We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

This book is dedicated to Klonopin.

Have you ever filed for bankruptcy or Chapter 11? No, but I wish I had thought about that shit years ago before I decided to overdraw on an old bank account. DO NOT WALK AWAY FROM AN OVERDRAWN CHECKING ACCOUNT, FRIENDS. Why didn’t anyone ever teach me that shit? I mean, someone should write a primer for adulthood that’s just two or three sentences long: 1. WEAR CLOTHING THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING FITS. 2. BUY DRUGS FROM REPUTABLE DEALERS ONLY. 3. DO NOT WALK AWAY FROM AN OVERDRAWN CHECKING ACCOUNT. I could have been such a better human.

Are you genuinely looking to get married, and why? Honestly? I don’t know, homie. Marriage seems so hard. I mean, even the ones on television look like they just take so much goddamned work. I’m lazy. Plus, getting out of one seems ridiculously expensive. And then when you get divorced, after all of the crying and draining of mutual bank accounts before your partner gets a chance to, you have to cut the children in half, which is probably very bloody and messy. You know, what I really need is someone who remembers to rotate this meaty pre-corpse toward the sun every couple of days and tries to get me to stop spending my money like a goddamn NBA lottery pick.

Why would you want to find your spouse on our TV show? Have you been to the club lately?! Shit’s fucking dire, man. Also, I need someone to watch Shark Tank with, and I feel like that’s a spousal kind of expectation. Can’t just ask your casual booty call to commit to spending Friday nights indoors arguing over the valuation of some at-home mom’s jelly and jam business. And I’m too poor to run multiple background checks.

Please describe your ideal mate in terms of physical attraction and in terms of personality attraction. Physical attraction? Not a real thing. If, at thirty-six years old, I’m sitting over here talking about chiseled abs and perfect teeth, then I am undeserving of genuine romantic love. I have slept with a handful of conventionally attractive humans, the prettiest of whom was this dude who worked at Best Buy and kind of resembled “So Anxious”–era Ginuwine. He was boring and lazy and totally caught off guard when I pointed those facts out to him. No one ever tells attractive children how much they suck, and then the rest of us get stuck with insufferable, narcissistic adults who can barely tie their shoes because someone else is busy either doing it for them or congratulating them on their effort. I do not have the energy to be in a relationship with someone exceptionally good-looking. I don’t know what an attractive personality is. I like charisma and charm, but what I really need to find is someone who doesn’t get on my nerves but is also minimally annoyed by all the irritating things about me. That is my basic understanding of relationships at this point in my life: that it all comes down to finding someone too lazy to cheat and who doesn’t want to stab her ears out every time I speak.

What have you not found but would like to have in a relationship? Someone who will leave me the hell alone for extended periods of time without getting all weird about it. I have a lot of audiobooks to listen to on the toilet.

What are your hobbies and interests? Hobbies: eating snacks, sleeping during the day, scrolling through Facebook quickly enough that people’s stupid videos don’t start playing automatically, listening to slow jams. I pretend to be interested in a lot of things: art, theater, recycling, donating to things, expensive varietals of coffee. But mostly I just watch television and read celebrity gossip on the Internet while getting most of my important news from Twitter, which I don’t even really like that much. I’m interested in animals and novels and red lipstick, but let’s just say “world issues” and “social justice” so I sound kind of smart to the viewing audience.

The Bachelorette is my guilty-pleasure jam. That may come as a surprise to some of you, but you should already know that a show where a woman is surrounded by twenty-five slabs of brisket clamoring to brazenly drink her dirty bathwater and massage the corns on her toes in front of the entire country is 100 percent my kind of party. I love watching a man humiliate himself; I wish it was on every night. Particularly the introductory episode, when we get to meet all the software sales executives and tax accountants and telecommunication marketers as they line up in their finest suits, teeth flossed and smelling good, forced to do the “Hi, please date me!” tap dance women are perpetually performing. Seriously, I used to try to neatly cram everything remotely interesting about me into my “Hey, nice to meet you, I am…” elevator pitch. Now that I know impressing a stranger isn’t worth the effort, I don’t do it anymore; I just assume every man I meet is bored and hates me. I can barely be bothered to give one a high five before writing down my e-mail and saying, “Get at me if you want.” So it is especially heartening to watch these smarmy, desperate clowns crawling all over one another like rats trying to get the attention of these “free spirits” and “dog lovers” who will eventually make them burst into real tears on national television.

The Bachelorette proves that men are as petty and vapid and ridiculous as women are made to seem. They’re just better at hiding it, because they get to be Real Men and sulk and brood and bottle everything up. These dudes are backstabbing drama queens who are constantly cutting one another down, throwing shade all over the place, and casting more side-eyes than a Siamese cat, all for a girl who, I must remind you, could probably not do long division by hand. And why shouldn’t they? Because every single one of these dudes is as boring as a glass of tap water, while the bachelorette is beautiful and friendly and forced to sit in a dress in sequins that have got to be digging uncomfortably into the backs of her thighs. I have never sat down to watch a marathon of episodes stored on my DVR and thought “Boy, does he seem interesting” about any one of the candidates up for sexlection. (Let’s hit pause on the remote for a second here and say that I do pay very close attention to one or two members of the cast: the black ones clinging for dear life to the inner tubes as they drift helplessly toward the deep end of the dating pool. No, she’s never going to pick Marcus or Jonathan, but she will keep them on life support for however many episodes it takes to satisfy the NAACP. I watch that shit like a hawk, like “This date better not include a ‘fun trip’ in a marsh boat on the ol’ Magnolia Plantation” or “If they serve these dudes a piece of fried chicken I will throw this TV out the ...

