So Sad Today: personal essays

SO SAD TODAY

Melissa Broder is a poet who has published four collections of poetry. She is also the creator of the @sosadtoday Twitter persona, which has amassed over 300,000 loyal followers worldwide for its short, sharp, sometimes shocking barbs. She used to work in publishing in New York, and now lives and works in California.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3065, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

Published by Scribe 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Melissa Broder

Published in agreement with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

9781925321333 (Australian edition)

9781925228557 (UK edition)

9781925307467 (e-book)

CiP entries for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

For Nicholas

For if we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago.

— Seneca

How to Never Be Enough

Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.

I was born two weeks late, because I didn’t want to leave the womb. When they finally kicked me out, I was like, oh hell no. I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.

Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough. According to my mother, the doctor who delivered me said I was pretty. I wanted to believe him, because I love validation. Validation is my main bitch. But I was not the type of infant to absorb a compliment. Had I been verbal I would have extended a compliment in return so as to assuage the implicit guilt of my own existence rubbing up against praise. Instead, I created an external attribution.

An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your own fault.

The doctor’s perspective was only an error of opinion. He obviously had shitty taste in babies. If he’d called me ugly I would have spent the remainder of my time in the hospital trying to convince him I was hot. But he liked me. There was definitely something wrong with him.

If you’re never going to be enough, it’s important to find a way to turn a compliment against yourself — to reconstruct it into a prison — which is precisely what I did. I decided I would have to stay pretty for the rest of my life. If I got ugly it would be my own fault. Don’t drop the ball. Don’t fuck it up. I was definitely going to fuck it up.

Next they probably put me in a room with, like, twenty other babies. Immediately, I’m sure I compared myself to all of them and lost. The other babies probably seemed pretty chill about being on earth. They shit their diapers like no big deal. They just sort of effortlessly knew how to do existence. I, on the other hand, was definitely a wreck about being alive. Why was I here? What did it all mean? Things weren’t looking good.

My first day on earth and I know I was already thinking about death. A lot. I was probably thinking about death enough to negate every future accomplishment, relationship, and thing that I might come to love with thoughts like what’s the point? and why bother? At the same time, I still can’t come to terms with the fact that I am actually, definitely going to die one day, as this might lead to the realization that I might as well enjoy my one brief life, and who wants that.

The situation only got worse when my mother announced that she couldn’t breastfeed. More precisely, she told me later, I was killing her. Killing your mother as an infant is proof of one’s too-muchness. In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.

I was killing my mother, because I was sucking too hard. Less than twenty-four hours on the planet and I was already trying to fill my many insatiable internal holes with external stuff. I was trying to sate the existential fear of what the fuck is going on here with milk. I was sucking and sucking, but there wasn’t enough milk. There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle.

As a result of all my sucking, I ended up in a higher weight percentile than my height percentile. This was problematic, because my mother had obese parents. She needed an object upon which to project her own anxieties. I was perfect for that! The religion of the household quickly became food: me not being allowed to have it and me sneaking it.

One of my favorite foods to sneak was me. In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my fingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between my teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

What I loved most, though, was to pick my nose and eat it. During story hour at school I created a shield with my left hand to cover my nose, so I could enjoy some private refreshment. Then I’d really get in there with the right hand. Some of my happiest childhood days were spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisfied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didn’t care. The bliss was too profound.

Unfortunately, the bliss was not going to last forever. Let’s be honest, the bliss was going to last four minutes or until my nose ran out of snot. But parents, if your kid is eating herself, you have to let her. Let your child devour herself whole. Even if she disappears completely, encourage her to vanish. Let your child eat the shit out of herself and then shit herself out. Let her eat that.

There aren’t that many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.

Love in the Time of Chakras

I’ve had sex with a lot of gross people. I’ve had sex with enough gross people that I feel like I should have gotten paid for most of them. While I’ve never gotten paid for having sex with any gross people, I have been a sex worker of sorts.

My first office job was as the administrative assistant of a Tantric sex nonprofit, which we’ll call Electric Yoni. Such places exist, and they exist just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, through the rainbow tunnel, where McMansions meet divination on Highway 1, Marin County, California.

