Signs May 22, 2008

I once tried to see a psychic after spotting a curbside sign. 
  
The sign wasn’t some otherworldly cue from the magnanimous cosmos (which would probably make for a far more interesting story), but an actual sign. A sign with colorful, big, stenciled letters in inviting rainbow paint that splashed an anomoly among the harmless trees and homes that lined that particular stretch of Main Street in my hometown.
 
And, see, Senior Year In High School Me craved anything that stood out as something different from all the harmlessness.
   
I say tried because the visit lasted only five minutes. It may have ended even sooner but the side room my friend and I had been immediately ushered into with a door that was then locked on us did not, unfortunately, have any windows to conduct an escape. When someone eventually returned to tell us we could have our Tarot cards read for $50, we chose the open door as an opportunity that would cost us nothing to see a guaranteed future of living to see at least another day.
  
As we ran away to our car with an engine still warm, the fortune teller yelled in our direction that she’d read our palms for only twenty dollars because she felt very compelled to give our fortunes that day and my friend growled at me, “What? She couldn’t see into the future that locking us into a windowless room would scare us the fuck off?”
  
I - and I assume my friend too - haven’t tried to see any kind of seer since. 
  
Including even Mistress Zarena, who could be found above the Dunkin Donuts in my college town. She advertised herself using a gigantic green sign covered with moons and stars. A sign that always seemed decidedly forced. Like the psychic had determined to dumb down her services to lure in unsuspecting naïves only to lock them in side rooms and offer Tarot card readings for the mere sum of $50 once they arrived at her door! 
 
Thank goodness I was onto her.
 
I have little idea today why I had wanted to see that psychic when I was 17. Maybe it was the product of being stuck in intense family hell and wanting some kind of assurance that I would get out of it all okay one day. Whatever my reason then, I’m pretty thrilled today that getting locked inside a windowless room of a stranger’s house was the only thing that scared me that day.
 
Because, really, I’m a terrible contradiction of Skeptic and Superstitious.
 
Signs covered with rainbow colored letters and stars and moons that probably only attract toddlers besides myself aside, my first instinct is to say No, Absolutely Fucking Not when faced with the hypothetical of whether I’d want to know my future if I could. I’ve encovered a way of living that works for me and that involves doing so in the very, very present. I like making decisions about things that will happen right away. It’s a means of self-perservation that almost certainly creates more problems than it fixes. But life gets too complicated and complex outside a 24-hour window to make me want to go about it any other way.
   
If I were to ever sit down and be given the first letter of the middle name of my future husband or the number of years plus or minus five I had left to live - it would really mess with me. Mess with how I looked at life. Make me ask things like, Well, did I have three kids because I wanted to have three kids or did I have three kids because some quack told me I’d have three kids someday and really, who can I blame for these punks here, please?
  
I laugh at TV shows like Crossing Over. Admittedly, I’ve only watched it while flipping channels so maybe my derision is premature. I can’t help it. I hear John Edwards ramble to someone in the audience about how they have a dead relative (listener raises eyebrow in confusion)… no, a close friend… (listener lifts head in encouraging manner) who felt like family, like a relative…, and I’ve peaced out of that channel like some close friend who felt like family for someone did on them.
  
But I do get into all the silly shit - horoscopes, fortune cookies, numberology, the Love Calculator, MASH, colorology, animalology (Ed. note: I just made this up but it probably exists, right?), whatever. At the end of a Chinese dinner with me, I’ll force you to pick your fortune cookie first because I guess I like how fatalist it seems that way. Although really, it’s just that I’m so weak when it comes to decision making that I can’t even decide my own fate by choosing my own damn fortune cookie. I’d rather let the universe - by way of dinner date and a crisp Oriental cookie - decide for me. 
 
I’m multiple personalities in one; hot, cold, with little in between. All extrovert on the outside but secretly aware that I would be just fine as a hermit. Until, that is, I desparately needed people’s attention once more. Some would say I’m the quintessential Gemini; I’d say the ultimate case of unmedicated bipolar disease. Gemini, I’ll concede, has the advantage of sounding more optimistic.
 
I’ll wait for that surprise announcement on the 16th of this month. But I’ll most likely forget by then. Because with as much enthusiasm as I approach all this stuff, I understand it’s fluff. And that’s why I like it. That’s why I’m okay running with it at an extreme level.
 
Questions of fate and choice, how much of life is already determined and how much of life we determine will always see me lean towards the latter. I love the idea of choice. As someone who grew up locked inside a totalitarian household, I crave the idea of choice. Having options? Is my drug.
  