I usually fall off by the time they get down to the final two, because romance is a lie and true love an impossibility. Any asshole can fall in love on a private beach in a tropical locale, surrounded by lush flora and adorable fauna, shining suns and chirping birds. Give me ten uninterrupted minutes without some ding-dong demanding something or subtweeting me or making me do work and I could fall in love with my worst fucking enemy. Seriously. What’s not to love about being expertly lit and drunk at two in the afternoon? But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like abou...

2. Instead of roses I would hand out condoms. Because I’m not living in a house with twenty hot dudes I can’t get naked with. You must be crazy. And you better believe those elimination ceremonies are taking place in the bedroom. No foreplay? NO ROSE. Keeps his socks on during? NO ROSE. Rabbit fucking? NO ROSE. Takes too long to come and starts chafing my haunches? NO ROSE. Blows air into my vagina? NO ROSE. Says dumb stuff in bed? NO ROSE. Won’t let me get a good up-close look at his butthole? NO ROSE. Won’t let me gag him and tie him up for fun, even though that does nothing for me sexually? NO BLEEPING ROSE. I should probably go get a robe, because my pajamas are just retired “exercise” clothes, and if I’m going to be kicking dudes out while their dicks are still sticky, I want to make sure I look as classy as possible. If the JCPenney catalog is to be believed, a bathrobe is a surefire way of achieving that.

I didn’t see the end coming. Which is not to say that I was surprised, because I wasn’t—I just thought that I had more time. I knew that when we had Serious Grown-up Talks about our goals, and mine didn’t include much more than “king-size bed and lightning-fast wireless Internet,” that I was eventually in store for a heartfelt yet awkward conversation about my lack of motivation toward property ownership. And that’s okay. Dating is totally weird at this age, what with all the pushy relatives and ticking clocks that people have to contend with. At twenty-four, who cares if you drink a couple of beers across from an irresponsible hipster’s ironic haircut and then take him home for less-than-memorable sex; but if you wake up on your thirty-second birthday childless and untethered to a human with health benefits who has read more than one book in the previous twelve months, you have to get your ass out of bed and start Dating with Intention. And maybe people don’t really say it that way, but let me clarify that that is precisely what “Oh, you’re still dating that guy who’s an iPod DJ?” really means.

Fred had a house, man. Which was like, LOLWUT. My previous life had been filled with so many gentlemen trying to get their dicks sucked in their childhood bedrooms (complete with superhero twin bedsheets, in one unforgettable case) that the first night I walked into Fred’s actual crib and met his actually spayed Rottweiler who came bounding down his actual stairs after we’d parked in his actual garage, I almost burst out laughing. I was peeking into cupboards and putting my ear against closed doors trying to determine whether anyone else lived there. That kind of shit was mind-blowing for a person who once dated a dude with six actual roommates. I was like, “How much is your seventh of the rent, thirty-seven dollars?!” — Anyway, Fred had a kitchen, and in that kitchen was a juicer and a fruit bowl that held seven perfectly ripened mangoes. I remember being struck by a half-empty bottle of Dawn propping up a sponge on the sink and thinking to myself how amazing it was that this was a dude who used dishes and then washed them. Listen, I don’t want you to think I was messing around with men who couldn’t tie their own shoes or whatever, but a lot of dudes in their thirties don’t have proper washcloths or fresh produce, so when I crossed the threshold of this actual house and didn’t immediately trip over seventeen barbells and a rat king of video game controller cords, I kind of lost my shit a little bit.

decided to wade back out into the choppy dating waters of the Internet a few weeks after Fred and I ended things, because I am not a person for whom meet-cutes naturally occur. I don’t have a dog to walk through a park of available single humans, no hip Laundromat in which to conveniently forget my dryer sheets so I can ask a handsome stranger for one of his. My dating profile was pretty perfect, I thought. My friend Jill says that I joke too much, that people are scared off by someone who tries to make herself seem so clever, but I swear to God that’s how I really think and not just some Internet shtick. I just can’t do the requisite “I love baby animals!” and feigned interest in “trying out new cuisine!” and pretending to “live every day to its fullest!” which doesn’t really even mean anything anyway. Why do people say that? What impression are they hoping to make? I watch TV all day and leave the house only for snacks: THIS IS THE FULLNESS THAT I AM LIVING.

Couple a handful of boring half-truths with half a dozen real pictures of my real body: weighty boobs and meaty backside and the outline of a belly in this one where I’m leaning over to blow out birthday candles on a neon-blue cake. No flattering Instagram filtration, no angled duckface surrounded by a group of my most attractive and nubile friends. The last thing I ever want to do is show up to a bar to meet a person who is expecting to meet the quarter of my sweating meatbeard I didn’t crop out of the one photo I wasn’t too embarrassed to post. BECAUSE POTENTIAL DATES WILL DRAG ME IN FRONT OF THE FIRING SQUAD, YES? I had read many a snarky think piece centered on blind dates derailed by the super mean lying liarface who’d broken some naive young man’s heart by having the sheer audacity to arrive at the predetermined meeting place fatter than she’d advertised. I wasn’t gonna be that lady.

