on why you should vote for Bernie Sanders

The Sunday Blunt is a 2020 election survival effort of researched, brief-ish, minimally edited rants on America’s hellish political hellscape and related hell. I’ve not been shy about my support for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary. Today she suspended her campaign for president, and I’d be lying if I said I’m not writing this in tears. My hands are a lil shaky. Honestly I feel like I’m going through a breakup. It’s fine. Ultimately Warren was a prepared, fearless warrior for the progressive cause, but not the cause itself, so to honor the righteous work she’s done in this race, it is only necessary that I urge everyone still to vote to cast their ballot for Bernie Sanders. There are a few considerations all of us weigh to some degree when casting a ballot. Personally, I vote based on shared values; that’s why I didn’t cast a strategic ballot in the California primary and stayed true to my heart by voting Warren. Actually, I cried then, too, when casting my ballot. My boyfriend joked that’s “The American Dream,” but honestly... kind of. At the bare minimum, we want to believe in the vision of America that our candidate represents, and that’s reasonable considering these fuckers *do* work for us. These campaigns, as cursedly long and tedious as they are, are literally job interviews. I imagine those who stay home on Election Day feel unheard and disenchanted and probably disenfranchised by the political system. They wouldn’t hire any of the options. A progressive candidate could turn out more voters by illustrating an America that isn’t a return to the status quo, but something better for all of us. For no small or invalid reasons, most Americans want better than what we’ve received so far. I’m one of those Americans. Actually, I can confidently assume a majority of people reading this are one of those Americans as recent polling shows 70% of us support a pretty radical change in Medicare 4 All. I say radical, but what I mean is moral. America’s current healthcare model (and the one Biden vows to protect under the misnomer of “Public Option”) maintains healthcare as a business where multiple industries make a shit ton of money off of you and me getting and staying sick. This includes the pharma industry, the insurance industry, and the hospital industry. And because industries on a whole incentivize profits, nobody is working on behalf of Americans’ health. If Americans are healthy, nobody makes money. Which is truly wild because our Constitution very clearly and early on identifies the pursuit of life as an inalienable right. Meanwhile, there are 27 million uninsured Americans (like ya girl) and nearly 44 million under-insured Americans buried alive both metaphorically and literally by medical debt or postponing (or altogether not seeking) necessary care. I fall into that latter group. Shit’s not right, and any proposal that falls short of guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans and dismantling the profiteering of our illnesses is a disingenuous slab of garbage, I’m not sorry for saying so. There are lives on the line. Voters also vote with their pocketbooks. I’m not in love with this strategy but I’m broke so I get it. We’re justifiably protective of our tax dollars—it’s money we earned but can’t control. Who the fuck likes that? And considering the undertaking, it’s no question Medicare 4 All would be expensive, and voters want to know if restructuring the current model will flatter their bank accounts. So will it? The short answer is literally nobody knows. My primary care doctor (a dreamy old fellow named Dr. Horowitz who wears bowties and still sees me without insurance every three months for medication refills, although usually I go every four months when I can’t afford it) tells me the first step of the transition to single-payer will be nailing down cost. Right now, one doctor might charge one patient $20 for Advil while another might charge hundreds because the patient is in a different hospital or a person of color or just because they can. (This isn’t an exaggeration, it happens every day, ask for itemized bills.) So anybody who claims to know how much Medicare 4 All will cost is lying, which means nobody can confidently tell you how your taxes will be affected. We can predict, however, how much the current system costs you. Obviously, there are premiums and co-pays and deductibles and medication costs and, like, a zillion other ways you’re charged. Need to call an ambulance? Depending on the distance, you can ride in this life-saving transport for between a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. Wanna have a baby? Ten thousand dollars. Diabetic? Despite outrage on both sides of the aisle, two bottles of insulin can cost upwards of $700 a month and prices are still rising. And even though we live in a dystopian hellscape where we can GoFundMe our healthcare costs, 90% of campaigns don’t get fully funded. Can you believe even that isn’t a solution? Which means I guess there’s only one thing we can do and follow the advice a rich, retired, Medicare-receiving man swirling iced white wine on a catamaran once gave me: Make more money. No, I’m kidding. We need to elect the only candidate with a god damn humanistic solution to this very real and urgent crisis, shit. Obviously, and much to my dismay, a vote for Bernie is not a vote for universal healthcare. Before we can even have that conversation, we first have to get our preferred old white man in the White House. Look, I’m not a pundit, but I pretend to be one in every Facebook status and conversation with my mother, so I’m going to answer the question on every political strategist’s voter’s mind: Can Bernie beat Trump? The short answer is yes and with better odds than Joe Biden. The long answer is holy what now!? who would have the answer to that question? Can you tell the future? Can I tell the future? Can Rachel Maddow tell the future?  In all seriousness though, I absolutely do get it. There is no denying that the threat of four more years of the Trump administration will have a devastating and long-lasting effect on our planet and every single global citizen. It’s bad, my dudes. That said, voting for political strategy is my least favorite way of voting. For starters, it’s an unreliable barometer based on nothing but guesswork and confidence in your own thoughts. But more importantly, it is insincere and doesn’t communicate to Democratic politicians what standards and values we’ll hold them to. Again, we employ them. If we want to be sensitive about our tax dollars, we should be mindful of which representatives build their whole damn lifestyles off of them. We shouldn’t be voting for politicians who have built a career on passing legislation and otherwise making decisions that degrade people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community or lead our country into war. However, if you arreeee going to vote strategically, here’s why Bernie: Centrists don’t win elections. As much as Hillary was very much a woman and sexism very much played a role in her electoral defeat, so did the fact that she’s a moderate. That’s (partially) why there was no President Kerry or Gore or Romney or McCain: Each of those candidates painted a decidedly more status quo America compared to their more extreme opponent.  Whoever we elect needs to engage and energize voters. Two things are for sure: 1. Republicans fucking love to vote. (They also love to suppress the vote, but another day, my friends.) 2. Progressive policies are popular and poll better than Trump’s policies across the board. The Democratic Party is a big, welcoming tent where everyone can hang and be protected and represented... when we elect the right officials. Unfortunately, many people the Democratic Party seeks to help (and need to reach in order to win) still don’t see themselves represented in the current political landscape or find solace in moderate policies. Biden’s campaign promises a return to 2016 when, y’all, if you can believe it, I still wasn’t insured. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in the race whose policies address the needs of marginalized groups we’d need to turn out in November.  If we can draw one lesson from Elizabeth’s campaign, it’s that politicians should be listening to the individual circumstances and needs of their constituents. Elizabeth did this in every selfie line and phone call to small-dollar donors and meeting with marginalized groups. At her speeches, she kept the lights on her audiences bright so she could see the people she was talking to. Elizabeth fundamentally understood that this never was about her being president but about the good she could do for each of us once she got there. There’s no question that Bernie has understood this his whole life. The president isn’t the leader of our land, but rather a representative hired to do the work of the American people. I believe then that it is our duty to elect the candidate who would do the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of us. Without a doubt, Bernie Sanders is that candidate. 

Twenty Lessons From the 2010s

2. Seeking therapy doesn’t mean I failed. 

3. Almost all of the shit kids laughed at in my Miami high school was racist or sexist or homophobic or fatphobic or transphobic or ableist. Laugh at things that don’t come at someone else’s expense. 

4. There’s no good reason to give or accept writing feedback that is unkind or calls into question my ability as a writer. The best feedback is that which leaves me feeling accomplished and energized, no matter how many edits need to be made. 

