Buffering

by Hannah Hart

  Rachel suggested I get a bikini wax and I tried it once. The results being an acne-like rash that covered my thighs and crotch for many, many weeks. Increasingly socially uncomfortable with my body (and now itchy, too) I avoided all situations involving pools and shorts. My skin just couldn’t take it.

  In terms of clothing, high school was confusing for me because I wanted to feel confident and sexy, but didn’t really get anything out of the attention I was receiving from the boys around me. Nothing from them felt the same as Rachel looking me over and saying, “That looks good. You’re pretty.”

  Things continued to confuse me even after I accepted my sexuality in college. Now I understood what kind of person I was trying to attract, but had no idea how I was supposed to attract them. As a budding baby gay I didn’t understand where I should fall on the spectrum. Was I more butch or femme? I tried to look at the lesbians around me to figure it out. At the start of college I was pretty much a blob of acne and hair that I stuck under a beanie 99 percent of the time. Only after I started dating my first girlfriend did I try to tidy things up a bit. But whenever I put on makeup it would make her uncomfortable. And her discomfort heightened my own discomfort. Already not confident in my ability to properly paint my face, I gave it up entirely.

  So as I grew more confident in my gayness, I grew less confident in my femininity. In my mind, it was one or the other. I felt like I had to toe this line with all the women I dated, checking off boxes in my head as to which one of us was playing the role of the “man” and thus had to (literally) wear the pants.

  Did I drive more often? Yes.

  Did I pay for more meals? Yes.

  Did I usually initiate sex? Yes.

  Was I always doling out the orgasms? Yes.

  Was I physically stronger? Yes.

  Was I the bigger spoon? Yes.

  For a while this was my simplistic, linear way of understanding gender roles within relationships.4 Depending on how feminine the woman I dated was, I would adjust accordingly. Combine this with a propensity to “chase” straight women until they incited a sexual encounter, and sometimes I felt downright manly.

  But then I would find myself wanting to wear makeup and heels. And look pretty. And feel pretty. Because I like being pretty dammit.

  So what did I want? Was I a top or a bottom? What should I wear on my top and/or bottom? I’d always dated beautiful women, but what if I wanted to be a beautiful woman, too? Would that mean I would have to date a more masculine lesbian to find someone who was interested in me? What was I looking for?

  Around age twenty-six I started to realize that I really wanted both. I wanted to be a beautiful woman dating a beautiful woman who wanted to fuck me. A bad-ass boss who thought I looked cute in a snapback hat but also cute without it. Someone who loved me and the diversity within me.

  The better I understood myself and who I was, the better I understood what I wanted my outer style to reflect. I spent years looking at myself through the eyes of other people: overthinking how much mascara to put on before a date by studying what types of pics the girl I’m courting likes on my Instagram. Does she like the pics of me in full hair and makeup? Or is she a fan of the clean look?

  But as I get older I’m letting go of the hetero-normative idea that being in a relationship has to mean adhering to traditional gender roles. For me, feeling sexy isn’t about a short skirt or a fitted shirt. It’s about feeling in control of the confines of my clothing. Revealing exactly as much or as little of myself as I want.

  What I can see now is that my relationship with my body has been dictated by resistance. Deep down, I always cared about the way I looked, but I wouldn’t allow myself to accept that fact because I’d come to believe that caring meant humiliation or admitting a lack of resource or understanding. Part of me would like to end this chapter with a lovely little message along the lines of “True beauty comes from within” or “The opinions of others don’t matter.” Those are both fair and decent messages that I’d like you to consider and embrace in your own time. But what I’ve discovered is this:

  It’s not superficial to care about the way you look. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the time spent on your appearance if that’s part of your self-care. People may use labels such as “vain” or “shallow” to try and keep you in a box, to make you feel small. But those people are usually just insecure themselves. Nobody else gets to tell you what you should or should not care about in terms of your looks. That’s something you get to decide all for yourself. If you want to shave5 off all your pubes, that doesn’t make you antifeminist. If you like to work out because you want killer abs for the summer, go for it—but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to.

  With our bodies we make statements before we speak, our presentation is a language spoken without words. You—and only you—get to decide what it is you’re trying to say.

  1 IDGAF = I didn’t give a fuck.

  2 SGAF = She gave a fuck. Or her mom did.

  3 That’s Jessica Couto, a sweet and awesome girl whose family was also super great. If you guys are reading this then “Hello!” from this new life!

  4 Don’t even get me started on trying to pick out a bathing suit.

  5 I had considered making this chapter about the first time I got laser hair removal. My friend Erica gifted me a coupon after graduation from college and I’ve been a huge advocate ever since. Let me just sum up that story by saying this: unexpected lasering of the butthole with surprisingly effective results!

  HOCUS FOCUS

  I hate to admit this because I like to think I’m very cool and calm and collected and cocky and confident and blah blah blah but the fact of the matter is, I’m just not.

