by Michelle Tea
We began a yearly poetry contest, open to everyone, in which the winner—selected by an established poet—would get his or her manuscript printed in a handsome letterpress chapbook. I approached the legendary City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, the nexus of the Beat Generation’s long-ago literary happenings, and asked if they would allow me to helm my own imprint. An imprint is sort of a press within a press; I would select and edit a series of books that would go out with both the Sister Spit and the City Lights names attached to it. It was my hope that City Lights would see that the bedraggled, upstart, underground literary voices I’d been championing for so long were in many ways the next wave of Beat literature—radical, experimental, written by people living uncompromisingly at the fringe of our culture. To my absurd delight, they agreed! And so a dream I didn’t even know to have as a child—You love books so much? Why not publish them?—came true. There is a belief in recovery circles that what your higher power has in store for you is so much more wicked awesome than anything you could ever think up yourself, and more and more I was finding this to be true. An unexpected surge of outside help and community support had elevated the work I’d been doing for so long, elevating my life in the process.
Around this same time, I sold a novel for a bit of money, then got paid to write a celebrity’s memoir for a bit of money, and then got a grant to write a whole new novel—all at the same time. I was being paid a living wage in an expensive city to do the only things I really had any aptitude for: creating culture for misfits and writing about my own topsy-turvy life. It felt like nothing short of a miracle. It still does! And if I had put any of my day jobs first—at any point in my life, stretching all the way back to when I was a juvenile delinquent—it wouldn’t have happened. Stacking low-wage job atop literary pursuit atop low-wage job resulted in me running an actual 501(c)(3) nonprofit, one of the most adult jobs I can imagine. I don’t always feel like an adult in this role—especially when faced with incomprehensible budgets, or when I have to meet with funders and explain to them why it’s worth their while to give money to an organization that prioritizes the perspectives of feminists, sex workers, and other cultural outsiders. If I have to try to bum money off rich people, it makes me feel like a twelve-year-old asking my mom to buy me an overpriced accessory: desperate, shaky, and defeated. Figuring out the appropriate thing to wear at any moment can give me hives, but I rise to the occasion as best I can, because it’s the adult thing to do. I have found Kelly Cutrone’s titular workplace advice, “If you have to cry, go outside,” to be valuable, though sometimes I haven’t made it out before the tears start splashing down.
But as discouraging as these tiny failures can feel, it’s not too hard to pull myself out of the funk of it—all it takes is one hard look at the big-picture triumph: I’m running a freaking nonprofit! I never even went to college! I should be back in my hometown with three kids I can hardly feed and a good-for-nothing man stealing dollars from my purse! If that doesn’t put things in perspective, there’s always: I’m an alcoholic! I should be wasted right now! Who cares if I accidentally wore a see-through blouse to meet with a funder, and then said the F-word twice? At least I’m not drunk! (Truly, one of the best reasons to sober up is how it makes the most basic accomplishments feel like major wins. The all-purpose At least I’m not drunk brings relief to any situation.)
My path to making an adult living has been a weird one, but I suspect a lot of people’s are, especially during an era of transitional industries, a dragging recession, and a vanishing middle class. It takes wiles and wits and weirdness to perfect the balance of love and money; it takes perseverance and patience and long-haul thinking. Often you have to walk away from the sure thing to stay true to your heart’s desire, and sometimes that desire needs to be put on hold to get the bills paid. At any point, wherever I am on that seesaw is where I’m supposed to be—smack in the heart of all-grown-up, without-a-net living.
12.
WWYMD: What Would Young Michelle Do?
What would young Michelle think of today’s Michelle?
Who cares? That Michelle was a jerk.
