Housekeeping & Open Thread

Hello! I’ve been too busy to do very much writing that isn’t for pay (that is, the Daily Dot). I haven’t even had a chance to do any proper link roundups, so I haven’t shared these two things with you:

1. I had the opportunity to be a guest on a lovely podcast called Sex For Smart People. In this episode, we discussed catcalling, female orgasms, Jian Ghomeshi, Gamergate, that Northwestern University professor who was accused of sexual assault and responded by suing the accuser, and affirmative consent laws. And more. Check it out here.

2. Skepticon is tomorrow! I’m repeating my workshop from last year, Getting It On at the Con: How to Get Lucky Consensually. It’ll be at 3 PM tomorrow in the delightfully named Maui Ballroom. Same deal as last time. In addition, I am taking my DSLR to Skepticon, so if you are there and want nice shots of your outfits, find me and let me know! I will not think you are vain. I love photographing people.

Immediately following Skepticon, I’ll be spending a lovely week at home in Ohio, where I will cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner for many people. Hopefully some actual writing will get done during that time, too.

Since I’ve been so absent lately, let’s do an open thread! What have you been reading or writing lately? What’s going on in your life? How are you coping with these bullshit temperatures? Why is your city the absolute best city in the world? (You’ve already heard my answer to that question, so I’m opening it up to you.) How do you feel about [current event I have not written about]? Here is your chance to talk about all the stuff you can’t normally talk about in my threads because it would be off-topic!

Housekeeping & Open Thread
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Camping Trip Mornings

My favorite moment of any camping trip is the first morning.

I wake up in my tent having finally made it through a spooky and often uncomfortable night–air mattresses and sleeping bags are not my thing–and feel relieved. I can hear dry leaves and twigs crunching beneath footsteps, the thud of hiking boots on dirt and gravel. Water pours from a spigot nearby as someone fills a kettle or washes their hands. There are sleepy conversations, debates about breakfast and pleas for the kids to brush their teeth. Having never been camping with anyone besides my family and their boisterous, colorful friends, I’ve only ever heard these discussions in Russian. Camping, like baking, knitting, and skiing, happens in my native language.

Outside the smoke curls lazily from campfires that finally collapsed shortly before dawn. Pale morning sunlight filters through the canopies of the trees, catches the drifting smoke, stumbles over the tops of the tents, and finally lands in my little sister’s hair, glowing golden, as she pulls me over for breakfast.

The picnic tables almost sag with the weight of the food and drink. Last night’s empty bottles line the tables, but so do this morning’s omelets, sausages, bread, cheese, hardboiled eggs, bagels, fruit, and tea. People shove food into my hands. Water from last night’s apparent rain runs off the blue tarp that hangs over the tables, and I find a dry spot to sit with my paper plate.

And as I look out from my perch at this small piece of the world, the things that seemed so treacherous in the dark just last night–the things you trip over, the things you step into, the things that cast creepy shadows in the firelight–now look boringly normal. The perilous trek to the campground toilets now reveals itself as a short and simple path. The black water of unfathomable depth that I saw at the edge of the flashlight’s beam is just a pond. Dragonflies flit over it, and a frog croaks at its edge.

In the morning, everything suddenly feels safe and familiar again.

When I feel scared, uncomfortable, and alone, I sometimes think about those camping trip mornings, and about how the exact same things can seem so much safer in the sunlight. This visualization that is also a memory calms me down. I think about the transformation that happens at sunrise that first day, of threatening to friendly, strange to familiar.

That transformation is mirrored in my own life to a frustrating degree. People I once held my tongue around and felt anxious with become my closest friends. Streets I explored cautiously, my eyes darting around as though searching for threats, become streets I walk down proudly, yet casually. Things that seemed burdensome and inconvenient to do become routines: ignorable at worst, comfortable at best.

It may not sound like something you’d describe as “frustrating,” but I do, because I can’t seem give myself permission to not be okay with everything immediately. Why couldn’t I have immediately recognized that person as the lovely friend that they are? Why didn’t I see these streets as my home? Why couldn’t I always do these things easily and automatically?

It’s just not how my brain works. I’d venture to guess it’s not how most people’s brains work.

I wish I were someone who craved novelty, who relished the unfamiliar, who reveled in uncertainty. Someone who could cherish their memories without feeling desperate to relive them. But I am not that person. I want it to feel like the camping trip morning all the time. I want to wake up and realize that I know exactly where I am, mentally and physically. I want to stumble outside, rubbing the dreams from my eyes, and see the people I love there waiting for me.

And most of all, I want to feel that these are acceptable things to want.

Camping Trip Mornings

New Year, New York

One exact year ago I stood shivering in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, waiting for the fireworks. There was a huge crowd gathered, people of all ages, kids with silly string and noisemakers, couples with their dogs, all waiting. I was with friends–some new ones, some old ones–thinking about the year I’d just had and the one I hoped was coming.

Whatever else happened that upcoming year, the most important thing was that by the end of it I would be back here in the city I love.

In a sense I’m still waiting for the fireworks. Still waiting for everything to be happy and okay. Still waiting to be completely certain I was right to come here. Still waiting for this story arc of my life to come to its perfect finish.

I know I’ll be waiting a long time, probably forever, for that.

But as the clock struck midnight a year ago, I wished to come here for good and I did. How often in life does a wish that urgent and overpowering actually come true?

I’m very lucky.

~~~

Before I moved a number of Well-Meaning Adults told me condescendingly that they so hoped I wouldn’t get disillusioned by New York once I had to actually live in it and have all my dreams shattered. That does seem like the typical young-person-moving-to-New-York narrative, but it didn’t happen.

Of course, I haven’t been here all that long yet. But I’ve been here long enough to watch one season shift to another, and then another. That means I’ve been awestruck by all of New York’s seasons now, and I feel like I’ve been here much longer than I have. I’ve played tour guide to visiting friends and done the various little things you start to do as you realize that it’s time to settle in. I’ve had my fair share of those late New York nights, come home after 3 AM to find kids still playing in the streets where I live. I’m learning where all the Chipotles and Barnes and Nobles are and which subways take way too long to show the fuck up.

I don’t know that I’m happy yet, but I don’t regret having moved, not at all.

If I ever leave New York–which, someday, I probably will–I don’t think it’ll be because I stop loving it. It’ll probably be because the rich and powerful of this city have decided to make it a place where, increasingly, only the rich and powerful can afford to live. Or it’ll be because some dream job turns up somewhere else, or because too many of the people I love will be somewhere else for it to be worth it to stay here, enchanted but alone.

~~~

The truth is that I’m pretty sad a lot of the time. I miss my old routines, my friends, my family, Chicago, college, nature, pretty much anything in the world I could conceivably miss. As I wrote in my guide to moving, it’s a process that doesn’t end once you get there and your stuff’s unpacked. I have plenty of friends and relatives and things to do here, but all my brain seems to care about is that it’s just…not what I had before.

I predicted this would happen, that this would be one of those things where things have to get much worse before they get better. I thought my first year or two here would be awful. I worried that my depression would relapse completely (which maybe it has, who knows). I didn’t tell many people this because I didn’t think they’d understand why I’d do something that I thought would make me feel awful for a while.

John D. Rockefeller said, “Don’t be afraid to give up the good and go for the great.” Sometimes “the great” is actually real shit for a while. Sometimes you never even get there, and in the real world, you don’t land among the stars if you miss the moon. You end up floating in the vacuum of space.

Sometimes I seem to do a lot of things that make me sad. This is only the latest in a long line of them. I don’t understand it except that, as someone for whom happiness has always been elusive, I don’t prioritize it very highly anymore. Living alone in New York is sad, but at least I get to live in New York.

~~~

Over the last few months I’ve watched myself change to fit into my new surroundings, sometimes in surprising ways. I’d remarked many times when I visited that people in New York are extremely helpful and kind to strangers, and while I’d never been one to refuse help when it was asked of me, I rarely offered it proactively. Now I find myself picking out the tourists and giving them directions, stopping to help someone carry something up the stairs out of the subway, suddenly sinking down onto the pavement in the dark to pick up the groceries that had spilled from a woman’s cart.

And then I think about how some of the people I’ve casually, thoughtlessly helped went home and told their friends how kind people are in New York, and how maybe when they come here for good someday they’ll carry on that custom. Maybe that’s how it gets perpetuated, despite what people think about New Yorkers.

But assertiveness and proactiveness are traits that can manifest in lots of ways. I used to shrink down and try to shrug it off when people harassed me, maybe thinking up witty comebacks hours later. But recently I surprised myself when I was walking down the street at night in Queens, listening to music, and some dude suddenly shoved an open stick of Axe in my face. (For a fun exercise, count the number of things wrong with his behavior.) I didn’t hear what he or his friends were saying, but without thinking about it or missing a beat, I yanked my earbuds out, shoved his arm out of my face as hard as I could, yelled “What the FUCK are you doing?”, and continued on my way without listening to the reply. I’m quite sure he meant no harm, but my response was mostly instinctual, and anyway, that should teach him about violating women’s personal space on the streets at night. It doesn’t really fucking matter what he intended.

I stand up for myself all the time in other ways, things I wouldn’t have done before I moved.

Another weird change, but this one I have no idea if it relates to moving to New York or not: although I’ve been playing music since I was 11 years old, I have never willingly practiced in earshot of people and have performed solos maybe once or twice. The thought of being listened to made me so uncomfortable that no matter how much I loved playing piano, it wasn’t worth it. But last week I came home to my family where I have a piano, and I completely shocked myself by sitting down and playing it in a room full of people. Even though I needed to relearn the piece that I’d forgotten and was completely out of practice. The fact that people were listening didn’t bother me a single bit, and over the course of the week I relearned the piece almost to perfection and felt even better about playing it in front of people. I am good, goddammit, and I will fill up the house with music if I feel like playing.

(One wonderful thing that came out of that was that I decided to ask my parents for a keyboard piano for New Year’s, so that I finally get to have a piano in my residence for the first time since I left for college. I think it’ll do wonders for my mental health.)

At the same time, moving here has made me crave and cherish alone time in a way I never have before. In Ohio and even in college, socialization was a sort of rare luxury and my brain operated in scarcity mode. That is, if I had the opportunity to socialize, I took it, because who knew when I’d have the opportunity again. While I enjoyed the things I did when I was alone, they always felt “pathetic” to me somehow, like I “should” be out there interacting with people instead.

Then I came here and social interaction became so easy to come by that suddenly I was desperate to cut down on it. I still felt weird about declining invitations or not going to events that I thought were cool, but it calmed me down to remember the sheer volume of things there are to do in the city, most of which recur at least semi-regularly. The world will not end because I didn’t go to some queer book club or poly party.

