in South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Paige Madison describes the desire to bury the dead as a part of the human ability to think in the abstract:

“Humans use symbols to communicate and convey these abstract thoughts and ideas. We imbue non-practical things with meaning. Art and jewelry, for example, communicate concepts about beliefs, values, and social status. Mortuary rituals, too, have been put forward as a key example of symbolic thought, with the idea that deliberate treatment of the dead represents a whole web of ideas. Mourning the dead involves remembering the past and imagining a future in which we too will die.”

As humans began creating more complex living arrangements, so too, did the rituals surrounding burial become more elaborate. It’s difficult to tell if the earliest burials were secular or involved any spiritual meaning, but soon, funeral rites took on a religious element, typically involving a belief in an afterlife. The development of social hierarchy also played a role in the development of how we bury our dead. The higher up the social ladder, the more elaborate and costly the service.

The specific traditions widely vary, across time and cultures. Since the Civil War, embalming and underground interment within a coffin has been the traditional burial practice in the United States. While embalming does delay decomposition, the notion that viewing the body somehow helps with the grieving process is not scientific, as noted by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford in her exposé, The American Way of Death. Rather, it’s a justification put forward by those who have a financial stake in encouraging embalming: the funeral industry.

As an adult, I took a class on grief. Part of the course work was a field trip to a funeral parlor. It was a large blue Victorian house that had been converted to part living space and part business, much like Shirley’s set up on the show. Keeping with the Victorian architecture, the interior decoration was heavy wood, silk-lined walls, and sumptuous fabrics of deep peacock-blue. The air was vanilla scented. It could have been an upscale bed and breakfast.

Our tour guide was tiny, with a sleek business bob and black-framed glasses. She was a recent graduate, joining the family business right out of college. “Third generation mortician!” she chirped. “I know I look really young, but I’ve been around this business my whole life. A lot of morticians are multigenerational. I guess we like to keep it in the family.” She was “passionate about helping people in their worst time.” After touring the viewing room, the coffin showroom, and business offices, we trooped downstairs to see the embalming rooms.

Walking down the narrow stairs, I began feeling the short breath, racing heart and sweatiness of a panic attack, knowing I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn. The pull to know what had been done to my sister was stronger and I kept going, doing calming breathing techniques. Downstairs was completely different world than above. Hospital doors, Dijon mustard-colored walls, dim fluorescent lighting, and cement floors. Odd chemical smells, plus something undefinable replaced the vanilla. It felt cold. And here? There were dark corners.

The embalming room looked much like it did in The Haunting of Hill House, except I remember more hoses and sprayers hanging from the ceiling. When I learned about all the draining, and injecting, and filling, I felt a screamless horror. I viscerally knew that my sister would not have wanted any of that done to her body. A body that she was so meticulous in maintaining. Not only was her death violent, but it felt like she had been further violated, after death.

Seeped in a commercialism that has largely removed meaningful ritual from burial rites, the funeral industry in the United States rakes in many billions of dollars each year. With the cost of cremation being many thousands of dollars less than embalming, funeral homes have a vested interest in steering their clientele in the direction of chemical preservation. Still, the number of people choosing cremation in the U.S. continues to rise.

According to the Cremation Association of North America’s 2017 industry statistics, the number of people cremated vs embalmed was 51.6%. Reasons behind the growth are varied, from cost to decreased religious stigma against it (the Catholic Church opposed cremation until 1963). Concern for the environment is shaping people’s choices as well, with the growing awareness of the toxicity of embalming chemicals leaching into the soil and water.

I’ve chosen cremation for myself because I don’t want anyone I love forced to see my death face; I want them to only recall how I looked alive.

My mother and I have only talked about this issue once, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t recall who brought it up, or how or why we discussed it. What I do remember is that I wanted her to know I was angry over being forced to view the open casket. I wanted — at least — an acknowledgement that my autonomy had been overlooked, that maybe a mistake had been made.

“I told you then that I didn’t want to see her, and now I’ve had to live with that image of her dead stuck in my mind since then. No one would listen to me!”

“I just had to see her one more time.”

“Then why couldn’t you look at her back in a private room? Instead of demanding that everyone see her? That I see her?” My resentment was like a pin popping a balloon; my mother’s entire body deflated. Looking at the ground, she mumbled, “I don’t know. I just couldn’t think really about anything at the time.”

In that moment, she seemed so tiny and fragile—something I could either choose to set carefully down or hurl at the floor, smashing to bits. Witnessing her hurt, I felt ashamed for only focusing on myself, and decided to let the anger go. I thought I had until it flared up while watching The Haunting of Hill House.

While the final episode is the one most negatively reviewed, I believe it gets it right. In order to move past grief — at least enough to heal and learn to live on — the raw honesty that comes from a moral inventory is needed. I’ve never wavered in my certainty that seeing my sister in her coffin was not right for me. I still wish one person had listened, and helped me, rather than being coerced into what other people thought would bring me closure.

However, I did need to let go of my anger, because I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted in my mother’s situation. The possibility that I might find out is my own Bent Neck Lady. I don’t fear my own death, but I am afraid that I will know the nightmare of burying my child, that I will have to make the impossible decision: embalming or cremation?

And does either choice really matter? Death’s outcome is the same.

