Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 90

“I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the accident at South By...

“I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the accident at South By Southwest a few years back.  A car plowed into a crowd of pedestrians.  Four people died.  Twenty-five were injured.  I was the twenty-fifth.  I broke my back and neck in four places.  The driver was fleeing from the police in a stolen car.  He was twenty-one years old.  His name was Rashad.  A lot of people in my life thought he should get the death penalty.  But I never had strong feelings about it.  Maybe I disconnected from my emotions.  Maybe it’s just my personality.  But I mostly just felt sad that he’s so young and he’ll be in jail for the rest of his life.  Recently I looked up the address of his prison.  I purchased a PO Box.  And I wrote him three letters.  I’ve held onto them for months without sending them.  I guess I’m struggling with the fact that empathy is a privilege.  I’m still alive.  I’m still able to walk.  There are people who lost more than me who might be upset that I’m showing him any compassion at all.  But I find it curious that I know nothing about somebody who had such a profound impact on my life.  All three letters begin the exact same way: ‘We’ve never met, but we were in the same place at the same time.’  I’m not sure what I’m looking for.  I just figure there’s something to be said.  And I’d like to figure out what that is.”

“My dad came to America in the 90’s. He worked at one of those...

“My dad came to America in the 90’s.  He worked at one of those stalls on 34th street selling ‘I Love New York’ t-shirts and plastic Statues of Liberty.  One of his coworkers had a sister back in Bangladesh, which was my mom. The whole thing was arranged over the phone.  Even the wedding was done over the phone. Everyone was on the line: my grandparents, my uncles, the Islamic priest.  My parents didn’t even meet in person until five months after the wedding.  I’m the oldest child in our extended family. Plus I’m the first one to grow up in America, so everyone is watching me. I’m like the lab rat for the American Dream. I was initially told that I was going to be a doctor. One of my earliest memories is sitting in my SpongeBob chair, practicing my numbers and letters.  In first grade my parents hired my kindergarten teacher to tutor me after school. My mother would actually negotiate with my teachers during parent-teacher conferences.  When I didn’t have a perfect grade in 5th grade science, she convinced my teacher to let me build a baking soda volcano for extra credit.  We didn’t have food coloring so we used Bengali spices for the lava.  Right now I’m in my first year of college. My parents have let go of the doctor thing. I think they trust me now because they’ve seen me accomplish a lot of things. But I still feel a lot of pressure.  A lot of people are watching me back in Bangladesh.  The sense of family is so big there.  If one person gets lifted up, everyone gets lifted up.  So everyone wants me to do well. And I want to do well for them.”

“My mom got really famous around my junior year. Up until then...

“My mom got really famous around my junior year.  Up until then she’d been the director of a nonprofit in our community.  She’d organize little protests here and there.  But her profile really exploded after the election.  I remember sitting on the stage while she gave an important speech.  I could see blocks and blocks of people, all looking at her with admiration.  I knew things were about to change.  I knew she was going to get busier.  Now she’s always traveling.  She’s always giving interviews.  Sometimes she’s on the phone from 9 AM to 9 PM.  We’re so proud of her.  She’s finally doing what she’s always wanted to do.  But she tries to hide the dark side from us.  She tells us not to go on social media and read the comments, or the smears, or the death threats.  She thinks she’s shielding us from it, and we play along.  We pretend to only see the good stuff so she doesn’t have to worry about us feeling safe.  Her public persona comes into the house a lot.  She used to be a calm person with fiery moments.  Now she’s a fiery person with calm moments.  When she gets upset, she’ll go straight into speech mode.  I think she’s afraid to ever let it go.  I think the persona protects her from her own mind.  Her own doubts.  Her own fears.  She thinks she always has to be strong.  I think if she could just sit down and say ‘I’m scared,’ it would tear things down.  She could be Mom instead of an activist.”

“We dated for two years. He looked great on paper. He was a...

