by Hannah Hart
* Above all: talk about it. Talk with people you love and trust. Talk to a medical professional.2 The best help I ever got was going to therapy to heal the wounds under the surface. To forgive my family and forgive myself.
So there you have it! I have never discussed my journey with self-harm publicly, and frankly, I’m still on the road to recovery. These days when I start to feel myself floating inside my body,3 I stand up and start moving around. Or I take a walk. Or I count colors (something my friend Kati Morton recommended). The hardest thing is being in the car when I’m triggered because I don’t know how to distract myself. In that case, Kati recommended shouting as loud as I could. I do that sometimes. But it startles me a bit.
In those moments of relapse I know that I need to be patient. So what if I have a triggering experience and I end up slapping the steering wheel? Or if I’m exhausted and angry and can’t calm myself down? The worst I might do these days is slap a wall or a countertop. It stings, but it’s better than burning myself with a cigarette or punching walls. I’d say I’ve come a long way. I always have to try and remember to be kind to myself.
It’s a journey of continued effort and occasional failure. And that’s okay.
I can’t beat myself up for that.
PUN INTENDED.
1 We barely had our act together enough to get to school with a decent attendance rate. Anything extracurricular was a daydream. It was a nice thought, though.
2 I know therapy is a privilege that depends on money and time, but if you can get yourself to see a professional, you deserve to give your life your best chance.
3 This feeling is called disassociation. I would disassociate from my body during times of trauma, and then the only way I could pull myself back would be to injure myself.
NEST
In the last chapter we talked about the last day I spent at home with what was once my family. Now I’d like to tell you a bit about the homes I make today.
I’ve made it pretty clear that Los Angeles isn’t my favorite city. If I weren’t in entertainment, there is nothing on God’s green earth that could keep me here. I much prefer cities that are cloudy and cozy and comfy and cultured. Not that LA doesn’t have culture! It does, in its way—I’ve just had a hard time acclimating to it.
After living in LA my first year, I seriously considered moving back to New York, but my therapist said that if I couldn’t be happy in one city, what made me think I would find happiness in another? I told her that I would give LA another shot, but this time on a month-by-month basis. No commitments.
I probably would have left a month after she and I had that conversation—if I hadn’t met someone.
In early 2013 I finally gave in to the fact that LA is an industry town. I actually made a New Year’s resolution to get out there and meet more people and not be so averse to networking. I suffered through more than a few deadly cocktail functions, and then one day a friend invited me to come along to a birthday party for a fellow industry person whom I’d never met. The function actually sounded pretty cool—a private party at an artisanal cocktail bar I’d been wanting to check out in newly hip downtown LA. I brought my childhood friend Hannibal as my plus one, and as soon as we walked into the party I was introduced to the birthday girl. Francesca was petite, with dark hair and bangs and catlike blue eyes. I was smitten.
We chatted periodically through the night, and at one point I told Hannibal that I had the distinct impression the birthday girl had been hitting on me. He looked over at her, a vision in silk and leather, and then looked back at me: a short, frumpy dump of a homo wearing a flannel shirt and a beanie to cover my hair, which hadn’t been washed in a little too long.
“Uh. No. I don’t think so, dude.”
Midway through the night, we left the party to go get breakfast for dinner at a diner I loved called Fred 62. And though the party was behind us, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming up ahead.
A week later, Francesca and I awoke in my bed, partially undressed and mostly confused. We got up and went out for coffee, and we got to know each other a bit. She told me she was straight, and I told her I wasn’t interested in dating.
Both of us were lying, but only one of us was lying to themselves.
Francesca worked as a publicist, and a lot of her insights helped me to build my career into what it is today. It’s the power of love, you guys. Makes people compromise. I compromised by going along with some of the aspects of Hollywood that I didn’t enjoy, and she compromised by encouraging my “crazy” ideas that nobody was interested in. Between the two of us, we found a shaky middle ground and moved forward together. But about a year and a half into the relationship, I told her I couldn’t stay in the closet with her any longer. She wasn’t ready to come out, and that was her business, but I personally found it to be too painful after so long. So in October 2014, I ended our relationship. Or tried to. Ultimately, I was too codependent and we ended up a couple again before long.
Francesca and I built our careers together, but our relationship wasn’t just about nurturing each other professionally. We really loved each other. At the same time, we each had our issues: I was often moody and angry, and she was often unhappy and detached. Spoiler alert: that’s not a healthy combination. But Francesca was my first real girlfriend. She knew everything about me, she understood my work, and she even comforted me at night when I had panic attacks in my sleep. That was not an uncommon occurrence. I’d sometimes wake up choking, unable to move. Francesca would hear my panicked breathing, wake me, and gently say, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I’d apologize and she’d go back to sleep, and I would get up and give up on trying to rest. Clearly I wasn’t my best self when we were together, but maybe that was as good as it was going to get for me. Maybe I would never sleep well at night. Maybe I would never feel safe in my own home.