But, like the inner thighs of my most beloved dark-wash, curvy-fit, slightly flared jeans, I wore Michael down. Not through any wizardry of my own—there’s just only so long you can keep having the best conversations of your life before you decide to get over your weird fear of bloated ankles and ask that fat bitch you can’t stop rushing home to e-mail to meet you in a bar you know your friends won’t be at so you can make each other laugh in person.

I mourned that relationship with Fred. I mourned it hard. Wrote a eulogy, had a funeral, shed a few tears, put flowers on its grave. When you break up with an asshole, it’s easy to just set fire to the shit and move on. But no one talks to you about ending a relationship that never sucked kinda amicably with your homie whom you still love to a degree and for whom you sort of want the best. No, you actually want him to be prosperous and happy. Not more prosperous or happy than you are, for sure, or all up in your face with it, but you aren’t actively wishing for homeboy to wind up homeless or hit by a city bus. I felt robbed, cheated of my silly daydreams of scribbling manuscript notes in a Moleskine as Fred stood in front of a nearby easel painting while listening to Kind of Blue on vinyl, but I wasn’t really mad at him. And I found myself wondering what he was doing. A lot. I’d hear a Quadron song and have to resist the urge to text him about it, or I’d throw my phone across the room like a grenade to keep from calling him to talk about a hilarious episode of Black Dynamite. I wanted to see Hiatus Kaiyote at the Double Door with him; I wanted to take him to this Afghani spot I had found in the suburbs with the most delicious mantoo and murgh chalau; I wanted to get his opinion on holistic remedies for my shitty, failing knees: I wanted my fucking friend back.

I dipped a toe in the water and almost got frostbite. In six months I’d gone from heartbroken baby animal to FACEBOOK DELETER AND BLOCKER, and the response I received to my “I’m ready to be friends again!” e-mail was terse and cold and suspicious. Because, in Fred’s mind, we still could’ve been friends all along. He didn’t not love me; I didn’t not love him: we just weren’t each other’s person. But, reasonable though it may have been, that talk had left me touchy and defensive, so I let his e-mails and texts go unanswered while I licked my “never gonna spend the morning cuddled at the Hyde Park library together” wounds. I didn’t take any parting shots before quietly scrubbing that picture of us at Big Star from my timeline, no nasty voice mail warning him never to call me ever again, and I assumed that guaranteed my seamless reentry into his life when I finally got enough distance from the hurt to allow him back into mine. I suggested Au Cheval for dinner, because that place is loud and sexy and dark and I knew that Fred would pay for however many $14 cocktails I ordered plus maybe a cheeseburger. I made sure to wear basic, dishwater-gray friendclothes and my house glasses. I probably didn’t even wear deodorant. Because this was a friend meeting, between friends. When he walked in I was flooded with relief, and when he bent to wrap his arms firmly around me I nearly burst into tears. I’m not often very good at exposing my innermost feelings: I am self-deprecating; I avoid ...

She still reeked of rotting garbage and had the personality of old shoes, but that little asshole just refused to die. The power of Satan or Xenu or some other diabolical deity grew stronger within her and she’d gain an ounce and an inch by the goddamned day. One afternoon, as I was taking some samples to the lab, I tiptoed over to the cage where Helen was snoring softly atop a mound of pink towels and fluffy blankets. Just as I felt the ice around my heart begin to melt, she bolted upright out of a dead sleep, her head swiveling 180 degrees on an unmoving neck until her sightless eyes were on me and a low growl rumbled up from the pit of her distended belly. Horrified, I dropped the samples and backed slowly away from her cell, glass shattering as infected dog urine splashed on the moderately priced sensible footwear OSHA requires us to wear at all times in the hospital. I crossed myself and flicked holy water (I keep some in my pockets in case of emergency) as she levitated to the ceiling of the cage. “I hate you,” I whispered. “Bitch, I hate you, too!” she spat back.

Now that the milky-white membranes that had covered her eyes for weeks had retracted, she was finally starting to look like a real cat. As she gazed up at me, blinking her eyes into focus, the corner of her lip curled into a barely perceptible sneer. “I’m underwhelmed,” she sighed, visibly bored by my face. I waited for Ken to go get something from the pharmacy before squeezing her so tight her body went limp and her eyes widened in terror. “I know where they keep the euthanasia solution,” I whispered into the downy fur on top of her head. A technician walked by with a load of towels fresh from the dryer and smiled. “That’s so cute! You guys are bonding!”

I tried to get into the whole “caring for an animal” thing, I really did. I bought a little carrier with paw prints all over it and overpriced food dishes and natural litter made from recycled newspapers. When I brought her home the day before Thanksgiving, Helen stepped tentatively out of her box, surveyed the landscape, and scoffed. “Where are we, the set of a horror movie?” Then she smiled at me as she hopped into one of my shoes and peed in it. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE HOUSEBROKEN!?” I screamed, racing over to dump her little ass out of my soiled New Balance. “I AM!” she shouted back. I hate this bitch and she hates me. For seven years we’ve been trapped in this mutually abusive codependent relationship, tearing each other apart emotionally while booby-trapping the apartment in the hopes that this will finally be the time those scissors just happen to fall on the floor blades up.