~~~

Usually with these New Year’s Eve posts I try to reflect on my life over the past year, in general. This year, moving to New York seems to be overshadowing everything else I’ve done with myself, which is probably not for the better. I did do a lot of cool stuff. I started speaking professionally-ish, I made a ridiculous amount of friends and started seeing a number of new partners, I went to grad school (which I rarely talk about either in my writing or to people because it doesn’t feel very important to me, but I still did it), I read a lot and revised lots of my opinions and ideas in response, I started working out again (which is a really big deal), I wrote lots and lots (and spent the entire year here on FtB, which is just awesome), and mostly kept depression at bay.

There’s not much to say about all that now but that, except at my worst moments, I really do feel extremely lucky despite how hard and sad things are a lot of the time.

Since this is after all my blog and most of you are probably here for the actual writing and not the rambling about my life, I decided to make a list of my favorite posts that I wrote in 2013. Not necessarily the most popular ones–just the ones I still find myself thinking about, linking to, and feeling proud of.

~~~

A few weeks ago, I was on a completely frozen 2 AM trek through upper Manhattan with a friend after having hitchhiked across the bridge from New Jersey (as you do), trying to get to the subway. My hands and feet were in that uncomfortable stage of freezing the fuck off where they just hurt a lot, and it was dark and almost completely deserted (some parts of the city do sleep). Had I not been with a friend, I probably would’ve honestly been terrified, but as it was, I was merely exhausted and extremely cold.

And then I looked up and saw a fire escape completely covered in Christmas lights. It shone like a beacon in the night, red and green. And though it probably wasn’t the first time I saw a fire escape decorated for the holidays, something about it went right to my heart–the fact that even something most people consider ugly and utilitarian can be turned into a celebration of something, the fact that you couldn’t even see the rust underneath all that light, the fact that folks don’t even really see their own fire escapes unless they happen to be looking out the window, so who could it even be for but for people trudging through the night in a lonely, out-of-the-way part of the city?

But this is something I’ve noticed New York does all the time. When I’m feeling my worst, when it’s the darkest and the coldest it ever gets, I find that the city shines through.

Until the fireworks–until leaving my friends and family to come back to New York starts to feel a little less like heartbreak and a little more like homecoming–I’ll keep looking for those little flashes of beauty in the dark.

New Year, New York

Miri's Survival Guide to Moving Across the Country Alone in a State of Terror and Panic

I have known I was going to write this post ever since I first stood in my stifling Chicago apartment looking at a bunch of empty boxes and thinking, “Wow, moving is going to be difficult! I’d better take good care of myself and give myself time to be a little sad and process things.”

Juuuust kidding. What I actually thought was, “Fuck me I hate this why am I doing this why am I such an idiot this is what I’ve always wanted fuck these boxes I don’t want to put my shit in these boxes I’m going to get Chipotle now.” And so I did.

Unfortunately, when it comes to emotional self-care, I’m a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kinda gal. I’m working on it. But, to paraphrase a John Green character slightly, if you don’t say the honest thing, it never becomes true. I’m writing this as much for myself as I’m writing it for you–I’m giving myself permission to need the advice that this post provides.

I was and remain incredibly lucky. I moved not out of necessity, but out of passion. I had a loving family with the resources to help me move, and even more family who welcomed me when I got here. I moved to my favorite place ever. It continues to amaze me every day. Not everyone is so lucky when they move, but given how difficult a time I still had with it, I figured maybe someone might benefit from this advice.

To be clear, this is not a post about the logistical/practical side of moving. It’s a post about the emotional side of moving. I’m the last person who should be talking about the former, but maybe only the second- or third-to-last who should be talking about the latter. So latter it is.

Care for yourself.

I don’t just mean in the typical self-care ice cream/chocolate/funny movies/bubble baths way, although that can also help. (Good luck getting a New York bathtub to cooperate with that, though.)

What I mean is to be kind and gentle with yourself, just like you’re (hopefully) being with the fragile things you’re packing up.

Sometimes before and during and after the move, I had to talk to myself sort of like a child. “Okay, we’re going to get in the minivan and drive for a very long time. No, we’re not coming back. We’re going to a new place.” “I know this apartment feels weird and scary right now, but this is where you live now. I promise you’ll start to like it when you get used to it.” Sometimes that was the only way I could handle thinking about the immensity of the changes that were happening. Sometimes you need to let yourself be a little kid again.

But other times I was very bad at this. I berated and blamed myself endlessly, guilt-tripped myself for not being more grateful for the opportunity, played the sort of endless games of “But you TOLD me you wanted to move” and “Didn’t you SAY this was where you wanted to live” that I absolutely despise other people playing with me, and would never try to play with someone else.

Finally I had to ask myself how I would treat a friend who was moving to a place they loved but was having a lot of trouble coping nonetheless. What if it were one of my partners? What if it were Kate? What would I say to them?

I felt so ashamed when I realized that I was speaking to myself as though I resent myself. I realized that even if a random person from my friends list whom I barely know messaged me and shared concerns like the ones I had, I would still be infinitely kinder and more patient with this person to whom I have no connection and owe nothing than I was being to myself. There was no good reason for this.

Be as kind to yourself as you would to anyone you love and value.

The internet is probably your friend.

If you’re reading this, you probably use the internet at least a fair amount. Congratulations!

During this transition, just like all the previous difficult times of my life, the internet kept me sane. Not only did it help with all the logistical stuff, but it gave me something to “come home” to when home didn’t feel like home. (I mean, home still doesn’t really feel like home.) There were definitely days when I came home, threw my stuff down, closed the door to my room, went online, and talked to my friends. And the amazing thing was, the internet is the same internet no matter where you are. The same people I talked to when I was in Chicago were still there. I watched Grey’s Anatomy on Hulu in Chicago and I watched it here in New York. I read the same blogs. I listened to Citizen Radio. Finally, something in my life was stable!

It’s important not to go overboard with this, but use it if/when you need to.

But remember to go out and try to put down roots.

I am, again, incredibly privileged to live in New York. As soon as I got here I started seeing the friends and family I already had here, and quickly made a bunch of new friends. I went to lectures and films, I tentatively ventured to some Meetups (although there are still tons of interesting ones I haven’t gotten to), I went to parties I got invited to, I saw friends in neighboring cities that were once a plane flight away but now just a $30 roundtrip ticket and a 2-/3-hour bus or train ride away.

And, as always, I went out alone to explore the city. Wandering around as an inhabitant of the weird space between tourist and New Yorker is fun.

But even when you’re not sure you really want to, try to get yourself to do social things at least sometimes. In my experience, the most amazing friends/partners will appear in your life in a way that seems random, but really isn’t. Maybe you go to a party that’s totally boring except one of the people you talk to there mentions offhand a cool-sounding Meetup group and you look it up and go to it and meet a cool person who doesn’t become a super close friend but who does eventually invite you to a poetry reading where you meet someone awesome who becomes one of the people you cherish the most.

This process can be extremely frustrating. But, given enough chances, it will work.

BUT try not to fall victim to FOMO.

I got FOMO bad. Real bad. I have, in the short time I’ve been living here, somehow managed to convince myself that if I don’t do every single thing to which I am invited and/or hear about then 1) I am a Failure and 2) I will never make good friends and find my people.

Something that helped was hearing my friends talk about when they moved to new places. Some of them didn’t do social things for weeks or months, either because they couldn’t handle it emotionally or were too busy with whatever they moved there for or just couldn’t find anything to do. And yet, somehow it ended up working out. Now they have friends and partners and communities and activities. You don’t have to Create Your Entire Life all at once.

So there were also nights when I made myself stay in because I was exhausted and I needed it. I fidgeted at my desk or in my bed and told myself that I have a very long time to do All Of The Things, and that doing All Of The Things at once is not worth it if I’m exhausted and miserable. 

If you need to, get some perspective.

I’m lucky to have a family of immigrants whose stories are horrific and hilarious and inspiring enough to have kept me going at times. My aunt told me about how she moved to New York from Russia years ago and spoke no English and had no money, and ended up doing the same long walk from Battery Park to Central Park that I once took in the summer heat with no cash to spare for a bottle of water or for the bus. She worked cleaning houses before she was able to pass her medical licensing exam and become a successful physician. My mom told me about moving to Israel from Russia right before I was born and living in one of the worst neighborhoods in Haifa, while pregnant with me, taking care of my then-8-year-old brother, and trying to find work. And, of course, not speaking any Hebrew.

Their stories of awful landlords and crumbling apartments and culture shocks and exploitative jobs makes me grateful, despite all the difficulties, to have been able to move here relatively easily.

Your mileage may vary with this strategy, because hearing other people’s tales of woe may not necessarily make you feel better about yours. For me, it often doesn’t. But the way my family members tell these stories and the fact that I can see how far they’ve come since then gives me a good dose of perspective.

One thing that I’m really sensitive to, personally, is condescension. I had more than my fair share of Adults being really (unintentionally, but still really) condescending and giving me patronizing advice that I didn’t ask for and telling me that I was Doing It All Wrong. So go to people you trust for things like this. My family was great about it. Random people on my Facebook, not always.

Speaking of which, now is a great time to enforce your boundaries.

While enforcing boundaries is always important, it becomes especially important when moving, when so many other things are out of your control. It’s not too much to ask of your friends and acquaintances not to do things that really bother you, whether it’s bombarding you with patronizing unsolicited advice or constantly asking for updates on how packing’s going or (if they live in the place you’re moving) pressuring you to make plans to see them when you’re not ready to yet.