5. Stay in touch with what I loved as a child. There’s a reason my most uninhibited, least judgmental self flocked there. 

6. It’s going to hurt like hell until it doesn’t. Keep going. 

6b. Besides, it will make for a great essay. 

7. Abstinence is one way (and for many, the best way) but certainly not the only way to use drugs responsibly. 

8. When it comes time to vote, pay attention to more than just the president. Local and state-level elections can make the difference in whether kids benefit from free lunches and people have access to abortions. 

9. I’ll feel better if I do the work. 

10. I’ll also feel better if I take the meds. 

11. It’s okay not to know something. Just say, “I don’t know enough about this to offer an opinion,” then ask questions and conduct my own research. 

12. It actually doesn’t fucking matter if something works or not for someone else. It only matters if it works for me.

13. Invest time and money into home decor that makes my space feel like me. It’ll bring massive peace. 

14. It actually never feels better to check an ex’s Instagram. 

15. Be boring. It’s the only way to get anything done.  16. I’m not my job nor the hours I work in a day. Work can be fulfilling and financially rewarding, but it does not make a life.

17. Nothing anybody does to me is because of me… but if I notice the same betrayal is happening often (i.e. heartache), maybe examine my choices. 

18. There’s a difference between loving a person and loving a fantasy. 

19. That feeling when I just need to know someone, that instinct signaling they’ll be important to me one day? That’s my gut recognizing a person’s capacity to destroy me. 

20. And when they do, my writing and my loved ones will save me.

on abortion

The Sunday Blunt is a 2020 election survival effort of researched, brief-ish, minimally edited rants on America’s hellish political hellscape and related hell.

I haven’t had an abortion but I can’t think of a time in my life when, if faced with pregnancy, I wouldn’t have gotten one.

I took emergency contraceptive once. Alone in a Rite-Aid parking lot, I flipped the box over in my hands and had two distinctive thoughts—The first was gratitude for access to this true medical miracle. When the condom broke, there was no question I’d take Plan B: that alone was forty dollars I couldn’t spare. The average cost of childcare in California was 45% of my salary, and I’d yet to see the pro-birth stans heading Congress propose socializing that shit. I didn’t even have a savings account.

But more importantly, or more personally, I didn’t want to be pregnant: not then, maybe not ever. My panic disorder thrived on sensitivities and discomfort within my body, and I worried without medication I’d become housebound with anxiety all nine months. I’d lose my job, and thus my health insurance, along with everything else. I’d be without partner: three dates later, the could’ve-been father would leave when he discovered I’m neither competitive nor super into movies. How are those dealbreakers? I do not know. Anyway. I was grateful. A child would have irreparably upended my life.

*

So it goes whenever personhood is threatened, too many brave humans have shared stories to social media about their abortions: the woman whose teenage boyfriend tried to lock her down by poking a hole in the condom, the young girl who wasn’t ready to be a mother. It’s wild, truly, that we demand each other publicly perform emotional labor when science draws the same conclusion: Society conclusively benefits from access to safe, legal abortion.

The Turnaway Study followed for five years two groups of women who’d sought abortions—one group had received the procedure, while the second was turned away because their pregnancy was, according to laws, too far along to terminate—and discovered that women who received abortions were not at greater risk for negative mental health side effects; in fact, 95% of those women were happy with their decision. A second, Finnish paper studying teenagers over seven years yielded similar results. Both studies reported the women who did not receive abortions were less likely to be employed full-time, more likely to receive public assistance, and more likely to live in poverty. The women who received abortions were more likely to pursue higher education.

While it’s nearly impossible to estimate how many illegal abortions were performed prior to Roe v. Wade, calculations of the 1950s and ‘60s suggest the number ranges from anywhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million procedures annually. By procedures I mean with bleach, with knitting needles, with scissors and wire hangers. I mean with staircases. Antibiotics significantly reduced the amount of associated deaths, but abortion still accounted for 200 deaths per year or one-sixth of all pregnancy-related deaths, according to the official reports. Doctors estimate the number was much higher. In El Salvador, where all abortions are outlawed, 11 percent of illegal abortions result in death. That’s 2,000 people per year.

*

—My second thought was quieter, more confounding: “Am I killing a baby?”

I was raised Catholic with an asterisk: my father had abandoned the shtick when his second grade nun-teacher slapped him with a ruler, and my mother enforced only CCD classes and Christmas Eve mass. Our household was liberal, pro-choice—Mom had lost a friend to a coat hanger abortion. But I grew up around a church and I have relatives who dig the church and I once dated a man who spent our four-year relationship disappointed I wasn’t “pure for him,” so I caught the drift: My womb was an incubator. With this pill, I robbed the world of a human. There was shame in my decision.

It’s unlikely I would’ve gotten pregnant. The sex in question had occurred on the seventeenth day of my menstrual cycle; if the sex happened one day earlier, the chances were exponentially higher. One day later: impossible. It’s curious, the way my reproductive system works: almost as though it’s designed to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Where do things go so wrong?

With sperm.

Obviously I wasn’t killing a baby. In the twelve hours since intercourse, if anything happened at all, we’d made a zygote, which is a mischievously adorable word but not a baby. I don’t know when a baby becomes a baby. I don’t think anyone does. When my sister and her partner wanted a child, the two pink lines on a drugstore pregnancy test was a baby. Two days later, when my sister told me about her sweet litto embryo: no question, that was my nephew.

But I imagine us reversed, and those two pink lines are a crisis, a financial and emotional grave. To my sister, the embryo is the reason she searches last minute cross-country flights we both know she can’t afford, books the appointment when I’m too ashamed and afraid, triple-checks I asked someone to drive me. The reason she saves my life.

There’s another asterisk to my Catholic roots: Big, lifetime *Golden Rule* fan. My father wasn’t one for, like, parenting, besides half-jokingly forbidding me from tackle football and motorcycles, and once bending at the hip and looking into my child-eyes and saying this: “I won’t be mad or disappointed about anything you do as long as you treat others the way you want to be treated.”

So I think about that.

I think, what if I hadn’t learned immediately the condom broke. if an unlikely pregnancy occurred. if the morning sickness throbbed against my throat for weeks so I couldn’t leave the house: for the illness and the fear thereof. for the panic attacks. for the unmedicated depression. what if I had to do it alone, if the loneliness rocked my bones like the ocean at shore break. How would I want to be treated if I was scared and alone and faced with a difficult decision?

And then I treat people that way.

How to Be Happy Sometimes

My father is a happy dude. Over the phone he tells me the series of events that ended in the short-sale of my childhood home as the real estate bubble burst, as my parents finalized their divorce. If there was stress or pain in those days—and without doubt there was—I don’t remember my father’s. I remember the house west of US-1 in which the last owner died but still Dad kept her furniture. I remember the cockroaches that drove us to eat dinner on the living room floor. In place of stress and pain, I remember Tuesday night cooking lessons, homemade key lime sauce. My father recalls how disoriented he felt to one day have financial security—college tuitions saved! retirements funded!—only to lose it, swept away like umbrellas in the storm. “But you know,” he says, “we got through.”

“It’s easier to get through when your brain chemicals work in your favor,” I say, because I’m that kind of person and in that kind of mood.

Dad laughs. “Yeah, sure is,” he says. “I wake up in the morning and my brain goes, ‘Hey man, you’re awesome.’”

“And mine goes, ‘shit, we have to do this again?’”