Occasionally she’ll sit on my desk, face pressed to the glass, chattering marching orders to the bird army assembled on the power lines hanging just outside the window, but other than that she doesn’t really do anything. She brings me absolutely zero joy. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and feel her hot body, nestled close, but never ever touching. If I move even an inch, she’ll jump up and move away mumbling some shit like, “It was cold in here and I was just stealing your heat,” because it would obviously kill her to admit she feels even the smallest bit of gratitude or affection toward me. I feel like I’m living with Mommie Dearest and nothing I do is ever good enough for her. More than once I have pouted and screamed, “But I’m the person!” while waiting for her to grant me access to the spot on the bed I like or clear the path between me and the bathroom. She has bitten me no fewer than 1,762 times, including once on my fucking eye while I was fucking sleeping, and another time she took an inch-long row of bites lengthwise down the inside of my wrist. (BITCH, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO DO.)

So I have one cat for sale. Scratch that, I’m giving her away. Free to even a marginally good home, but a terrible one is preferred. Black-and-white domestic shorthair, definitely part goblin, spayed (for the good of the species), fully vaccinated. Bites, hisses, growls when provoked, pretty malignant overall; won’t destroy your furniture or living space but definitely is in regular communication with dark spirits. Neither cute nor friendly, will rebuke all attempts at cuddling. Loves eating but nothing else, except maybe mayhem, as she is clearly a disciple of the serpent of old. Pros: FAT. Cons: TRASH. Inquire within.

I have no idea how people who actually have money talk to their children about it. But I sure as shit can tell you how poor people do. • “No you cannot have that.” • “The lights will come back on Tuesday when I get my check. Until then stop letting the cold air out of the freezer. I don’t want that ground beef to thaw out.” • “Wash those underwear out in the sink and hang them up so you can wear them tomorrow.” • “Put back that box of [insert name of overpriced boxed breakfast cereal] and get a bag of those [fruit circles/oaty o’s/wheaty flakes] from the bottom shelf. Don’t you look at me like that, it’s the same fucking thing.” • “Do you really need every Sweet Valley High book? Go back and read the ones you already goddamn have.” • *Removes package of Capri Sun pouches that the juice box fairy anonymously slipped into the grocery cart and replaces them with dusty bottom-shelf boxes of orange drink while glaring in my general direction* “Don’t try me, Samantha Irby.” • “Quit playing on my phone, you’re gonna run up my bill.” • “Who told you that you could order all these Columbia House tapes?!” • “Steer the car while I push it down the street to the gas station.” • “DID YOU HEAR ME? PUT THAT SHIT BACK, I SAID YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.”

My first jobs in high school were all babysitting gigs, and let’s be 100 percent clear about what I spent that money on: many issues of Sassy magazine, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Bjork’s Post on cassette, every brown and maroon drugstore lipstick I could get my hands on, and steel-toed Doc Martens that I would clomp around in all day every day, even during gym class. Not once did it occur to me that I should be “putting money aside” or “saving for a rainy day”; the first fifteen miserable fucking years of my life had been one great big, long-ass rainy day during which I gazed longingly at the material possessions of my classmates, scowling at their name-brand jeans and hating my broke-ass parents. As soon as I got my first envelope of twenty-dollar bills for chasing babies named Tommy and Caroline around playrooms big enough to dwarf our entire apartment, I started plotting all the dumb ways I was going to waste it, like trading my nondescript blue backpack for one from Eddie Bauer (an exercise that required two buses and much confused trudging through the “good mall”) and skipping my free cafeteria hot lunch in favor of overpriced bags of carbohydrate trash from the vending machines in the student center. I have never—and I mean ever—had a real desire to let otherwise-unaccounted-for money just chill in my bank account unmolested for more than maybe a week and a half. I barely have the willpower to leave other people’s money alone for the short time it...

was trying to fill this gaping hole inside me with “stuff I couldn’t have when I was a little kid,” and I assumed that one day, when I had finally bought enough magazines and name- brand snack foods to feel caught up, the feeling would go away. But it hasn’t. And because I know the value of a dollar, when I get one, I want to buy the nicest thing I can with it. I’m still buying hardcover books and department-store mascara, still daydreaming about what I’m going to spend my 401(k) on when I withdraw that shit early, because who are we kidding? I’m not trying to live to sixty-five, are you nuts? Technically, I can afford it. I make good money, and I don’t have any debt, because I’ve never owned shit and I dropped out of college. I pay for everything in cash because I don’t understand APRs, and my credit file was so thin from so many years of living off the grid that when I finally got around to applying for a Discover card, Experian thought I might be dead. Will my yawning internal pit of desire ever be full? Is there any amount of cash that’s enough to fully satiate this ravenous beast?! I don’t know, man.

If scientists could just cool out for a minute on the whole manufacturing of hot shit I will surely die without, I might be able to set aside some money for stocks or whatever, but I can’t right now, because did you know that for a scant $7.99 surcharge during off-peak hours, you can get Whole Foods precut watermelon pints and gluten-free vegan pizzas delivered right to your door by a dude named Jared driving a Smart car? That is if you don’t want to take an Uber there and back because fuck the train, a bitch just got paid!