I arrived at the job fresh off four years of psychedelics, deep in woo-woo, talking about energy, the Tao, and telekinesis — believing that an outside fix, an amethyst crystal, the proper measurement of snake oil could save me from myself. Every day I commuted back and forth from my apartment overlooking a crack dealer who swung a golf club in the lower Tenderloin, San Francisco, over that bridge, feeling sort of blessed and sort of miserable.

I was lonely. I had fled the East Coast right after college in a number of back-and-forth trips, fancying myself as a kind of Jack Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/other widely fetishized dude-figure. I was running away from the love of my twenty-one-year-old life, who I broke up with weekly, and was trying to prove to everyone — mostly myself — that I was okay. The psychedelic period had ceased and I was now drinking every day so as not to have to feel what I felt.

Staying drunk seemed like a very practical solution to me. If you could drink yourself into happiness, why would you stay sad and sober? And if you could drink yourself into ultra-happiness, why would you settle for regular happiness?

The first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, my ex-love had just come to visit me in San Francisco. At night he was very warm toward me, because we were drunk. We talked about a possible move to the Bay for him. He went down on me to the sound of my housemate’s drum and bass (everyone in SF is a DJ) always thrumming from the next room. But during the day, he would be cold and withholding of affection.

After he left, I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, alone. I remember the giant mountain moss, rust and rocks, the kind of gargantuan beauty they didn’t make back East. I couldn’t believe the fairy-tale magnitude of it. I wanted someone to turn to and just go oh my god, but I had only myself. I was not enough.

The founder of Electric Yoni, my boss, was a shipping heiress from New York City who had moved to Marin in the eighties in search of something bigger. She had renamed herself Judy Moon. Judy Moon’s signature look was anorexic homunculus in spandex. When I arrived, Judy Moon was deep into studying what’s known as nonviolent communication, which she rigorously incorporated into the Electric Yoni course curriculum. But interpersonally, Judy Moon’s communication style was still absolutely terrifying. She frequently made hissing sounds. She hissed that my behavior made her feel insecure. All of my behavior.

For years Judy Moon had run Electric Yoni out of her Belvedere mansion, which was 100% pink. The rugs were pink, the walls were pink, the zafus for seating were pink. She was known for writhing on the pink floor to demonstrate varying states of Tantric ecstasy (she did this, naked, at our board of directors meeting). Eventually, neighbors complained to the local authorities about the blocks and blocks of VW Bugs and Priuses with Visualize Whirled Peas bumper stickers jamming up the street. Or perhaps it was the people arriving in various states of undress that bothered them: Renaissance Fair costumes, medieval bikinis, appropriated Native American dresses, and African dashikis. Whatever it was, the Belvedere rich were finally like, What the fuck is going on? So Judy Moon opened a second space — a small center in a neighboring, less ritzy Marin town — where some of the workshops would be held. She called this the Moonrise Center.

Judy felt she had transcended from her root chakra to her crown chakra with age. She now sought to expand the course catalog from The Ecstatic Body; 12-Handed Massage; Watsu Rebirthing; Paths of Transcendent Loving; Yoni Yoga; Love Circle; Tantra Levels 1, 2, and 3; and Sacred Dance into a more diverse roster that included Angel Therapy, Life After Death, Reclaiming the Divine Feminine, Anti-Aging Medicine, and of course, Nonviolent Communication.

Through Craigslist, I was hired as an administrative assistant to try to rent out the space of Moonrise Center, to register people for workshops, and to answer all of their questions by phone and email. Judy encouraged me to sample all that the Electric Yoni and Moonrise Center communities had to offer, so that I could better describe the curriculum.

One of my first experiences engaging in the Electric Yoni oeuvre was to receive a vaginal massage by a man named Jeffrey Kivnik. Jeffrey offered to trade me three hours of vaginal massage in exchange for helping him promote his practice. Jeffrey was in his fifties and wore a do-rag on his balding white head. I was twenty-one, very pretty, and an active alcoholic and addict. The trade sounded perfect.

I’ve always had difficulty setting boundaries. And I’ve always had difficulty reaching orgasm with another human being. So, when faced with an offer to allow Jeffrey to finger me for three hours in exchange for giving him publicity, of course I said yes.

The vaginal massage began with a one-hour full-body massage. Then, for the next two hours, Jeffrey caressed, stroked, kneaded, and tenderized my vagina — or as he called it, my Yoni — using Reiki breathing (I think) so as to aid in the healing of past vaginal trauma. I never