I was diagnosed with clinical depression in the summer of 2016, but it didn’t start then—no happy six-year-old closely identifies with Eeyore, Chuckie Finster. I’ve kept my illness at bay for the better part of the past year, but lately I feel it in my bones like an ache I can’t stretch out. To escape the loneliness and discomfort, I drink more than I should, spend more money than I have. You know, numb in the short-term. Exacerbate in the long. It’s just, every morning in rolls the fog. Every sunset I wonder how soon is too soon to fall asleep.

One recent Sunday night I made a list, taped it above my desk.

How to Be Happy Sometimes

The list, all positivity and motivation, is unlike me. Inspo culture feels patronizing, veers maybe sorta toward ableism. Hear me out. While "just take control of your thoughts,” for example, isn’t inherently bad advice, it’s a gross simplification of a difficult process for people like me. I hurt in ways motivational quotes can’t heal. Some days, OK, it’s enough to smile while applying blush, easy to jog up and back a mile on Los Feliz Boulevard. But there are mornings I nap twice before 8 a.m. and days dishes go unwashed, reaching out from the sink and onto the counter like a limb, I am so sorry Bekah. Motivational quotes remind me of ways I fall short, teach me new shame. “Good vibes only” feels exclusive, like me and my illness are unwelcome here, and “no excuses” feels dismissive, like my illness lacks legitimacy, like my strength and courage are recognized only on days I make progress and not on days I don’t. I feel at once small and too much for any given room.

To be #motivational is to be privileged. I’m not suggesting privilege is damning or even bad; rather, privilege is the place from which we espouse and accept advice. It’s worth acknowledging. The items on my How to Be Happy list wreak of privilege: eat healthy, as if more than 20 million Americans don’t live in food deserts; run! implies I am to some degree able-bodied, implies it’s not nighttime; prioritizing myself selfishly is a privilege of childlessness. Of course this list is for personal healing so it’s chill, but shit, I’m privileged to occupy a space on the Internet and write hi my depression hurts. People everywhere fear disclosing mental health issues to employers will disqualify them from their job, that disclosing to peers and partners will label them crazy or worse. Remember how we turned on America’s sweetheart Britney Spears when she shaved her head and rammed an umbrella into a van?

Which is why I become frustrated when a quote about changing my perspective doesn’t address my need for professional care but the American healthcare system is trash garbage and I have access to band-aids like flax seed and YouTube but not a doctor. Even with insurance, I can’t afford one. When a quote tells us to take career risks and travel like classism is innocuous, like poverty isn’t traumatic and a reality or risk for a third of the United States population, like wealth is indicative of character and work ethic alone and not systemic oppression. When a quote about willpower as a muscle doesn’t clarify that it’s first and foremost a finite resource, that like a muscle it fatigues, that science knows lack of motivation is associated with low dopamine in the prefrontal cortex but not how to target dopamine in the right areas to overcome depression and low energy, that despite what capitalism fronts, humans do not attain value from their productivity. We are not machines.

*

For better or worse, I am a storyteller. Ask where I bought this shirt, I will tell you the vintage shop on Vermont, that I bought it for a Tom Hanks-themed party where I dressed as Forrest Gump Running Across the Mississippi the Second Time. I bought red shorts, too, but couldn’t commit to a red baseball cap considering, well. You know. I also teach storytelling. My favorite writing lesson is on specificity, avoiding abstract bullshit (I don’t say bullshit) in favor of concrete images, that this is how a character develops depth, that this is how readers relate. Motivational quotes, they don’t have that. I want to see the line etched across her knee as she stands from crying on tile grout. I want to see her bitten cuticles, peeling like a sunburn. Insert here the quote about showing the war through burnt socks in the road. I don’t want ten steps to success; I want to know what you eat when you’re hungry and money won’t stretch the week. For me: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Throughout college, I was in an abusive relationship and my personality shrunk to fit my boyfriend’s wishes: he wanted Stepford, quiet. When I showed him my writing, he asked if I ever wrote anything happy. I learned early what emotions belonged there. That night I quit writing, and when years later I left, I launched this blog. I wrote publicly for many reasons, not least of all ego: my thoughts were important. But in fairness and kindness to myself, I also wanted to help people. I’d endured something traumatic for many years and felt deeply alone in the experience and yet still alone in this new space, freed but confused and in pain. I didn’t know other people went through what I had.

I took motivational quotes like an IV drip, tattooed on my rib cage the John Mayer lyric “where the light is” after I revisited albums my ex teased me out of playing and the line reminded me not to shrink anymore. The Monday before I moved to New York, I tattooed birds on my nape inspired by the quote “I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on Earth, and then I ask myself the same question.” I didn’t once consider that I lived in Florida, where birds fly for the winter, or that I had freedom because my parents and stepmother had money.

One Saturday in a South Beach nightclub, a woman tapped my shoulder. “Are you Lyndsay? Sunday Whiskey?”

It was the first time I’d heard the name of my blog spoken by someone else. I was holding the neck of a champagne bottle, my chapstick on its lip. Days before I had written a post about moving titled “My Name Is on a Boarding Pass,” which. Anyway. I nodded. “Yeah, hi!”

“You inspired me to move to New York!”

I’ve shared that anecdote for years but only recently felt weird about it. My writing then lacked nuance, awareness. Certainly experience. I didn’t write who paid for my plane ticket—no surprise, it wasn’t me—or that I’d be moving not to New York but New Jersey into my aunt and uncle’s house rent-free. (They are angels.) While there, I wrote posts about sitting with loneliness and fighting the fear of change, but I didn’t write about sleeping in the George Washington train station or gaining thirty-five pounds or sneaking into the woods to smoke instead of finding a job. I didn’t write about my first Google searches for symptoms of depression, the boxes I ticked. When I rode the bus over the bridge into upper Manhattan, I didn’t write that I did so on my father’s weekly bank deposits so I could spend time with an old fling and his new girlfriend. It’s not that I did a bad thing, inspiring someone to chase a dream. It’s that I lied.

*

When I was three years old, Hurricane Andrew stripped the shingles from my roof and the rain ran through the walls and into the floorboards and damaged all my toys. We piled the mess, damp and moldy, onto the back patio. I learned not to attach value or affection to objects, that what’s yours can be destroyed. I learned panic attacks as young as kindergarten. At twelve my mother’s coworker taught me to keep my hair nice and clothes cute, and at fourteen my uncle taught me to stay skinny. In my early twenties I learned my fight or flight instinct is neither; instead I curl into a ball on the floor and weep silently into my knees—unless I’m also drunk and angry and three-years-silenced: then I thrash, kick my feet into the dashboard, slap the gear shift, the steering wheel, the man beside me. Over the years I’ve learned what magnificent power many men hold within their hands, their fists. There’s no timeline for unlearning. I want to get better. And some days, if I’m being honest, I don’t want to get better. Some days it’s easier to leave laundry like landmines on my bedroom floor, and other days I self-love so hard I reallytruly believe checking the Instagram of a dude with whom I shared three dates and never heard from again doesn’t affect my self-esteem, doesn’t distance me from reality. I’m still learning the line between self-care and self-sabotage, when a drink at the local bar is avoidance, when procrastination stems from the fear I don’t deserve my career and I’m one email from being found out. I don’t know what better looks like. I do know, however, that anyone who enjoys leaving their comfort zone hasn’t left it yet. This shit is terrible. The healing process is rarely good vibes and face masks and Chardonnay. It’s accountability and guilt. It’s embarrassment and learning to forgive when no one says I’m sorry. It’s ten thousand I’m OK’s whispered into a bathroom mirror, knuckles white against the counter. My most recent depressive episode ended one year ago, and since then managing my illness has looked like home cooking and eight glasses of water and still dating the wrong men but recognizing it sooner, leaving easier. It looks like a two-hundred page notebook half-filled with lists and setting an alarm three hours before a morning run to calm the anxiety and appropriately medicate. I run at 8 a.m..   I don’t know. I want to get better. There are days—fewer and usually spaced months apart—I don’t want to get better. Maybe a year from now life will look like waking up and thinking, “hey girl, you’re awesome.” Maybe better is filled with face masks and Chardonnay and motivational quotes and a chemically-balanced brain and forgetting that boy did that thing to my body that one time, or maybe not. Maybe better just looks like being happy sometimes.  