“We dated for two years.  He looked great on paper.  He was a composer.  He was tall and handsome and went to Yale.  He convinced me that we were soul mates.  And he was big into grand gestures.  One time he rented a convertible, handed me a foldout map of Canada, and said: ‘Pick anywhere you want to go.’  He did keep cheating on me, but he’d blame that on his bipolar disorder.  He’d tell me that his high sex drive was a medical condition.  And I believed him.  Because I was young, and stupid, and in love.  For my twenty-fifth birthday we were going to take a vacation to Seattle.  He’d just gotten back from a two-week trip to Israel.  He was really quiet on the train ride to the airport.  And just as we’re arriving, he tells me that he met someone in Israel.  I start crying.  He’s stone faced.  I’m thinking if we can just get on the flight, everything will be fine.  We go all the way through security and get to the gate.  At this point I’m musical theater girl sobbing.  Our flight begins boarding.  Everyone is staring at us.  Eventually we’re the last two left, and the gate agents are waiting for us to make a decision.  So I decide we should go home.  But he insists that I let him buy me a ticket to Chicago, so I can spend my birthday with my family.  So that’s what I did.  And the next day he calls me to wish me a happy birthday, from Nashville.  He’d flown out that same night.  To visit the girl he met in Israel.  That was the last I spoke to him.  But he did email me a few years ago to tell me that he’d written a musical about his life.  The airport scene was included.  And he wanted me to attend the show.”

“When my wife first told me that she was pregnant, I couldn’t...

“When my wife first told me that she was pregnant, I couldn’t sit down.  I wanted to rearrange the furniture or something.  There was this urgency.  Like I should be doing more.  My daughter is eleven months old now, and the feeling hasn’t gone away.  Everything seems so consequential.  I’ve been thinking about everything from her point of view.  The memories she’ll have in the future are going to be based on the decisions I make now.  I especially worry about space.  We live in a tiny apartment, and she’s got this little 5x5 piece of carpet that she plays on. Today she walked for the first time, using her little pushcart thing.  But she can only walk four feet before she hits a wall and has to turn around.  And I don’t ever want her to feel limited or boxed in.  But we looked at new apartments recently, and everything we can afford is so small.  So I need to focus.  I need to learn more.  I need to get a promotion.  Because I don’t ever want her to have an awareness of being poor.  Or any kind of worry at all.  I just want everything to feel natural, so she can prioritize her own life and her own feelings.”

“Eighteen is when I started fully dressing up and doing make-up....

“Eighteen is when I started fully dressing up and doing make-up.  I came out to my girlfriend when I was twenty-one.  I told her ‘I think I might be trans.’  And she said: ‘I know already.  Because you’ve always looked at me the way a woman looks at another woman.’  She began to address me as my female name.  She’d come with me to the make-up counter so I wouldn’t feel awkward.  But I’d still only dress up at home.  I felt ashamed.  In public I did everything I could to suppress that side of me.  I’d wear baggy jeans and plaid shirts at work.  I grew a long beard.  I’d laugh at homophobic jokes.  But inside I felt like an absolute depressed shit.  I started keeping a private Instagram account where I followed people in the trans community, and one day I saw a post from a girl in Queens.  She was looking to make some trans friends in real life.  When I messaged her, she invited me to a party in New Jersey where a bunch of cross dressers rent out a bar.  I didn’t even consider it.  I didn’t know these people.  And I’d never even gone outside of the house before.  But she video chatted with me as her guy self, and talked me into joining.  The night of the party I was scared as fuck.  I’d laid out all my clothes: ripped skinny jeans, Johnny Cash T-shirt, red and black wig.  I had my make-up picked out.  But I didn’t think I could do it. I felt like I was going to throw up.  But I managed to walk downstairs and get into her car.  She was pumping me up the whole way there.  I smoked one last cigarette in the parking lot, and followed her into the party.  The first thing I heard someone say was: ‘Oh God.  She brought a real woman with her this time.’  I was over the moon.”

“I grew up on a farm in Florida. It was almost like we...