Okay, that is sort of a joke. I don’t mean to sell my younger self out so easily, especially when what ailed me was not so much a bratty phase as a full-on nervous breakdown. When I look back at the things I did in my twenties, I can be a little shocked at my behavior, but I also remember that that was as well as I could do at that moment. And if it seems baffling to me now, I must have lost touch with how it felt to be me, right then, right there. Take, for instance, the time a waiter at a Chinese restaurant in Cape Cod reached out to rub the fuzz of my velvet bodysuit. (It was the nineties. How I wish I still had that velvet bodysuit today.) I was aghast that this man thought he could just reach out and put his hand on me, and I shrieked, “Don’t touch me!” throwing my little carton of soy milk all over him. It’s actually even worse than it sounds—my little carton of soy milk was one of those boxes you have to punch a straw into. To “throw” it at someone requires you to sort of aim and squeeze continuously. It lacks the drama of a single drink tossed into a face, and it requires you to commit to the act of dousing a stranger with liquid, since you have to keep squeezing. And all you get is a sort of weak stream of milk. Soy milk.
That I was walking around town sipping at a carton of unflavored soy milk might tell you all you need to know about my state of mind at that time. Many things had happened at once. I’d realized I was bisexual right around the time I realized I couldn’t afford college right around the time I realized my stepfather had been spying on me through holes he’d put in my bedroom walls. The political consciousness I’d developed as a teenager surged, brutally. I had a sort of terrible revelation, in which all forms of earthly oppression became very visible to me. I could see their interconnectedness with a horrible clarity that made it difficult to live. For me, in that moment, there was no difference between the urge to kill off a people via genocide and the struggle of an underpaid migrant worker picking my vegetables. If you think I’m demeaning the reality of mass murder by comparing it to unjust labor practices, you’re not understanding the almost mystical state I was in. You know how some people, via spiritual training or psychedelic drugs, can have a visceral comprehension of the deep and total oneness of everything? From the accounts I’ve read, this can be a pretty blissful experience—to know that we are not separate from one another, or the ocean or the sky or that frog over there sitting on that lily pad, all things crucially bound to each other. What I was going through was like the bummer version of that—there was no difference between factory farming and the oppression of gay people. There was no difference between laws that made me, as a female, keep my shirt on (while men’s bare chests roamed free) and the laws that justified slavery. And so a person who ate meat was to me no different from a fascist dictator, and if I should eat the egg of a factory-farmed chicken—well, I might as well be conducting medical experiments on third-world women. This was my state of mind right then. It was not a relaxing place to be.
I think a lot about this time in my life. It was powerful, intense, and, thankfully, short-lived—life snapped me out of it after a couple of years, though its influences echoed for longer. How did I survive when all around me—from the food on the grocery store shelves to the advertising on billboards to news headlines and casual conversation—seemed to confirm, again and again, that this planet is a terrible place and we humans have made it that way? Well, it was hard. I didn’t have many friends, because I couldn’t bear to be around people whose opinions differed from mine when everything felt so life-and-death. I could spend time only with people who thought like I did, other edgy, defensive individuals, all of us waiting to bust one another for thought crimes so we could call them out and thus feel like we were doing what we could to make the world a more just place. I couldn’t eat a lot of food—all animal products were out, including honey, because who were we to barge into the bees’ homes and steal their cr
eations? It was hard to eat even vegetables knowing that underpaid, uninsured people of color had picked them for me. I became frighteningly skinny, and often would feel faint and need to consume half a jar of peanut butter in a single sitting.
My fashion suffered as well. I couldn’t handle the way the world sexualized females, and after learning my stepfather, whom I’d admired and trusted, had been peeping on me, I didn’t want to wear anything that had been created to sexualize my body. Women’s attire, which I had loved so passionately for so long, became suddenly sinister. Why were we wearing skinny stilettos if not to make it harder to run away from an attacker? Why were we wearing short skirts if not to make it easier for malevolent men to sneak a peek, if not a grab?