Like Walking on Eggshells

In the summer of 2015, I started therapy because I had feelings for a man and wanted to die. I drove to San Francisco and drank beer at a brewery with the guy and his friends. After a few hours I grew tired and he grew tired and we shared a platonic parting and I returned to the house at which I was staying and crumbled onto the bathroom floor, idealizing death. It’s relatively uncommon, me thinking of dying. But when I do, I’m almost always writhing on a bathroom floor with romantic feelings, even the requited variety, for a man.

 *

 I want to marry beneath a remarkable tree. The guests, all fifty or sixty of them, will sit on mismatched couches, and I’ll wear a form-fitting, beaded dress, maybe in blush. I’ll write my vows, of course, and so will he. We’ll dance to my father’s band under strung lights and stars, and my sister will say a toast that’ll make the room laugh, except me; I’ll cry. In a good way. We won’t form conga lines or play the YMCA, and I don’t care for cake, or dessert for that matter, but for tiramisu and macarons, so he can choose what we cut and feed each other, kissing between bites.

 *

 What I did not know, at least not with any confirmation, was that emotionally abusive relationships scar longer and deeper than physical ones. This is not to say that physically abusive relationships aren’t damaging, debilitating motherfuckers. They are. Just that, according to my therapist in our first session, emotional abuse lingers, infiltrates in unexpected ways.

 *

 Over the years, my romantic daydreams have changed: As a young girl, I wanted the poofiest princess dress and a church with stained glass windows. Now, a year shy of thirty, I daydream the wedding less. Instead, I read advice on how to make relationships work: respect each other, don’t keep secrets, choose each other every day, even when he’s infuriatingly arrogant and I’m infuriatingly stubborn. In my daydreams he cooks, because I can’t, and I clean, even though I hate washing dishes, because I appreciate him. I don’t imagine kids or buying a house, but I do imagine a spare bedroom that we convert into an office and fill with books and in that room we have a No Speaking policy but every once in a while I’ll gaze up from my computer, and him from his, and I’ll smile at the way his eyes squint behind glasses and he’ll smile at the way my eyebrows furrow and rise while I read.

 *

 I don’t think I’ll marry. I don’t think anyone can love me, not like that. Which is weird, because I actually really like myself. I’m talented and intelligent and kind. I’m accepting of others and I’m funny, and even from an early age, I’ve been ambitious with enormous, all-consuming dreams. If I’m ever a girlfriend or a wife, I’d be a good one: I’m supportive and affectionate and excellent with parents. I’m willing to make sacrifices and compromises and prioritize someone above myself. And, okay sure, I’m impulsive and messy and I hate being wrong, and my bet is I’ll always be this way, but for someone else, I’d sweep more often. Take deep breaths. Let him win.

 But still I don’t think I’m worthy of love. I didn’t think this way before the abuse.

 *    

 Abusive relationships give the sensation of walking on eggshells. I read that somewhere, not long after the break-up, and I liked how it summarized my fear. I hid from my boyfriend in showers, cried while he slept. He fought nasty: name-calling, intimidation, gaslighting. He’d leave me (or when I felt particularly brave, I’d leave him) and he'd call to say he fucked another girl in our bed. I felt small and the world felt fragile and at every moment I feared he’d detonate. At restaurants. On vacation. In our bed. I want to know what it feels like to be angry and not leave or be left.

 *

 On Thanksgiving I called my father and we talked relationships. I told him they’re awful and why do we subject ourselves to them? I’m a million contradictions. Outwardly, I scoff at love, build walls so high one needs a rope and a god damn ice axe. But inwardly, love is a ravenous desire, unfuckingquenchable. I’ve never admitted that to anyone. Certainly not to my therapist. Only once or twice to myself. I feel desperate and shameful. Pathetic with poor priorities. Besides, we all know what happened last time.

 On the phone, my father said he’s open to a relationship. He’s a recent widower, which I assumed meant he was out of commission, but, as he said, it’s the opposite: Once you’ve experienced a healthy, loving relationship, you want it again and again. As my father reminded me, I don’t know what that’s like. Shit, I don’t know what love’s like. The first man to say he loved me slammed me into walls, and the next two, on later dates, said they didn’t believe they had the capacity for love.

I propose an upside. Historically I’ve accepted conditional affection and I’ve feigned love when I didn’t feel it, for feeling’s sake. I’m not that way anymore: I date serially, sure, but I also reject perfectly kind, intelligent men because I can’t fake attraction. I’ve waited this long. I know what I want and what I offer. It’d suck to settle.

*

  On long drives I dance and sing and imagine a man riding shotgun, laughing with me. I imagine slow, naked mornings and road trips through the desert and a No Speaking rule in our home-office. In my daydreams, the man is no one specific, but he loves the me I love. It’s nice to have these daydreams. For a while I denied myself them.

 I’m making space and, I like to think, progress. My heart was broken earlier this year and I didn’t idealize death on my bathroom floor. Last week I told a man I like him and didn’t follow up with “so I think we should end things.” These steps seem small, yes, and compared to the work I still need to do—forgive myself for my past relationship, stop speaking negatively of love, don’t force intimacy out of fear—they’re unimpressive. 

But it feels like something, y’know? Like healing.  

Me, too.

Mom and Dad: I love you. You don’t want to read this one.

At seventeen, I promised a boy we’d have sex but I changed my mind. This is to say, I had had doubts from the minute I initiated the AIM conversation until the minute I lay on his bed, his fingers fumbling for my zipper. I wanted to say “no” when he kissed me and I wanted to say “no” when he stripped off my shirt and I finally said “no” when he unbuttoned my jeans.

I remember saying “no.”

I don’t remember how he responded. I don’t remember how he felt inside of me. I don’t remember if we kissed or for how long sex lasted or whether he undressed completely.

But I remember saying “no,” and I remember afterwards he left to play soccer with his friends.

What is it to own your body? I’ve, afraid, given my body away and my body, forcefully, has been taken, robbed for minutes or seconds, cupped in a man’s eager palm, entered by a man’s hungry dick. I’m not always sure to whom this body belongs. I believed I owned my body, but on a summer Monday afternoon at seventeen years old I said, “no,”

and then.

Sunday night I scrolled my Facebook feed: Woman after woman—hundreds of women—posting two words: “Me, too,” as in: I too have experienced sexual harassment or assault. Women shouldn’t have to expose the secrets a body holds for others to believe predation and trauma,

but we did in throngs,

and Monday night a man who last month non-consensually grabbed my vagina spent two hours trying to convince me, first, to shut the fuck up, and second, that it never happened.

My body felt his grasp before my brain knew the word for it. My body registered its discomfort, its theft. I remember that. I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything, or if I did, in what tone at what volume. But I felt his grasp for days after. I know it happened. I’d rather it hadn’t.