My own personal issue was that, as soon as I started making plans to move, and especially as those plans drew nearer and nearer and especially after they happened, a large portion of my Facebook friends list decided that I would be their Official Repository for “Humor” Articles About How Much New York Sucks. How expensive it is. How shitty the apartments are. How hard it is to find them. How annoying the subway is. (It’s not even that annoying.) How rude New Yorkers are. (They’re not even.) I try to think that people thought I’d find this funny because I can relate rather than doing it to piss me off. Unfortunately, though, it turned out to be a huge anxiety trigger. Because guess what! I do have doubts about moving here. It is hard sometimes. The housing situation really is a little dismal. Shit really is expensive. Do I really need to be reminded of this? No.

The entire genre of LOLOL WOW LOOK AT THIS CRAZY STUPID NEW YORK SHIT LOL NEW YORKERS ARE SO WEIRD LOL articles really needs to die out, in my opinion. But until it does, I didn’t want any more of them posted on my wall. So I told people that and explained why, and enforced that boundary whenever people broke it afterward. It made my life just a little bit happier, at no cost to me or anyone else.

If you’re someone who likes routines (and most people do), create some as soon as possible.

When you move to a new place it might be tempting to Try All Of The Different Things to try to get yourself to feel more comfortable and at home. Sometimes this can be really helpful and fun, but sometimes what you need to feel at home is routine.

That’s why I quickly established My Gym and My Deli and My Work!LunchPlace and My School!LunchPlace and My Cafe. My School!LunchPlace is Chipotle, which people make fun of me for because why would you move to New York and just eat at Chipotle. Cause it makes me feel comfy, okay? I will probably eventually get tired of my love affair with Chipotle, or its CEO will say something really bigoted, and I will stop going there and start enjoying food from Every Country In The World. (For real, right next to the building where I have class is a Mediterranean place, an Ethiopian place, an Italian place, an Indian place, a Chinese place, and a Japanese place. And that’s without walking a few blocks to where Harlem begins.)

Routines help me feel like a resident rather than a tourist. In a city of tourists, that feels nice. Knowing exactly where to stand on the platform so I get on the train at such a spot that when I get off the train I’ll be right by the stairwell that will take me to the next train I need is cool. So I stand on the platform in the same spot every time.

Relatedly, unpack as soon as you can. Unless it’s too stressful. Then don’t.

Typically, I find that unpacking helps me feel at home and gives me fewer things to worry about, since I can finally stop living out of boxes and start knowing where all my shit is. But this time was a bit different, because it was very difficult to fit everything into my limited storage space, and every time I tried to unpack I just got terribly anxious. If this happens to you, let go of any perfectionism you may still have after moving across the country alone in a state of terror and panic (that tends to really cut down on the perfectionism) and let things just lie in boxes or piles on the floor. There will be time enough to put all of the thingies where they need to go.

Avoid reminders of your past home when you need to.

The wisdom on this goes both ways; some people feel comforted by such reminders, while other people, such as me, break down crying in public. That happened today, which is actually what prompted me to finally write this post and stop putting it off.

It was the first actually cold day of the season, and the first snow. There’s a Target near where I work and I needed to get some stuff. Tights. A pillow. Whatever. I found the Target and walked in, and the glass door slid shut behind me, and suddenly…I was home.

I don’t mean home as in a shopper’s paradise, although that too. Home home. The Target was laid out exactly the way the one back in my hometown in Ohio was, with the women’s clothes and the accessories just to the left of the entrance. I walked over to some purses and scarves and just stared stupidly at them. I remembered doing my college shopping four years ago. I remembered buying Pokemon cards for my little brother. I remembered when my ex-boyfriend and I bought identical folding sphere chairs. I remembered clothes shopping with my mom. I felt like I could do a 180 and walk right back out and be in the sprawling wasteland of a parking lot with the mall across the street and the pool down the road. I could get in my parents’ car and drive home (driving?!) and my family would be there waiting for me.

If you’ve never walked aimlessly through a nearly-empty Target crying and not being able to breathe properly, I don’t really recommend it.

It just felt so stupid. It’s a stupid fucking generic store. They have them everywhere. I’ve even been to plenty of other Targets in plenty of other cities and states, without any bouts of Sudden Crying. But there it was.

I bought my shit and left the store without my coat on, thinking that maybe the sudden cold would make me snap out of it. It didn’t. The wind reminded me of Chicago and I just cried even harder. I put the coat on and went to the subway. I cried all the way back to Manhattan, half-napping part of the time. By the time I got to Times Square, I felt like I was back in New York again and not wallowing in some Midwestern past, and I felt a little better.

The point of that whole story is: I’m probably not going to go to Target again. At least not alone, or at least not until I’ve settled in better. It’s not worth it. I almost want to, because that stupid store is the only place in the five boroughs that has ever given me that visceral I-could-walk-right-out-into-Ohio feeling. I know I could chase that feeling if I let myself, but I won’t. I moved here for a reason. I left that place behind.

But remember where you came from.

I spent many useless years trying to shed Ohio and the Midwest from my identity like so many useless outgrown and unfashionable clothes. In college, I remember being extremely proud whenever anyone told me that I looked or sounded like I was from New York, which was often. And in my junior year when I was taking Hebrew, I was practicing with my teacher and asked her how to say, “I want to be from New York.” She said, “You mean, ‘I want to live in New York.'” I said, “No, I don’t just want to live there. I want to be from there.” (The correct translation, by the way, is Ani rotzah l’hiyot meh-New York.)

I am not from New York. I am never going to be. That ship sailed 22 years ago when I was born in Israel (not too shabby a place to be from), and sank somewhere in the deep sea when my parents bought a house in Ohio. So it was. Instead of a childhood in Central Park and the Met and Rockaway Beach, I had a childhood reading in my backyard and hiking and going to the pool and riding my bike for miles and miles. Oh, and unlike kids here, I never had to take a fucking exam just to get into middle school. Could’ve certainly done worse.

Even if your move is not quite like Miri’s Brave Quest To Finally Be In A Place She Belongs, you might still be struggling with the desire to fit into your community versus the desire to remember where you’re from and the way you lived there. As you get to know new people, tell them about your old life and what your past homes were like. Let people understand you as the product of all the experiences that led up to your move to this new place, not just the new ones you’re having with them now.

It’s tempting sometimes to see moves as opportunities for total reinvention, and I definitely had a bit of that going on. But sometimes that can feel very isolating, like there are huge pieces of you that you didn’t bring with you when you moved. So bring them.

Miri's Survival Guide to Moving Across the Country Alone in a State of Terror and Panic

Occasional Link Roundup

Hello! It’s been quite a while since I last did one of these, so it’s going to be quite long and include some slightly-older links. Such is life.

Speaking of life, it’s been pretty busy/weird. I moved to New York, started grad school, started my field placement (all social work students do it three days a week), met a bunch of people, did a bunch of things, and discovered the joys of going grocery shopping and carrying bags on the subway and standing with them for half an hour and then hauling them up to my fourth-floor walkup. You know.

At just under three weeks, I’m still a very very new New Yorker, and it shows when I show up late to basically every social gathering because I can’t Brooklyn or because I neglected to check the subway service advisories. Or when I try to pay with my credit card when half the places here only take cash. Or when I don’t realize that I shouldn’t have bought so many groceries at a time because I’d have to carry them on the subway and stand with them for half an hour and then haul them up to my fourth-floor walkup.

But considering what a dramatic change in my life this was (biggest move since I immigrated to the United States 16 years ago, fuck yeah!), I’m sort of dealing? I love it here so much. I love that today I went to a feminist group meeting and tomorrow I’m going to a thing called Nerd Nite which has lectures and live music and booze and on Saturday I’m hanging out with one of my best friends and on Sunday I’m checking out more bookstores and on Monday I’m meeting with the other leaders of another feminist group and on Tuesday I’m going to see this ridiculously cool-looking play about Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue. I could keep going but I don’t want to make you guys too jealous.

And on top of all that, I get to see stuff like this and this and this and this and this, and eat stuff like this.

Life is good. Hard and busy and stressful but so good.

On to the links!

1. Cliff talks about changing her name from a very feminine one to a gender neutral/male-ish one, and discovering how differently she was treated online:

I used to think people called me irresponsible, dirty, immoral, or speculated about me having diseases because I wrote about having multiple partners.

Then I changed my name from Holly to Cliff.

2. Libby Anne discusses atheist men who want to “save” women from religiously-motivated sexism:

Far too many atheists appear to think that so long as they’re not religious, they surely can’t be sexist. This is wrong. Very wrong. Sexism does not cease at the church door. If a male atheist wants to attempt to deconvert women by focusing on the sexism imbedded in many religions, he needs to make sure that he’s not engaging in sexism himself, and he darned well better be ready to address his own sexism if it is pointed out to him.

3. Tauriq explains that asking to be called what you’d prefer to be called is not “censorship” or “political correctness”:

To claim “censorship” over “compassion”, PC over politeness, is to only reinforce that you don’t actually care about language and, therefore, the other person; it’s to continue weaving the cocoon of solipsism that’s being pointed out, preventing you from actually acknowledging someone that’s not you or like you. This doesn’t mean unnecessary censorship or policing of words or phrases doesn’t exist: mockery of religion, politics and ideas – even monarchy – resulting in bans or firing is problematic.

But it’s fallacious, black-and-white thinking to claim that any time, anyone requests you not say or refrain from saying something it’s censorship: This shows you don’t recognise nuance in a complicated world; you fail to acknowledge that different things require different responses even if they appear – at first glance – the same.

4. Lisa Wade examines some gendered American Apparel advertisements side-by-side and uncovers some hilariously sad differences.

5. Tressie writes about Miley Cyrus and the use and abuse of Black women’s bodies by white women (and men):

I am no real threat to white women’s desirability. Thus, white women have no problem cheering their husbands and boyfriends as they touch me on the dance floor. I am never seriously a contender for acceptable partner and mate for the white men who ask if their buddy can put his face in my cleavage. I am the thrill of a roller coaster with safety bars: all adrenaline but never any risk of falling to the ground.

6. Jane Doe, MD on Twitter talks about the shame many women feel about their genitals and how it has harmful consequences for their health.