When I was in college—an experience I barely survived—a desperate friend gave me a book to read. It was the now-ubiquitous An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a memoir of a psychologist’s life with bipolar disorder and how she struggled with diagnosis and treatment. I enjoyed reading about someone who was so very, very much like me.  Jamison’s book is the reason I sought treatment for mental illness. And since becoming a disability activist, and someone who studies disability memoirs, I’ve read thousands of words on message boards that say Jamison’s book, or another psychiatric illness memoir, gave a person the courage to seek help.

The friend who gave me Jamison’s book later told me that his secret motive was for me to have just such an epiphany. I didn’t mind his interference at the time. I was, after all, in desperate need of an epiphany. Before getting treatment for bipolar disorder, I wouldn’t sleep for weeks at a time. I’d make reckless decisions without thinking of the consequences. Then, without warning, the reverse would kick in: I’d be unable to get out of bed; I’d miss days or weeks of classes; I couldn’t concentrate or care about homework. It was, in retrospect, not an easy way to succeed in college, or even to survive.

So I was grateful for the book, for the help I got, for the medication that I still take, now, years later.

I’ve never stopped wondering about the disability memoirs that come out each year and what they mean to us, as disabled readers. I also wonder what the memoirs mean to nondisabled readers, whose motives might not be so kind.

When I became a rhetoric professor, I published an article, “The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability,” about psychiatric disability memoirs (the kind of article that no one reads, in a journal that no one has heard of). I argued that people with psychiatric disabilities were able to reclaim their authority as speakers, and as members of society, using what I called the “mood memoir” genre.

Mood memoirs provided a way of saying, “I still have control over my own story.” Even, “I still have control over my own life.”

In studying mood memoirs, though, I discovered that the genre has certain limitations. Authors must meet specific reader expectations: readers expect to be inspired, to read about overcoming disability, and to read coherent, truthful narratives. Memoirs that don’t conform to these conventions of inspiration, overcoming, coherence, and truthfulness are often rejected by readers. They either don’t make it to the bookshelves in the first place due to publisher gatekeeping, or when readers don’t find what they’re looking for, they rake authors over the coals.

In the past, in order to rebuild credibility in a normate-dominated world, disabled memoirists sought hyper-verisimilitude. After all, if our disability supposedly damaged our perception of reality, what better way to prove our doubters wrong than by hewing to the doubters’ own standard of truth?

But today, disabled writers are pushing back. Today, we’re recognizing that the normate memoir genre doesn’t fit disability stories. And not only when it comes to truth, but when it comes to everything.

Memoirs of disability are often studies in suffering. But what I’ve found in my research is that normate readers don’t actually want to read stories of suffering—not by itself, at least. They want suffering-plus. They want some form of Aristotelian catharsis—a release.

Aristotle, in the Poetics, defines tragedy as “a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…and through the arousal of pity and fear [effects] the [catharsis] of such emotions.” It’s not enough to read a story that arouses pity and fear—a tragedy (such as a disability memoir) must also provide the catharsis of these emotions in the reader, or the story has failed. At least by normate standards.

Normate readers who read disability memoirs want to cleanse themselves of their feelings of pity for and fear of disabled people.

But the normate reader’s demand for catharsis leaves disabled authors in a bind. To hew to the demand for normate truthfulness, a story might not have any redeeming qualities except for the disabled writer’s ability to tell the story in the first place. A suicide survivor who is alive and writing has already overcome a lot, but for this genre, which requires catharsis for the reader, mere survival is not enough. To meet the normate reader’s demands, there has to be more. There has to be redemption. The author has to “get better.” The sine curve must come all the way up again.

But what if there isn’t any redemption? What if, after the suffering, all the person makes out with is her life? Those stories are too depressing, aren’t they? No one will want to read those, will they?

Or will they?

A suicide survivor who is alive and writing has already overcome a lot, but for this genre, which requires catharsis for the reader, mere survival is not enough.
Click To Tweet

In 2015, I published a long-form essay about motherhood and suicide. My essay was a little dark, sure, but so is everything else I write. I pointed to a massive, multi-year study of parental suicide attempts and their effects on children published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Its findings show that having a parent who attempted suicide, even controlling for other factors, ‘conveys a nearly 5-fold increased odds of suicide attempt in offspring,’” I wrote, and added, “You might not see it if you aren’t looking for it, but one of the subtexts of this study is motherhood, along with its favorite hobgoblin, guilt.” Motherhood and guilt? Yes.

In the study, the researchers addressed some weaknesses in their research, including that their “probands are mostly female,” but they didn’t get into why mothers might try to kill themselves more than fathers.The point was, this study actually had a lot to say about gender and parenting. So, I wrote about my own suicide attempt and my own family, my own disability and my own fears. And it provided no catharsis.

Readers’ responses to my essay were strong, mostly positive.

The few negative responses, though, policed the piece in familiar ways:

“i don’t know. i mean, obviously i’m glad my mother chose to have children, or i wouldn’t exist! but i think you’re kidding yourself if you think living with someone who oozes unhappiness doesn’t have an impact.”

“You have nothing to feel guilty about if you do not use your suicidal [sic] as a threat to your children, but some parents do.”

“But I would gently suggest that you talk to your kids about your depression and suicide attempts only after consulting with a good therapist who specializes in working with kids.”

“It’s hard to have a parent that, through no deliberate fault of their own, isn’t a [sic] one hundred percent available support for coping with the trauma you have. It gets so much more complicated when they’re the source of all that [shit.]”

I knew, objectively, that these commenters weren’t talking about me, Katie, the person who wrote the piece, because they do not know me. I wasn’t the source of all that shit. The parents of the commenters were. Why were they so angry at me?