I haven’t owned my shoulders since an ex-boyfriend forced them into walls. I haven’t owned my waistline since an adolescence spent flipping through Mom’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs and Cosmopolitan magazines. I haven’t owned my breasts since a gay man groped them in a Hell’s Kitchen bar.

My body has been stripped for its parts, claimed by male gaze and male hands and male desire.

Maybe that explains why, after a man grabbed my vagina (in a bar, over cheese and crackers) after I stomped out after he followed me down Vermont Avenue after I told him to get the fuck away from me,

I hugged him goodbye.

The eye suggests this body belongs exclusively to me, but experience taught me it doesn’t.

Men claim bodies, first, because they can. On average, men are stronger than women. Anatomy, as Freud put it, is destiny.

Men claim bodies because sex is inherently violent in the same way violence is inherently sexual. Testosterone controls both sex drive and human’s propensity to violence. Freud notes that sexual intercourse—the “primal scene”—strikingly resembles a violent struggle: the physicality, sweat, penetration, thrusting, grunting, nails clawing backs, teeth biting flesh.  

And then there’s society.

I don’t want to write right now about the ways society fails women. I want for once men, the lot of them, to take my word for it.

As I write, I think of inevitabilities:

People will read the opening to this essay and belabor the fact I initiated the AIM conversation. People will challenge my credibility when I can’t remember every detail. People will wonder what I’d done for my boyfriend to lay hands on me, dispute the existence of female objectification, reason that men who aren’t sexually attracted to you cannot sexually assault you. 

I know people will do this because I’ve done it to myself.

Once a man told me he could never respect a woman who slept with him: the way she relinquished her body to his control. He said he could never respect a woman he fucked, the word spit like shrapnel.

I forgot we had hugged goodbye until he said so. The day after the assault, I remembered talking to him in a bank parking lot and then—nothing. In one retelling I said I threatened to call the cops. In another I omitted the parking lot altogether. But when he said it—“We hugged goodbye”—the memory rushed to my body: his arms his chest his waist. The streetlight to my right. The defeat in my limbs.

Maybe he returned to me my body, but with it comes great shame for where it had been.

We’ll Always Have Sunsets

It was early 2009, and I did not want to meet my father’s new girlfriend. My parents’ divorce had finalized only a few months earlier. This new woman, I thought, was at best a rebound, at worst a homewrecker. I was twenty and angry.

We shared the same favorite Beatles song, me and the new girlfriend. “Revolution.” I learned that the night we met. She treated me, my father, my sister, and a couple of our friends to see The Fab Faux, a Beatles tribute band that sounds like the real thing. We drove there in a limo. When “Revolution” started—the clanging electric guitar, the racing drum, the background yell—she tapped my shoulder. “This one’s my favorite!” She sang along, smiling, dancing with hands and hips. Dad’s new girlfriend smiled the kind of smile that made everyone around want to smile too. I’m not sure if by that point my father had nicknamed her “Sweet Thang,” but probably. By the end of the show, I knew for certain my father’s new girlfriend—Kim was her name—was impossible to dislike.

*

I stood on the dock, bitching. “I do not do boats.”

Ignoring me, my father loaded the boat with essentials: a cooler, life vests. I went to Key Largo thinking we’d jet ski, not boat. There’s a difference: one I’d done before and decidedly disliked, and the other I hadn’t tried, so my feelings were up in the air. I worried about seasickness. The last time I’d gone boating was a year or so prior in St. Augustine. I had deep sea fished, or rather, I spent the trip curled in a ball, trying not to throw up. But this day, the bay was smooth and notably shallow—imperative differences I chose to avoid.  Kim promised I’d be fine. She talked me on board.

It turns out, I like boats.

Kim teased me for years: when I’d go tubing, when I’d kneeboard, when I learned how to drive the boat, the one afternoon I tried wakeboarding, the vacation in Hawaii I snorkeled. “I thought you didn’t do boats,” she’d say, imitating my whine. “Oh hey, Miss I-Don’t-Do-Boats.” In Canada, we sailed while the sun set—Kim’s favorite time of day. My father played guitar and we sang.

Recently Kim saw a photo of me on the same boat from that first day. My father drove, and I smiled beside him. Kim laughed looking at the photo, said Dad should have that framed and mailed to me. “Remember how Lyndsay doesn’t do boats?”

Kim didn’t know that just after that photo was taken, she was Baker Acted for threatening suicide to her daughter.

*

A month after I moved to New York in 2013, my father called on my lunch break. He worried Kim might have a problem with alcohol. After her father’s funeral, she’d drank so much, she passed out on the toilet, fell off, maybe got a concussion.

I’d drink at least that much after your funeral, I probably said. Or maybe I said, I don’t know—that sounds like a reasonable day to get drunk. Whatever I said that afternoon, sitting at a picnic table in front of a grocery store on Fulton St., too many miles from my family to be of any use, I needed to believe that no, no, Kim was not an alcoholic. Not our Kim.

In hindsight, there were signs. I’d lived with my father and Kim for the six months preceding my New York move, and in the mornings while drinking coffee, Kim sometimes poured herself a glass of vodka before retiring to her bedroom for the day. She worked from home. In the evenings,  her words slurred, her memory like mist. I’d later learn that what I had interpreted as sometimes was frequently, and what I’d interpreted as normal wasn’t.

I returned to my office. Should I confide in someone? Alcoholism wasn’t that serious, was it? I mean, I drink. And sometimes I don’t drink. Kim could do that: control her consumption. I remember thinking, or maybe the right word is hoping: There’s nothing to worry about. But what if there was?

*

Kim passed away January 4, 2017, at 6:36 p.m. from complications of alcoholism, namely cirrhosis of the liver and esophageal varices. She is survived by her husband, four children, two stepdaughters; her mother, and two brothers. Her first grandson was born 36 hours later.

*

I’m not sure which anecdote best illustrates my stepmother’s alcoholism.

Maybe the time she flew to New York for rehab, drank during the flight, forgot why she was on a flight, and tried to check-in to a hotel at which she had no reservation. She slept in the lobby. The police came.

Maybe the time she chased my father with a garden hoe.

Maybe the rumors she circulated about my father—that he was using her for money, he was cheating. She had developed Korsakoff Syndrome (a chronic memory disorder), and in the morning she’d love him but by afternoon she’d forget, rage and call him an asshole. Could he get the fuck out of her house? More than once she demanded her assistant pack my father’s clothes in garbage bags.

Maybe that she said these things and behaved this way while my father put his life on hold to help her. He called every doctor in town. He researched every rehab center. He left her cards on the nightstand—I love you, he’d write, his all-caps handwriting in permanent ink.

Maybe the Christmas she tossed half my presents in our backyard lake. She’d thrown other things in the lake, too: her wedding ring, for one. Once she threatened to drive into the lake.

Maybe the time she lost her car at a hotel. She’d forgotten she drove, took a taxi home, and the next morning she’d forgotten to which hotel she’d gone.

Maybe the time I went to her house and she told me to fucking leave, that I’m not her fucking daughter, and why don’t I tell my father to fuck off, while I was at it. A minute later she emerged on the driveway in tears. She was sorry, she would do anything for my dad’s girls. Amy and I were like daughters to her. I couldn’t stop crying.

*

That was not Kim. Kim was sick.

That was not Kim. Kim was sick.

That was not Kim.

Kim was sick.

*

My father proposed to Kim in bed. They were that way, without frills. The six of us kids took to calling them Tomberly, or sometimes Tim. Their love was that gross gooey shit I didn’t believe existed until it stood before me, arms wrapped around waists and shoulders, smiling and laughing as though the only ones in on a joke. They were happy. My god, they were so happy.

