Ugly and Bitter and Strong Suzanne Rivecca
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UGLY AND BITTER AND STRONG SUZANNE RIVECCA The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. —Michel de Montaigne here’s a tiny park on Hyde Street in San Francisco, on the cable car line, and for about a year I half-heartedly planned to kill myself Tin it. The park is slightly sunken, set off from the street, mostly concrete: one of those wedged-in, rarely utilized “mini-parks” common to this part of the city. There are a few rickety maroon-painted benches, a banner of tattered Mexican party flags, some scattered plants and trees. Sometimes, on warm nights, people sit there and eat ice cream cones from the famous ice cream parlor on the corner. Sometimes people take their dogs there to pee. But most of the time it’s empty. I zeroed in on it because it’s near my apartment and ill-lit. I’d made only a cursory stab at formulating the logistics. Mostly I fantasized in broad strokes, visualizing the final result rather than the step-by-step labor. I knew this much: I wanted to put my California ID in my pocket, along with a piece of paper with my sister’s contact information, swallow a bunch of Xanax with alcohol, and hang myself from a tree. I didn’t think about what I’d use to hang myself, or what I’d stand on to reach the tree, or what kind of knot I’d tie. I didn’t even know which tree. My reluctance Suzanne Rivecca to hammer out these details probably indicated a lack of genuine resolve. 47 Or maybe it was just indicative of the bone-shaking agitation that made it impossible to focus on anything intently enough to make a plan. I walked by the park almost every day, but found it hard to enter. Sometimes I’d stand on the sidewalk and just stare into it, my heart rate accelerating. I knew this was the place, but I didn’t want to go in and scope out coordinates and vantage points. If it was going to happen, I didn’t want to be methodical about it. I was waiting for some trigger that would make it inevitable: some fresh humiliation, some galling failure. Something that would make it all fall into place, get the ball rolling organically, negate the need for foresight. I may have also been waiting for an irrefutable reason not to do it at all. I didn’t tell anyone about the park. At the time, the only person I told about wanting to die was the therapist I was seeing, and it took me a while to disclose. I initially started seeing her because I couldn’t write anymore. Six months or so after I started, I asked her, “Under what circumstances would you be legally obligated to 5150 a patient?” She explained that there is a complicated set of protocols and procedures involved, and that committing a person is not something she would do lightly. The theoretical candidate would have to have a specific plan and the means to execute it, and would have to express in no uncertain terms an intention to implement that plan, immediately. Saying “I want to kill myself” isn’t enough. So that’s what I said, in a rush of relief. I finally knew I could say it out loud, this weak and contemptible declaration, the source of such isolating shame. And I knew better. I’d known people who had killed themselves. I knew the devastation it inflicted on families and friends, the wreckage, the ruin. I was no disaffected teenager naively romanticizing my own morbid sadness. I was an adult. I knew better than to want this. I was ashamed. But I still wanted it, because it felt like the only dignified option available. UGLY AND BITTER AND STRONG 48 Being awake was intolerable, and I couldn’t sleep. I felt useless. I was convinced I’d end up homeless. It didn’t feel like an abstract fear. I worked with people who were homeless, and was familiar with the varied trajectories by which an ostensibly “stable” person could stray to the fringes. It isn’t always a dramatic all-at-once plummet: addiction, psychosis, bankruptcy, a family that disowns you. Sometimes it’s incremental, a slippage by degrees. You freeze, you hide; you abandon all responsibility in a series of escalating omissions. You don’t answer the people who come looking for you. You stop being able to support yourself because supporting yourself means having the capacity to interact normally, to answer for the consequences of your actions or inaction. You no longer feel capable of going through the motions necessary to navigate the world on legitimate terms. You become convinced that you’re exempt from these terms, that they were not written with you in mind. And you’re so ashamed of your failure, so afraid of burdening people, so terrified of being beholden to or controlled by whoever might save and contain you, that you just recede, and ultimately disappear. In its frighteningly cumulative accrual, its snowballing relentlessness, this imagined path was like that shopworn nightmare of being in college and having ten exams on the same day and realizing, too late, that you haven’t gone to classes all semester. It’s one of those fatalistic hypotheticals that can seem, in the mind of a depressed person, both luridly surreal and utterly plausible. You’re catastrophizing, friends would say to me, when I talked about becoming homeless. They were right. But I’d reached that dark inner place at which a catastrophe seemed less outlandish than a reprieve. I’d recently returned to San Francisco after an absence of almost three years. In the years I’d been gone, I was supposed to have finished a second book. That never happened. So I moved back and immediately began to inhabit what felt like an old and outworn version of my life, as if I’d gotten stuck in a Lost-esque time warp and couldn’t escape. I’d gone back to my UGLY AND BITTER AND STRONG Suzanne Rivecca old job as a fundraiser for a social services program in the Haight Ashbury: 49 one that weathered, via the valiant grit of my boss, a constant succession of crises. We worked with homeless teenagers and young adults. In an average month, at least one client would commit suicide or try to commit suicide or overdose or get murdered. I’d left this job almost three years earlier, after I’d sold my book. I’d been happy to leave, because, despite my love for the organization, my boss, and the kids, working there was inordinately stressful and paid next to nothing. San Francisco didn’t care about homeless drug-using youth dying, and I felt like it was my job to make the city care, to tell the story right, and I had to walk a fine line in order to do it: to tell the unvarnished truth about how desperate things were, but in a way that didn’t offend or accuse or beg too hard. The desired tone—verbal and written—was a kind of tempered, humble rationality, and the jarring dissonance between the tragedy and injustice I witnessed and the tepid equanimity with which I packaged it felt like a daily betrayal, of myself and of reality. When I resumed this job after my hiatus, I remembered how necessary the dissonance was, how it seeped into the daily fabric of my life and consciousness. It was a skill I had to relearn. It was a skill that also came in handy for my freelance job: writing sprightly ad copy for a luxury makeup company run by a celebrity. In that circumstance, the contrast between my mental state and the manic- pixie-priestess persona I had to embody—“Turn your inner glow into an outie” was an actual line of copy that sprung, like a rogue spiral of silly string, from the blackened hull of my morose and addled brain—was at least absurd enough to distract me, in a bleak, bemused way. I would come home from the homeless-youth place and sit at my living room desk with a giant pot of tea that I kept refilling for hours, peering at photos of soap and hair serum in an attempt to evoke some pithy distillation of their true worth and meaning, emailing friends lines like Take instant hair repair on the road, and don’t forget to send a postcard UGLY AND BITTER AND STRONG 50 to your split ends, and they’d write back What the fuck is happening to you, and I’d welcome their mockery as a kind of reminder that I was still me, still the antithesis of this. There was reassurance in that, because it entailed interaction of some kind, a sort of reflective surface through which I could glimpse an oppositional incarnation of my true selfhood: my mirror-image, this distorted, compromised cosmetics-hawker. But when I wasn’t writing makeup copy or human services grants, all I did was shake and panic and weep and walk the streets, barreling up and down hills with the blinkered imperviousness of a phantom passing through walls. I thought I would never write fiction—or anything that wasn’t ad copy or grants—again. What’s worse, I didn’t want to. I felt an overpowering, disgusted aversion to the very thought. I didn’t see the point. I couldn’t even go in bookstores anymore.