Not even my sex life was immune to this philosophical virus. I was paired up with a woman at the time, and our available repertoire was fast shrinking. Strap-ons? No way! Why would we want something that resembled a penis? While we both had fond memories of tying one another up at the start of our dating, simulating violence was now forbidden. As was most music and literature, and art, and movies. I recall myself at the height of this, sexually frustrated, my hair cropped short, wearing baggy jeans held up with a woven hemp belt and a roomy, gender-neutral T-shirt, eating a bland bean burrito and reading a giant coffee-table book about the grim legacy of aboveground nuclear testing in the 1950s (American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War; it’s actually fascinating and you should read it yourself if you get the chance). Poor me! I was twenty-one years old. I was supposed to be partying and having lots of dumb sex I’d later regret. And I would, soon enough. But right then and there I felt like I was the emotional receptacle for all the feelings of grief and despair the rest of humanity should have been feeling but wasn’t.
I once read that what makes a poet a poet is the ability to see likeness in things that are not immediately similar. I do have the mind—heart? soul?—of a poet, and so the leap between the illegality of prostitution and the fact that people of the same sex couldn’t marry was a short trip for me. Every day a new problem revealed itself—ageism, cultural scorn for fat people, the sexism embedded in our very language. My world got smaller and smaller and I got angrier and angrier. I thought, quite seriously, about destroying my neighborhood frat houses, places that harbored what I assumed to be rapists in training, if not fresh offenders. I thought about moving into a forest somewhere, “living off the land” in spite of the fact that the last thing I’d grown was a sprout in an egg carton back in first grade. A sprout that died. Maybe I would settle down on “women’s land,” one of those rural communes occupied by other women who couldn’t handle the world. If I was of a different class or had health insurance, I might’ve wound up in a hospital of sorts—the kind with a rolling lawn and regular therapy and craft sessions. But I was loose in the world, very much alone in spite of my relationship, which was on the skids. Nothing could survive in such an unforgiving, harsh landscape, certainly not love. I consoled myself with lonely drinks of Mezcal, the relief the alcohol brought to my body astounding and necessary. If this was what the world truly was, who could handle it sober? Not me.
How did I ever climb out of this heap of misery? It was both easy and not easy. Simply put, I could not survive without beauty and pleasure, two things that my nervous breakdown had outlawed. In that way, my recovery was inevitable. But it was hard, and in some ways I will always be haunted by what I experienced. Because all of it was true. There is a continuum between oppression and atrocities. By participating in the world, I do become part of numerous problems. Eventually, the answer to my politico-spiritual conundrum was also somewhat spiritual in nature: I exist. As surely as the migrant workers and the frog on the lily pad and the ocean, I exist. So it must be okay to be here. And if this is the time and place I have been born into, then I will be of it, no better or worse than any other of my kind. And slowly I began to open up to the world, and in doing so, to my own imperfect desires, my human nature. My girlfriend and I broke up, and I moved to San Francisco, to move in with an old friend who didn’t know what I’d been going through. The sight of me—my hair shorn, my sacklike clothes barely hanging on my emaciated frame—shocked him. I looked like I was dying. But in fact, I was coming back to life.
Really, though, it was a KitKat that did it. I was standing at a bus stop, starving. Hunger was my daily state. Realizing I needed change for the bus, I walked into a corner store to break a bill. There was a goddamn KitKat bar, glowing in its red wrapper, right there at the counter. Oh my God, how I have loved a KitKat bar. Its yummy crunch, a cookie and a bit of chocolate, the action of snapping a slender bar from the brick of it, savoring the sweetness. As if on autopilot, I reached for it. Put it by the register. Handed over the bill, damp from my sweaty palm. The man gave me back my change, unaware of the magnitude of the transaction. Some part of me, some selfish, human part that yearned for sweetness, had won out. I ripped open the wrapper and gorged myself on this not-vegan, corporate chocolate whose cacao beans had surely been sourced under terrible circumstances.