They married November 3, 2012, in an intimate ceremony in Key Largo, FL. My step brother walked his mother down the aisle; my sister and I walked our dad. Kim’s daughter was maid-of-honor, and my Pop Pop was the best man. They married before a dock during sunset. My father’s band played the reception. Kim wore a teal and coral dress.

This year she forgot their anniversary. She was hospitalized, throwing up blood.

*

Alcoholism is a disease. A disease like cancer is a disease like diabetes is a disease like HIV is a disease. Many dispute this, claim people like Kim have a choice in the matter. They’re wrong. Nobody, least of all Kim, would choose this.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Addiction defines alcoholism this way: “An addict’s life is often centered around their drug of choice, which in the case of an alcoholic is alcohol. They spend much of their time figuring out how to obtain it, drinking it, and recovering from its effects. They also do this at the expense of practically everything and everyone around them. Jobs suffer, as do relationships with friends and family members, and often alcoholics are in trouble with the law.”

Alcoholism alone explains the illegal golf cart rides down busy roads to the gas station. Why she lost custody of her youngest sons. The bruised liver, the tar stool, the blown esophagus, the near-dementia. The tubes, the heart monitor, the machines that kept her alive more days than her body would have survived on its own.

*

I last saw Kim not connected to wires and machines in a hospital bed on Christmas Day 2015. (I first saw Kim connected to wires and machines in a hospital bed on Christmas Day 2016.) She was sober and chain-smoking on the porch beneath the tiki hut. It was later in the evening, only a few stragglers from the day remained: me, my father, Kim, and this guy who turned out to be a neighbor, but whom I’d never before met. He argued politics, something about how you just have to work hard to obtain a college education, blahblahblah.

“Look,” I said. Hard work can get you only so far: because of hard work, I honed my talent for writing and obtained a career. But I qualified for said career because of a costly master’s degree, which required a cross-country move. Kim paid for my undergraduate and graduate education. She financially supported my moves to New York and Los Angeles. 

No matter how much hard work, I would not be where I am today without my stepmother’s generosity. 

Kim aww’d, pulled me into her arms. She never did these things for recognition. She’s not that way, helping people to feel better about herself. She paid my tuition because she knew I wanted to be a writer, and she knew I wanted a degree that said so, and she knew she had the means to help me accomplish that.

“That’s so sweet of you to say, little love,” she said. She smiled her Kim-smile, her cheek pressed into mine.

*

At her celebration of life Saturday, I shared many of the above stories. The one’s about Kim. Not the one’s about her disease. No person should be defined or remembered by that which ailed them.

*

The first time I said aloud “Kim is dead,” it tasted badly. It was palpable, the words a weight on my tongue.

Grief is relentless.

Addiction is relentless.

My family, we’ve had practice in grief—we lost our Kim years ago. Interventions. Rehab stints. Marchman Act’s. Doctors and psychiatrists and drugs and memory loss and yelling—my god, there was so much yelling—and legal documents and lakes.

I last heard Kim’s voice on Election Day. She sounded good, sober. I could’ve recognized her voice anywhere. She joked I should run for president. We laughed, and I remembered Revolution, and boats, and the family vacation to Steamboat Springs when like dominoes we all contracted stomach viruses, and Christmas-Day-matching-pajamas and Costco-maxi-dresses, and singing B-b-b-bennie and the Jets!, and the way the sun glowed behind her on her wedding day.

Kiss Me, I’m Depressed

I.

Do you ever wake up with the sunrise, well-rested after eight hours of sleep, and kiss your dog’s cheek, smile into her fur as she licks your face good morning, and then exercise to music you love and drive to work listening to music you love, and feel good—genuinely good—and motivated, like maybe one day you’ll go back to school for a PhD, because, heck, you’re smart as shit, or maybe direct a movie, because is there anything you can’t do?, and you drink coffee and work a job you love with a boss you love even more, and then around 2:30pm an ache grows in your chest, a palpable dread as you consider the rest of your day—teach children, attend dinner with your closest friends—and you wish (an all-consuming wish) to instead curl into a ball in bed, or even on the floor, what does it matter?, and cry or drink wine, or cry and drink wine, and quit your job and move to Europe or frankly anywhere, anywhere but here, because does anything matter anyway?

II. In the fourth grade I gagged up everything I ate except koala cookies, the ones filled with strawberry frosting. The doctor called it stress. I was nine, afraid of my teacher. I didn’t have a word for it then. Stress wasn’t quite right. I’d later be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. 

III.

(From “You’re The Worst”) JIMMY I just still can’t understand. Can you—can you explain it to me? Please. GRETCHEN I’m scraped out. I’m that car we sent to Mars, flipped upside down so the sun can’t reach my solar panels. I’ve always been able to flip myself back over eventually, but… I ran out of times. This is how I am now. And it’s not okay with you, nor should it be.

IV. This morning I drove to my therapist’s office. My appointment was for 11:00, but I called last night to change it to 9:00. I guess I called too late and/or no one listened to my voicemail, because I arrived but my doctor didn’t. I waited until half-after and then drove to Starbucks for an egg and cheddar sandwich. I cried in the parking lot, drove down the street, cried in another parking lot. I texted the man I’m dating to run away from me as fast as he can. I texted my sister: I’ve hit bottom. I texted my boss to say I’d be in shortly. My eyes swelled. I screamed into my steering wheel: I’m a problem I’m a problem I’m a problem I’m a problem

I don’t remember now if I took surface streets or a freeway to work.

 V.

It doesn’t always look this way. Around noon it looked like me sitting silent while everyone around me spoke. I felt suffocated. My chest burned. Tuesday night it looked like too much whiskey. Six months ago it looked like curling into the fetal position in the bathtub, shower running. This morning it looked like not washing my hair for the fourth day in a row. I couldn’t lift my arms. Do you know how hard it is to lift arms? A year ago it looked like gas station coffee and pajamas. When I’m lonely, it looks like swiping on a dating app. When I lived in New York, it looked like staying in bed until four every day. It looked like Thai food and Jameson shots. It looked like living with an ex.

VI.

(From “You’re The Worst”) GRETCHEN

You need to stop. It’s like you have amnesia. Every day you think things are going to be different and I’ll just be happy. Well, maybe you can understand this: I feel nothing. About anything. Dogs, candy, old Blondie records, nachos, you, us, nothing. So, for the last time, please go.

VII.

Dear loved ones, My brain is broken, and I’ve spiraled into my dark place. It’s not terrible here, but for the lack of light and the sudden, impractical mood and appetite fluctuations. I drank a strawberry milkshake for lunch—that helped, until my stomach hurt. Teaching tiny humans helps. Writing helps. Alcohol doesn’t help, but I’m learning that the hard way. I’m sure exercise would help if I had the energy. I have no energy. (It’s not that I hurt; it’s that I’m hollow.) Singing Alanis Morissette helps, specifically the Jagged Little Pill album. My Chihuahua’s kisses help. If someone wants to bring me brownies, I’m almost positive that won’t help-help, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

I guess what I’m trying and failing to say is, I know this happens, sometimes for months, if I’m lucky for only weeks, and who knows how long until it passes, how long I’ll feel another way before that passes, too, and believe me I know to do *what makes me happy,* although right now “happy” feels like some imagined bullshit that dim-witted, half-brained hippies fell for. You can’t fix me—you can’t fix me—but if someone wants to love me, wants to accept me anyway, wants to listen, wants to sit in silence in my bed, wants to tell me I’m pretty and smart and funny, wants to walk my dog because fuck that’s tedious right now, wants to recommend music, wants to watch The Mindy Project, wants to send me snail mail, wants to stare at the stars, wants to let me cry, wants to pay off my credit card bill, wants to go for sushi, wants to write me haikus, wants to dance in my living room, wants to listen to me read poetry, wants to watch the sunset or stay up all night for the sunrise, wants to buy me coffee because another fun thing is I’m constantly tired, wants to play me guitar, wants to play me piano, wants to play Story Cubes, wants to understand me…well. I’d like that.