Because I’d broken the genre rules, and they were punishing me for it.

Let’s go back to Aristotle, to his triangle of rhetorical aims.

My intended audience was others like me, who’d considered or attempted suicide, and who might also have been parents or considered becoming parents. I also knew I’d be reaching others beyond that group.

My intended purpose was to reveal my darkest fear, and by doing so, help others who shared that same fear: that I’d harmed my children when I’d considered suicide.

So far so good.

My writerly persona, though—that’s where I failed.

The normate expectations for the mood memoir include redemption. The writer must suffer, and then find redemption. It’s the path of Aristotelian tragedy. But I didn’t apologize for nearly dying of suicide, or for the risks the JAMA study says I now pose to my children. I was not sorry. In fact, I was angry. I was furious that maternal suicide disproportionately affects our children. Maternal everything disproportionately affects our children. The burden on mothers is way too high—from what we can eat when we’re pregnant to how we parent our infants and toddlers. Everything we do is monitored, studied, checked, and regulated.

And then the researchers dared to throw up their hands: Why do more moms try to kill themselves than dads? It’s beyond us.

I had a deadly illness. It nearly killed me, but I survived. I refused to apologize for it.

The result? Some readers were mad I hadn’t been sorry. I hadn’t been remorseful for the harm my suicide might cause my children. They told me to get therapy, that I would hurt my kids, that I should feel guilty.

Repentance is what readers expect of disability memoirs. Repentance brings redemption. Redemption brings catharsis. For readers.

But my disability story isn’t for your catharsis.

The writer must suffer, and then find redemption. It’s the path of Aristotelian tragedy.
Click To Tweet

I’m merely part of a trend of disabled writers dismantling normate genres.

Karrie Higgins took on normate veracity with her essay “Strange Flowers,” when she took to task doctors and teachers and more, all of whom let her down, doubted her and mis-treated her. An angry reader, “Coco,” attacked the truth of Karrie’s story. “This work is more like magical realism inspired by some real events but woven into a fictional and surreal landscape,” Coco wrote. “So my mixed feelings come from using the shock value of a supposedly true first person narrative.”

In her essay, Karrie tackles truth as she struggled to put in order the evidence of her brother’s sexual abuse of her: “I walked the galactic paper trail like a labyrinth, but the sequence felt wrong, even though I obeyed the strict chronology dictated by the documents. I didn’t remember my life in that order. I was not even sure things happened in that order, even though the documents said so. Maybe the order people discover things is the order they really happen.” In attacking “truth,” Coco merely reinforced Karrie’s project of questioning truth-telling itself.

Porochista Khakpour, in her new book Sick, also challenges normate memoir rules, as the New Yorker notes: “‘Sick’ is a strange book, one that resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” As the review points out, there is a disability memoir genre that normates expect, one with a clean storyline and transcendence. Khakpour has kicked the genre to the curb.

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote an important, groundbreaking book that created the space we needed. In the decades since then, we’ve been changing the rules of disability memoirs. Some readers have resisted this change. They’ve gotten angry.

But disabled writers are not here for your genre expectations, not anymore.

The goodbyes have overturned the horizon and lay bare their seed on fertile ground; there is a pale face receding, framed by a curtained windowpane. He’ll rise, forgetting, but as he slides the curtains open and hears the tinny metal slide of the rings suspending them, he will be flooded with misery, a desire to lay back down in bed.

The light filters through the trees—strange blocks of shadows dance on the wall. Some leaves are bright, mantis-green, backlit by the sun—others are fern-green, muted and shadowed. They tremble on their branches; the burgundy maple tree in the background reminds him of rust or blood. He turns and fingers the sheets where they used to lay, obsessed for many weeks with one another’s bodies.

Her period was intense—thick and streaming out of her. She was afraid of taking anything with hormones, so the copper IUD had rendered one day of every month a kind of horror scene, but in truth he thrilled at the intimacy of it, even as he was repulsed by it. It was hot to the touch, he could almost see steam rise from the rivulets running down her legs. He thinks of a dead rabbit sighing its life into the sky.

The stains of her blood trace their bodies and he can’t bear to throw them out. He decides that the next time he brings someone home he’ll say he’d cut his foot—or his hand. If he decides in the moment it will sound more true.

How do you imagine the future? I often conceive of it in vignettes like this. Although conceive is the wrong word because in truth they come to me—the visions are full-bodied, screaming or sashaying into my consciousness—I don’t have the sensation of creating them.

But why are the imaginings so cruel? Why do I imagine his dread at my recent departure when that departure is not coming. That kind of sadness—those sickening final goodbyes that coat your days in thick grey ash—is currently coiled sleeping, docile as a sun-drunk cat.

I remember reading that you often dream of horrible things so you can psychologically prepare for the very worst things if and when they happen. Like circuit training for your nervous system.

I recently wrote about another one of my morbid fantasies, which involves my brother’s tweed coat and my mother’s grave. My mother was disturbed; she told me she didn’t like experiencing the “shadow of her own death.” I said I understood. But I also knew I’d keep imagining it.

Sometimes the casket is open. Sometimes I sing Celine Dion, choke-laughing at how saccharine and awful the lyrics are, but goddamn they feel good to belt out on the highway. Sometimes my father is crying, unshaven. Rattled and terrified. Sometimes it’s spring and the brightness of the daffodils silhouetted against the late March frost is spectacular; I pick as many as I can hold; I fill her whole casket with them.