I’m the type of person who moves into a new place but never unpacks the cardboard boxes. I just pull my belongings out as I need them. I buy books and bookshelves, and armchairs for reading, but that’s pretty much it. Pre-Francesca, walking into my apartment you wouldn’t have found any art on the walls, but you’d have seen a stack of frames in a corner waiting for “someday” to hang them. You wouldn’t have found a TV or any plants, either. The rooms I’d lived in had always been about function over form. A stack of books, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. Oh, and a camera, and a couple kitschy items for the kitchen. I wasn’t accustomed to material things, and frankly, they intimidated me.
So when Francesca suggested that she move into my place, I readily agreed. Francesca was so sophisticated, and I knew she would make our home beautiful. Once she moved in, there were never any dirty dishes in the sink and the house was always clean. Incredibly clean—Francesca’s cleaning patterns were very similar to my stepmom Jenny’s, an observation that Naomi made one Christmas. And clean meant healthy, in my mind.
Not only was Francesca very clean, but her family had always been very big on tradition, and so was she. Another foreign concept for me. Francesca and I shared two wonderful Christmases together. On the second one we were unboxing her family ornaments, the same ones we’d pulled out the year before, when I looked over at her and asked, “So we celebrate Christmas the same way—every year?” She looked back at me, equally shocked but smiling and shaking her head because she was getting used to statements like that from me. That comment, and many others I made over the course of our relationship, showed her how far I was from understanding “home” and “family” the way she knew them.
Material things were second nature to Francesca. I don’t mean that in a bad way! The woman had great taste. Her parents were wealthy and exotic and European. Decorating the house, buying furniture, going grocery shopping, those were the tasks that she could perform effortlessly and that daunted me completely. With no frame of reference for making those kinds of decisions, walking into a department store and thinking “What do we want for the house?” rendered me silent and panicked
. I’d look at Francesca wide-eyed and say, “You pick. I have no idea.”
So Francesca would pick, and we made a home together. Or rather, two homes. The first place we lived in together was cozy and humble, but ironically, as we encountered more problems in our relationship, the urge to move into something more opulent grew. We both ran our businesses from home, and we were constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Maybe it wasn’t emotional space we needed. Maybe we just needed more physical space! Yeah. That was the ticket!
In November 2014, we moved into a house that I can only describe as a little absurd.
It had two floors, vaulted ceilings like a fancy log cabin, and a deck that wrapped all the way around with a view of Los Angeles that you see only in movies. Not to mention the pool out back and a detached studio for me to work out of. It was perfect for two people who liked to play just as hard as they worked. In that house we threw parties a couple weekends a month, parties that usually ended with Francesca in bed with a migraine and me trying to convince people to jump into the pool with me at 4 a.m.1
The house was massive, and it took us a while to furnish it. Francesca would mark off weekends on the calendar labeled with areas of the house that she wanted to finish: “FLEA MARKET—rugs, couch for downstairs, something for Hannah.” It was sweet, and she was trying, but I wasn’t, and every weekend I would find an excuse to bow out of these field trips and spend the day getting high and feeling detached.
The truth was, I had my own tastes and opinions on what I wanted in our home, but I didn’t know how to voice them. Not to mention that spending money like Francesca did made me feel self-indulgent—and guilty. My mother was living somewhere in squalor and possibly in danger, and there I was looking at a couch with a four-figure price tag that Francesca declared “reasonable for the quality.” I felt as though she were speaking another language and that I wasn’t speaking at all. I felt dumb and insecure. It was a feeling that reminded me of many humiliating memories growing up, and so to avoid it I would drink and detach.
Which is how I found myself most weekends in our gigantic house with a pool and a white dog and my own separate studio, standing in the kitchen in the afternoon and drinking straight from the bottle. This didn’t feel like happiness, but I figured my idea of happiness was distorted to begin with.
Francesca encouraged me to do things “for me” and to get things “that I wanted,” but it felt impossible. I bought myself a Wii, and in the middle of setting it up I started to cry, walked over to where she stood in the kitchen, and told her I felt so guilty for all that I had. I was so worried about my mom. Francesca didn’t know what to do. I was a wreck. Francesca and I were entangled and enmeshed and had no sense of self outside each other. We were caught in a web of our own design, neither of us strong enough to break free. We stayed that way for two and a half years before I finally got up the courage to clear it all away.
In December 2015, almost a year after ending things with Francesca, I called Naomi and told her that this was the year I was going to risk it and try to save Mom. She’d been living in the small apartment we’d found for her in 2008 in a low-income area of East Palo Alto, but we knew she needed to be hospitalized. The trouble was, forcing a move like that on an unstable person is very risky. On the advice of our father, we hadn’t pushed for hospitalizing Mom in the past. In his opinion, trying to get her some help could lead to her running away from us—that had been his experience in the past—and from there she would be homeless again. Or we could give her a key to an apartment and let her spin inside until everything in her stopped spinning entirely. His stance was that there were only two options:
* She dies in the apartment.
* She dies on the street.
It was a no-win scenario. The best we could do was to make our peace with that.
