Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 115

“I’ve been on antidepressants since August of last year. I was...

“I’ve been on antidepressants since August of last year. I was living alone in the city at the time and feeling a lot of anxiety. So I talked to a therapist, and she recommended antidepressants. At first I was nervous about taking them. There’s a bit of a stigma in the African American community. If you take any sort of medication, it’s like: ‘Oh, you crazy now.’ So the first thing I did was look on the Internet. I’m not even sure what I searched. But somehow I ended up finding Matt’s videos on YouTube. He was sort of documenting his own experience with antidepressants. He was black. He was male. He was queer. And he was doing fine. It just made me feel a lot less alone. I sent him a short message thanking him for his videos, and he started checking in on me about once a week. He’s been a great friend. We actually just met in person for the first time on Saturday.”

“My father called me ‘stupid’ a lot. Even when I’d bring home...

“My father called me ‘stupid’ a lot. Even when I’d bring home good grades, he’d say things like: ‘You’re smart, but you don’t know anything.’ I just wasn’t a big reader like him. He always had a book in his hand. Math was my thing. During lunch I’d go to the junior high library and sit on the floor with puzzle books. Now I’m a teacher, and I’ve taught every math class in the high school curriculum. A few years ago I was teaching my precalculus class, and I stumbled upon a set of numbers that generated ellipses with identical positioning in both the rectangular and polar coordinate systems. So I turned them into variables, wrote a two-page proof, and had my work published in a journal called The Mathematics Teacher. Take that, Dad.”

“My mom left the Philippines when I was five years old. My...

“My mom left the Philippines when I was five years old. My sisters and I were very young at the time. We basically raised ourselves because my dad doesn’t talk much. It must have been hard on my mother. She wasn’t able to come back because of her visa status, and we didn’t have the money to visit. We talked on the phone about once a month. She’d send us letters, and clothes, and toys. It took ten years of working and saving for her to finally bring us over. I think the reunion was much different than she imagined. She probably expected us to be grateful, but all of us were teenagers by then. We weren’t used to being told what to do. So we were pretty awful to her. And my father divorced her soon after we arrived in America. But her sacrifice paid off. We all graduated college and have good jobs. But it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized how lonely those ten years must have been.”

Today in microfashion…

Today in microfashion…

“My dad came here when he was my age, but I don’t feel...

“My dad came here when he was my age, but I don’t feel especially connected to Vietnam. I haven’t even really asked him about his history. I’m a proud person. But for me it’s about what I’m doing right now. I didn’t experience my father’s history. So I’d rather not identify as the son of a refugee. I’m an American kid going to an American school. I’d much rather see myself as an adjective. Preferably one that refers to my personality. Like ‘cool.’ Or ‘nice.’ Or ‘interesting.’”

“Last year I did an exploration of having a child on my own. I...

“Last year I did an exploration of having a child on my own. I went to the doctor, and after she looked at my uterus, she said: ‘Not only is it possible, but your uterus looks younger than its years.’ Then she put me in the stirrups and did a demo to show me exactly how the procedure would work. The ultrasound screen was right next to me. I kept looking at it and wishing I could see a baby on there. But I was already 48. I was single. My income wasn’t secure at the time. And I didn’t have family that could take care of the child if something happened to me. So I decided not to do it. I finally closed the door for good. I cried uncontrollably for weeks. It’s a gaping hole in my life that will never go away. I’ll just get better at dealing with it. I wish I’d done it on my own when I was younger. I wish I’d stopped complaining about the past, and hoping for the future, and just said: ‘Fuck it. This is where I am now, and this is what I can do about it.’”

“Last week I was picking through the trash, looking for bottles...

“Last week I was picking through the trash, looking for bottles and cans to recycle, and my social worker walked by with her family. She walked just a few feet from me. And I know she saw me. But she didn’t say a thing. Not even ‘hello.’ I asked her about it during our next meeting, and at first she denied seeing me. But then she told me that she had been in her ‘private space.’ That really put a stake in my heart. Why can’t you say ‘hello’ to me in your private space? So I’m writing her a letter. I’m using a dictionary because I want the words to be perfect. If you mess up your words, then it’s easy for people to ignore what you’re trying to say. And I want to be sure she knows exactly how it made me feel.”

“It happened on Father’s Day. I took him out to lunch, and then...

“It happened on Father’s Day. I took him out to lunch, and then afterward we went to a barbecue at his family’s house. He’d been drinking all day. At one point he’s got our daughter in his arms, and he tells her to call me a ‘biatch.’ So I start yelling at him. And he hits me so hard with his fist that I had to get ten stitches. That was the last straw for me. I still think he’s a great dad. I’ll give him that. A lot of people ask me how I can say that, but I see it like this: when he’s around my daughter, I see the love. She lights up when he walks in the room. I wanted that love for myself, but at least she gets it. And he’s a good provider. He works. He just bought her a bunch of new clothes this weekend. When he dropped them off at the house, he asked me if I was going to drop the charges. I told him ‘no.’ Not this time.”

“I feel like I had so many more stories before I came to film...

“I feel like I had so many more stories before I came to film school. I wrote so much when I was young. I’d fill up entire journals. I was a quiet kid, so writing was my way of imagining conversations that I’d never have in real life. But it doesn’t feel like I’m expressing myself anymore. It’s become less about whether I like it, and more about whether my professors and classmates like it. I’m always focused on the rhythm, or the structure, or the notes I received in class, or all these rules from a long time ago that everybody uses because they work. And it just feels like I’m swapping out decorations in a house that’s already been built. But I’m afraid to be more inventive, because if your work doesn’t fit the rules, then people will doubt your talent. So film school has made me much better at making other people happy. But it’s made me less happy. And that’s not a direction that I can see myself continuing for very long.”

“My mother was sick for most of my life. She had nineteen years...

“My mother was sick for most of my life. She had nineteen years of treatment for Hodgkin’s disease. But she was the kind of mother that would come home from chemotherapy, vomit in the bathroom, and then still cook dinner for all of us. And she did this while getting a PhD in clinical psychology. She just loved being a mother. Even after the chemotherapy destroyed her ovaries, she adopted two more children. She passed away I was twenty-five. Shortly after she died, I realized that I couldn’t remember her voice. I’ve just never been an oral person. It was maddening. It felt almost disrespectful. I had all these old videos of her, but they were silent. So I thought I’d just never know what she sounded like. Then last night, my sister found a small cassette in an old box. It was from my mother’s answering machine. And she picked up the phone during one of the recordings. It was a month before she died. She was so sick at the time. But she said to the person: ‘Nicholas is coming to visit me, so I stayed up late baking, and I’m waking up early to clean.’”