Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  In contrast to our very adult problems were our clothes—most of us, including me, were wearing pajama bottoms with T-shirts to allow for freedom of movement in class. My pajamas had spaceships all over them that day, and on the top, I wore a T-shirt from the musical Chicago, which I had already seen seven times—or at least seen the second half of seven times.

  “What about you?” Hazel asked me. “What are your demons, Jasmin?”

  “Yeah,” echoed Eric. “Why the Prozac?”

  I looked up from the ground, and then around at the circle of precocious eighteen-year-olds in pajamas, staring back at me.

  I took a breath, not knowing how to respond. Nothing seemed big enough, valid enough, true enough. Nothing in my life could possibly make sense of the overpowering sadness that lived inside me. I had love, after all. I had privilege. I knew these things, and yet I felt like a prisoner inside myself.

  Finally, I looked up at the stained ceiling and audibly exhaled. The spots on it were browner and wider than they had been the previous week. There were rumors that the building was full of asbestos, and the rumors turned out to be true, because two years later, the city mandated that the building be destroyed. But before the building was destroyed because of asbestos, I had to face my own poison. “I’m fat,” I finally said. “And I fucking hate myself.”

  —

  That night I baked a cake. It was the first one I ever made, and even though it came from a box (just like Mom’s!), I was wickedly and irrationally proud of it. It was a chocolate layer cake with store-bought chocolate icing. When I picked up the eggs, cake mix, and icing earlier that day, I had enough good sense to buy two tubs of the icing—one of which I snacked on, in its entirety, as the cake rose in the hot oven.

  And when the cake was ready, I ate it in full. And as I ate it, my heart felt full. So, with crumbs on my shirt and icing on my mouth, I whispered to Philadelphia, “The Prozac must be working.”

  FIVE

  the perfect facade of safety

  My sophomore year of college was when everything came to a head, then promptly and without warning changed the course of my life.

  During the summer leading up to it, I had worked as an acting teacher at a Jewish day camp in New Jersey. There, I had tried out both my newfound ability to attract boys and my newfound sexuality, by way of an intense but short-lived relationship with a Rutgers student named Bradley. I made my choice primarily based on Bradley’s talent at playing the piano and songwriting. He was also an excellent accompanist to my growing roster of show tunes.

  Returning to my tiny Philadelphia apartment, where my cardboard cutout of James Dean still remained, unwavering, in the window, I fell right back into my now-familiar mix of driving ambition and deep despair. Fortunately, I still had my short-term fixes—the familiar comforts of pizza and scrambled eggs. Like my James Dean cutout, the calmness bestowed by food was reliable, always there, providing the perfect facade of safety.

  I was no longer seeing Dr. Smith. I finally got fed up with her accusation, leveled at me more than once, that I was high on pot during our sessions. I wasn’t. Though I laughed it off at the time, looking back I can see why she may have come to that conclusion. The truth is, she didn’t trust me, and she had every right not to. I was guarded with her, never able to get past her obesity for long enough to give her a glimpse into the reasons why I ate to excess, or the reasons why despair was taking over my life.

  Anyway, the main reason I had been seeing her was for the meds, though I don’t actually think that the Prozac did much for my sadness (nor did it make me a better actor). In fact, an argument could be made that the extra-cheese pizza I ate every day, or (if I was feeling fancy) the cheese omelets, did a better job at keeping my depression at bay. But that was the thing: Neither the meds nor the food nor Dr. Smith helped me look more closely at the systemic reason behind why I was stuck in a hateful cycle of overeating and depression, depression and overeating, overeating and depression, and on and on. More importantly, not only did they fail to help me understand it, but they didn’t help me get out of it. Gradually the depression became even more consuming than before, and I spiraled deeper and deeper.

  —

  At some point, others began to notice that I was slogging through my days. I dragged my feet, perpetually arrived a few minutes late to class, and stopped volunteering to go first (or at all). When my academic adviser, who was also one of my professors, asked me what the story was, I responded that it wasn’t that I wanted to die, but that I didn’t want to live, either. That obviously raised a red flag with him, and the school soon bundled me off for more sophisticated professional intervention. Thus began a new course of treatment with a group of doctors at the nearby teaching hospital. It was, in retrospect, one of the worst disasters of my life.

  The hospital was only a few blocks from where I lived, yet it seemed an entire world away from the colorful land of theater arts that had defined my Philadelphia existence. The building was bright white, sterile, and lacking the charming nooks and crannies (and, presumably, asbestos) that made UArts bustle with such distinct character. I was evaluated by a young medical student whose crisp white lab coat was too large for his tiny body. He asked me some standard questions, then shuffled me to the next doctor, who asked me more questions and wrote out a scrip for an extremely heavy dose of a mood stabilizer that stabilized little more than my lack of self-worth.

  Adolescent angst is a pretty scary place. The pharmaceutical industry, which claims to make it easier to navigate, is too often making it worse with medications that are unnecessary at best and addictive and damaging at worst. I’m certainly not saying that prescription medicine is never helpful, but too often the proposed solution for every misery is to simply pop a pill. And while I initially craved a pill to find validation for my feelings (anything for a quick fix), like so many others, I quickly saw the dark side of that supposed validation. Once I traveled down the well-worn path of mood-stabilizing medication, there was no stopping—until I had no other choice but to stop everything.