7. Ian may have left FtB, but he’s still off being awesome elsewhere:

Identifying as “a skeptic” does not somehow mean that all the things you do, all of the heuristics you use when arriving at conclusions, are magically imbued with skepticy power. Your brain is not better because you have chosen to affix a label to yourself. If anything, the use of a label in the place of a behaviour suggests a brain that is less engaged, not more. The moment that you stopped questioning your own assumptions, the second you abandoned the premise that you might be wrong about something, the instant you precluded from yourself the possibility that you are prone to the same errors that everyone else is, that’s when you stopped being “a skeptic”.

You are “a skeptic” right up until the point when you stop acting like one.

(By the way, I wrote something very similar [before Ian wrote this, I might add] that you might also enjoy, in case you haven’t read it yet.)

8. Alex thinks you should stop asking people for “coffee”:

The popularity of “coffee” stems, I think, from that ambiguity. It serves as both euphemism and get-out clause, putting dating or sex on the table with plausible deniability – ask to hook up, and your neck is on the line; ask them for coffee, and rejection can be parried with face-saving statements that you “didn’t mean it like that”.

[…]The trouble is, that ambiguity puts the other person‘s neck on the line. Inviting someone neither to dating or sex, nor a social event, but to something which could usually mean either places on them the burden of interpretation; of negotiating correctly an advance chosen for its disclarity.

9. Mitchell has produced a very useful guide for Freeze Peach Warriors and Brave Heroes who have been blocked on Twitter:

Second, remember that though these violations of our rights are serious, the powers that be have, in reality, only erected a proverbial Maginot line against truth and justice. Blocked on the Internet? Remember that you can still employ an army of sock puppets to do your truthy bidding! Those people in the park don’t want to hear your speech about the merits of Men’s Rights Activism? Follow them when they try to leave! Don’t stop until you’ve made sure they’ve heard everything you have to say! Family down the street doesn’t want to listen to your doorstep speech about Jesus how feminism is keeping us down? Look up all of their online accounts and make sure they can’t go two minutes without being bombarded by the free exchange of ideas!

10. The Belle Jar on being a woman writer:

When a man says flattering things about your writing, you will always be left wondering whether it is your work that interests him, or the fact that you are young, conventionally attractive and female. Most frequently it will be the former, but still, you can never shake off the fear that you are not so much talented as you are naïve and pretty. You often feel as if you are only valuable in so much as men desire to fuck you.

11. Ultra Orthodox Jewish sects in New York City have a scary amount of political influence, as Adam discusses.

12. Franklin tackles the common but ridiculous assertion that feminist men are just fakin’ it to get laid:

I don’t quite get what’s going on in the head of some guy who thinks pretending to be feminist is a ploy to get laid, but I have to assume that a guy who thinks that, probably doesn’t think women are very smart. If someone pretends to think women are people, but doesn’t actually think women are people, I suspect the ploy would be revealed rather quickly. Probably some time between appetizers and the main course, and certainly well before any clothes come off. I really don’t think it’s possible to pretend to be feminist, at least not for any length of time longer than a dinner conversation.

13. Paul Fidalgo has some of the most lyrical writing ever. Read this piece about sleep.

14. Ginny wrote a great post about anger: how it can be both useful and not useful for social change, and how, ultimately, expressing anger isn’t always about social change:

But all of that is about anger as a tactic, anger as a tool for change, and that’s only part of the story. The other piece of it is anger as simple self-expression: oppressed people have many, many reasons to be angry, and telling them to curb their anger and express themselves in a way that’s polite and acceptable to those who are profiting from the system that oppresses them — well, many words have been written on how wrong that is, and I agree with them. Anger is only sometimes, and only partly, about creating social change; it’s also about letting the damage be real, and be heard. It’s not about me at all; it’s about letting someone who’s been hurt just fucking react honestly to that hurt.

15. Aoife explains why you should stop accusing every homophobic person of being a closeted queer person:

But when you say that the loudest homophobes are closeted LGBT folks, you erase the fact that the vast, vast majority of homophobia doesn’t come from closeted people. It comes from straight people. Casual, everyday homophobia overwhelmingly comes from straight people (and yes, by the way, I know that all of you aren’t like that). The vast majority of people who vote against marriage equality are straight. The vast majority of the people who draft gender recognition legislation that enshrines gatekeeping, divorce, diagnoses and compulsory surgery are cis. The people who think that knowing we even exist should be kept from kids, because we’re too ‘confusing’? Mostly straight and cis. The people who treat us ever-so-slightly differently, who tokenise us, who judge us by how closely we conform to stereotypes? Mostly straight and cis. And, yeah, most of the people who brainwash, reject and demonise us are straight and cis too.

. This post by Melissa McEwan wins every award ever.

I am advised, by people who imagine that rape prevention is the responsibility of potential victims and survivors, that I must be careful what I wear, how I wear it, how I carry yourself, where I walk, when I walk there, with whom I walk, whom I trust, what I do, where I do it, with whom I do it, what I drink, how much I drink, whether I make eye contact, if I’m alone, if I’m with a stranger, if I’m in a group, if I’m in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if I’m carrying something, how I carry it, what kind of shoes I’m wearing in case I have to run, what kind of purse I carry, what jewelry I wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people I sleep with, what kind of people I sleep with, who my friends are, to whom I give my number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment or condo or house where I can see who’s at the door before they can see me, to check before I open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch my back always be aware of my surroundings and never let my guard down for a moment lest I be sexually assaulted and if I am and didn’t follow all the rules it’s my fault, which I already know firsthand from having been raped and seeing about 1 in 6 of my female friends and about 1 in 10 of my male friends going through it and getting victim-blamed, at least once and frequently more.

I am persistently terrorized by the ever-present possibility of sexual assault that I am tasked with preventing and the knowledge, the first-hand knowledge branded into my memory like a scar that never quite heals from the sizzle of the iron that left it, that if I am harmed, there will likely be no one there to advocate for justice on my behalf, no matter how loudly I shout nor how deeply I dig my own fingernails into my skin to escape the agony of injustice and neglect for a blissful moment of self-directed pain.

I fear being hurt again, and I fear being a failure at surviving.

This fear is part of the backdrop of my womanhood.

What good things have you read or written lately? Share them here!

Occasional Link Roundup

812 Miles

Mile 1

Of all the car doors I’ve shut in my life, this one feels the most final.

Mile 31

I can finally breathe properly for the first time in days or weeks (I’m not sure). As soon as we got on the road, I instantly felt better, so instantly that I’d call it miraculous if I weren’t already so familiar with my own patterns.

The last fourteen or so hours have been some of the worst of my life. I was up till past 3 AM, crying and panicking too much to sleep. Everyone I knew nearby was either out of town or asleep, not that I’d ask to see them even if I could. I wanted to quit everything. I regretting signing my New York lease more than I’d ever regretted anything. If only, I thought, I could unsign that piece of paper, drop out of grad school, go home to Ohio, get a boring job, and never have to leave anyone or anything again.

I was online and made a bunch of rather miserable tweets that you can probably find if you wanted to, and luckily there were a few people around to talk me down from it. I suddenly remembered that my friend Andrew had, earlier that day, brought me a chocolate muffin and I’d left it in the disheveled kitchen. That got me out of bed, and I mechanically walked–though it felt more like crawling–through the ghost of an apartment until I found it and brought it back with me. For some reason this made all the difference.

But the morning wasn’t much better. I got less than three hours of sleep. I woke up at 6 AM when my alarm went off and realized this was not a nightmare. Through the gaps between my drawn curtains, I saw that it was sunny, beautiful out. My soon-to-be-former home was waking up and starting the day with complete disregard for whether or not I would be there by that day’s end.

I could barely open my eyes all the way and I cried about everything. I cried when I saw my room completely empty, I cried when I had to throw away some things that wouldn’t fit, I cried when I walked down the street to get a bagel (with lox), I cried in the shower, I cried when I hugged my roommate (and friend) goodbye.

For one morning I was the world champion of crying. I could cry at literally anything. I could cry about taking my apartment key off of my keychain. And I did.

Mile 85

I’m lucky that the biggest moves of my life–from Israel to Germany back to Israel and finally to the United States–happened before I was 7 years old. I was too young to understand what I was losing, too young to remember more than the fuzziest outlines of the architectures of my former homes.

The only time I start to understand is when I visit Israel and walk through its streets. Suddenly, unbidden, an alternate universe unfolds in front of me and I start to wonder–who would my friends be? Which cafes would I write in? Would I even be a writer? What would I sound like, speaking Hebrew fluently and without an accent? How different would I look and dress? What would I study?

(All I know about that alternate-universe me is that they would still call me Miri, because that’s how Israelis abbreviate my name.)

And I start to mourn a self that could never be. I idly consider moving back, even though I know it wouldn’t work, I could never get back what I’d lost.

But the life I’m leaving now is not hypothetical. That me existed. I had friends here. I had routines. I had places I loved to go. I pelted my friends with snowballs and read by the lake on summer evenings and cried on benches surrounded by gardens that were more beautiful than I felt I deserved.

I loved people there, and I was loved.

Mile 116

There’s not a single cloud in the sky in northern Indiana today. We drive past fields of soybeans and ripe corn, interrupted here and there by patches of woods. The sunlight flashes off of silos and tractors standing idle in the fields. Occasionally, there are solemn wooden barns in various stages of disrepair.

Soon enough these landscapes will be a sight as rare as a good bagel outside of New York.

Mile 147

But actually, the second-worst part of this morning was the shower. After we’d packed everything into the van, my dad and I each took a shower so we wouldn’t be all sweaty and hot in the car. He went first, then went to wait outside. I took my shower and couldn’t make myself get out of it.

Not that I’m by any means an expedient showerer on the best of days or anything, but this time I really, really, really didn’t want to get out of it. At the other end of that shower awaited the rest of my life. After I got out of that shower and got dressed, there’d be nothing left to do but to say goodbye and get in the car and leave. There would be no more excuses. I had thrown away everything there was to throw away. I had vacuumed very carefully. There was no way to delay it anymore except have a tantrum and refuse to go like a four-year-old.