“I ate a KitKat bar,” I confessed to my roommate. He looked at me, confused. I had simply reported the eating of a candy bar, but I had said it in the voice of a person who had just run someone over with her car, so there was, you know, this dissonance. I retired to my room. How could it be okay for me to have eaten this candy? It was like I’d pushed a button that said I’m for the torture of animals and corporate domination and child labor in colonized lands. But could my purchase have only pushed a button that said I’m for cheap and available sweets whilst having seriously low blood sugar at a bus stop? Maybe it pushed both. Maybe there were no buttons, and whether or not I bought a candy bar at a corner store actually meant very little.
Soon enough I was dating people again. In San Francisco, in the nineties, even the boys I found myself making out with were flirting with all sorts of newfangled perversions. One guy surprised me greatly by confessing that he would like for me to doll him up like a Barbie and smack him around a bit. I loved making out with this person, my hands twirling in his long, curly hair, but I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t because Barbie was sexist propaganda that brainwashed girls to aspire to twenty-two unrealistic beauty standards (which I had recently written a slam poem about), and it wasn’t because S and M mimicked actual sexual violence (another recent poem topic). It was because I wanted to be dolled up like Barbie and get smacked around a bit, and I was only at the start of coming to terms with this, making a strange peace between my deep political beliefs and the irresistible pull of sexual desire. The romance fizzled out, but there were others. I rendezvoused with people who kept all sorts of sex toys under the bed, and when they fished them out, I didn’t flinch.
Beauty and pleasure—these things are inside me, but they’re outside me, too. They’re bigger than me and I am no match for them. My time under the influence of injustice has widened my notion of beauty, so that I see it in people, places, and things that are commonly overlooked. That period when I rejected beauty made it so that I now have more beauty available to me than the average person. Things that people get funny about—body sizes and types, hair, feet—don’t bother me. A part of me, marked by that dark time, is now called to spot the beauty in everyone, as if it were my job. I must say I’m good at it—perhaps it’s my poet’s nature again.
I still wonder about my ability to love and empathize with animals and yet eat them. It seems a disconnect must be in place, a kind of denial, but the more I probe, the more I believe it’s not denial but acceptance. I am a feeling, loving human who lives off the meat of other feeling, loving beings. Most everywhere I look on our planet this is the case, life consuming life. I am not outside any of it; I am in it—implicated, inevitably guilty, guilty of having desires and the ability to fulfill them. A chicken in the Crock-Pot, a fur coat in the closet (used, but still) hanging alongside clothes made under dubious circumstances in countries I’ll never visit. It’s not that I don’t ca
re. My heart shakes with rage and anxiety when I read about striking garment workers being shot at by police, or impoverished children picking the cacao beans that might have made my KitKat bar. I try to make choices that align with my highest beliefs. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and in between I try not to have a panic attack over it.
Once I looked at a photo of an Indian child playing atop a pile of garbage and I thought of my niece and thought—that’s her. There’s no difference between my niece, whom I love with all my being and who will never play in an international garbage heap, and this child I will never know, his hands grimed with trash. It is still inside me, this ability to experience connectivity, and it still feels as powerfully true. I sometimes pull away from caring too deeply because I fear falling back into that long-ago paralyzing, unhappy state. I’ve wondered if my caring is like my alcoholism—I lack the ability to do it in moderation. Whereas some people can, say, rescue feral cats and still have a normal life, the saving of a feral cat could lead me to throwing away all my shoes and painting on recycled paper with the juice of berries (true story).
What do I say to this long-ago Michelle who is aghast that I’ve turned into a materialistic meat eater? How to explain that the same ethics currently keeping her alive today will stunt her tomorrow? Could I get her to understand that change is inevitable and not to be feared, however scary? I doubt it. I know how awful I was to argue with, how harsh and all-or-nothing my stance. I made friends cry, I was so unwavering, and I didn’t care. People’s feelings were not half as important as the much more abstract issues I was obsessed with. Now I think people are the issues. If everything is as connected as I felt it was during my nervous breakdown, then perhaps kindness can go much further than we know.