  For instance when I’m into a girl, I immediately start to panic. I overthink every text, every conversation, every interaction, no matter how small or how basic. There is no playing hard to get for me. I just can’t do it. Instead, when I like someone, I want things to happen at warp speed. If there is someone I want to get to know, I want to get to know that person right away, superquick, all at once, now or never! All or nothing. That’s my thought spiral. You’re in or you’re out. You win or you die. Game of Thrones is the best. Etc., etc., etc.

  The truth is, I repeat this pattern in all areas of my life, not just in dating but literally in everything I do. I just can’t slow down, I can’t play it cool, I can’t stay in the frame. Long story short, I didn’t have a grip on my focus, my focus had its grips on me.

  In early 2013 I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed. From January to March of that year, all of my big projects and ideas were greenlit at once. In January I got my first book deal; in February I launched the campaign for the Hello, Harto! Tour; and in March my friends and I made our first film Camp Takota, that we would start filming in August. (Right around the same time as the manuscript deadline for my book, only two weeks after getting back from tour.) Oh, and during all of this I also needed to post two videos a week to the channel. My time was limited and needed to be managed and managed well. I could get it all done so long as I could just stay focused. Which . . . well . . . you know. Wasn’t my forte.

  In the midst of all this chaos I was in my first adult relationship. I had been dating my girlfriend, Francesca, for about six months when I told her I thought I needed to see a psychiatrist. I’d been seeing a therapist for almost two years at that point, but I felt I wasn’t making progress. I felt as though there were certain patterns that my brain had decided for me and that all the talk wasn’t really helping. Good days and bad days felt as though they were totally outside of my control; good days being days when I got a lot done and took good care of myself, bad days being when I’d spend the day pacing the floor, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Worst of all, there was simply no room for a bad day. This was my big year of opportunity, the reason for all the risks I had taken. But with so many irons in the fire, I constantly felt as if I were one false move away from burning the whole house down. Which
would send me on a spiral which would lead to another bad day and so on and so forth.

  Despite all of this, part of me genuinely believed I could do it all. Because I usually thrived on pressure. In college, I started all of my papers the night before they were due, and I never outlined. My senior thesis (which was a comparative analysis of memory and autobiography!) was written over the course of one panicked day. I never wrote first drafts, everything left the printer as final. I never learned structure or systems to do things differently because up until that point the pressure had worked for me.

  Until 2013.

  Suddenly I had so much going on that flying by the seat of my pants just wasn’t going to work anymore. I needed to learn to be more organized and to create deadlines for myself.

  My therapist had helped me in many ways, but some days (due to the level of shit I was processing) sessions with her left me feeling vulnerable and drained and sad—and that was not a good state to be in when later that day I had to get drunk and cook.

  I tried exercise as a way of managing my anxiety—walking had always helped me clear my head and was usually a good way to reset my system. That helped, but I couldn’t pick which direction I needed to be pointed in since all my obligations were equally urgent and equally important. And since I was used to getting 100% done at once, these larger products1 that would require multiple drafts and edits and attempts, were my nightmare. I didn’t know how to do things 10–50% at a time. So instead I stayed trapped at 0% checking one project off at a time.

  Hard to prioritize when everything feels like a priority.

  Other things I tried: caffeine (which was great! but it made me sleepless and anxious), meditation (which helps me a lot today, but at that point I couldn’t do it at all), and lots and lots of anger and stressing out and feeling like a hopeless failure who was a fool for even thinking I could handle things. Why couldn’t I just focus and be present? Everyone around me seemed to be dealing just fine, so why couldn’t I? Clearly, there was something wrong with me.

  When I got home from the Hello, Harto! Tour, I was exhausted and depleted and facing the reality that I now had two weeks to write an entire book before moving into production on our film. I had overextended myself and was an absolute emotional wreck.

  I voiced all of this to Francesca, who was supportive; she loved me and was probably also eager to find out if there was anything to be done about my obsessive thought spirals that seemed to appear out of nowhere and consume me completely.

  Eventually I went to see a psychiatrist my therapist had recommended whose office was on the other side of LA. The traffic getting there was exceptional, and didn’t help my anxiety about the appointment. My thoughts were in a loop:

  What if this is how schizophrenia starts? What if that’s what she tells me, “Hannah, you’re just like your mom, and you’re inventing all of these worries. You’re going to need to spend weeks in a hospital to sort out your brain.” Oh God, I really don’t have time for that.

  What if I’m somehow both depressed AND debilitatingly anxious? What if she needs to put me on a rotation of antidepressants during the day and antianxiety meds throughout the night? What if the meds don’t work? What if it takes six weeks before we even know if they’re the right medications to begin with? Oh God, I don’t have time for that either.

  Wait . . . what if . . . what if the drugs make me content but . . . I lose the ability to be funny?