Maybe that’s why I can come across as indecisive sometimes. It’s not that I can’t choose something; it’s that I can’t choose one. I don’t tend to have favorites for this reason. I love summer. But I love fall and winter too and spring is absolutely lovely (and hey, Spring, if I keep throwing compliments your way, maybe you could pay back the compliment by hurrying your arrival to Chicago?). I like purple and hues in the green family are nice too and you can never go wrong with black and doesn’t it really depend on whatever the item is that I’m choosing the color for anyway? I can see myself as either a serious professional or a free-spirited artist. I like the beach and the mountains, and either Thai or Italian sounds absolutely delicious for dinner tonight.
 
That must be what makes fortune tellers seem so attractive to some people. Trying to relieve some of the overwhelming concept of choice and different paths and infinite futures and wanting some kind of guarantee no matter what the answer is. No matter how deluded it is to try to get some insight into the one thing we should all be able to accept as something we’re not supposed to know.
 
It’s what can make indecision appealing, too. Making the choice to not choose.
  
I don’t like admitting that I don’t know what to do next. I’ve always run on a bender of impulse where the Great Unknown of tomorrow, next week, next year, the future is only seen as an irresistible challenge.
 
But with yet another post-college birthday just a few weeks away, I can’t help but feel like I’ve trapped myself in a sense of waiting. Like I’m sitting around for a fucking sign. An inclination one way or another that can get my brain to say that this is the right thing to do with my life because it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Something that can let me know it’s okay to say no, for good, to a future of law school, six figure salaries, security and pleased parents. Because it’ll all be okay.
  
Something that - admittedly - I can blame if it all goes to shit.
 
Who knows.
  

While this doesn’t look too promising, maybe “if you really want it and are prepared to make some sacrifices for it…” is as good a sign as any.
 
To give me that extra inspiration right now to move - anything being better than sitting around and waiting.
 
Yes. While I’m perfectly comfortable taking my cues from some online game, a psychic - a real live person who can tell me my future - can just stay the hell away from me.
 
I don’t need verification I’ll be ending up in an insane asylum someday.

My Name Is January 16, 2008

He sat me down and looked at me. Quizzically.

“Okay, Daughter, why you put Kimberly as your name on math homework?”

I stared back at him in silence.

His eyes bored into my own, increasingly quizzical. “This your math homework or not?”

It was. But I shook my head no. Facing my father, the no-frills immigrant whose idea of a good joke was Daughter? It play time already? I have good game for you. You play writing alphabet in perfect cursive 50 times!, I had already determined that fibbing away my ownership of this piece of paper that cringed before him would be far easier than materializing the thinking behind signing a piece of homework with a name that wasn’t my own.

He paused. “So then you telling me you not do your math homework last night?”

We both knew he had me. For reasons twofold. One: My pencil scratches the night before had led him to lecture that the most correct answer for long division problem #7 not what you write, Daughter! Remainder should never be in fraction! Use decimal. Einstein and Newton use decimal! And the man had a memory that would make most of today’s computer hard drives jealous. Two: This was my father. The man whose motto for schoolwork was 100% or Better! I was clearly odd enough to sign my homework with a name that wasn’t my own, but I wasn’t ready to admit to not finishing my homework. Not to this guy.

The truth was that 9-year-old fourth grader me loved the name Kimberly. So much so that I had begun signing all of my assignments as Kimberly. Only a few weeks earlier, we had been given an art assignment involving construction paper, blunt scissors, and a concept using our names to create cut-outs. I used the name Kimberly.

Ms. Kennedy had no other choice than to call my father and politely inquire if, perhaps, there was a pet named Kimberly in our household or, even, a family member with the name. He, in response, asked her if she was looking for the Kims.

“Ok. Maybe this a easier question. Who is Kimberly?” His expression had become one of genuine curiosity.

Being impressionable has always been one of my Achilles’ Heels (Ed. note: Because each of my multiple personalities is allowed one, right?). For 24-Year-Old Me, this can mean getting too affected by my surroundings. By current events; the grind of the daily workday; and harsh elements that come with living in a big city.

Fourth grade Me played absorbent sponge to Saved By The Bell. California Dreams. Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club series. I wanted to be Zach Morris’ girlfriend, Jessica Wakefield’s BFF, and Alternate Officer #2. 

And being a Kimberly felt like one step closer to that.

Kimberly meant shiny blonde hair always tied in a high ponytail. Someone who opened her My Little Pony lunch box and found very normal peanut butter and jelly sandwiches everyday. Who never got teased for her slanted eyes or asked to show her Tae Kwan Do moves while waiting in line to play Four Square. Who didn’t find Curtis Haywood always singing about her dirty knees or telling her to look at these.