I didn’t do that. I turned off the water with shaking hands, leaned against the shower wall to try to catch my breath, dried off, reapplied my clothes, and left.

Mile 165

My dad wants to prove to me that the iPhone car adaptor he has is jacked up, so he tells me to play some music. He has an idiosyncratic music taste (everything from classical to Amy Winehouse), so I went with something safe: the Russian music I grew up with.

The song is called “We’re Leaving” (except in Russian) and I obviously chose it on purpose. I can’t do it justice in translation, but I’ll just say that it’s a sweetly optimistic song about leaving and going somewhere you know you’re loved, but leaving behind people who love you too. There’s also some stuff in there about not really knowing what lies ahead, and about understanding that time will heal you, and about, basically, getting your shit together and helping other people. So, needless to say, it’s at least a tiny bit relevant to my particular situation.

It also talks about how quickly time always passes when you’re about to leave, or when someone is about to leave you. That’s the part that always hurt me the most about leaving. I’d know that I have just a week left and that it’s killing me, but that soon I’d feel like I’d do anything to still have a whole week left. And then there’s a day left and it’s killing me, but soon I’ll wish more than anything to still have that day. And then an hour, and then half, and then no time at all.

For the last few weeks I’ve been terribly worried that when my dad arrived to pack up my things into the van, they wouldn’t fit, or some other calamity would happen and we’d fight about it and arrangements would have to be made and it would be a huge mess. This thought was extremely stressful, but there was little I could do about it because I couldn’t exactly visualize how much space the van would have or how much space my things would take up once they were all packed up.

But then my dad showed up, looked over my things, and made absolutely no comment about the glaring possibility that they would not fit and a Disaster would occur. We carried the stuff down the stairs quickly and easily because I’d packed it into many small boxes rather than fewer large ones. It fit into the car easily, without anything fragile being squished, and with space to spare. I was sort of dumbfounded.

Then during the drive my dad mentioned to a few people on the phone that I’d packed very well and everything had been easy, and I realized an embarrassing truth: I had been hoping that the things wouldn’t fit and there would be fights and it would be a Disaster.

After all, it would delay the inevitable moment when I’d have to leave.

Mile 247

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Harder than any academic program, harder than hiking the Negev in August, harder than band camp in 95-degree heat, harder than applying to college or grad school, harder than any breakup, harder than getting into (and staying in) treatment for depression. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. There will be harder things in the future, but for now this is it.

Mile 293

Last night at some point I went on a bit of a rant about sexual assault and victim-blaming, because it’s been on my mind lately since I’m completely terrified of going anywhere alone in New York after 11 PM.

As I tried to explain to someone who has never had to worry about it: imagine going through the WORST thing that could ever happen to you, and imagine knowing that no matter how it happened–no matter HOW–people you love, people with legal and social authority, people with power would blame you for it. The first words out of their mouths would be to blame you. No matter how it happened. You could be sitting on your fucking couch in your ratty sweatpants, eating popcorn, when it happened, and they would tell you that maybe you were sitting too attractively.

That, to me, is worse than the sexual assault itself. Much worse. I can probably deal with physical pain and trauma, but the social isolation that will follow is a different beast.

That, to me, is why it doesn’t actually matter that New York is totally safe these days and come on stop acting like it’s such a terrible place when it’s totally not anymore. (I know that. I love it, after all.)

If I get raped or mugged in New York, people I care about will ask me why I was out alone in New York. Full stop. If I get raped or mugged in New York, my options are 1) hide this from people I care about, including lying about any injuries that result, or 2) get blamed.

That many people find it acceptable that half of the world’s population is terrorized and trapped indoors at night by the threat of gendered violence is a testament to the dismaying power of cognitive biases to create and perpetuate oppression.

Mile 423

The Midwestern farmlands have gradually turned into nearly-unbroken deciduous forests and lazily rolling hills. The sun is setting. I’ve just eaten chicken nuggets with barbecue sauce, which I generally end up eating at some point on just about every road trip.

I mentioned once before that the first time I went to New York City on my own, it was for a stupid reason. I’ll elaborate: it was for a guy. The same one I could barely make myself stop hugging back in Chicago this morning. (Was it really just this morning?)

That was the reason I went, but it wasn’t the reason I stayed. New York eventually helped me rediscover the person I used to be, before depression and before I started clinging desperately onto people in an attempt to avoid the misery I felt. I used to love being alone. I used to take long walks and write for hours rather than in short bursts. I used to treasure my own company. I used to need no one else to have fun.

In New York I started doing all these things again. During the summer that I spent there two years ago, I’d hole up in bookstores and read entire books in a single city. One time I walked from Battery Park all the way to the northern end of Central Park: nine miles in a day. I took the bus to Rockaway Beach alone. I sprawled on the grass in Central Park alone. I even went to Times Square alone, although in Times Square you can never be alone.

As terrified as I still am of being alone in the city, I know that it’s my favorite place in the world to be alone.

Mile 482

For the past four years I’ve believed earnestly that coming to Northwestern/Chicago was a huge mistake, one of the biggest I’d ever made. Although over time I stopped imagining what life might’ve been like had I chosen better, I never really stopped believing that it had been the wrong choice.

Until last night. Only last night, sitting on a cold rock at midnight while Lake Michigan danced beneath me, did I realize that it had not been a mistake, and I had been in exactly the right place, and there was no reason to regret anything.

But all I could do with that realization was go home, try to sleep, wake up early, and move far away.

Mile 692

It’s dark now. We’re driving through the mountains in Pennsylvania. They’re black silhouettes against a slightly less black sky, full of stars I’m not going to see again for a while. We’re not talking much anymore, but my dad is playing me some music he’s discovered recently.

We thought that love was over,
That we were really through
I said I didn’t love him,
That we’d begin anew
And you can all believe me,
We sure intended to,
But we just couldn’t say goodbye.

This brings up all sorts of memories of my now-former life and I almost choke up again.

Mile 743

For the first time this entire trip, we hit traffic. We inch forward painstakingly until the traffic jam clears up. It does so right as we pass the “Welcome to New Jersey” sign. Go figure.

Mile 789

I can tell we’re close. The sky is a dark, dirty orange, and more and more signs for New York City are zooming past us.

Now I’m thinking that this is a huge mistake, that I shouldn’t have moved to New York or I shouldn’t have decided to study social work or neither. I know why I feel this way, though. The move is triggering memories of college, of how sure I was that Northwestern was the right place for me to go and journalism was the right thing for me to study, of how dearly both those decisions ended up costing me.

But I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t like that. I did my research this time. I found out what the social work curriculum is like and what my professors research and what services Columbia offers and what I can do with my degree and what sort of starting salary I can expect and which agencies Columbia works with to provide field placements and how to get licensed to practice therapy afterward and whether I can transfer that license to another state should I leave New York and how much it would all cost and how long it would take me to pay back the loans and what loan forgiveness programs are available and so much more.

I researched New York, too, by traveling there so much and visiting different parts of it and becoming very, very well-acquainted with Google Maps. While my love for the city is probably not very rational, my decision to move there was very much so. I did my research. I will not have to regret this. I will not.

Mile 800

In the distance, I see the skyline.

Mile 810

We’re speeding over the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge. Literally speaking, I know what lies before me (it’s Manhattan), but other than that I have no idea. I might love it, I might hate it, or–most likely–I will have some complicated combination of feelings about it.

I do know that across that bridge will be a graduate degree, maybe even two. Across that bridge, barring any huge setbacks, will be two licenses that will allow me to do the work I want to do. Across that bridge are people I love, people my family has known for years and years. Across that bridge are people who will eventually mean the world to me, but I haven’t even met them yet. Across that bridge are the places I go every chance I get.

Across that bridge is a city where the lights never go out and the trains run all night. Across that bridge is a city I know is home, even if I don’t feel it quite yet.

But the rest is largely a mystery. In a few minutes I’ll be there.

812 Miles

On Memories Of Former Homes

The market is swarming with people on Friday afternoon. Tables covered with piles of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, bread, and household goods beckon as their owners shout their prices into the din. Feral cats dart beneath the tables, dodging people and cars to snatch scraps of food. Shoppers haggle: “Ten shekels for this? No way. I’ll give you eight.”

If you listen closely, you’ll hear Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, and probably more. You’ll see men with kippas and black hats. You’ll see women, including young girls, with every inch of skin covered but their hands and faces, and women with miniskirts and crop tops. You’ll see schoolchildren shopping for their families and old men and women dragging bags of groceries on their own. There will always, at any given moment, be an old lady standing at the curb and shouting at a bus driver because the bus route has changed, and the rest of the passengers are shouting to her which bus to take instead.

More than anything, you’ll notice the heat. It beats down from the sky and rises from the pavement, seeps out of buses and cars and into your body like a poison. It’s a dry heat, which may seem like a small comfort, but it makes all the difference.

Past the market stalls and down the mountain, the Mediterranean glimmers. By this time of year it’s nearly impossible to actually swim in thanks to the jellyfish, but if you swim in the bay you’ll be fine.

The hours pass and the market starts to shut down. By the time the sun is setting, the whole city has slowed nearly to a stop: buses don’t run anymore, stores have closed, and the last few stragglers are rushing through the streets to get home. As night falls, the smell of freshly-baked challah flows out of open windows along with the prayers and songs of Shabbat.

To you, this may be unfamiliar and weird and even uncomfortable; to me, it was home.

