A note about today’s essay: I’m talking about some big feelings, which might be emotionally expensive. Please take care of yourself.
Today I am 32, and alive, and that seems like the most meaningful thing I could possibly say.
I never thought that I would make it to my thirties.
I had my first major depressive episode around 11. I remember my dad saying something in the years surrounding it that what I was feeling were normal, “growing up” feelings. I knew that wasn’t true, because there was simply no way that everyone sincerely, consistently, wanted to not exist anymore.
At the time, I didn’t connect that formative experience with depression with the fact that by the time I was into my teens I felt sure that I was going to die young. There wasn’t intent with the thought, or a particular timeline, it was just a thing I knew.
My impulse is to try to explain that more, to articulate the experience of believing something so implicitly that I understood it as a fact. I wasn’t afraid of it—at least not consciously—because it lived in the triangle of anxieties that my brain deemed not worth worrying about, like earthquakes or a building collapsing. I could see why other people worried, but I didn’t personally feel the teeth. Too many little things in front of me to obsess about to turn to anything that big.
And the older I got, the more that knowing took on a certain kind of logic. I’m a queer artist who has known depression and anxiety for almost as long as they’ve known anything.
None of those are words for lasting, words for stay.
There’s a poem in the book where I talk about a night I blacked out—
I wake up
zipped into my leather jacket
with a bruise on my face;
the only explanation for the pain in my neck
the shower curtain ripped from the rod.
When I am tempting fate
do I buy myself more time
by surviving to the morning?
Like playing chess with Death
but instead of an Ingmar Bergman film,
it’s an episode of Jackass.
The bruise was on my nose which, presumably, I smacked against the edge of the tub sometime before passing out horizontally across my bed, with my jacket zipped up to the collar.
Intellectually, I could recognize that that was bad. That I could have broken my neck or gotten a concussion or done any number of things to irreparably damage myself. But mostly what I felt was embarrassment about a video from the night before where a friend poured champagne into my mouth and I made a pornographic slurping noise (I can still picture myself in the video). Like the earthquakes, the reality of the situation was too big for me to hold.
I kept living. I kept living even through the times when I very explicitly wanted to die. I stopped using substances to try to run from myself, which never worked anyway. I stopped being afraid of making plans too far in advance, because I wanted to see Harry Styles in the pit which meant buying tickets a year in advance. I read books and I wrote a novel and I got a dog and I kept living. Again, and again, and again, I stayed.
And then, somehow, inexplicably, I turned 30. And I thought, “I never thought I would turn 30.” But I did. I turned 30, and 31, and today I am 32 and alive and so happy and so sad and it is hard to wrap my mind around how both things can be true.
I wanted to write to you about all the things I am looking forward to, all the things there are still ahead to create, all the gifts of lasting. But in this moment I think all I have the capacity to say is that I am making myself, still, always.
Today I am 32 and alive and I intend to stay.
Beyond grateful that you stayed (and beyond grateful that I stayed too so we could meet each other!) Happy still-alive-iversary, dear friend. xx
I'm glad I know 32-year-old you :)