For my father, I wove a tale about a secret club made up of me and my friends whose initiation demanded everyone to go by their code name for one week and mine happened to be Kimberly. (Ed. note: How early my tentative grasp on reality displayed itself!) My father accepted my answer and punishment involved re-doing every piece of homework I had signed with the false name. Thus ended the Kimberly Saga.

People I’ve met since elementary school refuse to believe I was ever severely shy. That’s the equivalent of believing there was ever a time you weren’t a huge whore, my best friend in college Teddy used to tell me. Or a nonstop lush, piped in Carlos.

Feeling shy is a resort of safety, though, when you’re a young kid and you’re impressionable and you have a volatile father at home, and you can’t understand why the hell your eyes or your skin gets you teased at school. Not by everyone. Not all the time. But enough to make you feel guilty, like you’ve done something wrong yet you’re not sure what or why. Guilt that eventually transforms into shame.

The teasing eventually ended in fifth grade when all the boys began to like me. Natural athlete, tall for my age, and already growing into my looks: I became a triple threat in the World of Elementary Schoolage. 

But the universe and I had signed a contractual agreement at my birth that agreed they would be able to play fun with the hell out of my life until its end because, in return, I would be allowed to live to see mornings after nights of taking 10 tequila shots in 10 minutes or double fisting King Cobras before watching Snakes on a (Motherfucking) Plane that would come in my future. And the similar.

So my parents moved our family to a nearby town the following summer. One far smaller and far less diverse, with a single middle school and a single high school. My friends cried at the news. I cried at the news. I begged my parents to change their minds (Ed. note: In the history of humankind, has this ever worked?). They comforted me with the fact that I was starting middle school. And that no one would know anyone.

They were wrong.

On my first day of school, I quickly learned that everyone knew everyone.

Some since pre-school.

But, as the new girl, I was flocked to. And I quickly forgot the shyness that I had learned in elementary school.

The next seven years saw popularity, class president elections, team captain selections and a Homecoming Queen nod. And not once in a small town that was a whiteboard dotted by only a few specks of color did I ever feel out of place by being one of those few specks.

Zora Neale Hurston begins her book Their Eyes Were Watching God with an anecdote about the main character’s first realization of her race. It happened with a photograph and noticing a dark person who was different from all the other little children and - after asking who that was - learning that she was the one different from all the rest.

Learning that she was different from all the rest.

Life after my small town began to teach me that life is a bit too big and a bit too fast for people to always have the time or opportunity to get to know the person behind the shell of a body. It began to teach me that sometimes you’re a category rather than an individual. That pre-established schemas help people come to conclusions about you. That something as simple as an outward appearance can establish a sole identity.

Learning, for me, began at my prestigious alma mater.

My mailbox burst with mail sleepily waiting to be read on that first day I arrived. Many were fliers. Join this group for women! And Do you have Pride for your Race?! Or Hi - I hear you like God! (Ed. note: To this day, I have no idea where they may have heard this.)

I have a hell of a lot of pride for my gender, for my race, and for my personal ideas of what may or may not exist when it comes to something more spiritual. But I don’t particularly give a shit for people who want to draw assumptions about me based on any of these things. 

I’m a complicated mess. Don’t you dare try to pigeon hole me.

When Elly’s crush Adam developed a big crush on me during our senior year of college, it was because he must have a thing for Asians. And I get it. I get that Asian Fetishes exist - believe me, I get it. Asians are fierce!, remember? But to Elly, I never said, Well Rob must have a thing for bitchy JAPs. Which could have been true. It’s just not the kind of thinking my mind would employ to tell my friend why someone must like them.

When I was admitted to a nearby top undergraduate university before anyone else who had applied at my high school, my best friend Elizabeth told me dismissively that It must be because you’re Asian. Affirmative action crap. My best friend - who I had always known could be jealous and competitive but this? - slammed me as a misplaced statistic. I didn’t end up going to this school. But she did. She eventually was accepted many months later. The same university whose Admissions Office employed her mother. But I’m sure that had no influence. Just like my perfect ACTs; near perfect SATs; 11 AP tests all scored 5s; substantial volunteer work with Habitat and the Battered Women’s Shelter; and being Class President or Cross Country Captain had no influence in her opinion.

When a man crashed a rock through the passenger window of my car a few years ago and yelled GO BACK TO CHINA, YOU CHINK, my mind immediately remembered a past boyfriend’s Japanese-American friend who had been shot while stopped at a traffic light by someone in a car next to him in Palo Fucking Alto, California. Both then and now, stories like this shoot feelings of surreal into my veins. A sense of disbelief. My natural naivity couldn’t then and can’t now understand that much hatred and ignorance still being something people feel. That it’s something that has yet to remain laid to rest in history books, in the sections about the Holocaust or Bosnia or Colonial America. 