  I don’t actually remember a whole lot of details about what came next, but I do recall with a haunting clarity that I was misdiagnosed as bipolar and improperly medicated. The combination of the wrong meds and crippling self-hatred caused me to basically cease functioning almost altogether. I woke up in the mornings feeling like I was under water, my limbs like thick and soggy logs that I could hardly maneuver. I started to fall asleep in class, and when my friends invited me to South Street for a foray to Johnny Rockets, I opted instead to crawl into my unmade bed with my weeks-old sheets. My head ached and my heart felt numb.

  One day, during an early morning ballet class that I had forced myself to attend, vaguely proud that I had arrived to the barre only a few minutes late for the warm-up, I went blank. I just stood there as the people around me did the warm-up routine: bending over, bending back, and again. My intention was there: “Plié,” I whispered to myself, as my soggy, heavy limbs dangled at my sides. But I simply could not move—my multiple medications were making me a zombie.

  And so I left college.

  Off I went back to New Jersey to stay with my mother and Wayne. Mom was determined to get me past my zombie state, and so after making sure I was under the care of a much more competent psychologist, she encouraged me to audition for a children’s play, in which, thankfully, I was cast. This was a role that paid actual money (at least enough for a coffee) and made me feel like a working actor. When people asked why I was suddenly back home, I went with the bogus story that I had left school in order to be in this play, rather than the truth: that I had left school because after years of self-medicating depression with cheese, I had been wrongly medicated with equally legal, but much more powerful, pharmaceuticals. As a result, I had suffered a mental breakdown. I’m sure that they preferred hearing the fake story. I certainly preferred telling it.

  —

  Only a
week after returning to Mom’s from Philadelphia, I met Richard. There have been so many times throughout the past fifteen years that I have wished I could just pluck him out of my story, but I can’t. He’s embedded in it as permanently and as deeply as the scars and stretch marks all over my body.

  My friend Vera had made it her personal mission to cheer me up, and so she insisted that we take an afternoon trip over to the college town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, where, coincidentally, my brother, Jeremy, was living at the time. Jeremy was a recent college grad who spent his days canvassing with the environmental group NJPIRG.

  Though I hadn’t spent much time there, New Brunswick and I went way back: I had been born there nineteen years earlier and I’d also had my breast reduction there. So, when I made eye contact with an older man who worked at a record store that Vera and I popped into, I thought surely the third great thing to happen to me here would be meeting my soul mate. That was the way I thought—always looking for the quick fix. Perhaps meeting a romantic partner would solve all my problems, make life right again. At the very least, a little harmless flirtation and mutual desire would create a welcome distraction from living, once again, on Anna Lane and under the watchful eye of my TM.

  Richard had a shaved head and pronounced jaw and wore faded jeans and steel-toed combat boots. He was older—that was clear—though it wasn’t until our first date (of two total) that I found out that he was thirty-five. I pretended that it didn’t faze me, figuring that if I was seemingly unflappable about it I would seem more mature.

  In spite of my sojourn with Timmy, and my quick fling with Bradley, it was still highly unusual for men to give me attention of the positive variety, and yet Richard was clearly fixated on me, repeatedly asking me the kinds of things that men ask women they are trying to pick up, but which I’d never heard from anyone before: Could he help me find a particular album? Did I go to Rutgers? Was I new in town? Because surely he would have remembered me if he’d seen me before, he said.

  Vera pulled me into the classic rock section, her eyes glimmering. “See, Jazz, things are looking up for you!” She was practically giddy, and her excitement made me shyly smile. I had been a sad sack for months, and I wondered sometimes if those close to me in my life had more invested in me getting happy than I did. When Richard asked for my number, I was astonished and wondered, momentarily, if he was making fun of me.

  A few days later, we met at a diner, where we both ordered cheese omelets with steak fries, then shared a scoop of lemon sorbet (in truth, I wanted my own scoop). Afterward, we sat in Richard’s car (a true lemon) and made out like teenagers—which, in fact, I was. Richard wore circular, wire-framed eyeglasses that night (making him look more intellectual than when we’d met a few days prior), but placed them in the glove compartment during a breather from our make-out session. That was when he told me what I had always been dying to hear—that, had I been around in the 1940s, my curves would have made me a model. Bolstered by this praise, I decided to tell him that I was self-conscious about my weight. He responded by lightly grazing his hands over my shape and saying, “No, no, babe . . . you’re exactly the right size . . . Who wants a skinny bitch, anyway? You’re succulent.”

  I was hooked.

  —

  On our second date, I drove right past my brother Jeremy’s place on the way to Richard’s. Jeremy lived in a communal house known widely as the Purple House, for it was a bright, jewel-colored purple—and it always reeked of pot.

  I did not intend to have sex with Richard that night. Though I was not a virgin, the only two men I had been with by that point had each been my boyfriend at the time, and sex was not something I simply jumped into.