~~~

When I was 13, I returned to Israel for the first time since my family moved away seven years earlier. That trip, at the time, meant absolutely everything to me. It was a chance to rediscover my history and heritage. It was a vacation from the boredom and bullying that made up my school days. Most of all, it was an escape from the horrible new feeling–not even just a feeling, but a way of being, really–that had seeped into every little corner of my life. Six years later, I would learn to call it depression.

Those two weeks in Israel caused mood swings the likes of which I’d never experienced before (but that would become too familiar over the following nine years). I felt ecstatic to be back in what I then considered my Real Home and full of wonder at the things I was seeing and learning. Being there caused a flood of old memories to resurface and I delighted in them.

But at the same time, I balked with increasing fear and horror at the idea of returning to my miserable American existence, which I was certain I could cure only by returning to Israel after high school. (I did not, obviously, know about antidepressants.)

Although I knew I’d miss the food and the stunning beauty and the beach and all that, what I knew I’d miss the most was just that feeling that I had there, that unmistakeable thereness.

I told my mom in tears that I was terrified of forgetting what it was like to be there, and in response she told me about a trip she took to southern Russia as a teenager, a trip that grew fuzzier in her memory over time, but that she could never truly forget. Maybe the details were gone, but the essence was not and never would be.

Somewhat comforted, I tried to capture the “thereness” in any way I could. I associated it in my mind with certain smells and songs. I kept a detailed diary. I took photos. I recorded it in poems.

Ever since, I’ve been chasing that feeling.

~~~

Summer is probably the best time of the year to be in Ohio. It’s hot and muggy as hell, but everything becomes soft and beautiful in the summer. The fields of ripening corn ripple over hills left by glaciers long ago, and the streams that wind through the woods–assuming they haven’t dried up–are perfect for dipping your feet into.

My mom and I, and later my siblings once they were told enough, would often explore the paths that lead through these woods. Many of them separated different subdivisions from each other, or they were part of school grounds or parks. One such path led to a mysterious mansion far away from any other houses; another was strewn with paintballs that my little brother eagerly collected but that my sister was for some reason terrified of.

Summer in Ohio is anything but quiet. Cicadas can keep you up at night if you’re not used to them, and early in the morning you’ll be woken up by neighbors tending to their lawns more meticulously than my family ever did. Once or twice a week we’d drop whatever we were doing because we’d hear the ice cream truck coming down the street, and that was our favorite summer sound of all. (That, and the lifeguard’s whistle when breaktime ended at the pool.)

For a good twelve years or so, that’s how all my summers felt. Nowadays they’re quite different.

~~~

More wisdom from my mom: the summer before I started college, I was dating my best friend and we were about to go off to different schools. Although I’d spent the previous summer in Israel, away from my then-boyfriend, this was the first time I’d be in an indefinitely long-distance relationship and I wasn’t taking it well. His school started a month before mine did, so he was the first one to leave. My mom told me, explaining that my anguish was perfectly normal: “It’s always harder to be the one who stays.”

Maybe that’s a small part of the reason it’s so much easier now for me to love places than people. With places, I always get to be the one who leaves. Places don’t “grow out” of me and leave me; I grow out of them and leave them. People change suddenly, without warning; places usually change slowly and very predictably, if you know anything about sociology.

That’s not to say that my relationships with places are easy or simple. It took me a long time to understand that I love my town in Ohio in some way. It was painful to realize that I couldn’t stay there and still be myself. It was even more painful to come to Northwestern and realize that what I thought for five years would be a safe haven was actually rather cold and unwelcoming, and not the sort of place I would ever learn to belong in. Yet there were things I loved about it too.

When I was little I played a game with myself. It was very simple. All I did was pay careful attention to my surroundings and pretend that I was seeing them again after having been away for a very long time, perhaps because I’d been transported to a magical alternate universe and had just now found my way back (I liked fantasy novels as a kid; can you tell?). This game made me see ordinary things like my house or my backyard through an entirely new lens. I was able to make myself feel as though my boring white-bread neighborhood was the most amazing place in the world, simply by pretending that I’d been forced to leave it for a while.

Later on, that actually sort of happened. No, I didn’t get transported through a wormhole to an alternate universe; I just went back to Israel for a whole summer (the aforementioned summer). When I returned to Ohio, I instantly fell in love with it in a way I never had before. It was so green. So quiet. So comfortable. I could understand the language strangers spoke to me. How had I ever taken that for granted?

I never really lost that feeling, and I carry it with me now as I move to a place that’s almost as different from Ohio as Israel is.

~~~

Everyone whines that they hate snow, but you can feel the energy pick up on campus as the flurries turn to snowflakes that grow bigger and bigger. Just a few hours ago it was sunny and above freezing, but that’s Chicago weather for you.

As Deering Field turns from green to white, students on break from class (or maybe just skipping) show up to throw snowballs and make snowmen. Past the field, Deering Library towers imperiously like a set from Harry Potter. In fact, we’d often jokingly call it Hogwarts.

If you walk past the library and down to the lake, you’ll see the hundreds of huge rocks that line the coast. Most of them have been painted by students to celebrate friendships, relationships, student groups, or just their lives at Northwestern in general. Sometimes I see marriage proposals, sometimes I see my favorite song lyrics, sometimes I even see Russian words; I’m not sure which of those makes me happier.

Ever since I first saw the painted rocks the summer after my seventh-grade year, I knew I had to get into Northwestern and paint my own rock someday. I managed the first half of that, but, for some reason, not the second.

~~~

You might think that, as a person with depression, I tend to focus and ruminate on the negatives of things. Although I do that sometimes, I also have a remarkable ability to find the positive in just about everything. Usually this ability serves me very well; although I’m fragile during transitional periods and dislike change, once I’ve had some time to process things I’m able to adapt to just about anything. That’s because I find the good in it.

Ironically, though, when I’m depressed this turns into a sort of weakness. Like a lifesaving medicine that becomes a deadly poison in overdose, my happy memories of past homes become so potent during depression that they rob me of my ability to appreciate the present. When I’m depressed, I’m tortured by these memories, which play over and over in my mind like faded old movies that I can’t turn off. I remember the most insignificant little things: the worn-down steps to my grandma’s apartment building in Haifa, the porch swing on the deck back in Ohio, the hard and scratchy couch in my old dorm where I’d watch football games on TV in the fall, the sound of kids jumping off the diving board at the pool my family went to (still goes to; I’m just not there anymore), the snow falling around University Hall, the taste of a sudden mouthful of Mediterranean water, the slam of the door to the garage when my parents came home from work, the music of my high school marching band echoing through the muggy summer night.

I think of these things without wanting to and I hear the same cruel thought over and over: You will never feel these things again.

I have these memories, but the places they come from are lost to me forever.

Oh, sure, I could return, physically at least. I have returned. But the feelings are gone. That thereness is gone.

~~~

Another season, another (very different) campus. It’s a summer night in New York City and I’m sitting in front of Columbia’s Butler Library and crying for too many reasons to explain. Students–my peers, theoretically–walk past me in chattering groups and I wonder for the millionth time what’s wrong with me. I’m finally exactly where I wanted to be and somehow it still feels awful.

After a while I pick myself up and walk somewhat mechanically off of campus onto Broadway. The sun has just set, which in most of my previous homes would mean that things have either died down or will shortly. But here, the city is just coming to life. The restaurants around campus are still full. People are standing around in front of bars and on street corners talking. The 24-hour pharmacies and grocery stores and diners (I’m still amazed at the idea of a 24-hour anything other than Burger King or 7-Eleven) are full of customers.

The night is warm, but not hot, and I feel better.

There are, right now, over 8 million people in this city who are just like me and also not like me at all. All of them have, at some point, been as terrified and lonely as I am right now. All of them have places that they love and miss. All of them have friends that they rarely see, or might never see again. All of them have parts of their pasts that they wish they could relive, and parts of their pasts that they wish they could forget, and maybe even parts of their pasts that they wish they could both relive and forget, if only because forgetting would end that burning need to relive.

It’s hard to feel alone when I think about that.

