The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  37

  “I’m scared of writing.”

  A student says this to me. I ask her why and she says, “Because __________ might read it.” When you teach writing, you hear this a lot. The impulse is to say: Who gives a shit about __________. But it’s more complicated than that; in fact, I think that response is dangerous. While _________ might be the writer’s mother who doesn’t know the writer smoked pot that one time, I’ve also worked with writers coming out of abusive relationships; writers interrogating identity, race, gender, and sexual orientation; writers surviving physical and emotional violence; writers surviving physical and mental illness; writers not just surviving this life but living the holy hell out of it. The question of who’s on the other end of the page is more complex once I look past my own privilege. It’s an issue of physical safety. Above all else, I want the artists I work with, specifically youth, to be safe. That’s when we can ask hard questions, face difficult truths, make discoveries and go deeper and push and fight and learn through the work, and I think part of that includes a differentiation between the act of writing and the choice of when and if and how to share that writing. Maybe, for now, you’re just writing for yourself. Maybe you’re writing for a teacher. Maybe, if your teachers do their jobs right and build spaces where art and ideas and individuals are all equally respected, you’ll choose to share it with the class. Maybe you’ll choose to perform it. To submit it. To hand it to ___________ and start a dialogue, or fuck _______________ and give it to the world.

  37

  Dear Stephen Hnatow My White Knight of a Realtor Who Swept In at the Last Possible Second and Sold My Stupid Fucking Condo as a Short Sale So We Didn’t Have to Foreclose Even Though We Lost a Ton of Money and Will Be Building Our Credit Back Forever But Who Cares We’re Freeeeeeeeeeee,

  I love you.

  If I’m ever ready to consider the possibility of having a discussion about maybe talking about buying something again in the far-off distant future, I will call you.

  37

  With the mortgage off our backs, my husband quits his day job to blog full-time.

  37

  With the mortgage off our backs, I write.

  37

  With the mortgage off our backs, I go to the doctor, a woman who is smart and kind and has great shoes. We talk about heart disease. We talk about melanoma. We talk about my thyroid, which, she discovers, doesn’t function. She looks at my THS levels and asks about weight gain—yes, lots. Dry skin—yeah, but I live in Chicago. Irregular/difficult menstrual cycle—I did, it was awful, but I got an IUD and now it’s fine and omg what a luxury, to walk through this world without pain! Depression—I’m better now! Memory loss—I’m writing a memoir! Or at least a memoir-like thing? Genre distinctions are confusing and who knows what the marketing department will suggest we call this book in 2017. And exhaustion—maybe?

  “Maybe?” she repeats.

  I say I have four jobs.

  I say I have a five-year-old kid.

  I say I get up at 5:00 a.m. to write.

  I say, “Exhausted? Fuck—aren’t we all?”

  37

  My husband calls and ask if I can sneak out of work. We do this occasionally. Cubicles are dull and sex is fun, but this time, when I arrive at the address he’s given me, it’s not a public restroom or a freight elevator. It’s a car dealership. We’re not here for a quickie. We’re here to buy a car, which to some of you may sound easy and normal but for us was a big goddamn deal. For years we’ve been driving a beater of a Honda Civic: it started maybe seventy percent of the time, made weird noises one hundred percent of the time, the radio never worked, the AC never worked, the windows didn’t roll down, Christopher is six foot five and sick to death of scrunching. But finally, with the mortgage off our backs, we can buy something—not new, but new for us.

  Afterward, we pick up our kid, now four, from preschool, and are driving somewhere or other when we hear, from the backseat, “Daddy, do we have Xfinity?”

  Christopher says, “No, buddy,” and our kid loses his mind, zero to fury within seconds. “we have to have xfinity xfinity is the best xfinity xfinity xfinity.”

  “What on Earth?” I say, turning in my seat.

  He points forward, between the passenger and driver seats, to the radio. “The man in there said so!” he says, his panic real, and with the same type of screeeech you hear in race-car movies—say, Death Race 2000 or The Fast and the Furious franchise—my husband crosses Western Avenue, pulls the not new car off to the side, and turns to face this American child of 2013 who watches Apple TV, listens to podcasts and playlists, and until this very second has never heard a commercial.

  “We need to talk about something important,” Christopher says, and our son goes focused and quiet. Daddy’s voice is serious. Daddy uses this voice to talk about bullying and typography, say please and thank you, and don’t kick the dog. “We need to talk about the psychological impacts of deceptive marketing.”

  He’s seven years old now and recently, as I drove him to karate, he leaned forward between the passenger and driver seats and yelled: “that is a lie. america does not run on dunkin’.”

  37

  I told a story at a local reading series about sleeping with my TA in college. Afterward, an editor from a new independent press approached me and asked if I’d like to make a book.