VIII.

As per Alex Simand’s request, I shall end with a poem I just pulled out of my ass.

 roses are red—i guess

                       i don’t know

                       i like the yellow ones with

                       pink tips

and i like morning breath

on my forehead, on my belly

the squishy part above my hip bone

i giggle ‘cause it tickles

but i like it anyway

and i like morning weather

and body heat

and cold fingertips dancing on my rib cage

can you hold around my rib cage?

squeeze the life back into me—

                       these days i’m bones

                       these days i’m tired

                       these days i need a pinch

to know i’m breathing

Good Girlfriend, Bad Daughter

by JEH, guest writer

I cowered in the corner of my best friend’s bedroom, one shoulder against her armoire, the other against her turquoise wall. “Please,” I said to my boyfriend. “I can’t. My mouth hurts.”

“You’re a fucking cock tease.” His voice was a whisper, but his anger filled the room as he raised his fist. “Stand the fuck up.”  

I turned my head to the side, moved my hands in front of my face. “Please don’t.”

I don’t remember what he said after that, but a moment later I nodded and extended a hand, and he pulled me up and backward toward the bed. I do remember that I was in my bathing suit and my hair was wet; we’d been swimming that afternoon. I remember that in the lamplight my skin looked even tanner than it was; I was sixteen, it was summer, and I wasn’t a fan of sunscreen. I remember the pain in my jaw as I fit his penis into my mouth. I’d had my wisdom teeth out a few days before. I remember his hand on my head.

That night I went home and showered and dried my hair. I sat on my bed and wrote about the day in my diary. “I gave Kris head for the first time tonight,” it probably said. “He said I was amazing,” it probably said.

I wasn’t a victim. I was a good girlfriend.

*

Later that summer my mother read my diary, a fact I didn’t know when she asked me if I wanted to go to dinner with her, just the two of us. I thought that would be a special treat; I’m the oldest of five kids. I didn’t get much time alone with my mom.

In the dim light of the restaurant, my mother paused and changed the topic of conversation. “I know you think you’re a ‘good girl,’”--she framed her fingers in scare quotes across the table--“but good girls don’t give blow jobs.”

My face burned. I didn’t want to, I wanted to say. Instead, I nodded and took another bite of pasta. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I know.”

At the end of the summer, Kris kissed my best friend and, when I broke up with him, started to call me in tears and threaten to kill himself. Once, he showed up at my window at midnight; he lived an hour away. I told him to go. I told him I never wanted to see him again.

After that, he stalked me via AOL Instant Messenger, where he berated me ceaselessly. I flinched each time the incoming message signal dinged. I told him to stop. I called him an asshole. I muted the computer. I kept reading. At cum-suckin whore, I printed the conversation and took it to my father, a lawyer. I was afraid. I prayed I had grounds for a restraining order.  

My dad read, then looked at me. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “In a court of law, they’ll say you provoked him,” he said. “You shouldn’t have taken the bait.”

I nodded and took back the paper. “Oh. Yes, sir.” I felt painfully aware of my mouth moving over the words.  

I folded the paper and put it in my diary. I never wrote in my diary again.

*

Years later, when Facebook opened to the public, I started getting friend requests from Kris.

Each time I see his name, I’m sixteen again: in a bathing suit; at a restaurant; standing in front of my father.

I freeze. I swallow. I am painfully aware of my mouth.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I’ll be sharing my stories throughout the next few weeks (and forever), and I hope others feel liberated to do the same. We should not—cannot—be silenced. Our voice is our power.

Donald Trump Is Our Abusive Boyfriend

After the second presidential debate I walked home from the neighborhood bar and collapsed into child’s pose. My roommate had skipped the debate—”I know my triggers,” she said—and now lay on the couch scrolling through Netflix. I inhaled, filling my chest and stomach, and then exhaled, as though I could expel from my memory—my body—the horror show I’d witnessed. There is not enough wine in the world for this shit.        

In 2005, Donald Trump rode in an Access Hollywood bus with host Billy Bush and bragged about how, as a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants—most notably, grab women by the pussy. Initially journalists and mansplainers everywhere clutched their pearls at his vulgarity, until it occurred to everyone—HOLY SHIT!—the Republican presidential candidate bragged about sexual assault. This would be shocking had he not spent the last year and a half incessantly targeting every human not born white male. His campaign is a master course in oppression, and at least half of our country doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. I’m unsure which is worse.    I was most recently sexually assaulted two years ago. New York City, the downtown 1, dinnertime rush hour. Somewhere between 79th and 50th, a man squirmed his flaccid dick out the zipper of his red jeans and stood there, his hipbones at my eye level. When I later told friends about this, I heard more than once: “Welcome to New York.” This is the equivalent of “locker room banter” for desensitized city dwellers.

During the debate, people around me laughed. I fidgeted. I slapped my chair’s arm rests, tapped my foot against the table’s legs. I ordered a second Bulleit neat. I practiced the breathing exercises a hypnotist taught me: inhale for seven counts, exhale for eleven.

This election cycle became triggering long before Friday’s video. I started unfriending Trump supporters on Facebook weeks, no, months ago. Two weeks ago I took a personal day from work: I couldn’t do society. As someone who endured emotional abuse and has spent years clawing her way out the other side, I don’t need my progress derailed by an orange man with a penchant for –isms and –phobias. I feel threatened. I feel unheard, invalidated, gaslighted, unloved. Years ago I made a pact with myself: I will never allow a man to make me feel like that again. America, you shouldn’t allow a man treat you this way now. 

You are in an abusive relationship. It’s cool: it took me more than three years to recognize I was in one. Frankly, it’s not completely your fault, as our culture doesn’t speak often enough or loud enough about domestic abuse.

Evidence of Trump’s abusive campaign has been obvious since he threw his hat in the ring and generalized Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” He’s made a habit of humiliating people, highlighting the mistakes of others, attacking anyone who jokes about him (or disagrees with him), exhibiting zero empathy or compassion, and giving no shits about anyone else’s feelings—I mean, unless those feelings mirror his feelings, and in which case, it’s still all about him.    I compiled the following handy-dandy list on how Donald Trump abused America between his “apology” Saturday morning and debate performance Sunday night. Heads up: this may be triggering.  1. He demeaned and disregarded the opinions, ideas, suggestions, and needs of others.  Anderson Cooper: Please allow her to respond. She didn’t talk while you talked. Hillary Clinton: Yes, that’s true. I didn’t. Donald Trump: Because you had nothing to say.