“That’s a really nice bag,” I said genuinely, taking a sip of my light bill. “Did you recently receive a settlement of some kind?” She laughed heartily and poured her Obamacare deductible down her throat in one long swallow. “Girl, nah, I bought this with money I should’ve spent on my car payment.” I clinked the ice in my checking account overdraft fees and nodded solemnly in agreement. A lot of us are living like this, right? Taking cabs and ordering takeout Thai on payday, then walking the three blocks to work from the train with a bologna sandwich in our bags a week or so later? How does anyone do anything? Or, better than that, how does anyone do both the shit they want to do with their money at the same time they’re doing the shit they need to? Example from my own dumb life: I need to buy a plane ticket to LA on some last-minute shit. If I buy it now, I’ma probably have to pay my rent late. If I wait, chances are I’m gonna have to fly out at 10:30 p.m. and pay $1,200 for a center seat or some equally undesirable thing. Every time I pay an overdue bill from a doctor visit so long ago I can’t even remember what was wrong with me at the time (WTF is the point of this insurance if it doesn’t cover anything?), I shed a tear for the half dozen quirkily adorable T-shirts I could be ordering from ModCloth instead. I want to be one of those people who feels satisfied when I pay my bills rather than cheated out of whatever frivolity was sacrificed in their place.

The other day, while I was trying to figure out how I could work fewer hours yet still have enough money to buy something at CB2 called an alpine gunmetal bed (yes, I need that), a thought came to me: I SHOULD MAKE A GODDAMNED BUDGET. Then I thought, Fuck a budget. I grew up poor and now I have money, so I’m going to spend it on Chanel nail polishes. I don’t know how you can possibly have joy in your life when you do shit like “balance your checkbook” or “pay your minimum balance on time,” and if doing those awful-sounding things means I can’t see four movies in one weekend, then I don’t ever want to do them. I can’t go to the library. I mean, first of all, what if someone else checked out the book I want? I’m not the only one reading the book reviews in the Times, so now I gotta put my name on a list after your aunt Karen and my elementary school principal, then just, like, wait for them to be finished? I would rather be dead.

I am also not sexy. At least not in the traditional sense, not in the way that makes erections jump to attention the moment I walk into a room. I feel like my sexiness is a thing that creeps up on you, like mold on a loaf of corner-store bread you thought you’d get three more days out of. One day you’re slapping me on the back like I just pitched the shit out of a Little League game, then the next you’re like, “Holy shit, this lumbering laundry bag full of damp tennis balls actually has reproductive parts, and, boy, do I want to touch them.”

Twenty minutes later I was in a real room with a bed, my sister Jane, who’d met us in the waiting room, next to me yammering into her phone. The doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me one of those condescending sad smiles. The kind you give a child who says 2 + 2 = 7 and believes it. Apparently, I hadn’t had a heart attack. No, instead of “life-threatening cardiac event” the reading on the EKG came out “not right emotionally.” Not kidding, all those lines and squiggles on that mile-long piece of tape spelled out the words “MENTALLY ILL” like an electric Ouija board. Did you know that a panic attack can feel just like a heart attack? I didn’t, but I learned that shit quick as the phlebotomist jammed an IV into my arm and the doctor loaded a big dose of Ativan into my veins and knit his eyebrows together with concern while batting around words like “therapy” and “anxiety.”

I was born to one of those mythical black hero women, a single mother who somehow managed to graduate both high school and a nursing program despite having had her first child at sixteen, a woman I never saw pop a pill or take a drink or bury her head under a pillow for three days at a time. Every single time I just can’t…get…up I beat myself up a little, because it’s not like I have children or a job I hate and there’s probably nothing the matter with me other than laziness. When I was growing up, no one in my house was talking about depression. That’s something that happened to white people on television, not a thing that could take down a Strong Black Woman. Which also destroyed me on the “Why are you listening to Smashing Pumpkins instead of [insert name of popular early nineties R & B artist]? Are you even black?!” level. So I was (1) super fucking depressed, (2) super fucking depressed with no one to talk to about it who wasn’t going to immediately suggest child services remove me from my home, and (3) super fucking depressed while clocking in on the low end of my skinfolk’s negrometers because I identified hard with Courtney Love and read Sassy magazine because Essence wasn’t really speaking to me yet, so wasn’t this whole thing yet another way I was desperately trying to be white?! When I was young I was frequently described as “moody.” Or dismissed as “angry.” According to the social worker who routinely pulled me out of class, I was intellectually bright but “qui...

Even when my fucking parents died in 1998 and I had an actual thing I could point to as a source of my unrelenting depression, a cause to substantiate the effect of my simmering hatred, I played it off. I don’t know if it feels like this for anyone else, but I definitely come from the kind of people whose response to “Hey, man, I’m pretty bummed out” is “Shut up, there’s nothing wrong with you.” Or how about “You just sleep all the time because you’re lazy.” Like, if it isn’t broken or hemorrhaging, you need to bury it under these dollar-store snack foods and work it out by your fucking self. OH, OKAY, COOL. So then I developed very glamorous coping mechanisms like covering myself with grisly death tattoos and eating food out of the trash. And then, because I wasn’t actively trying to kill myself and could keep a job and make friends and pay my rent and not do heroin, I made peace with it. This is just how I am. I’M FINE. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this undercurrent of sadness that, if I’m being honest, I don’t totally mind. It was easy to ignore because it doesn’t bother me that much. And I don’t want to be some shiny, happy idiot. This is gritty; this is real.