I’m hardly the target of copious amounts of racism. This post would be a lie if that’s what I made it appear. But each time - any time - it happens, it stings. It’s an extra layer that I’m reminded I need to be conscious of and fight through if I want people to see me. And I do. I can’t bare the thought of being just a statistic or a stereotype. I need to be allowed to be me.   

To the insults, I want to yell back: Hey! Be fair, dude. I’m a fucking walking bundle of traits that are ripe for insult! Alcoholic. Overindulgent. Talkative. Bitchy at times. Too smiley at other times. Flakey. Manic. Nympho. Not short-tempered but in possession of what I call a Short-Notice Temper. (Ed. note: My boyfriend nods along.)

Perhaps the modern world has zapped creativity from the masses.

Color-Blindness isn’t the remedy. It has to be Color-Acceptance. Acceptance to coexist. To not shoot people you pull up next to at a traffic light. To not tie up people to the backs of cars and drag them for miles. To not kidnap people and beat the shit out of them. Just because they’re different from us. 

And to not yell WELL WHY DON’T YOU GO BACK TO YOUR TRAILER SO YOU CAN FUCK YOUR SISTER in retaliation because it’s easy to stoop to their level because they did it first.   

The university I attended held graduations over the course of a few days. The grand ceremony for all graduates to attend - the one with the Great Famous Speaker (Ed. note: Who has been in the news a lot these days and forces me to remember his dreadfully depressing speech that did not mention the word graduation or the idea of graduation one single time), the Fanfare, the Sense of Being Part of Something Bigger Than Oneself - fell on one night. The other days were for each college’s individual graduation ceremonies where graduates would Walk Across the Stage and Grab The Fake Diploma.

A week before graduation, instructions were emailed to all seniors in the college of arts and sciences to pick up cards from the Student Center and fill them out with our names and majors. Add a phonetic spelling of your name if you think the announcer may have any trouble with it, the email included.

My birth name is Western European. It’s in the King James Bible. It’s - dare I say it - a WASP Name. But from my first day in kindergarten and every new class or substitute teacher ever after, I learned that seeing my first name coupled with my Foreign Last Name triggered mispronunciations. Which is pretty fucking funny for me because, like I said, it’s - dare I say it - a WASP Name.

Teddy and I dutifully followed the email instructions and went to the Student Center to fill out our cards. I quipped that I should add ”(Rhymes with _______ )” between my first and last name to help the speaker. Teddy responded that if I did this, I would most likely walk across the stage with the announcer saying “[Damsel] Rhymes with _______ [Last name]“.

He had a point.

So I refrained. And come graduation day did. And the speaker - dare I say it - Asian-ized my first name just like I thought he would. But hell, I didn’t give a fuck, I was graduating from fucking college!

I walked towards the stage. I smiled towards my fanatic twelve family members who pressed against the railing framing the seating section, each with some form of electronic - a video camera, a tape recorder (I kid you not), a camera - in their hand, and stepped onto the stage. I quickly scanned the sea of black robes to find Teddy, who had bet me $100 that the announcer wouldn’t fuck up my name.

And tripped. And pulled the Dean down with me because he chose that moment to shake my hand. And I laughed the kind of shuddering, silent, huffing and puffing type of laugh. And left my faux diploma on the stage. And was asked to return to the stage by the announcer with the microphone for the entire audience to hear, just to be certain that should one or two people have been looking down at their programs for the last 3 minutes, they’d be involved in the fun as well.

Perhaps it would have all happened differently if I had just filled out the card with the name Kimberly.

But what’s in a name? Would I not drink as much or swear as much or like math or dress appropriately for work more often or play Submissive Daughter or refrain from tripping while walking across the stage during my college graduation by any other name?

Something tells me no.

Totaled Denial November 30, 2007

My father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. My 16-year-old sister was the one to accidentally inform me of this a few nights ago.
 
Accidentally because our phone conversation began when she called to ask how one determines the subject in a sentence that uses passive voice. And it migrated to how my mother was anxious to see her new Saab SUV. Which led to me wondering aloud why the hell our family needs four cars. Answered by my sister telling me that my father’s truck was gone and that she had cried when she saw the metal carnage. And ended when my sister asked, “Do you think I wasn’t supposed to tell you about the accident?”
 
Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt.
 
Growing up, I lived in a town that was frequently listed in the top half of national lists that rank the best cities to live in America. Or raise a family. Or find good schools and safe streets and a real sense of community. One of those types of lists. It was a town with only one high school. The type of place where doors are left unlocked and golf courses can be found 10 minutes apart from one another. Where everyone and everything is beautiful and white and clean and perfect on the surface.
 
