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this. I remember crying quietly in the dressing room until she asked to be let in.
Ultimately, I chose to marry Rocco Siffredi because, I reasoned, I would rather be with Rocco Siffredi sick than another man healthy.
Now instead of sick and well he floats between sick and sicker.
Another one of my fears is boredom, hopelessness, the feeling that I am dead while I am alive.
The sick person gets depressed and you get depressed. If you’re lucky, you share a dark sense of humor.
But the thing is, I feel ashamed too. Sometimes I feel like having a sick husband is a measure of my worth. Like, of course I would get the husband who is sick.
It sounds fucked up, but I get jealous of people whose partners have brand-name illnesses.
Sometimes I feel full of despair and cannot figure out why. Like I forget to equate the two things: the illness and the sadness. Then I wonder why I am sad. Then I get scared that my sadness is a free-floating sadness that will never go away. Sometimes I feel doomed.
In universe time, I am already dead.
When your partner is sick, you want frivolous joy.
I preferred to be the wingman, the locker-room buddy (or in our case, the kitchen buddy).
I have the brain of an addict and the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Also, men really like sex. I don’t think I was ever rejected.
One night I invited him to hang out and he said sorry, but he was playing video games by himself. I knew then that this was not safe for me emotionally.
We made out in the street (I like boys who seem gay and making out in the street).
There was Tom, who lost his virginity to me. He basically broke my vagina, but I left him with some tips on how to be gentler with the next woman.
There was Ben, a gorgeous twink who is actually gay. We would kiss for hours and talk about existentialism and the boy he liked in California.
I liked thinking about other women wanting him. It made me want him more.
The rarer person starts to look better. You don’t see his flaws. He only shows you his best self.
Maybe some people find it threatening—that their husbands could have desires they are not addressing. That they, themselves, might have desires that they are not addressing. That “the way things are,” the status quo, doesn’t have to be the way things are.
The gays, of course, understood. My gay friends loved my open relationship. I was considered “French” and “evolved”—a beacon in the straight world. When I told my friends that Rocco Siffredi and I were monogamous again, the straight ones said congratulations! The gays seemed disappointed.
It’s easier to be a sick person in Los Angeles than in New York. LA allows for more mobility, when weakened.
What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.
I’VE ALWAYS HAD GENERAL ANXIETY, and later came panic disorder. But it took me many years before I realized there was depression underneath the anxiety. They are the flip side of the same coin.
As a little kid I took fearful thoughts to a greater extreme more than most kids, I think.
There was no specific event that triggered the anxiety for me. Rather, the anxiety was always there, floating, looking for something to land on.
For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety. When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic.
From a nonpoetic standpoint, fire is an easy place for anxiety to live, because it is both a visually striking and painful death.
As a Jewish girl, I had Holocaust images shoved down my throat from a very young age so that I would “never forget.”
There were my Zionist grandparents who warned of neo-Nazi risings in Europe.
But now she said that was disgusting. I was disgusting. She was over masturbation and had discovered pot and a new best friend. I didn’t stop masturbating. But I felt like the only one.
In high school, I channeled my anxiety into an eating disorder. Anorexia, with its counting of calories—the busyness of all that math in my head—became a wonderful place to focus my fear. Then when I was seventeen I discovered drugs and alcohol. That was the real solution.
Weed made my brain a playground, a new earth to be explored. Liquor, beer, and wine gave me the peace of mind I’d always sought. Psychedelics allowed me to connect with other human beings in a way where I could finally address the question of What is going on here?
Amphetamines kept me skinny and made me untouchable to sadness.
I wanted the thing out of me as soon as possible. I had gotten pregnant by a blunt-smoking kid who ripped the sleeves off his T-shirts to make tank tops that showed his nipples. I wasn’t having this kid’s baby. He asked me if I would mind if he took acid on the day of the abortion.
But you didn’t die. So even though you feel like you are dying today, you probably won’t die.
One thing that’s especially sad about alcoholism and drug addiction is the way something so beautiful and sacred turns so ugly.
too. If you felt like me, you would stay fucked up. The act of not drinking was an impossibility.
Of course, I didn’t quit everything. I continued to take pills: those prescribed to me and those not prescribed. I picked up weed again. I remember sitting by a fireplace in upstate New York, fucked up out of my mind on morphine, thinking, This sobriety is great.
I passed by a church. Standing outside was a group of people, mostly gay men, smoking cigarettes. It was eight thirty on a Tuesday night. I kind of knew they weren’t going to church. I asked the men who they were. I don’t know what compelled me to ask. That was the second miracle.
I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.
Also there was a cat. I was relieved by the cat, because it was something to hold.
The shaman said, That doesn’t sound like anxiety to me. It sounds like depression.
She said that every time a parent yells at a child that it is a curse.
I guess she thought I knew that when we spoke of my anxiety we were also speaking of depression.
truth. I began to celebrate this sensitive part of me—the things that I thought were most despicable: my need for constant validation, disappointment, feeling gross and fat and ugly.
There were accounts where people were saying, If you’re depressed or sad, just get up and dance. That’s a crazy fucking thing to tell a depressed person.
Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die. I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.
Why aren’t we all walking around and acknowledging this all the time? Maybe we can’t afford to. Maybe when we’re not in the fear and sadness, we run from it. We don’t want to think about it.
All I want from you is to be liked. Of course, that is a scared woman’s way of saying what I really want, which is to connect with you on a deep and true level while I am still on this earth, and maybe even after I am off it.