It’s one of the hardest days I’ll ever have and I think my mind is trying to help me pre-cope with my own inevitable unraveling. Perhaps if I imagine it 100 different ways, one of them will be close to the truth and when the daffodils rear their rippled yellow heads, I won’t scream into the snow; I will have been here before.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dialogue between imagining and forgetting. In truth, both feel predicated on possibility. Imagining lances all kinds of psychological blisters. Adults happily pretend they can forge the future. Self-help books insist that the Universe sees your pining and just might bend to your will.

So go ahead, conjure that piano, that Porsche, that perky-titted blonde; try things on! Change the furniture, the rage, the loss; try pesto instead of that alfredo sauce. Imagine the world being kinder, more just.

Imagine a world that feels less like purgatory—filled with indiscriminate killings, venomous spiders, leaking sphincters, inexplicable rashes, impossible cruelties to children and the environment—and more like a fraught family reunion! We’re all gathered here together for a few days…sort of by our own will! We should all do our best to take care of one another while we’re here and have a good time before heading our separate ways again.

But isn’t forgetting also a kind of imagining?

I’ve been reading a lot about amnesia recently. The Mayo Clinic breaks it down into three types: The first is retrograde amnesia (difficulty remembering the past, things that were once so familiar), and the second is anterograde, which is difficulty learning new information. These two are caused, of course, by a delectable variety of absolutely terrible things from brain swelling and alcohol abuse to seizures and tumors—you get the idea, the human body is nothing if not fragile as a paper mache egg…but the kind of amnesia I’m interested in is the more rare, dissociative, or psychogenic amnesia, induced by trauma.

The brain protects itself from remembering something awful. And in this void, in this once-was-pain space, we find another kind of imagining. A place where that thing never happened. You can imagine a life that isn’t marred by the inky edges of darkness; violence, death, depression. The mind, knowing what it does to your poor heart, to your central nervous system, to your bowels which run with ice when you remember—tidily blurs those edges until the memory is gauze.

It helps you imagine a better past. It is, of course, often not much more than a fleeting parlor trick—the memories course back and crush you—but it’s a lovely respite.

Isn’t forgetting a kind of imagining?
Click To Tweet

My fascinating if mildly morbid research started because I couldn’t remember having sex with my ex boyfriend. I realize this is a trivial thing in many ways, but it started to eat at me. It was a small, but potent and disconcerting void. It was as though someone had come in with kindergarten scissors and started sloppily snipping those memories away. Like that very sad, very wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Did I bring the scissors? Did I wear a stocking on my head—my features mashed against the silk mesh—and start lopping out our love making?

…and then I realized I was relieved. In part. It is both the cruelest and most lovely of gifts. To forget his face and hands and feet. It’s like losing time—the minutes that made hours which made days and weeks—simply vanished.

I started looking at the few photographs I had of his naked body. I’ve always wondered if post break-up one is even allowed to do that…but I suppose if you remember their body in your mind it’s tantamount to the same thing, but I didn’t anymore. So was it a violation?

I started to scroll—that eerily familiar sensation of thumb-sliding, a gesture once awkward and unimaginable now ubiquitous—and stare at his limbs, trying to conjure what once felt like an extension of my own body.

I suppose my mind is willfully forgetting so I can move on. His whole body is a scar that’s blistered and ran and is just a bumpy ridge I run my fingers over in the dark; I can’t really feel or see it, there’s just a shape where he once was.

And now? I’m busy imagining more goodbyes; I’m imagining the void that my absence will bring to another person’s life. We’ve only just begun and I already need to forget.

By July Westhale

The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

Dear you,

When I was 4, my mom drew me a bath.

“Watch the water,” she said, “and come get me when it’s full.”

I’ve replayed this scene thousands of times — her piano fingers on the rusted faucet, the bathmat an inky-gray, like a fingerprinting. I remember the water filling, filling, the plastic toy boat rising victorious in the swells. I remember calling for her, and hearing only silence. I remember the water overflowing, soaking the mat, leaking down the hallway linoleum, past my sick and sleeping mother.

I don’t remember the moment the water reached our neighbor’s apartment next door, but I do remember that when Child Protective Services was called, I put my body between them and my mom.

“She was sleeping,” I said. “It’s my fault.”

I was taken to a children’s home and, screaming, dunked into a bathtub of ice water.

No one gave me information about what was happening. No one offered comfort. It seemed to me, even at the time, that those in charge thought that silence and isolation was a better solution than explanation and solace.

I had it so so so much better than any of these children in the news.

I’m so proud of my community for standing up and staying compassionate and tender. Of the radical empathy you’re showing to each other and yourselves. I’m so proud of your hand-lettered signs and your fundraising and your yelling and your insistence on better behavior, a better world.

And your stories. I’m most proud of your stories.

For those of you scared to act, or feeling dissociated, or overwhelmed —

hear my story. Take it as a place that helps creates space for whatever you’re going through. That’s what narrative can do in times like these. Take it moment by moment. In this moment, you’re listening, and that’s massive.

HA, age 30, Abuja

“I had to remember to change the pronoun of my lover so nobody could tell she was female … making up pictures and stories of how we met and why I couldn’t introduce ‘him’ to any of my friends. It was exhausting.”