2. He belittled and trivialized Clinton’s accomplishments, hopes, and dreams.  Clinton: Well, here we go again. I have been in favor of getting rid of carried interest for years starting when I was a senator from New York. But that's not the point here. Trump: Why didn't you do it? Why didn’t you do it? Clinton: Because I was a senator with a Republican president. Trump: You could have done it. If you were an effective senator, you could have done it. But you were not an effective senator.  3. He accused and blamed Hillary for things he knew weren’t true.  Trump: First of all, she was there as Secretary of State with the so-called line in the sand. Clinton: No, I wasn't, I was gone. I hate to interrupt you. At some point we need to get the facts out.  Trump: You were still in contact with the White House. 4. He made excuses for his behavior, tried to blame others, and had difficulty apologizing.  Trump: Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground. I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. 5. He called people names, gave unflattering labels, and made cutting remarks. Trump: I was surprised to see [Bernie Sanders] sign up with the devil.  

6. He played the victim and tried to deflect blame onto others, rather than take responsibility.  Trump: Let's be honest, we're living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we're facing today.

7. He invalidated and denied his abusive behavior when confronted.  Trump: No, I didn’t say that at all. I don't think you understood what was said. This was locker room talk. 

Trump: Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Cooper: In the days after the first debate, you sent out a series of tweets from 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. including one that told people to check out a sex tape. Is that the kind of discipline... Trump: No, it wasn't check out a sex tape. [It was.] 8. He made subtle threats and negative remarks with the intent to frighten and control Clinton.  Trump: If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor. Clinton: It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country. Trump: Because you would be in jail. 9. He tried to make us believe that he is always right, and others are always wrong (even when he’s proven incorrect). Trump: How stupid is our country? Martha Raddatz: There are sometimes reasons the military does that. Psychological warfare. Trump: I can't think of any. Raddatz: It might be to get civilians out. Trump: I can't think of any. 10. He gave disapproving or contemptuous looks or body language. 

After I lifted myself from child’s pose, I joined my roommate on the couch. We watched Mean Girls. I ate leftover Thai. We laughed about Glen Coco. I wonder now, Who here has felt personally victimized by Donald Trump? The Republican presidential nominee is somehow, strangely, our real life Regina George. 

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I’ll be sharing my stories throughout the next few weeks (and forever), and I hope others feel liberated to do the same. We should not—cannot—be silenced. Our voice is our power.

It’s Because You’re Crazy

I was visiting San Francisco when it occurred to me—unprompted and after only two beers—that I’d never properly addressed my four-year emotionally and verbally abusive relationship. I mean, I thought I had. I’d done shit. In the five years since our breakup, I’d moved to New York and Los Angeles, once drank enough vodka to nap on Sammy Sosa’s shoulder, started a career and pursued a master’s degree, trespassed across the George Washington Bridge, became a vegetarian, figured out what in the world “feminism” means, and paid $1,425 of my hard-earned, cash-money a month for a one-bedroom apartment in the Hills. I was hot shit. Until, that is, I sat in a brewery at a picnic table across from my most recent ex-boyfriend (a kind man with whom I’d broken up, but hadn’t wanted to), and upon returning to the apartment at which I was staying, I thought, what a wonder it would be to die.  I don’t mean die-die. I mean, not answer my phone, not get out of bed but to shit or pee or pour another whiskey, not deal with sticky emotions and memories and heartache. Die metaphorically, y’know? And, really, only until the pain stopped; once the pain stopped, I’d be chill. But life, in that moment, was killing me. 

The next morning I emailed therapists. I scheduled an appointment for Wednesday. Driving south on the 101, I rehearsed the session. I’d start from the beginning of my love life (twelve years old, a boy I saw only three times in as many months whose first name rhymed with his last), segue into jokes about unrequited love, and land on this zinger: the conclusion I’d come to on the drive: I’m terrified of love. 

I should be clear: I’m not afraid of *commitment* or *heartbreak* or *vulnerability*. That is to say, I am afraid of all of those things. But more pressingly I’m afraid the man I love will call me a slut. I’m afraid the man I love will pin me against walls, car doors, our bed. I’m afraid the man I love will yell at me so loudly, so forcibly, our roommate will consider police intervention. I’m afraid the man I love will emotionally stray and blame the betrayal on me. I’m afraid of gaining weight to the man I love’s disapproval, and later, his insults. I’m afraid I’ll uncover some buried courage to get the hell out, only for the man I love to call two days later with the heads up: he had fucked another girl in our bed. I’m afraid of the rug burn from crying on the floor. I’m afraid the man I love won’t apologize. I’m afraid the man I love will demand I shoulder the blame. 

I’m afraid because this happened to me. 

Therapy went as rehearsed, but for one breakthrough: my therapist confirmed I’d been abused. I knew this already, of course; I’d conducted the Google searches, written the op-eds, spoken the words aloud. But nobody had, like, so assuredly validated it. So when she said, “You were in an abusive relationship. You’re okay. It wasn’t your fault,” I could do little more than drum my fingers on my knees and try my best to breathe. 

There’s a stigma against mental health, but that much we all know. Why else would it take five years to seek therapy? Why else did I deny myself antidepressants? Isn’t life easier thinking maybe I’m a little screwed up, but, like, nbd, than a PhD-toting stranger saying so? 

Less obvious, though, is the persistence—the downright unawareness—of gaslighting. Besides it being the one skill at which presidential nominee Donald Trump is truly accomplished, gaslighting is also the mad-chill friend who tells you to “Calm down,” to “Relax,” says, “It’s not that big of a deal.” Gaslighting is the old college buddy who says, “I was very close with you and [your ex-boyfriend] during the time you were dating and I don’t recall any abuse.” Gaslighting is saying, “You’re insane,” and “You’re crazy,” yes, but it’s also saying, “Other people have had it much worse,” and “I think you’re interpreting your feelings as abuse.”  All of this has been said to me. This year. 

But if the abuse was merely my imagination, and in fact my ex-boyfriend was an honest man, and me, a delusional woman, and in fact I’d conjured up the whole ordeal—what for? I beg to know—then why did I tense when a man I adored gripped my shoulders? Why did I compulsively shake, claw at my skin, writhe and struggle to breathe while watching the movie Room? When Joy’s captor, Old Nick, yells, hadn’t I heard a variation of his words before?    Look, I’m not not messed up: I’ve been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and any given day might be improved with a glass or two of pinot. But the implication of an old college friend saying, “I have had unhealthy relationships and maybe I’ve even let a man treat me less than perfect, but when I’ve reflected and saw the role I played in the relationship, I didn’t blame him or write fictitious stories about him just to get sympathy” is this: 

Your reality, Lyndsay, is untrue. No, look, I hear you: your ex-boyfriend was sometimes a jerk. And sure, your relationship wasn’t always the healthiest. But, like, have you considered that’s your fault? If it was so bad, why didn’t you just leave? That’s plain weakness. What’d you say? You were afraid to leave? That’s ridiculous. What, he slammed you into a garage door track? Maybe that’s because you were crying too loudly. 

I know the implication by heart—I’d gaslighted myself for years. I’d spent all that time avoiding therapy telling myself I’d asked for it. I was too sensitive, a crybaby. Was there another way to love someone like me: damaged, emotional, too outspoken for her own good? If I’d shut the fuck up every once in a while, quit fighting my ex, or better, quit believing I’m worthy of his love, I’d realize he makes good points. I am immature and insecure and slutty and crazy, and this man—this gentle, honest man—is doing me a service letting me know. No, I never needed anyone to gaslight me. I had it covered.       

In my therapist’s office, I drummed my fingers on my knees and tried my best to breathe. My heart raced. I gulped, an attempt to break the knot in my throat. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been abused.”  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault.”

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I’ll be sharing my stories throughout the next few weeks (and forever), and I hope others feel liberated to do the same. We should not—cannot—be silenced. Our voice is our power.