“I grew up on a farm in Florida.  It was almost like we lived in a time capsule.  Nothing but ass whoopings and hard work: raking the yard, feeding chickens, tending horses, planting fields.  And my family was Jehovah’s Witnesses.  So we had to follow the Bible.   We had to do every single thing.  There was no room for metaphors or interpretation.  It was almost cultish.  I only had two guilty pleasures: playing in the woods, and horror movies.  Once a month my older sister would take me to the mall.  She’d pretend I was her daughter and sneak me into horror movies.  I was only nine or ten years old but we saw them all: Poltergeist, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street.  She’d cover my eyes when there was a sex scene, which pissed me off, but everything else I saw.  I just loved seeing out-of-control maniacs on the screen.  My entire life had always been so controlled.  I loved the feeling of being afraid: everything runs through you, spine tingling, fight or flight.  It made me feel alive.”

“Solitude is necessary to balance things out. But isolation is...

“Solitude is necessary to balance things out.  But isolation is different. It doesn’t feel like a choice.  I don’t want people to see me. There’s this shame for not having much of a life.  Everyone else has full lives and families and jobs.  So I keep to myself.  It’s like there’s a big hole inside of me.  And a lot of air.  Some days it can be hard to move.  Recently I became really malnourished. One morning I woke up with an intense headache, and ended up having a seizure on the floor of my apartment.  I spent the next three months at a hospital in Brooklyn.  They let me take my wheelchair anywhere.  I could explore new floors and meet new people.  If anyone needed water, or books from the library— I’d get it for them.  My social worker told me that everyone liked having me there.  It was the strongest sense of community I’ve ever had.  I’ve been depressed since I got home.  I want to go back.”

“When the kids were young I was living in the moment. I was...

“When the kids were young I was living in the moment.  I was just trying to get them through the day: homework projects, sleepovers, keeping the food coming.  Taking this one to a band concert.  That one to a track meet.  There were plenty of worries, but they always seemed manageable.  I could usually intervene if one of the kids had a problem.  And I thought: ‘Once they’re out of high school, I’m done.  I’ll finally be able to relax.’ But all my children are adults now, and I’m worrying more than ever.  Because their problems didn’t stop. They just became adult problems.  And there’s not much I can do anymore.  One of my sons has depression.  I began to notice during our Sunday night phone calls,  his voice was flat, the answers were short. Then I asked the right questions and it all came out.  He said:  ‘I’m depressed. And I don’t know why. And I don’t know how to fix it.’  One night he just wept on the phone, quiet weeping, which is the worst. Because there’s nothing to address. Just lots of dead space, and: ‘Are you still there?’  There wasn’t much I could say to cheer him up.  Mothers tend to lose their credibility after a lifetime of praise.  So I’m just left to worry if it will ever resolve.  I worry if he’ll ever be happy.  I urged him to see a professional, but there’s not much else I can do but pray.  I’m not sure if prayer helps, but I get on my knees and do it anyway.”

“I grew up in Colombia. There wasn’t much to watch on...

“I grew up in Colombia.  There wasn’t much to watch on television back then because we only had a few channels.  Everything was black-and-white.  But every night there was a famous music show.  All the big bands came on that show: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin.  Always my nose would be stuck to the TV.  I went completely crazy.  My parents could not understand.  Sometimes I’d get so excited that I’d cry.  I grew my hair long.  I told myself: ‘One day I will be in a band.  I do not know how.  But I will do it.’  A few years later my father got the opportunity to manage a dairy farm in Spain.  From there I was able to get a visa to London.  I was nineteen years old, and London was almost too much for me.  It was so exciting.  All the time I was crying.  I worked as a dishwasher and started going to all the nightclubs.  I fell in love with punk music: Sid Vicious, Billy Idol, The Clash.  They made me dance like a crazy.  So many times I cried.  But I especially wanted to be on the stage.  So I found two guys and started a band.  We were called The Ridiculous.  For two months we played on the street outside the club.  But it was harder than I thought.  We never were invited inside.  Our drummer found another band.  Then the guitarist found another band.  And then it was just me.  That was forty years ago, but I’m still keeping the punk alive.  One day I will try again.”