~~~

People tell me that the new memories I’m making can replace those old ones. That the new home I’ve found makes up for the loss of my previous homes. It doesn’t, just as new friends can’t replace the ones I’ve lost. Love just doesn’t work that way.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad that I’ve moved to a place that I adore so much. I’m glad that I could live here for the rest of my life and still be learning new things about it all the time. I’m glad that I’m a just a subway ride away from sprawling parks you can get lost in and from some of the loudest, most crowded city streets I’ve ever seen, from stores that sell the food I grew up with and stores that sell food I’ve never heard of or tasted before.

But those memories continue to haunt me and I know that I have to live with them somehow.

The best I can do is to try to capture them in writing so that I don’t have to carry their weight on my own, but it seems that I can’t. At best, writing provides a facsimile, a movie-set version of landscapes that were endlessly deep and rich. They didn’t end with a painted backdrop.

Sometimes I feel like I’d give anything for just one more day to inhabit these old places, homes, selves, lives. I want to feel like I felt when I lived there. I want to feel like the person I was, even though I don’t actually want to be that person anymore.

Isn’t there any way I can come back?

Most of all, though, I don’t want to lose yet another home. But it’s too late. I made the decision to move months ago, and even if I’d chosen to stay in Chicago, it wouldn’t have been the same. College is over. Those lazy days in coffee shops and bookstores are over. Running down the hall or down the stairs to see my friends is over. I will never again feel like I felt when I did those things, and I will never again be the person who did them.

I have to keep telling myself this so that it’ll sink in, even though telling myself this feels like shit. Otherwise I’ll keep feeling like any minute now I’ll wake up back in my old apartment and realize that this whole New York thing was just a weird and kind of scary dream, and it’s time to throw on some clothes and get to class.

But the funny thing is that someday this, right now, is what I’ll miss. Someday the memories I’m making right now will have a “thereness” of their own and I will miss them just as terribly as I miss Israel and Ohio and college now. Someday I’ll look back on my first days and weeks in New York and smile and cry about them.

It is probably true that whenever I travel between these four places in the future, I will simultaneously be leaving and coming home. I’m trying to make my peace with it, as awkward as it feels.

It’s weird, isn’t it? Loving more than one person feels completely natural to me.

Loving more than one place, though, feels like betrayal.

On Memories Of Former Homes

The Letter I Didn't Write

[Content note: depression, suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, sexual assault]

This is a long and intensely personal post about college, which I graduated from today. I’m writing it more for myself than for you, so feel free to skip it if you come here mainly for the political rants and psychological babble.

A few weeks ago I got a Facebook invite about a book that some students were compiling. Any current Northwestern senior could contribute a letter, anonymous or not, about their four years at Northwestern, addressed either to themselves four years ago or four years from now. This fall, incoming freshman will receive a copy of the book.

I waffled for a few weeks, finally convinced myself that I had nothing to say, and let the deadline pass.

Of course, that’s not true. I had plenty to say, but I knew that if, four years ago, I had received a letter from my current self about my college experience, I would’ve packed back up and ran the fuck away. Why do that to an innocent freshman?

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

I’ve heard this for my entire life, and it’s the little voice in my head that so often keeps me silent. But usually I can ignore it, which is why this blog exists.

This time it worked. While I won’t say that I have nothing nice to say about my four years at Northwestern, most of it is not very nice. So I stayed silent.