I played the charade. I never told anyone what happened behind the closed doors of my house, the endless oppression and desperation I felt when I was inside it for loving someone so much that I knew loved me too but only wanted to decimate everything about me that made me me. I went to school every morning with a large smile on my face. I got the grades and played the sports and had the hoards of friends. I got invited to all the parties and the tailgates and the bonfires and I lied endlessly when explaining why I wouldn’t be able to make it to this one this time. It was playing by the rules. Because that was my high school and that was my town.
 
Nothing, I think, can be as suffocating to a person’s soul as playing so much pretend. Playing dual, triumvirate, quadruple roles. Trying so hard to convince yourself that when you tell your best friend Allison that you’ll be at her house at 5:00 pm before the football game later that night, that this time, it’ll be true. And willing it to be true. Then going home after school and accepting the reality that if you dare ask your father for permission, he may strike you just for entertaining the idea of asking if it was okay.
 
In hindsight, I don’t think labeling my decision to not tell anyone what happened at the hands of my father as being fake is entirely accurate. I truly wanted to believe that I was the girl everyone thought I was, the one with the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect home. I may have been trying to fool everyone around me, but I think I was trying to fool myself the most.
 
I prayed. A lot. I prayed every night that when I woke up, I’d have a father who wasn’t afraid to love his family. I prayed for a father who’d stop hurting me. For a father who I didn’t need to be scared of and feel like I had to protect my family from. I placed myself in front of the firing squad, took the brunt of his verbal anger, because I didn’t think my mother and my sisters could still be whole if they were the targets. It hurt too much thinking of them hurting that much. 
 
These aren’t the things I remembered when my sister told me my father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. 
 
I remembered my father waiting for me every single day by the fence outside of my preschool with my favorite popsicle when it was time to be picked up, him hoisting me on top of his shoulders as we walked home. I remembered the day he taught me to ride my bicycle with no training wheels and how, when I finally got it right, with the background of my father’s laughter, I felt like I was flying. I remembered when my mother wouldn’t listen to my pleas to not make me sing O Holy Night in front of the whole town because I was terribly shy when I was a little girl. She was too busy insisting it was a great honor to be chosen for having the prettiest voice among all the students at my elementary school, and it was my father who talked to my mother and convinced her that it wasn’t the right thing to force me to do.
 
And I remembered how when I went home in October, my dad gave me a hug when he saw me and told me he was really proud of me. And how I just knew that this time, it wasn’t just a fleeting moment of him showing his semblance to a normal father.
 
I eluded to a family secret I wasn’t ready to provide elucidation on just yet many posts ago. But what are secrets but just another form of denial? An unwillingness to confront the truth?
 
My father was raised by a man who wasn’t his birth father, a man I thought was my grandfather until only a few years ago. My father’s birth father was my grandmother’s first husband, a great man who came from a powerful family. He was assassinated during the Korean War when my father was only an infant. The great, powerful family promised my grandmother they would care for her and my father. But my grandmother was scared and alone with a newborn in a country that was war-torn and had just lost hundreds of thousands of lives. So she married the man who came to raise my father and who I later thought was my grandfather for the first 21 years of my life. A man who passed away during my freshman year in college, someone who I always felt had treated my cousins a little nicer and a little warmer than me and my sisters.
 
I wholeheartedly believe that blood ties are not what creates family. Father, grandfather, grandmother, daughter … they’re ultimately nothing more than titles for roles that we fill and create meaning. There’s little in my opinion that is more beautiful than when children are adopted and given homes and love they may otherwise not have. Or when your friends can become your family, the people who love you unconditionally and provide you a safety net. So why bother to emphasize the distinction that my grandfather was not my “true” grandfather or that he was not my father’s “true” father?
 
Because this was a man who never embraced my father as his son. He only saw him as a reminder that his new wife, my grandmother, was not a virgin and had been previously married, both unforgivable in that society. He wasn’t a big enough or good enough person to rise above those things, so he abused my father endlessly. My father sold newspapers and shined shoes on the streets while my grandfather kept his other three children, my uncles and aunt, well-fed and spoiled.  He moved his family while my father was in school one day, leaving my father, a 12 year old boy, to come home to an empty house and wander around alone, until a neighbor informed him that his family had moved and where they could be found. My father walked the 30 miles to get there, and when he arrived, he was ignored.
 
My mother told me all of this a few years ago. And then my father told me himself during the long car ride back home after my junior year in college had ended, in a very matter-of-fact and non bitter but sad - very sad - way. And I finally began to understand some more of why things were the way they were. Because while it doesn’t provide excuses, I’m not interested in excuses. I’m interested in understanding.  
 
It was hard to look at my uncles and my aunt and my grandmother the same way for a few months after I learned all this, a grandmother and aunt and uncles I loved and thought were great people. It took a while for me to accept that they did as much as they could to help my father but that my grandfather kept everyone scared to do more.
 
