making it through
By the time you read this I will be thirty already, but just now I have an hour and forty minutes left of twenty-nine, and some things to tell you, so here it goes. I was at K.'s earlier, and leaving, actually, and T. asked how I felt about it, the end of this decade, the commencement of the next one. I told her what I've been thinking and not saying, because it's so dramatic, because I have, like, my health and my apartment, my job, my books, all of my family and all of my limbs and all of my extravagant luck.
I said, "I feel like I'm walking out of a house that's on fire." As in: there's nowhere to linger. As in: there's nothing to go back for. As in: I've been trying to leave the place I've been living for so fucking long.
When I started taking Lexapro in August, I wrote, "I say I let them put me on an SSRI but the truth is that I asked for it." Is there anything more powerful than being sick of your own shit? My therapist had been gently suggesting drugs for years, at that point, and the one before her thought it would help me, too. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready I wasn't ready I wasn't ready, I was young and I was fierce and I was determined to feel everything, even when all I was feeling was pain, and then numbness, and then static, and then fear.
I didn't write it then but as it happens I know, to the minute, when I decided that I was ready for the drugs. I was at M.'s wedding; I had had a very bad panic attack the day before, a couple of hours before the rehearsal dinner, had nearly passed out after getting out of the shower, had missed most of the festivities to lie in bed trembling. The night of the wedding itself, though, my luck my luck held, my brain cooperated.
It was three or four in the morning and we'd been dancing for hours. Someone put on The Mountain Goats song This Year. Every time I hear This Year I think about how B. used to play it on December 31, a little joke with herself; I think about the time I kissed N. in front of her just to piss her off, because that was the kind of thing I did for so much of my stupid, wasteful, vicious twenties: kiss boys in order to provoke girls, hurt someone else before they hurt me, hurt someone else so that they would hurt me. A. said to me today, about that period of my behavior: "You know. You made sure to take up a lot of space."
I am gonna make it! Through this year! If it kills me! M. and I were holding each other by the forearms. We jumped up and down, heedless. We were defiant, snarling along. My best friends, her wedding, the enormous dark silent wet hot Maine night all around us. The only place I could have wanted to be in that moment. There I was.
And then, all at once, just like that! The fight went out of me. I felt it like a dam bursting: the enormous, annihilating sadness of years spent living only to prove I could survive them. I thought: I could make it through an indefinite number of years before they killed me. I could keep up the facade of my fury. I could keep snarling and spitting, showing the world the sharpness of my teeth.
But the truth was, no one was coming for me-- not to kill me, and not to save me. In that moment, late at night or early in the morning, exhausted either way, I had burned up the last of my anger, and I was left with the oceans of my loneliness and despair. It turned out that rage had only created a temporary perimeter against them; it had not armored me against their incursion, had not protected me from their effects. A year or two earlier, at some other moment of acute crisis, I had pulled a desperate set of tarot cards, asking them only: is it safe?
At that moment, I finally, fully understood that the answer was only: no.
The answer was: as safe as you make it. You are only ever as safe as you will let yourself be.
I know that nothing is really going to change when it ticks over to midnight, to 12:01. I have to become whatever different person I want to be. But I think I'm ready to do that now, or at least to start figuring out how to try. I don't want to make it through this decade if it kills me. I want to make it through this decade because that's what I want to do.
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I wrote an actual essay about the end of my twenties and my misadventures with men and everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster as part of The Awl's year-end My Other Life series; if you're not superstitious about things produced in 2016, you can read it here. I also wrote a Tumblr post about The Rolling Stones and bad winters and living in songs and in your body.
And here is 2017's first little thing.