I grew up in a normal northern-Muslim household in Jos. My parents were well educated and worked government jobs. We spoke Hausa and English interchangeably in a five-bedroom house with my three siblings and four cousins. Each room had a double bunk and people running in and out, so we learned early in life to share everything, especially personal space. We woke up every morning at 5 a.m., we ate lunch at 2:30 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. and were in bed at 8 p.m. I attended an Islamic primary school, returned home to extra lessons, then attended evening Islamiyya school to learn to read the Qur’an and write in Arabic. Our lives had a comfortable routine and life was easy.

I attended the same school as my siblings and I remember having a crush on my teacher Ms. S___ when I was in Primary 3. She was pretty. She was female. She was political. I don’t think she did anything different or special, I just enjoyed being in class and watching her while she taught. I loved going to school. I excelled because I was super attentive and always trying to please her. As an adult, I learned that my reaction wasn’t unique as most people have a crush on their teacher at some point. Mine just turned out to be female. This was mildly disappointing; I thought we had something special.

As much as I loved school, I was severely bullied because I was young, small and generally easy to pick on. People knew what was going on. There was this tall girl who had a little clique. I can’t remember her hitting me but I was deeply afraid of her and if she ordered me to do anything, I quickly obeyed. When we had a test in class, I would crawl under the tables and my classmates would make space for me. I would give her my paper to copy off, then crawl back to my own seat. She would ask what I’d brought for lunch today and if she liked it, she would say, ‘Okay, I’ll have that one. You have mine.’ She told me that if I ever saw her carrying anything, I should come take it. So, if she had a bag on her, I would take it to her desk.

Most people have a crush on their teacher at some point. Mine just turned out to be female.
Click To Tweet

One day in Primary 4, when I was about 8 or 9, I was sitting on the windowsill in class. She was late. Her car drove into the school compound. I could see it from where I was sitting. She got out with her bag so I jumped out the window and went to take it for her. Unknown to me, the teacher was there and wondering what the fuck was going on.

All hell broke loose. There was a whole lot of trouble for everybody — most of the people in class, her and her gang, and other teachers — for not having said anything. They started watching me and it became annoying. I became that person that everybody knew was being bullied so I convinced my parents to let me stay home and write the Common Entrance exam. They bought me the form and put me in extra lessons. I wrote the exam and got admission into the same secondary school as my sisters. I was very excited!

I really loved secondary school as everybody was friendly. After being brought up in such a regimented household, I was used to going to bed early. In school, I would get punished often for sleeping during prep. The punishment was to jump for thirty minutes or so to wipe the sleep from your eyes. But I was so notorious that I perfected the art of sleeping while jumping. So many nights were spent in front of class, jumping and sleeping. After prep, I would not even remember walking from class to the hostel. Immediately I got to the hostel, I would sleep, half the time in the clothes I wore because I was so tired.

I can’t point to the first time I liked a girl. I have memories of so many women who drew a strong reaction from me. From Ms S___ to these older girls who took care of me and whom I was attracted to. There was a rotating number of women whom I had a thing for.

In boarding schools in Nigeria, women are allowed to show affection and love. There was a kind of coupling up that was generally allowed. It wasn’t a big deal. A chokkor or a lifey was just someone special to you. Sometimes the person was in the same class as you and sometimes they were in a higher class. And the relationship was romantic in nature. There was even a whole economy around Valentine’s and buying gifts for your chokkor.

So, we grew up accepting that it was okay to love another girl. It was even celebrated. In our uniform, there was a code. If you tied your belt backwards, it meant you were in the market for a chokkor. A person would be like, ‘Okay, I like this girl.’ Her friends would go and talk to you or your friends and ask if you had a chokkor. You would say, no and they would reply, ‘Okay, we’re going to connect you with someone. Thursday night, you’re going to wear your best outfit, and we’re going to come take you from your room to your chokkor’s room.’

Sometimes, you would have no clue who she was. Other times, you knew because she was sort of picking on you or gave you extra food or said hello to you one too many times during assembly. They would take you to your chokkor’s place and leave you there for the night. That was totally normal. There was drama when some girls were snatched from their chokkors. We would hear things like ‘Amira was just going steady with Nneka and the next thing, Bola came into the picture and now Amira no longer hangs out with Nneka. They stopped going for break together and now she goes for breaks with Bola.’ We would all be scandalised that such a thing had taken place.

We grew up accepting that it was okay to love another girl.
Click To Tweet

Throughout secondary school, almost everybody had a lifey but there were only four people who had girlfriends. They were not just in love but had kissed, made out or had sex. They were all known of course. You’re teenagers, you talk to your friends and nobody can keep a secret. When I was in JS3, there was this huge outrage about two girls being lesbians. One was in SS2 and the other was in JS3. They spent all their time together. At some point, they kissed and someone found out. They told somebody who told somebody who told the school administration. They were both suspended.

I thought it was weird that people were allowed to be in love, but never to take it to the next stage. Years later, people who knew me in school would tell me how homophobic I was. I wasn’t homophobic but people around me were and I didn’t do anything to speak up. At school, I was so sure that I was not a lesbian. To be a lesbian, you needed to have held a girl’s hand, kissed a girl, made out with her or had sex with her. I had done none of those things. Then secondary school finished.

My childhood passed really quickly — one day I was a kid and the next, I wasn’t. University was fun. I found studying a breeze. But socially, few girls played any kind of sport at that level so I kind of stood out. It also didn’t help that I liked to wear men’s clothes. Everyone I knew became super feminine and conversations became about clothes, parties and boyfriends. I wasn’t into clothes nor did I like any boy but in my bid to fit in, I decided I needed a boyfriend.