But now it’s my graduation day, and, as with everything else in my life, I can’t fully process or move on from these four years without writing about them. Besides, this is my blog, not anyone’s book meant to provide inspiration and guidance to a new generation of Northwestern students. This space is mine, and this is the letter I didn’t write.

~~~

Continue reading “The Letter I Didn't Write”

The Letter I Didn't Write

Excited, Worried, Scared Shitless: How I Feel About Moving

Photo May 08, 19 16 27
Apartments in SoHo, April.

As I’ve certainly mentioned here countless times already, I’m moving to New York City at the end of the summer–in just three and a half months. I’ve wanted to do this for years, and I’ve visited the city so many times while I’ve been in college that it’s long felt like a second home. Or third. Or whatever.

My love for the city is like nothing else I’ve ever felt. I’m not really one to be a huge “fan” of things–TV shows, book series, comics, games, drinks, anything–but when it comes to New York I’m like one of those obsessive fans, an aficionado, a groupie. I read about its history and geography. I trek through its streets and make my own mental maps. I follow its news and politics. A particularly stunning photo of New York will often make me tear up, and when Hurricane Sandy hit last fall it was like getting punched in the gut. But each time I travel there and see the lights of Manhattan through the plane window yet again, it’s like reuniting with one of those friends–you know, the ones you’ve only known for a few years, but feel like you’ve actually known since childhood and wonder how you ever lived without.

So in many ways, when I move in three and a half months it’ll feel less like moving and more like coming home.

Who’s cutting onions in here, by the way? Yikes.

Most people who know me know all this, because I talk about it all the damn time. You know those people who won’t shut the fuck up about Beyonce or cats or beer or whatever? That’s me with New York. Many people have even mistakenly assumed that I’m from there, which puzzled me until I realized that in this country it’s customary to love the place you’re from. If I love New York so much, that must be my hometown.

So, when I got into graduate school and told everyone I’m finally-finally-finally moving to the city I love, people were happy for me because they knew how much this means. And as the still-undecided date nears, conversations with people often go like this: “So you’re moving soon! Isn’t that SO EXCITING? Aren’t you SO EXCITED?”

Yeah, I am, and that’s obviously a reasonable assumption to make. But that’s not at all the only thing I’m feeling right now, and when people ask me that it makes it impossible to talk to them about what this is really like for me, in all its complexity. (When I’ve tried it with people I know well by saying things like, “Yeah, I’m really excited, although it’ll also be pretty stressful finding a place to live,” they usually wave it off with something like “Yeah but you’ll figure it out I mean come on NEW YORK ISN’T THAT EXCITING?”)

Of the two extremes, this is by far the better one. There have also been people in my life before who seem desperate to make everything into a negative: “Oh, boy, just wait till you see what it’s really like. Unaffordable, hot, loud, and smells like garbage. You’ll be back in the Midwest before you know it.” Uh, thanks, dude, but I think I know where I’d prefer to live.

It’s true that I dislike small talk and prefer conversations that actually go somewhere and result in people actually learning things about each other, so maybe that’s why being compelled to grin and talk about how excited I am rubs me the wrong way. Maybe people don’t really want to hear about some of the other thoughts I have about moving. Which is fine.

That’s why I have a blog.

So yeah, I’m excited. But I’m also scared shitless. How will I find a place to live? How will I be able to afford the things I need, let alone just a few of the ones I want? How will I find a job in two years?

I’m also proud. Because despite being scared shitless, I’m doing it anyway, and I might not’ve at an earlier point in my life. I might’ve chosen to stay close to my family and the friends I already have and decided that the risk of moving somewhere new and dealing with those new stressors was too much for me to handle. And I wouldn’t blame anyone for doing that, but I still get to be proud of myself for overcoming those fears.

I’m also just unsure. Will I miss the leafy streets of the suburbs I’ve lived in? Will I miss the quiet? Will I miss the smell of freshly mowed lawns, and the joy of running through sprinklers in the summer? Will I miss lying by the pool, everything silent except for kids laughing somewhere in the distance? Will I miss going to parks in the fall? I don’t mean like Central Park. I mean big state parks with trails and rivers and ravines and fallen trees you have to step over. People have told me my whole life that I belong in a big city, but were they right?

(Sometimes I miss my parents’ house so much I can’t breathe. Sometimes I just wish I could call it mine again.)

I’m also curious. Who will my friends be? What will my routine be like? Which subway stop will become “mine”? Where will I go thrifting, where will I buy groceries, which bookstores will I fall in love with? Will I ever find a coffee shop that has wifi and outlets and at least one empty table? I know I won’t get to do all the things I want to do, but which ones will I get to do? Will I take up martial arts? Will I volunteer somewhere? Will I join some queer/poly groups?

I’m also worried. Which of my friends will I never see again? How will I be able to visit my parents? Will I still be able to go to conferences? How will I work out? Will I have to choose between eating healthy food and buying clothes when my old ones rip?

I’m also sad. I’m sad to be leaving everyone and everything behind, and sad that I didn’t grow up in New York so I wouldn’t have to abandon my life just to live there. I’m sad that I can’t look at my room anymore without imagining it already packed up into boxes. I’m sad that, to a certain extent, wanting to move to New York so much kept me from just being happy to be here.

All of this I cannot say when people ask me if I’m excited, expecting an unhesitant “Yes!”. And although I’m happy to talk about how much I love the city and how much I’m looking forward to moving, sometimes the weight of the unspoken fears and regrets and uncertainties feels heavier than the boxes into which I’ll pack up my life and send it–by car or train or plane or all three–800 miles east.

But, yes, I’m excited. I’m excited to drive over the bridge to Manhattan for the last time, excited to check out CFI-NYC and meet all the people here, excited to help lead my school’s feminist student group, excited to start my classes and my internship. I’m excited to finally get a pet, if my lease allows it, and to have a creature to love and take care of.

I’m excited to finally explore all the places I’ve wanted to explore and all the ones I haven’t even heard of yet, and to return to the ones I already love. I’m excited to see the new World Trade Center when it’s finished. I’m excited to watch Central Park turn orange, red, and yellow in a few months.

I’m excited to take the subway to Queens or Brooklyn to see my family. I’m excited to get to know even better these distant relatives whom I nevertheless call “aunts” and “cousins” because that’s a better approximation of how it feels. I’m excited to get out of the city sometimes–to Long Island to go to the beach, upstate to go camping, to New England to go skiing, to Boston and DC to see friends.

I’m excited for all the nights out, the lectures and talks, the yoga classes, the concerts and operas and ballets, the sports games, the dates, the shopping trips, and the days at the beach that are in my future. But not only that–I’m excited for the nights spend cooking and watching TV with my roommates, the weekends spent writing at my desk, glancing out the window to see the snow fall. I’m excited to feel like I can just relax at home for as long as I want without the pressure to go out and explore, because my days in the city won’t be numbered anymore.

I’m excited to finally put down roots somewhere for the first time, because for my whole life I’ve known that “home” is only temporary. I don’t want to move anymore. I don’t want to move for years and years, if ever.

I’m excited for the day when someone asks me where I’m from and, for the first time, I instinctively say, “New York.”

Railroad tracks to Manhattan
Railroad tracks to Manhattan
Excited, Worried, Scared Shitless: How I Feel About Moving

Lessons I Learned From Depression

[Content note: depression]

People struggling with mental illness (or any sort of illness, or anything crappy, really) are constantly exhorted by well-meaning people to find the “silver lining” in their experience. This often takes the form of tropes about “learning who your real friends are” or “learning how to fully appreciate life” or “understanding what’s really important in life” and on and on.

For a long time I resisted the entire notion of finding “lessons” or “learning opportunities” in my decade-long struggle with depression. (Yes, decade-long. Yes, I’m 22.) Part of this was because the people who demanded that I do so were just so damn annoying, frankly. No, I will not spin you a convenient story about What Depression Has Taught Me to make you feel better when you see my tears or my scars.

But mostly I resisted because I felt that admitting that I’ve learned things from this experience requires intentionally forgetting the fact that most of it had no meaning. There is no meaning to losing half of your life to something you can’t even see or prove to people or sometimes even describe in words. There is no meaning to having most of the memories of your life discolored, blurred, and tainted by a misery and terror that had no name. This is not the stuff of inspirational memoirs or films. While some people suffer for political causes or for their children or in order to produce a great work of art, I suffered for absolutely no reason at all.

But, of course, I did learn some things. Maybe I would’ve learned them even if I’d had a more normative emotional experience, but right now it really seems like I learned them as a result of being so miserable a lot of the time. And while I reserve a very special fury for those who implore us to create meaning out of meaningless suffering and produce “lessons” and “silver linings” and “bright sides” carefully repackaged for their consumption, I think these are lessons that are worthwhile to share.

I am not my GPA, weight, debt, scars.
Lesson 1: Not everything your brain tells you is accurate.

Most people, I think, go through life without giving much thought to whether or not their perceptions are providing them with the most accurate possible picture of reality. But sometimes our brains are pretty crappy at this. Of course, I would’ve learned that without the help of depression, because I study psychology. So I’ve known for a while about stuff like the fundamental attribution error, the halo effect, anchoring, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the false-consensus effect, the just-world hypothesis, in-group favoritism, the hot-hand fallacy, the Lake Wobegon effect, status quo bias, and all sorts of other biases, fallacies, and errors.

But what really brought it home was depression. While the cognitive errors I’ve listed are generally adaptive and keep people happier, depression was the opposite. Instead of telling me that people like me despite evidence to the contrary, my cognitive distortions told me that everyone hates me despite evidence to the contrary. Rather than telling me that I’m above-average in most things, they told me that I’m below-average in most things. On any given day I would invariably feel like the stupidest, ugliest, least likable, most worthless person alive. True story.

At some point it occurred to me that I would never recover if I didn’t learn how to treat what my brain said with a healthy amount of skepticism. So I started to. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the time in my life when my political views evolved the most, because I also started challenging my knee-jerk reactions to various issues in our society.) Of course, this is a lesson that is not limited to folks with mental illnesses, because everyone’s brain does this to them at some point. For many people, including some of those who proudly label themselves “skeptics,” thinking critically about what happens inside one’s brain does not come nearly as easily as thinking critically about what happens out there in the world.

So, for me, this meant a lot of time spent repeating to myself, “Yes, I feel like Best Friend hates my guts, but that’s just a feeling and it’s not necessarily true” and “Yes, not getting that internship makes me feel like I’m a complete failure who will never amount to anything in her chosen field, but that’s just my brain lying to me again” and “Yes, Partner wants to see their friends rather than me tonight, but this doesn’t mean that Partner doesn’t care about me and doesn’t want to keep seeing me anymore.”

Pause, rewind, repeat, and there you have my recovery.

Lesson 2: Your feelings are valid.

Does this seem like a contradiction to the previous lesson? It’s not. Unfortunately, when confronted with the apparently irrational emotions of others, many people immediately jump to the conclusion that those emotions are WRONG. (These people should never try to be therapists.)

However, just because someone’s emotions do not seem like a “rational” response to what they’re going through, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason for them. That reason can be whichever complicated and still-misunderstood brain processes cause depression. It can be that those are the emotions they saw expressed in their families growing up, and learned to mimic at an early age. It can be that last time this sort of thing happened, it ended terribly and now they’re freaking out over this seemingly minor thing because it could end that badly again. It can be that what’s currently happening to them is reminding them of something else entirely.

Or it could be for any number of other reasons that you do not know, and that the person having the “irrational” feelings might not know either. So why assume?

It’s important to remember, too, that there tends to be a pattern to the emotions we decide are “irrational” and “inappropriate” in others. Anger from a woman or a person of color is perceived differently than anger from a white man. Sadness from a woman is perceived differently than sadness from a man. Archetypes like the Angry Black Man and the Hysterical Woman are sometimes so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice ourselves applying them.

But all emotions are valid. Some are less adaptive than others, some we want to change, some can contribute to unacceptable behavior if we don’t address them, yes. But they’re all valid, and telling others (or ourselves) that some emotions are not okay to have doesn’t help in changing them.

Lesson 3: Sometimes you have to keep your mental health in mind when making decisions.

This is the one I’ve resisted the most. I had to quit studying journalism because it was giving me panic attacks, and I chose not to pursue a PhD in part because I didn’t think I could handle it emotionally (well, and because the thought of it just bored me). When it comes to my personal life, my mental health is a big part of the reason I gave up monogamy, although I’m now glad I did for many other reasons. It’s also part of the reason I never studied abroad, gave up many other opportunities, and chose to move to NYC.

When I first started to realize that mental health is a factor that I need to consider when making decisions about my academic, professional, and personal life, I felt abandoned and betrayed by my own brain. I understood intuitively that sometimes you can’t do things because they require physical traits or abilities that you lack or because you don’t have the cognitive skills or because you just lack access to those opportunities. But to have all those things and still give something up just because my brain doesn’t like it? That seemed ridiculous.

In fact, that way of thinking is just an extension of the stigma of mental illness. Just as we think that mental illness isn’t really “real,” we think that mental health isn’t really important. It’s reasonable, we think, to choose not to live in Florida because you can’t deal with the weather or to choose not to go running because it’s too hard on your knees or to choose not to be a physicist because you can’t do math worth a shit, but not getting a PhD because grad school would make your depression relapse? Not being a journalist because interviewing people gives you panic attacks? Not studying abroad because being away from people you love makes you suicidal? What the hell is up with that. Just deal with it.

So for a long time I did stuff that made me miserable because I was fighting so hard against the notion that mental health is something you need to take care of and cultivate, just as you would with your physical health. But one of the most important things I’ve learned how to do in college is knowing when to say “no” to things that sound fantastic but might break down the levees I’ve built up to keep the depression from flooding in.

Of course, sometimes it still makes me furious. I recently gave up a great opportunity for that reason; I badly wanted to do it but every time I thought about actually doing it, and the sacrifices it would entail, I broke down, sobbing, paralyzed, unable to say yes or no to it. Eventually I finally turned it down, full of resentment at myself and my useless brain, but trying to understand that my reason was a good one and that I deserve permission to make this choice.

Now, naturally, there are those who would tell me to Just Do It! and Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone! and blabbityblahblah, but those people will just have to trust me when I say that I know the potential dangers much better than they do. Mental illness is a whole ‘nother ballgame. When I want to Get Out Of My Comfort Zone! I try getting to know someone new or reading something I disagree with that makes me a bit uncomfortable. When I move to NYC, I can Get Out Of My Comfort Zone! by joining new groups or going to events where I don’t know people and seeing what happens.

That’s getting out of my comfort zone. Ignoring the fact that I have important needs when it comes to my mental health, though, is not “brave” or “spontaneous” or “gutsy.” It’s just irresponsible, just as it would be irresponsible go ride a motorcycle without a helmet or to not wash my hands during flu season.

So give yourself permission to treat your mental health with the care and concern it deserves. Of course, you might be aware that doing something could make your mental health worse and choose to do it anyway for any number of reasons, and that’s completely fine, too.

But so many of us struggle merely to accept the idea that it’s okay not to do things for the sole reason that they might worsen our mental health, and that’s something we have to overcome.

It's okay not to be okay.

Lessons I Learned From Depression