But I don’t have a lot of peace in me. I have a lot of unrest. So when I called Naomi and said, “I’m doing this no matter what,” she understood and agreed to help. I saw a tarot card reader (no joke) to help me pick a date when the stars would be aligned and we could forcibly hospitalize Annette. The woman drew the cards from her deck and immediately told me, “This card stands for the beginning of Taurus. End of April, early May.”
Now, believe what you will about astrology, but having a deadline in mind helped me organize myself into action. I chose to focus on preparing myself for April 26. That was the day we picked.
I got myself back into therapy (I had stopped going for a couple of years), but this time, instead of “talk” therapy, I tried cognitive behavioral therapy to help me break free of my harmful patterns. It was supereffective for me. I strongly recommend it for those who may be interested.
I also started going to the gym, maintaining healthy friendships, and setting boundaries between my personal life and my professional life. Then I got to work building a case with the help of my friend and fellow YouTuber Kati Morton.
Kati is a good soul. She’s a licensed marriage and family therapist and has worked in psych wards in the past. Her role was to help me gather and document the evidence we would need to prove our case “against” my mom. I know this sounds strange, but it was our only option. The mental health care system in this country is so broken that the only way to get someone help in the form of hospitalization is to build a detailed case proving him or her to be mentally unstable, even if that is already abundantly clear.
I was applying for what is called LPS conservatorship2 of my mother, which is basically impossible to gain unless the mentally ill person has physically attacked someone (within recent history) or has attempted to take his or her own life (again, within recent history). There is no way to be proactive and save a life. The laws are designed to function retroactively after a violent incident.
And frankly, I didn’t want my mom involved in a violent incident.
But Kati and I discovered that there was another way: if we could get a hospital to declare her gravely disabled, it could give us a referral letter from the attending psychiatrist to begin our petition for the LPS. However, step one of this process would still be getting Mom arrested and forcibly admitted to a hospital. How would we do that?
Her delusions had gotten worse, and her ability to act on them was increasing. She was banging on neighbors’ doors, screaming at them to release her family members (she was convinced that her dead father was being held hostage by one of them). She also regularly called apartment security to have them come and protect her from the convicts waiting outside her door. For the first few years she was in the building, security humored her, but ultimately they stopped taking her calls. The management office we rented from often asked me to remove her, but when I explained that I couldn’t and begged them to let her stay, they backed down. To remove her they would have had to call the police, and we’d deliberately found her an apartment in a low-income immigrant area, knowing that the neighbors and managers there would be unlikely to call the cops. And no one ever did. But now the only way to get her into that hospital was to have her arrested. So we’d basically wedged ourselves into a corner.
One night in March, my mom called me twelve times in rapid succession around 3 a.m., saying that her friend was planning to shoot me with a gun. I needed to know so that I could protect myself, but she said that maybe she should get a gun first.
Bingo.
When Naomi and I drove up to visit her in April, we called the police and reported the incident.
The police went to her apartment and asked her if she planned on shooting anyone.
“No,” she replied.
The officers called us back and said, “That’s good enough for us!”
Naomi took the phone from me and told them that she was terrified our mother was going to hurt someone. That they must take action now. Because they had the power to save lives, and not all dangers are ones that you can see right away.
“Have you ever been afraid of someone you love?” she asked.
Whatever magic Naomi possesses wo
rked. The officers took Annette in and we gained a three-day hold, which meant that I could get into her apartment and take pictures for evidence. Sure, we had incident reports, court cases, voice mails, and e-mails and statements from family members, and many, many documents in our arsenal, but as someone who works in a visual industry, I knew that photographic evidence would be crucial.
“I hope it’s dirty enough,” I said to Kati as we drove over to Mom’s. Naomi wouldn’t be joining us because she had meditated on it and had a sense that she really needed to stay away. We follow instinct in our family, so although I questioned her decision, I didn’t argue with her about it.
“Even if it’s not, maybe we can find something that will be useful in building the case. Has your mother ever been a tidy person?”
I thought only a moment before replying “We should probably go by the hardware store first.”
“For what?”
“Face masks.”
Standing outside the apartment door, I thought about the last time I’d been there, almost two years earlier. Francesca and I had flown up one summer day to visit Maggie and her family. We were blissful and still in the fairy-tale phase of our love. Francesca was the only girl I’d ever introduced to my mom. Naomi and I weren’t speaking at the time (she was going through a divorce and had “run off to a mountain”3), but when Francesca met Maggie they instantly adored each other. I was feeling pretty good and decided that since we were up there she might as well meet my mom, too.
All things considered, from my perspective, the visit went really well. Sure, Mom was ranting, and sure, her tiny studio apartment was a sty, but hey, it wasn’t the worst. From my perspective.
During the visit, I sat on a bench my mother had salvaged while Francesca sat perched on the edge of the couch (another dumpster find), barely moving. She had her hands folded in her lap, and she was staring at my mother so intently that I assumed she was simply trying to follow along with her tirade. Sitting on the bench, I faced my mom while she stood and spoke, gently pacing back and forth, her eyes glassy and her face red, but with no objects in her hands and no urgency behind her words.