H___ was the first boy I kissed. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was almost exciting, but not quite. I would talk about the fact that we were not really compatible and he always told me that my expectations were built around watching too many Bollywood movies and that, actually, we were fine. I had doubts but I didn’t want to rock the boat because I was very comfortable in the relationship. He was a good friend, he lived and schooled in another city, and we saw each other once or twice a year. We relied on writing each other letters as no one had cellphones then. After about three years of this, we broke up when he started dating another girl in his school. I was relieved and moved on quickly.

Around that time, I was coming into myself and trying to figure out what was different about me. I knew I liked girls but I was still convinced I wasn’t a lesbian. I concluded that there must have been something wrong with H___ and I just needed to find the right boy.

This led to the beginning of my wild stage. I started partying every weekend, hanging out with a lot of boys and I had no problem kissing anyone and everyone. I was determined to find the right person with just the right chemistry. I made out with a ton of boys. There was tons of heavy petting and that was it. And my friends were fascinated. They would joke about it and help me keep score.

We only stopped counting after about a hundred. In all those hundreds of boys and men, I never found anyone mildly exciting and I never dated. But it made me feel normal to have a boyfriend and be out there kissing everyone. I was slowly realising that I was only attracted to women, but I was in deep denial!

It was around this time that my family went on hajj. I remember trying so hard to pray away the gay. It might have even been my sole aim in hajj. I would include it in salat, during tawaf around the Kaaba, during my walks on Safa to Marwa, and it was my consistent prayer when I stood on Mount Arafat. I prayed every day, deeply, sincerely, that I would no longer be in love with girls, that I would no longer be a lesbian. I wanted nothing more than to be straight, to meet a man, fall in love with him, get married and have a family. I just wanted to fit in, to be a good daughter, to be a good Muslim.

Then I met this girl on the website Hi5. My status had ‘interested in girls’ and hers had the same thing so we started talking and flirting. She told me she had a boyfriend, she had dated girls before, she was fascinated by northern girls and she would like to meet me. I told her I would definitely like to meet her too.

Her name was N___. She was schooling and living in Ghana. We decided to meet when she was in the country. I went to Lagos because she was there for one night before flying to Kumasi. We hung out that night and the next morning I flew back to Abuja. I was so excited: Oh my God, I can’t tell anybody. I met this girl and she’s cute and she’s also into women and she likes me and I like her and we are going to date. When she got back to Ghana, we had a conversation and decided to date.

We would talk on the phone all the time. I told my friends I had met this boy named Nathan. After about three months, I bought a ticket to Ghana to visit her. We had agreed we were going to take everything slowly but after three hours at her place, she asked me, ‘So, can I kiss you?’

The world stopped. If I said yes, I was going to be committing a sin. If I said no, all of this was kind of useless. I would never find out if I really like girls like that. She kept on asking, ‘Can I kiss you?’ I told her, ‘If you keep asking, I’m never going to answer you.’ So she reached over and kissed me — then we had sex.

And … the sex was awful. It was awkward and very weird. I was too into my head and watching myself have sex with her. I was overthinking everything, and I was riddled with guilt. We had sex a second time and just cooled it off. We would write long emails to each other and talk all the time but that was it. I went to Ghana on three different occasions. We would kiss but we never had sex again.

Then Facebook came along and destroyed Hi5. We all moved to Facebook and stopped meeting people who could put ‘interested in girls’ as their description. Internally, I was settling into self-acceptance. I had already had sex with a girl. I knew I was completely into women and no man was going to change that.

At the age of 26, I fell in love. I was sooo in love, I wanted her to meet everyone. I wanted to shout from the top of every building how much I was in love with her. She was the first person I could walk with on the streets holding hands. We would talk about everything, anything and nothing; honest, frank conversations. We were friends and we were lovers. For the longest time, it was perfect.

I knew I was completely into women and no man was going to change that.
Click To Tweet

I experienced the awesome freedom that was the ability to love myself, to love another person and be okay with it. I didn’t know where it was going but it felt good. I wanted to keep going and figure it out whenever. Shortly after she and I became official, I moved out of home and started living with a flatmate. I knew in my heart that I could not live in the closet. I was flirting with the idea of coming out, and I knew that I was likely to lose friends and family if that happened.

I was already living a double life: free and out when I was with my girlfriend, hidden and sad when I was back home or at work. I felt like I was choking. I couldn’t take the pretence any more so I started to cut ties with a lot of people. I stopped spending time with friends and buried myself in work. I would tell them I was too busy. I would travel without telling anyone and spend weeks away. I had decided that I would shut out everybody before anybody alienated me. I even stopped communicating with my family and told them I needed to be an adult.

One day in 2012, I sent a message to my mom saying, ‘I want to introduce you to my girlfriend and don’t you dare act surprised.’

With my heart in my mouth, I waited for her reaction. Deep down I was ready for the absolute worst. She replied saying, ‘Where’s she from? And are you girls getting married?’

I said, ‘Slow down woman. I said girlfriend not fiancée. Do not try to U-haul us.’ I was flabbergasted. I took a screenshot and sent it to all my queer friends. I was shocked, relieved, happy and convinced that my mum was the most amazing person on the planet.

I had decided that I would shut out everybody before anybody alienated me.
Click To Tweet

Then fast forward to 2014 after the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill passed. I was so angry that it had passed into law that I wrote an article about being lesbian in Nigeria, stating how the law couldn’t criminalise sexuality. Immediately I published it, everything changed. There was a lot of abuse, a lot of online bullying and a lot of threats. Some type of stupid semi-hisbah board from my state put out an APB to find and prosecute me.