  Richard’s housemate was home, so we mainly hung out in his room in order to have our privacy. I slowly walked around, taking in the space, stopping at carefully framed photos of his family—his sister, his mother, his nephews. “They’re all cute,” I said. I thought only a really good guy would have his family’s photos hanging up.

  We started kissing, and it was clear Richard wanted to do more. So I decided to set my first boundary of the evening. We were sitting on the side of his bed, feet on the ground. He was focused on my neck, giving me room to speak. “Hey, Richard, I don’t want to have sex, okay?”

  He kept going at it with my neck and finally mumbled, “Mmm-hmmm.” We continued to make out, and he started to undress himself, then me, calling me luscious, gorgeous, and captivating. “You should just always be naked,” he said, making me cackle, flattering and embarrassing me.

  “Richard, I don’t want to have sex,” I reiterated a few hot minutes later, though from a smaller, further-away place. This time, he ignored me.

  It was late—around midnight—and it was absolutely pouring outside. Thunder clapped and bright bolts of lightning momentarily lit up his otherwise dark bedroom. I started to wonder where I’d sleep that night. I was growing uncomfortable, even though I also craved the attention Richard was giving me. I was caught between two polar feelings: how confined I was starting to feel with Richard all over me and how freeing it felt to be kissed and complimented.

  I looked down at my body. It was dark in the room, but I could still make out the red scars on my breasts from my surgery just three years earlier, scars I had forced myself to explain to him moments earlier—and had to demystify for every other person I slept with—in a somewhat awkward way, because how do you bring something like that up in the heat of the moment?

  My stomach was round, with a deep, vertical crease in the middle that made me feel I was somehow blessed with two of them. My thighs and arms were full and fleshy, and yet Richard seemed to think that my extra padding was “succulent”—so maybe it was?

  Soon he was on top of me, and it became clear what was happening. I knew I needed to manage the situation, but I didn’t know exactly what it was I had gotten myself into. Even in retrospect, I am perplexed by the decision making that led to my being in a thirty-five-year-old’s bedroom, completely naked, proclaiming that I didn’t want to have sex. It’s not as though I blame myself, exactly, for the events that were about to unfold, but I was not taking care of myself—and most certainly should not have been there. I was wooed by Richard’s interest in me, his obsession with my body, with my flesh. Despite the fact that I was no longer on medications, aside from an antidepressant, ever since I had been prescribed heavy doses of medication that I did not need, my body and my mind had felt detached, like two separate entities sharing space. Richard was temporarily merging those two parts of me, and I found I was thirsty for unification and affection.

  “I don’t want to,” I said—louder and firmer than before.

  “You can’t do this to me, babe,” he replied, also firmer.

  I was silent. I shut down. It was going to happen no matter what I said, and so I asked him if he had a condom.

  He did not.

  I put my foot down again, as much as I could muster. “Could you please get one?” I whispered, and his shoulders stiffened up and his brow furrowed.

  “God damn it, Jasmin,” he said as he got off of me and out of the bed, haphazardly pulling on his clothes as he ran out of the house and down the street, in the pouring rain, to get a condom at the nearby store.

  I was alone in his bed, still naked. Was this my out? I could not for the life of me figure out what to do—whether to leave, and risk running into him on my way out, or to stay and continue to pretend that things were functioning in a normal, respectful way.

  My eyes welled up. I closed them and let a few tears sneak out and roll down the sides of my face, as I thought of my mother asleep in her bed—just twenty minutes away on Route 18—or my grandmother asleep in hers, a half hour in the opposite direction on the New Jersey Turnpike. The unconditional love they each had for me staggered me just then, juxtaposed with this house, this room, this moment. I felt kicked in the gut with despair. I thought of Philad
elphia, just an hour and a half to the south, and wondered if my former classmates were sleeping. Or perhaps they were on South Street getting looks and getting drunk. I was, I knew, just a distant memory to them already. I didn’t matter to them anymore, not nearly as much as I mattered right in that moment to Richard, who walked back into his bedroom in what seemed like just a few short minutes later—completely drenched and mildly out of breath, but carrying a small plastic black bag of condoms.

  I still didn’t want to have sex with him. I saw no way out.

  In a last-ditch effort—and fueled by the fleeting self-respect I tapped into as I thought of how important my friends and family were to me, and perhaps how important I was to them—I tried to find a way out anyway. And so mere moments after Richard returned from the store, when he was on top of me once again, trying to find the erection he had lost, I grasped at my last shreds of self-worth and said, “Richard, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to.”

  He ignored me, tried to fumble with the condom. It became clear that he could not get an erection with the condom.

  My voice became tiny—yet it was still there, I was sure of it. And even though I barely heard myself say, “Richard, no,” I said it—and Richard heard, too, because he hit the pillow above me with all his might and once again said—louder, this time—“God damn it, Jasmin!”

  Perhaps it was a couple of hours too late, but at that moment I tried but failed to get up and out of the bed, and into my clothes and into my car, and onto the highway and back to my life—away from Richard, away from this house, away from this city where I was born and where I then worried I might also die.