  37

  I was sitting outside my son’s kindergarten class, waiting for him to put his rain boots on and I got an e-mail saying that the piece I wrote about postpartum depression would be included in The Best American Essays.

  37

  Tentatively, carefully, cautiously—things were looking up.

  38

  Our building caught on fire.

  38

  Christopher took me to hear Zoë Keating perform at the Old Town School of Folk Music. If you have the opportunity to hear her live, run. Do not walk. Sitting in her audience, watching her build “Optimist” from a single refrain into an entire orchestra, I knew I wanted to make something like that.

  A week later, I jumped in on a story development session at 2nd Story, the storytelling collective I’d worked with for nearly a decade. Picture twenty-some brilliant, complicated people telling stories informally over coffee and/or wine. You can hear the ones that take hold, that stick, that get people leaning forward and asking questions. Those are the ones we develop: first on the page with other storytellers and an editor, then off the page with a theater director and sound designers. And then we share them with a live audience, which, depending on the venue, might be eighty or a hundred or five hundred of your new best friends.

  Amanda was facilitating that day and she asked us all to stand. “Imagine that wall is the day you were born,” she said, pointing. “And that wall is, say, age forty.” She pointed at the opposite end of the room and indicated the empty space between: ten years old, twenty years old, thirty. Then she invited us to stand on a time when we were afraid.

  I was nineteen years old and alone in a hostel in Rome, sixteen and naked in a quarry in Michigan, thirty-six on the phone with my dad, thirty-six on the phone with the bank, twenty-two on a side street in Wrigleyville, eighteen in my dorm room in Boston, thirty-two on the Montrose Dog Beach, thirty-two on my bathroom floor while my baby cried on the other side of the door, thirty-eight in the car with my son on my lap, our building lit up red with sirens.

  Do you want to play, too? You can do this on your own: grab a sheet of paper and draw a horizontal line between two X’s. Do it. I’ll wait. The X on the left? That’s when you were born. The one on the right? That’s however old you are right now. Take thirty seconds and mark some X’s on that line for the moments that scare you; the big and the small, the wonderful and the awful, when you were six and twelve and twenty and forty. Don’t think too hard about it; just get it out of you. See what you have to say. I wager you’ll find some beginnings there, some meat and emotion and story. Write them. Paint them, dance them, scream—make somethin
g.

  38

  Caleb and I make a deal: when we watch movies, the remote control will be right here. At any point—if we’re scared or sad or confused—either one of us can hit Pause. We can talk about it. We can fast-forward or turn it off and play Uno.

  Examples: I paused Honey, I Shrunk the Kids because I’d forgotten how sad it is when the ant dies. “It’s okay, Mommy,” he said, patting my leg. “It’s not real.” He paused Return of the Jedi to ask when we could see Leia’s movie. “We’ve watched three movies about Luke learning the Force. Leia’s got the Force, too, right?”* I paused The NeverEnding Story right before Artax dies in the Swamp of Sadness.

  “Listen,” I said. “Something scary is about to happen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen this movie one or two or nine hundred times.”

  “Does this part scare you?”

  “It does.”

  “It’s the horse, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “It dies, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “Okay. Let’s fast-forward.”

  The next day, he asked if we could watch it again. Chicago was mid–polar vortex and all the schools were closed. Here is my privilege: I could work from home. We sat on the couch, Caleb watching the movie while I answered e-mails, looking up in time to hit Pause at the Swamp of Sadness. “We’re at the horse part,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  And he said, “Let’s try.”

  We made it fifteen seconds.

  Jump to the next day, round three. I had my hand on the remote the whole time. “Not yet,” he’d say. “Wait.” We made it through the scene. Then we hit Stop and talked for a while. In the end, we both cried for Artax, for Atreyu, for Bastian. “It’s okay if a story makes you sad,” I told him. “It’s okay if it makes you angry or afraid. These feelings are real. Let’s live them.”

  39

  My dad calls from Alaska. He calls often, a couple times a week. He tells me about the weather or my brothers or whatever book he’s reading, and even though it’s always fine, I still feel the smallest kick of panic at his name on the caller ID.

  Is it the mountain?

  Is it his heart?

  “So listen to what happened,” he said. “I was chopping stuff for stew and there’s a knock on the door and I answer it and it’s a guy selling home security systems. Door-to-door home security systems. I haven’t seen a door-to-door salesman in I don’t know how long. You know I was a door-to-door salesman, right?” I didn’t. “I told you that, right?” He hadn’t. “Dictionaries. I was in college and I drove to Pittsburgh and sold dictionaries.”

  And we’re off, me with the questions: “Wait, you lived in Pittsburgh?” and him in the story: “While I was there I saw Anna Maria Alberghetti play Maria in West Side Story. It was the first time I’d seen theater on that scale and I was in awe. There was this chain-link fence across the stage and when the Sharks and the Jets did that ba-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-da number they jumped on the fence and it didn’t move! It didn’t even bend! I was shocked! How did they do that?” I love listening to him. I love that he talks about West Side Story at the Civic Arena with the same excitement as he talks about a twelve-point buck or a hundred-pound halibut or a whale swimming under his boat, so close that waves start rocking and you have to grab hold of something so you won’t fall overboard.