  I don’t know which of those thoughts scared me more, the idea of having a debilitating illness or the idea that taking medication might make me less funny. This whole medication thing was starting to feel like a lose-lose. Why was I even going to this appointment?

  “So what brings you here today?”

  Oh. The appointment was starting.

  I had been so lost in my head that I had somehow parked the car, entered the building, gone up in the elevator, and checked into the appointment on autopilot. Now I was sitting across from an older woman who reminded me slightly of Professor Umbridge from Harry Potter.

  “Um. I’m just here. I guess.”

  She smiled, eased back in her chair, and began to explain how the session would work.

  “First I’d like to outline my insurance policy, I don’t take insurance, but I can provide you with documentation that shows—”

  The woman spoke at a turtle’s pace! I was trying to be on my best behavior, sitting still and listening. She was so methodical and deliberate in her speech. I wondered if she was a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s the thing, you know. You never can tell. But wait, there was a cross on her desk. Definitely not a Witness. They believe that crosses are “idolatry.” How bonkers.

  “Does that sound fair to you?”

  “Absolutely, yes.” During my thought parade she had mapped out her billing system in detail. I wasn’t listening, but I heard what she said.

  “So I’m going to start by asking you some questions.”

  “Okay!”

  She proceeded to ask a series of questions about my family history—mental health and emotional stuff—along with questions about my daily routine, my career, my stresses, my joys, and so on. There was a clock on the wall behind her, and I wondered if she put it there so that clients would be aware of how long the session was lasting.

  Another thing I noticed while she was asking her questions was that she kept shifting between four sheets of paper. She had them in her lap against a leather file folder and after I answered each question she would make notes on the different pages. At first she wrote on all four, and then eventually shifted to writing back and forth on the same two sheets. Eventually she was writing her notes down only on one sheet. I looked at the clock to see how far we’d come in the session, we were nearing the end of the first hour. Why was this thing two hours long anyway? What was going to happen in the second hour?

  She cleared her throat and I glanced away from the clock back at her face. She looked down and seemed to assume a more casual air when she asked:

  “As a child, did you ever have difficulty in the classroom?”

  Oh, my god. She thinks I have ADD.

  “You think I have ADD.”

  My tone was curt. I was frustrated, and I didn’t want to keep dancing around with her.

  She didn’t seem surprised by my curtness. Almost as if she had expected it, she replied, “Is that something you’ve heard before?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean . . . like from my teachers and stuff.”

  She was taking notes again. “Do you know what years?”

  “Like what grades? I dunno. Like in second grade . . . I remember we had a school assessment test and I was only supposed to complete it up to a certain point in the packet, but I didn’t know that, so I completed the whole packet and turned it in. I always turned my test in first, by the way. Not that I was always getting an A, but I always got through tests really fast. I don’t know if that’s relevant, but I thought I’d share. Anyway, I finished the whole packet, which went up to the fifth-grade level, and then the teacher wanted to have a special meeting about it because apparently I had done really good. They wanted to put me into the GATE program, which was for gifted kids, so that was really cool.”

  “Did you go into that program?”

  “GATE? No. We couldn’t afford it. Actually, my mom never even made it to the meeting. She was proud of me, though.”

  “I see.” She smiled. It felt a little condescending. “Now back to my question, did any of your teachers ever tell you that you might have ADHD?”

  “ADHD? What’s that? Is that the same as ADD?”

  “ADD is becoming an outdated term. It doesn’t include the intensity of focus—the hyperfocus—that is also part of the diagnosis. In my practice, I believe that ADHD is the more appropriate assessment.”

  “Huh. That’s cool. I didn’t know that.” I was fully tuned in to our session now. ADHD was a term I hadn’t heard before. I wanted to know more. This was getting interesting.

  She was qui
et. I was quiet. Oh she was waiting for me to continue answering her question. Right.

  “Okay, lemme think. In second grade, they did say to my mom that they thought I had ADD . . . or ADHD . . . did they call it that then? Sorry, doesn’t matter. Then there was something in fifth grade, and then again in eighth, and then, yeah, my sophomore year in high school my math teacher wanted me to see somebody. Because I never did any of the homework, but I did well on the tests. I loved to participate in class, but outside of the classroom I just kind of . . . lost focus.”

  “So you operate well with structure?”

  “I guess it’s more like—” I had to stop and think. “I guess it’s more like I operate well under pressure.”

  “Perhaps you’ve used pressure because you’ve lacked the ability to create your own structure.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Most people with ADHD don’t realize that. Through years of failing to perform, though sometimes excelling despite this, they feel a constant state of underachievement.”

  “Yeah!” I was excited. “Man, I just always feel like I have all these great ideas and things I want to do, but I just don’t do them! I just can’t do them! I totally feel that way. I’ve basically done nothing with my life.”

  She smiled, and this time it seemed kind. “Given that you have two degrees, are responsible for the financial support of your family, and also on an upward trajectory in your career—I’d have to disagree with that assessment.”