And it was ironic and sad when the story began to sound, to feel, a little too familiar.
 
The difference between who I am now compared to who I was growing up, who I was even back in college, is that I know now that I play the game of denial at times and I don’t want to anymore. So it felt ironic and sad, but I can accept that. And I can be happy that while I hurt almost everyday growing up, I don’t hurt everyday now. I can’t hold grudges. I’ve never been able to. Maybe it’s just another example of denial - wanting to forget and shove the past away as much as I can - but I’ve always been one to live in the very, very present.
 
When I heard my father got into a terrible car accident, I didn’t remember the hurt. I remembered the walks home after preschool; the mornings we’d play golf when the dew still clung onto the blades of grass; the lectures he gave me about how family always came first. And I felt grateful that there may be a chance for more because he’s alive after an accident that could have easily taken his life. Grateful - but also frightened - that I have parents that try to not bother me or cause me senseless worry by telling me my father was involved in a terrible car accident that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive.
 
I’ll still push things I don’t like to think about into the far corners of my mind. I brush aside questions about whether I’ll finally be attending law school next fall. I try not to remember my four best friends who hurt the living hell out of my heart last summer and how things have still been left with ties loose and tangled. I don’t want to think about the fact that I’ve gained pounds that don’t fit correctly on my body. Or that my grandmother has been very sick recently. And that I really should start saving money because living paycheck to paycheck is fine until - who knows knowing me -I need bail money or an emergency room. And how I’ve noticed a dark spot on the inside of my right calf that seems to be bigger than it was when I first noticed it a few months ago and holy shit what if after all my jokes about getting skin cancer for summers upon summers of ruthless tanning are finally coming true? And how I’ve considered canceling my alert emails from the Chicago Tribune (that I have no idea why I receive because I’m no big fan of the Tribune) because looking at my Gmail account and glancing at subject lines like ”Train accident,” “Henry Hyde dead,” “Charges in U. of C. student’s slaying,” “Former model gets 8 years for musician deaths” just starts to feel so heavy and sad.
 
But the denial about my past? And the trying to pretend I’m perfect and everything is perfect and holding everything inside and lying and hiding and the faking that nothing bothers me and only surrounding myself around people who want to fake and pretend and just keep running, running from their dysfunctional demons too?
 
Like my father’s truck, it’s been totaled.

The Broken Spring November 13, 2007

During the latter part of my senior year in college, I began to see a woman named Wendy once a week.
 
My father had begun calling every morning at 6 a.m. that spring. Pressing Talk on my cell phone unleashed his voice into my bedroom, a voice that held more weight than just sounds uttered from a mouth. And even though he was hundreds of miles away, my mind instantly ran back to the nights he’d yell at me for hours in the study of our house, keeping me awake to listen to things that no child of any parent who brought them into existence should have to hear.  To the mornings I’d wake up with eyes swollen shut from uncontrollably crying once I was allowed the safety of my own room, my own bed. To the breakfasts I’d have to endure with my mother and my sisters, pretending to be the perfect family we appeared to be to everyone else. Sometimes I’d recall one night in particular, the night I left the study after having to listen for hours about how the sight of me disgusted him. He chased after me and punished me for having the audacity to walk out on him while he was talking to me. My mind would eventually bring me back to my present, and I would think about how easy it would be to just click End. And I would think about how I knew that I could never do that.
 
He began every conversation as though he was already in the middle of it. You get accepted into Harvard Law yet? What about Yale? Daughter, you hear me? What about Yale Law! You get letter yet? Why you so quiet? You not just wake up right now, do you?? And he had a point. I was quiet during these morning conversations that sometimes lasted for multiple hours, normally preoccupied with lighting cigarettes or mixing drinks. It may have only been 6 a.m., but to me, it beat the uncontrollable crying.   
 
As early as the orientation week before freshman year even officially begins at my university, students are informed that our school allows us a certain number of free psychological counseling sessions at the campus health center to be used at any time during our four years. It’s a valid attempt to stave off suicides at a prestigious school that employs a demanding quarter schedule and is located in a climate that knows harsh weather and long dark nights once October comes and lasts until April, sometimes even May, leaves. 
 
I had dealt with his demands all throughout college. Booze, friends, and distance had always been enough to take the sting away from his ranting phone calls.
 
But something changed that spring of my senior year. He had finally broken me. Really, really broken me.
 
After years of verbal and, sometimes, physical torment; after years of being the best and hearing it wasn’t enough; after 3 1/2 years of intense collegiate learning; and after the previous two months of going out and getting fucktastically trashed six nights a week to run away from the demons, I had nothing left.
 
So without telling anyone, I went to the health center, tagged in my free counseling sessions, and began to see Wendy.
 