I am just an old garbage bag full of blood patiently waiting for death to rescue me, but sometimes when I tell people that, their immediate response is HOW CAN YOU BE SAD, YOU’RE HILARIOUS!!!!! and then for five seconds I’m like, “This person who has never met me before is correct. I’m so funny I should stop thinking life is a trash can.” But five seconds after that, some human roadkill yells at the grocery store bagger or pulls his scrotum out on the train, and I get the insatiable urge to peel my skin off like the layers of an onion and jam my thumbs into my eye sockets, just hoping that I’ll disappear down the garbage disposal of human existence straight into hell. Then it’s easy to just write the depression off as an irritation at the dummies I have the misfortune of sharing the planet with. “I’m not depressed, dudes who ride unicycles in rush-hour traffic are fucking idiots,” or “Nothing is wrong with me, the real problem is all these people mindlessly texting while their dogs shit in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk.”

The emergency room was slow that night and they saw me right away and talked to me in their most soothing voices. I got some X-rays and a CAT scan and when the doctor came in to tell me my heart was enlarged, I asked, “Is it because I love too much?” and we both had a hearty laugh before he was like, “STOP EATING MEAT” and put through the order for me to be admitted and hooked up to a ventilator for two days.

All this might be easier if I could punch something, but I’m not a punch-something person. I’m a “sit in the dark in the bathroom with a package of sharp cheddar cheese slices” person. Except I don’t even really eat cheese anymore. Plus I can’t fight. I’m soft, man. And I don’t have any answers. The world is scary and terrible and people out here don’t want Obamacare to fix a paper cut let alone offer some discounted mental health care, so what is left for us to do? Talk about it? Stop being afraid of it? Shut down those who want to dismiss us as fragile or crazy?! I went on Lexapro, but after three weeks I had stopped sleeping and fuck that. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everyone, but I’d rather be angry and well rested than tired and happy. Or “happy,” I guess. I have pills that make me sleepy instead of panicky, and I learned how to do this four-seven-eight breathing technique that’s supposed to switch your body from fight-or-flight to a passive response, but come on. Seriously, the only time it even occurs to me to do it is when I’m already sweating and trying to dry swallow some of these benzos. Do black girls even get to be depressed? If I ever have more than $37 in my pocket I’m going to open a school for girls with bad attitudes where we basically talk to therapists all day while wearing soft pants and occasionally taking a field trip to the nearest elote cart. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just tell some more stupid jokes. Good thing I’m hilarious.

A couple of months ago my vegan Russian trainer moved to Hawaii so she could run ultramarathons in a temperate climate and mack on girls in grass skirts. At first I was sad, but then I thought, “Now there will be no one to scowl disapprovingly at my attempted push-ups! Hooray!” During our last training session, right after I’d completed seven of the fifty sit-ups she’d asked me to do, she said, “You are my most disappointing client.” And I interpreted that as “This tiny human says it’s okay for me to keep eating red meat and cupcakes in bed. Good talk.” We did some partner stretches, and after she adjusted my knee for the fourth time, she said, “I worry about you. We are going to text after I move.” I nodded in agreement while my brain said, “Fine! Joke’s on you! Texts don’t have eyes!” A week after she left I got a text from THE RUSSIAN. THE RUSSIAN: What’s for lunch? ME: Lean Cuisine!!! THE RUSSIAN: and what? ME: Water…? THE RUSSIAN: AND WHAT? ME, breaking into a liar’s sweat: Um, oxygen? THE RUSSIAN: WHAT ELSE?! [I could hear her shouting in my brain.] ME, still trying to be on that bullshit: Granola bar. THE RUSSIAN: You’re lying. ME: Okay, okay, you caught me. A granola bar and an apple. THE RUSSIAN: … ME: And a Diet Coke. THE RUSSIAN: … ME: Oh, and I had half a doughnut this morning. THE RUSSIAN: … ME: Okay, fine, a WHOLE doughnut. THE RUSSIAN: … ME, sighing at my screen: *Two* doughnuts. THE RUSSIAN: … ME: And I might have also had a beer before work. THE RUSSIAN: I...

“Ditch the workout and join the party!” the official website shouted at my eyeballs. Zumba “is the only Latin-inspired dance-fitness program that blends red-hot international music and contagious steps to form a ‘fitness-party’ that is downright addictive!” I am suspicious of words like “addictive” and “contagious,” and I immediately blanched while clicking through all the pictures of lean and toned soccer moms gyrating in crop tops and neon bicycle shorts, their perfect bodies beaded with sweat, their toothy, openmouthed grins screaming, “I AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY YOUNG AND CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE LIFE.” I am a negative person by nature, and I typically shy away from anything that requires me to be having visible fun. I like to do stuff that I can sit quietly in the back and enjoy, and I have spent my entire adult life perfecting a bored-yet-slightly-amused-and-entertained facade. And I just don’t understand being excited about exercise. It’s like doing a cartwheel on your way to have a root canal; my face just doesn’t light up at the prospect of abdominal isolations. Also? The pictures. Look at that instructor guy with his shirt off. I’m not trying to embarrass myself tripping over my feet doing watered-down salsa steps while some red-hot international instructor rolls his eyes at me in disgust and bounces quarters off his ridiculously chiseled backside.