My mum went crazy on me. ‘How could you? How dare you? How could you say you’re a lesbian?’

‘Why are you acting this way?’ I asked her. ‘We had this conversation years ago and you were fine with it.’

‘I regret the day I had you,’ she told me. ‘You’re a disappointment to me. In fact, you’re not my daughter.’

My sisters said, ‘Why are you doing this thing to her? Are you trying to kill her?’

I asked them, ‘What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to take it back? Lie? Just say what you guys want to hear? Because it’s not going to change anything.’

The entire family went ga-ga. Everyone was calling me, trying to ‘talk sense into me’. All they wanted me to do was take it back and tell them what they wanted to hear. They sent me all these preachings and scriptures to get me to change.

I stopped picking up their calls and replying to their messages. But to put their minds at ease, I told them I was a lesbian but I had never dated anyone. I thought it would be easier for them if they thought I had never had sex with a girl.

Throughout all of this, it was just my baby sister who was supportive. She asked, ‘What does this mean? What has this meant for you all this while?’ I told her, ‘Well, that’s it. All these lies, the pretending and faking. I’m tired. I am a lesbian and that isn’t going to change.’ She asked me why I never told her, and then just listened to all my experiences as I ranted about how hard it was. She stayed on the phone and cried with me and I felt very guilty. She was barely 21, all her friends were talking about it and there was nothing I could do to protect her from the outpouring of hatred that also came her way.

It’s nearly impossible not to think about time—the hurtling of our bodies and planet through the inky-blank cosmos across the strange continuum that demarcates our mortal coils, our very consciousness as a species—when The Holidays roll around each year.

It’s a heavy season.

(Listen to Establishment cofounder Katie Tandy read her story.)

Even a hard-boiled atheist like me who has managed to largely relegate Christmas to brimming glasses of Pimm’s Cup, roaring fires, velvet dresses, and too many pigs in a blanket with dijon mustard, can’t help but enter a kind of personal reckoning with the immediate year of yore.

There is an uncanny feeling that washes over me when I hear Bing Crosby start to warble. I feel my boundaries grow faint, and suddenly I am 4, 10, 15, 25; I am also 34. I am here, right now, and so too are all the ghosts of each Christmas.

Some of those ghosts are mischievous and rattle the windows and hide my jewelry. Some are lovelorn and pet my head while I sleep; I can smell their tears. They smell like old copper.

Some are rageful and like to push me around. They like to splash white wine into cut-glass goblets and howl. But each time I whip my body about to confront the shove that sent me sprawling, there is nothing there but my thumping heart and I feel foolish.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed and Virginia Slims and they love to turn the music too loud and help decorate the house. They’re partial toward anything sparkly and always want to eat beef bourguignon for Christmas dinner. They wrap all my presents with too many ribbons and always hide the tape so cleverly that it breaks your heart to tear into a parcel that perfect.

Some of the best ghosts hang my stocking on the mantle with two thumbtacks because it’s so heavy with trinkets; they lend me their scarf when they want to play bocci in the waning light of dusk on the lawn.

Christmas ghosts complicate my time. They remind me that things are not linear; time is tangled, circuitous; you can — like Meg from A Wrinkle In Time — travel to any point in your life and wander around a while.

I think some people use journals or therapy to do these kinds of travels.

Me? I use ghosts and things.

I use a kind of inverted psychometry. Whereas regular psychometry allows someone to hold an object and understand who made it, where it’s been, and all the people’s lives it’s passed through, I am able to imbue objects with meaning, with memories, with ghosts.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed.
Click To Tweet

People tease me about being a packrat — my collection of things is extraordinary and dusty and heavy and takes over a lot of surface area and is seemingly eccentric. Does someone NEED a sixth full-length black dress from this coastal thrift shop? Well, yes, I do. Because when I take it out of the closet I remember that that was Valentine’s Day two years ago and I’d gone backpacking and camping with a dear friend who rolled her ankle as she burst into, “Giants in the Sky — there are big terrible giants!” from Into The Woods and I almost shit myself laughing, but also felt terrible because she was limping pretty badly.

We found that dress together when we finally got back into town, into Pescadero, and we were just in total lady-love and I was reminded, which I needed desperately, that female friendships are imperative to my joy.

What people don’t understand is that with every object, I’m building a memory palace. This is more than being sentimental. I’m building a time machine.

I love the coupled foreverness and ephemerality of things. Things from antique shops, flea markets, tag sales, and second-hand shops that are filled with other people’s sweat and tears and laughter and life-dust.

And then I fill them with my own.

I am, incidentally, dating a wonderful Jewish man — Jake! — from Marblehead, Massachusetts; he says I’m teaching him to Christmas this year.

We’ve rented a small cabin-y house in Guerneville, California, for December and January. It’s in a redwood grove, so regardless of what temperature it actually is in town, it’s 35 degrees and shadowy as hell at our place; you can always see your breath. It’s a ghosty place.

Anyway. I was, as a packrat, very excited of course to decorate for Christmas and because we didn’t have any ornaments or doo-das or anything, we had to go to Goodwill to get some — obviously — so my spooky, packrat, ghost-loving being was just beside itself with the sheer possibility of the psychometry that awaited me within these fluorescently-lit walls.