It’s not that seeing a therapist hadn’t crossed my mind before. But in my family, sprained ankles were looked upon and told to be “walked off.” And ibuprofen or other painkillers? For far too fucking long did I think women actually had to feel like knives were being thrashed around the insides of their uteri once a month. If my body dared get sick, my father blamed my “poor character”. Physical pain was hardly allowed to be recognized; mental health didn’t have a chance. You were fine, and that was it.
 
My friends in college were the type of people that loved how fucking crazy we were. There was no time to worry about what life may bring after graduation, no time to worry about moving away or falling apart; we were too fucking busy having too much fucking fun. Racking up stories to tell the next day at brunch. And I loved it, too. We did too many fucking crazy things, but we were taking advantage of the unique situation we’d never be in again - old enough to get anything we wanted, but young enough to not really have a fucking care in the world.
 
Then the daily phone calls from my father began. And the precarious balance I was walking between sanity and that other side quickly became no balance at all.
 
Wendy may have saved me that quarter. I had my hesitations entering the sessions. I had walls. I came in skeptical. I didn’t want to be fed self-help book crap or mantras I should repeat to myself every morning while looking in the mirror. But Wendy just listened. No judgment. And it wasn’t until then that I realized that was the one thing I was desperately missing from my life. One thing that wasn’t judging me. Or competing against me. Or talking about me. Or loving me. Or hating me. Or pushing me down. One thing that would let me just be. Wendy gave me that.
 
After several weekly meetings had passed and we had gained a comfort level with one another, she suggested I meet once with the health center’s shrink. And I dutifully agreed. But I didn’t get to sleep the night before the appointment - pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper that was due that same morning - and seconds before my meeting with the shrink, knowing I looked off, knowing I felt off, I decided to see how crazy I could make her think I am.
 
I know this is a fucking awful approach to seeing someone who was trying to help me, but with a few choice answers, she had prescribed me sleeping pills, anti-depressants, and Adderal after a 35-minute session. Prescription medicine can be a beautiful thing, but thank God I knew, for me, this wasn’t about chemical imbalances that needed to be rebalanced. I never took the pills continuously. The sleeping pills made me feel too drowsy all the time, and what the fuck is the point of life if you can’t just be on? And the anti-depressants? I knew I was going through something incredibly rough that made me hurt every waking moment, but I knew that my spirit, my will to live, my soul, was not depressed. That probably sounds like a lunatic saying that they know they’re not crazy to you. I’m certainly not suggesting that there aren’t people who do need this type of help and do need this type of medication and there is nothing wrong with that and everything great about it if that is what that individual needs. But I knew what I needed, and what I needed was to talk and have someone listen.
 
(Oh - I forgot to mention the aftermath of the Adderal, didn’t I? Well, with both my best friend and I having senior honors history theses due that quarter, I think you can safely assume where those went.)
 
A part of me will always hold on to denial, that weapon that was my best friend through a lot of painful times when I was younger. Writing about these kinds of memories forces me to remember, to think, to ask myself if I’m a better person now. I think having these memories, in some way, makes me a better person now.
 
There’s a lack of anxiety and nerves now. No feeling in the pit of my stomach that gnaws at me constantly. But oddly enough, Wendy popped into my mind the other day. The woman who may have saved me my senior year in college. It may sound cheesy, but I thought about how happy she would be for me to hear that I am doing better, if not well. To hear that things with my father, while not perfect, are improving.
 
I think I’m going to buy a card for her during my lunch break tomorrow. Write a message with subtle reminders of who I am in the chance she may not remember me. Emphasize how much she helped me. Remind her that what she does - on a campus full of students who appear to care more about their high-end drugs, fashion and BMWs than their mental health - is important.
 
Thank her for meeting with me, the skeptical brat, once a week during the spring of my senior year, and just listening.

The Egyptian November 7, 2007

I once didn’t see my friend Rachel for approximately 12 straight days during the winter of our senior year in college.
 
My friends and I had a habit that quarter of not letting each other out of our sights, equal parts co-dependence and what’s that theory about how when you find people who do and believe the same things you do you then become a tight cohesive unit even if those things you do or believe may be wrong because it provides you with validation? Cultism Right, Friendship! What with all the binge-drinking, food-gorging, and crash-studying, where was the time to be alone?
 
Once Rachel’s lovely face reemerged from the black hole we had assumed she had accidentally fallen herself into, we were all very eager to hear what she had been busy doing.
 
“The Egyptian,” she began, while we stood in her kitchen mixing drinks.
 