1. I get up too early in the morning. My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all. I can hardly muster the strength to take a bird bath and pull on my yoga pants that have never seen the inside of a gym, let alone cook steel-cut oats and make a kale smoothie.

My joints still hurt. After much half-hearted consumption of every legume, sprouted grain, cheese made from nuts, and root vegetable snatched from the loving clutches of the earth, I know that the degenerative disease currently snacking on my sacroiliac joint will maybe hold off for an hour so I could stand in front of the stage and get sweated on by Drake, but I’M SO SAD and THIS IS AMERICA so I WANT MY BONES TO STOP HURTING while I EAT CHEESE. I have an $800 tiny robot computer that can tell me the weather in Tokyo and knows to suggest “hoe” when I finish typing the phrase “yeah right,” but science can’t figure out a way for me to have a little yogurt without my having to rely on a walker the next day?! Pffft.

I don’t know that I’m always happy in this big body. Or what there is that I can actually do about it. I was not born to delicate people; my mom was six feet tall and my dad was short and broad with oversize hands that he gifted me along with my life. This rotting meat corpse they created is riddled with inexplicable disease and is as wide as it is tall. I was never destined to be a waif, or to have a less-than-terrible relationship with food. I grew up poor, anxious, and unhappy, with cheap carbohydrates the only affordable substitute for joy. If I had a depressed kid right now, I’d drag him to a doctor and ask for some Wellbutrin, but that was never an option for tiny me.

Million-Dollar Mermaid A solid 75 percent of the time I am awake, I am in pain akin to that of childbirth. Sometimes you can read the excruciating discomfort on my face, but I’ve gotten really good at masking it so that it just looks like I’m stifling an unpleasant bit of gas. People are always asking me what Crohn’s feels like, and my answer is this: it’s like a compact car is trying to drive through my small intestines, all the time. Seriously, and it doesn’t matter if I eat or don’t eat or whatever. Oh, here’s something fun—I don’t care what diet you’re on or what herbal supplements you take. If they work for you, I’m happy. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or if people walk around just dispensing unfounded medical advice to everyone they’ve ever met with a health issue, but more often than I’m comfortable with, some asshole with a high school diploma wants to sit me down and talk at me about how they can cure my wretched-gut disease. There’s always some bag of dicks with a beer in his hand, a triple cheeseburger on his plate, and a cigarette in his mouth trying to talk to me about healthy eating. And with zero trace of irony! I appreciate the effort, I really do, but this shit is autoimmune and I have a gastroenterologist. If all I had to do was put down this taco and take those herbs your grandma swears by, I’d already be cured. Thanks, though.

moms. I couldn’t decide what to wear, because I’m at a time in my life when nothing I put on feels good and even fewer things look good, and the T-shirt and jeans I would like to spend my days wearing aren’t always appropriate. Nor is the hoodie. And, if we’re being honest, the jeans don’t always fit right. Jeans and bras, man: ARE THEY EVER 100 PERCENT COOL?

I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early. Fat babies are adorable, while fat children are a little less so. Fat teenagers are chided into either end of the eating-disorder spectrum, and fat adults are either admonished for not figuring out how to get new bodies during adolescence or straight up dismissed altogether. I wish that I was an emotionally healthy human without years of accumulated trauma, one who just decided to be a fat caricature of a person perched gleefully atop a mountain of doughnuts, shoving candy bar after candy bar between my teeth while cackling demonically over how much money my eventual care will cost taxpayers or whatever it is comments-section trolls always accuse fat people of doing. And I don’t need sympathy or special consideration because, ultimately, who even cares? You hate me, and I hate me, too. We are on the same team. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe we could all just mind our own fucking business for once, and that when you can actually see a person’s scars, maybe be a pal and don’t pick at them.

By this point in our nascent relationship, Mavis and I had figured out how to mash our moist and sweaty sex parts together with marginally enjoyable results, suffered through awkward introductory meals with each other’s closest friends/families (including a surprise birthday party I totally almost ruined by being a pouty asshole), and gone in on a family cell phone plan: IT WAS TIME FOR US TO PLAN OUR FIRST JOINT VACATION. Thoughtful romantic that I am, I texted, “Hey, instead of flying first-class to Jamaica to drink rum out of coconuts and risk skin cancer roasting under the sun, how would you feel about instead spending nine hours wedged into a rented car with my dead dad’s ashes to go to Nashville and eat biscuits and gravy and listen to terrible country music for a week?” In hindsight I realize that that is a heavy fucking thing to ask a normal person with actual human feelings to accompany you to do. In my mind it was like Weekend at Bernie’s, but in real life she has a mom she talks to on the phone once or twice a week and isn’t used to my whole LOL I KILLED MY MOM shtick. This could be an emotional minefield.