I strolled the aisles tsking tsking and gasping and snatching things and holding them to the light, considering their potential for Christmas joy. “Find all the string lights you can,” I said, jabbing my finger to an adjacent aisle. “Even colored ones?” he asked suspiciously, not wanting to waste time or go too far astray from the very discernible path comprised of Christmas fervor fever-dreams.

We are nesting; we are playing house the only way I know how.

“Just how kitschy is too kitschy?” I point to a foot-tall gilded Santa. Jake eyes it warily, but he’s smiling. “It’s…pretty amazing.”

“Plus. It’s kind of an homage to Guerneville right?! He looks just like a fabulous bear!” (Guerneville is known for its very robust gay scene.)

“I don’t know…” he says and wanders off to take another lap. “Look for Christmas balls too!” I holler to his back. “And ribbon! Oh, and wrapping paper maybe!”

Some of my Christmas ghosts are traipsing behind me. They’re burning my fingers with hot glue guns as I make wreaths with my mother; they’re ripping open the orange Stouffer’s box of Welsh Rarebit with my dead grandmother so they can make the cheese fondue.

I find a box of wired gold leaves — Jake loves those — and a box of green sparkling Christmas tree candles complete with stars on top. They’re so ugly and beautiful. He doesn’t love those, but he gets it. They’re ugly-beautiful and that’s an aesthetic I’ve marked much of my life by.

Then he inquires about a…“Christmas tree skirt?”, a phrase he stammers out like a foreign vocabulary word from tenth grade. “Yes, yes! You’re right. We def-need a skirt. You pile all the presents on it!”

He’s starting to feel weary from the lights; I feel that this Christmas elf’s spirit is waning. “Let’s check the fabric section and then we can go I promise!”

He finds a red plaid blanket woven with gold threads. It’s perfect. A good-bad 1950s-esque vibe. We stuff it into our basket and make our way to check-out where even the curmudgeonly woman can’t deny my stupid joy about these stupid glass balls and tacky gem-stone stars.

We pick up champagne from the gas station and I get to decorating the minute I get home; I make a bagillion hooks from wire for all the balls and start to cry when Bing belts out, “the child, the child, sleeping in the night, he will bring us goodness and liiiiiiiiight!”

We’re headed south for actual Christmas though. My brother has just bought a house in Montecito and they’ve just moved in; we’re leaving on the 22nd to road-trip to Southern California and have a poolside Christmas after our perfectly spooky, cold, couple-cozy pre-festivities in the forest.

…and then the fires get bad in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Footage starts rolling in that is haunting, harrowing; orange flames lick trees and houses and destroy lives.

The fires have consumed more than 230,000 acres and 1,000 structures.

The air was growing blacker and as the fires drew closer, my brother grew ashen, reticent, frightened. He was desperately trying to shift his paradigm — “Things are just things ya know? It’s really putting things into perspective” — but his voice belied his heartbreak and the grindings of his mind as he imagined losing all his possessions.

He’s like me. His objects are magical to him. They conjure. They carry his boyhood and his adventures and his sense of self. His possessions, his home, are a kind of museum that he visits on the daily. He could tell you about every matchbox car, every pair of sunglasses and sneakers, every salt-shaker and Scout ad he owns. He has two back-up hard-drives of his photographs that I venture have been collected and sorted, as expected of the curator he is, for the past 20 years.

The idea of him losing his memory palace — a place also poised to be the place where his children would truly call home — broke my fucking heart.

He finally called me yesterday and said he was going to join his wife and son who had fled to Florida a week ago; he was still holding out hope that the fires would subside, the smoke would dissipate, and we could all be together.

It was not to be.

“I got the two things out of the house that were haunting me though, Katie. Mike’s guitar amp and grandpa’s World War II camera.”

Our grandpa — Russell Haviland Tandy — was my father’s father and taught us both the art of storytelling — there is, perhaps, no greater joy than a well-told yarn. There are few people on this earth that can capture the room the way he could, swilling a stinger. (That’s a lethal drink he loved made up of brandy and creme de menthe).

I doubt the camera works — although knowing my brother he’s taken it to every local shop to see if it could be fixed — but this is an Object, regardless of its functionality, that is not to be trifled with. My grandfather — Hula, his friends called him — filled that camera with photographs from the war; he filled it with tiny slivers of his life rendered in 3–1/2 by 5 prints (Kodak called this the 3R size). And now my brother has filled it with all kinds of memories and feelings that I can’t begin to glean or understand. But my ghosts see the ghosts of my brothers’ and they’re madly waving hello.

As for the guitar amp, my uncle recently died — he left behind his daughter who is just 30 years old. They were very close — exceptionally close; her loss is the most profound. I imagine it will be a kind of bifurcating life-gash; there was my life before my father died, and my life after.

Michael was a music lover and talented guitarist. He showed my brother The Wall by Pink Floyd at an utterly inappropriate age; he showed him the power and the glory that is Rock ‘n Roll. Is there any greater joy?

My Object of Michael’s is an admittedly pretty ugly tapestry woven from wool — it depicts a gathering of musicians all gathered in a circle playing together rendered in a pseudo cubist style. As long as I can remember, it hung in his music room; it is filled with the tuning of guitars, of his growling voice….“paranoia strikes deep, into your life it may creep…” as well as his more gentle croonings, “All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown…the moon rose through the nighttime till the daybreak comes around…”

It’s filled with him urging me to, sing, Katie! Man, you’ve got a great voice. (I was never going to be a guitarist.) Is there any greater joy?

This Christmas I am turning to my ghosts to help me celebrate. I am turning to the past and I am turning to the future.