Sad Janet: A Novel

by Lucie Britsch

If you just broke up with someone, be sad; if you just ran over somebody drunk driving, feel depressed. You shouldn’t take a pill that makes you feel okay about terrible things.

Our era will be known as the Greater Depression.

The Japanese have a term for it: mono no aware, the sadness of things.

But the Japanese get it. They have fourteen words for it that don’t exist in the English language, for this feeling that staying afloat is almost impossible.

Sometimes I think it’s my fault that I let the sadness in. I used to make these crying tapes of sad songs that I’d listen to at night when I was in my bed and supposed to be sleeping but I wasn’t, I was crying. Crying for all the shitty things I knew were coming. I wasn’t even a teenager yet, but I felt tender and raw and open to all the pain. All those dumb songs about love and heartbreak. I should have been listening to the fucking Muppets.

The whole world is too sad, really, but no one wants to admit it because they made it that way.

We would live on love. Love wasn’t happiness; love was something else, something that transcended all feeling. If anything, it veered toward the sad side.

Happiness is not on my radar. I want other things. Like control over my life, my body. Like being able to get through a day without feeling like I’m doing it wrong. I want to feel all my feelings, not swallow them, and if they swallow me, so be it.

Your mother says you have no interest in getting married or starting a family, even the gays can do that now, Janet, what’s your problem?

Am I dying? I ask, only half joking. Ha! he actually says. You, Janet, he says, are funny. Funny people die too, I say.

When I finally let it all go, have my breakdown in the grocery store, it will be spectacular.

If enough people tell you that you have no life, you start to believe them.

I won’t be needing these. I love the sound of dogs crying out for love. I can relate.

My mother thinks the shelter is a front for a meth lab because she watches too much TV. I tell her Debs has a PhD in Women’s Studies, but that just makes her think it’s a lesbian meth lab.

My sadness wasn’t caused by any one horrific unspeakable incident, like my mother thinks it was. It’s more an accumulation of tiny sadnesses, ones I’ve been collecting for as long as I’ve known the value of pockets. I’m going to need more pockets is my You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

It’s safer to assume everyone’s an ass and let them surprise you.

Mine is black, with a lot of scratches and dents, like my heart.

I spent the next few days after she caught me being a little meaner than normal, in case Melissa thought I was anything other than a pain in the ass.

Life is all about how you fill the holes. I am all hole, most of the time, a cave of a person.

I’m so proud of you, my mother says, because she thinks that’s what we all want to hear, that our parents are proud. When really what we want is to be accepted, to feel that their love isn’t contingent on anything we’ve done. That just being us is enough.

I won’t do them, but for different reasons: I always want the families to adopt me too.

I’m so exhausted of taking care of myself that I’d happily curl up wherever anyone would have me. I’d be no trouble, really. I just want to be taken care of.

I want to be powerless to it all. I want to give myself over to Christmas. Take me, Santa. I hate how horny I can get about the wrong things. Let’s hope these drugs kill your sex drive the way the regular ones do.

When I walk into his office, I expect him to hug me. Balloons, maybe, a piñata filled with drugs, some sort of celebration.

People think it’s all storm clouds and the Smiths up there, but really it’s happy storm clouds and the jangly Smiths songs you can dance around to holding a branch.

That’s three things I don’t want to do, all in order to do something I don’t want to do. It’s like someone punching you in the vagina and telling you your jeans are all wrong.

Mariah fucking Carey. Just say the word Christmas and she’s there, like a dog when you drop a sausage.

I feel an urge to salute him, but you can’t do that anymore without people thinking you’re some kind of overly social Nazi, so I just nod.

increased anxiety, aggression, irritability, hostility, worsening of depression, and suicidal thoughts. Just what every little girl dreams of for Christmas.

All the tiny sadnesses will build up until they make you into whatever monster you are that keeps you up at night.

until Mrs. Claus leaves Santa for a woman, she’s not into it.

Sometimes when people look at me with pity I want to shout, I was a teenage girl once! so they know I can survive anything.

Behind every okay man is a better dog.

That’s a trick I learned a long time ago: When you sense that people are losing interest, just mention a puppy you rescued. It brings them right back.

She asks what I’m reading, which is our version of phone sex. I tell her the last ten books I’ve read, of which she has heard of zero.

Supernatural was on and sometimes all you need is some hot, demon-hunting brothers.

It sounded better than I’m so sad I can’t even masturbate anymore and tomorrow will only be worse since it’s Christmas.

Behind every door, I hear versions of Christmas happening. Some of them are silent apartments. Empty rooms. People gone for the holidays, off to be other versions of themselves for other people. This is what life is about. If you can do it. I can’t even be a version of myself enough for me.

It’s almost impossible to be a woman. All I really want to be is a person anyway.

All I see is a man speaking for a woman and telling her she needed to be fixed.

Stepping outside, I’m surprised how calm the world actually is. It’s only my head that’s full of noise and chaos.