We leaned in, excited. This was our friend Rachel, after all, a girl who would sometimes have to avoid house parties in college because she had already slept with each of the housemates holding the house party in question, unbeknown to the housemates themselves. My mind instantly foretold misadventures with a tall, dark mysterious stranger, a man with a foreign accent and broken English, a man who needed not the English when his primary concern was making my friend Rachel his Cleopatra. (Historical note: Cleopatra was not in fact “Egyptian” but a descendant of the Hellenic Ptolemy line, but this isn’t The History Channel, so let’s move on, shall we?)
 
All of us paused to let her continue. In the silence, she raised her right hand to her mouth and lowered her left hand to her tailbone, began demonstrating the Walk Like an Egyptian dance, and said, “You know, the Egyptian.“
 
Apparently, the woman had been severly ill for 12 straight days and was unable to keep anything down or inside her body, and, apparently, the Egyptian is when one’s body feels the need to expel from opposite ends at the same time. And that is all I am going to say about that.
 
It’s not a coincidence I remembered this story today. My body has spent all night and day systematically throwing up every 40 minutes. The last 6 or so times have been nothing but bile. Gross, disgusting, no-matter-how-many-times-I-brush-my-teeth-I-can-still-taste-it bile. I’m hesitant to blame it on food poisoning since food is my love and finding out that it may have poisoned me is probably similar to the heartbreaking betrayal Screech felt when he saw Zach kissing his precious and life-long love Lisa right before she held her fashion show at The Max for the FIT admissions recruiter, but that sushi I ate for lunch yesterday may want to prove me otherwise.
 
Thanks to my friend Rachel, through the cold sweats, the non-stop shaking, and the uncontrollable tears streaming down my face, I cannot stop repeating to myself: No Egyptian, no Egyptian, please God no Egyptian.
 
Which, incidentally, has led my boyfriend, while comforting me, to soothe, “Of course, baby, of course, no Egyptian food. How about some Saltines?”

Celebratory Affy Tapples November 2, 2007

Once upon a year ago today, I woke up half-naked and hungover in a bed that wasn’t my own, struggling - I mean, really struggling - to decide if putting the fishnet stockings from the previous night’s costume back on would help or hurt the military short shorts and knee high black boots I’d have to wear past Henry the Doorman while leaving the bed that wasn’t my own’s apartment building.
 
Even in the barely lit room, the nearby mirror reflected that my hair was still in the bouffant hairstyle I had so carefully coiffed the night before to look just like Kim Jung Il’s. (I know what you’re thinking, how does this girl manage to stay so classy and aware of current affairs?)
 
The owner of the bed that wasn’t my own remained asleep while I decided against the stockings.
 
Seconds before leaving his apartment, I began to feel utter horror realizing that walking out of that apartment meant walking around in public - in daylight public, in 7:15 a.m. daylight public - wearing a slutty Kim Jung Il costume that had seemed absolute genius the night before.
 
The gods did not disappoint.
 
There are walks of shame, and then there are walks of shame that include:

• traveling in elevators with investment bankers who wink and tell you that their job forces them to wake up early too;
• breezing past the doorman who you’ve come to adore because he refers to you as his mon chéri!;
• learning that indeed one can get goosebumps on their knees;
• pulling down your waist-length military coat desperately as you walk past a mother with a child’s hand in each of hers as though that will cover the stretch of exposed skin starting from where your skankyass short shorts end to where your skankyass knee high black boots that actually look quite decent when paired with a knee length pencil skirt or jeans begin; and
• scurrying into a cab where the first thing you hear is that Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior died for your sins - yes, even you! - over the radio waves.

Mine was the latter.
 
I arrived at my apartment. I probably showered. I hope I didn’t select any part of the fishnet stockings, military short shorts and knee high black boots attire to wear to work that morning, but I can’t fully commit myself to that hope since my difficulties with work appropriate dress have been widely established.
 
Now the bed that wasn’t my own has become mine too. And the craziest thing about last night was that we didn’t go out at all, instead selecting to watch Blade Runner - which I confused to be Blade for the first 15 minutes of the movie and wouldn’t a Vampires movie seem a more likely choice than a Robots-in-the-Future movie on Halloween night? - while I carefully eyed the gourmet Affy Tapples he had brought home, contemplating how much a pain in the ass making a mess and getting caramel and nuts stuck between my teeth would be to eat one.
 
There were no fishnet stockings. No military short shorts. No knee high black boots. No scorning mothers or Jesus guilt. And a part of me feels nostalgic - or as nostalgic as someone can feel about drunken nights they only 85%-ly remember.
 
But I still woke up half-naked this morning.
 
And this time, I didn’t have to worry about sneaking away from the bed that’s now mine too, in knee high black boots and military short shorts, already dying - I mean, really dying - with embarrassment and fear that Henry the Doorman would no longer think of me as his chéri anymore.