The courtship was amazing. Until I met him, I had been an unwitting victim of a lot of Netflix and Chilling, except that wasn’t a thing then. Let’s just say I spent a lot of nights on various boyfriendly futons watching HBO for whatever amount of time is long enough to feel like a not-prostitute before having unenthusiastic sex. I was twenty-five, man. No one was asking me to dinner! It was like, “Oh, hey, cool, you gave me your number at that De La show! Wanna come over and watch me and my roommates play Resident Evil for three hours?” So I would say yeah, and shave my legs, and get all my shit on, and go to some kid’s house to watch him smoke weed and play Xbox, and then when he lost, we’d go to his room and have loser sex atop the pizza boxes and Jordans and DVDs scattered across his bed. And by “have sex” I mean “lie stiff as a board with all my muscles taut so his roommates wouldn’t hear the bed squeaking.” Lather, rinse, repeat for the entirety of my early twenties until this adult human male picked a time and a restaurant that served food on real plates. In the cab on the way home, I whispered to myself, “This is it.” I knew it was love because he was busy with school, and I was not busy—at least, not busy in big and important ways—and it’s cute when you’re not busy to mail care packages to your boyfriend who literally lives thirty minutes away but hasn’t called in a week because he is so fucking busy. That inner cringe when a friend asks “Have you ever even been in...

How do I know I’m in love if I don’t want to kill myself all the time? Mavis is the nicest person I’ve ever met, and it was hard to recognize I was in love with her because she never let so much time elapse between “hey wats up winky-face emoji” texts that I had deleted her number and had to respond, “NEW PHONE WHO DIS.” She has never replied “…uh okay sure” when I tell her I love her. She’s never patted me on the back while telling me that she thinks of me as a really good friend despite our regular carnal relations; never said, “Nah, I don’t read your shit because you really aren’t that funny to me”; never disappeared for a month and then popped back up all nonchalant. She has never, not even once, made me miserable. How is it possible that what we have is even real?

You know how when you’re in your mid- to late thirties, and you’re dreaming about where you are going to live hopefully by age forty-two, and you’re picturing your reasonably affordable one-bedroom apartment in a moderately safe and attractive neighborhood: who is living there with you? Is it the withholder? The serial cheater? What about the commitment-phobe, or perhaps the grifter? Yeah, no. It’s none of those. It’s some mythical being you haven’t met yet, one who doesn’t have any suspicious Facebook activity that can trigger hours of pointless scrolling down strangers’ profiles, looking for infidelity clues. I have developed a very special set of skills as a coping mechanism for falling in love with shitty people. I can go days at a time without so much as a smoke signal. I have no problem eating in a restaurant alone or living without physical contact for weeks or believing that a person who definitely was sleeping with several other women was also somehow devoted to me. That’s the deal, right, that it’s not real unless it feels like someone reached into your chest to pull your heart out while you stand by helplessly? I can work with that. I have not, however, figured out what to do when a person I am romantically involved with keeps her word and looks after my feelings. If Mavis showed up at a reading, drunk and inexplicably wet, and heckled me onstage, I would know how to handle that kind of love. I understand a love that argues with you in public and occasionally pu...

Today is Zac’s forty-third birthday. We met on the eve of his thirty-second. That totally blows my mind. Like how can I be this old? How could this have all gone down a decade ago? And how are the scars lurking under the surface of my skin still so easy to find? I remember the first time I ran into him in public after we’d broken up: my friend Julia and I were at the Silver Room block party, withering under the blistering July sun, when I heard a familiar laugh behind me and my stomach fell right out of my butt. I turned around and made eye contact, then immediately started to cry, but all cool-like behind giant sunglasses. It felt like all the wind had been sucked out of my lungs, an acute pain that I could feel radiating through my whole body. I clutched Julia’s arm, tears streaming down my cheeks, and was like, “Yo, I gotta go. Right now.” And then we pushed our way through the crowd of sweaty, gyrating bodies to get a cab home. It had been, I don’t know, six or seven months? And I thought I was fine after we broke up. I didn’t fall apart like I thought I would. But when I saw him again something cracked open inside me, and I went home to my new apartment (this time just one ...

You can’t tell by looking, but I was a nanny for a while in high school and through my early twenties. It was just like The Help except swap in liberal white guilt and Land Rovers for Jim Crow and cotton gins. The most important thing I learned was the difference between the boxed-macaroni-and-cheese parents and the holistic-kale-anti-vaccination parents. Macaroni moms are the easiest to be around, obviously. Because, duh, you can totally let their kids zombie out in front of the TV and order a sausage pizza. I am not good enough to be around my no-screens-in-the-house flaxseed friends. For real, I can’t be having your kid in our adult conversation because you don’t want him to get high on Sesame Street and fruit snacks. GO AWAY, BABY. And I have neither the intelligence nor the patience to navigate the kid aisle at Whole Foods while trying to find the gluten-free, carob-sweetened, agave soy organic vegan oxygenated wheatgrass bites or whatever so that my newest nephew has something to snack on while trying to stay alive for two hours in my apartment. I might put my knives away and hide the porn, but educational toys and petroleum-free jellies are not within my purview. You need to know all this stuff, of course, because some of these new moms will lose their impacted shit on you if they catch you pouring anything other than Hawaiian volcanic water into their child’s bath. Yes, that same person you watched pull a disgusting dollar bill from between a stripper’s ass cheeks ...