  “What we were talking about?” Dad says.

  “Uhm—Sharks, Jets, Alberghetti—”

  “Pittsburgh, dictionaries, door-to-door—”

  “Security systems.”

  “Security systems! So I was cutting stuff for stew . . .” and off into the story. Apparently, the salesman pushed hard. You and your family are at risk. Here are the statistics. Your dog can’t protect you. Your guns can’t protect you. And forgive me for saying so, sir, but you’re not a young man anymore. There are assholes out there who’d take advantage. They’d come in when you’re sleeping, when you’re out of town and your wife’s all alone and—

  “You know what this guy was doing?” Dad says.

  He pauses.

  He’s a great storyteller—building the tension, landing the punch.

  “Selling fear.”

  39

  A local theater company invited me to be part of the post-show discussion. A character in the play had postpartum depression and they were interested in how art can help us heal. I loved the production—the director and cast both brilliant. The theater itself was small, black box, with actors and audience at the same level. The lights went down, all of us together in the dark. There was the new baby. The confusion, the fear. The mother was crying center stage and there I was on the bathroom floor—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked. It was so real. She was right there next to me. I could reach out and touch her as she moved through the fog. Another character entered: a teacher trying and failing to connect. Another: a teenage girl all up in her head, the real world around her dull and on mute. Three different woman, a triangle of bodies, their stories tangled together and there, in the dark, I lived all of it: my body, my breath, my bones.

  Afterward, there was a panel including the director, a social psychologist, and me.

  We talked about the data: six hundred thousand women experience postpartum depression annually. We talked about the nuance of that data: the number goes up to nine hundred thousand if you include miscarriages and pregnancies not brought to term, and that’s based only on reported diagnoses. Here’s the truth: only fifteen percent of women with postpartum seek help, and that percentage changes based on class and race, postpartum as experienced by adoptive mothers, and queer and trans parents.

  We talked about the feeling—guilt, shame, helplessness—and how we carry it all in our bodies. I remember saying how scared I still was seven years later, that it would all come back: one second you’re fine; the next, you’re on the floor. And we talked about the stigma, how so many women don’t seek help because they don’t think people will believe them.

  A woman in the audience raised her hand. She said she didn’t believe them. Postpartum depression wasn’t real. Women today—

  That meant me.

  —just needed to love their babies. To realize that a baby is a gift. Another audience member agreed: Maybe, she said, if those women—

  That meant me.

  —stayed home with their children, they wouldn’t feel so guilty.

  She went on, but I’d stopped listening.

  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

  Only I will remain.

  Here’s how I’ve decided to remember this experience—the real estate I give it in my memory. This was a small taste of what it feels like to be invisible. Multiply it times a million and you’ve got what others live through every day. Like their lives don’t matter. Their voices don’t matter. Their stories don’t matter. Their gender doesn’t matter. They don’t matter because of the color of their skin or where they live or their faith or their job or what’s in their bank account or whether or not they have children or who they love or how old they are or how their bodies move or any of a thousand things.

  I’m grateful for the empathy.

  Dammit, I’ll use it.

  39

  I’m at a writers’ festival in Florida: heat, sun, ocean. My body knows lakes and rivers so salt’s always a shock. I walked in burning sand and drank whiskey and talked about stories with smart people hungry for ideas, for words. I love these people. They light a fire under my ass and I do my best to return the favor.

  On the third day, I got onstage and told a story. It was about a girl, nineteen years old, scared and alone in a bathroom stall in a hostel in Italy. She pees on the stick. She waits three minutes.

  I tell this story often, so much so that it’s no longer mine.

  At the reception follow
ing the reading—drink wine, eat cheese, talk to the writer—a woman approaches me, asking if I have a moment. We go off to a corner. She tells me about a time when she was young and scared and alone. I’m not going to say it here. It’s not mine to share, not to mention this woman is an incredible storyteller. If and when she’s ready to put her work into the world, it’ll crack open your heart.

  I will say this much: It was heavy. Guilt and shame and fear.

  Way too much for a person to carry alone.

  I held out my hands and asked if I could hold it.

  Real and Imaginary Ghosts

  On Sundays we go to the Montrose Dog Beach so Mojo can run it out. It’s a mile of fenced-in off-leash shoreline on Lake Michigan—open to the water, open to the sky. If you show up midmorning—say, 10:00 a.m.—it’s a madhouse. It’s a jam-packed outdoor party with hundreds of dogs playing, rolling, chasing balls, chasing each other, sniffing and/or mounting, saying no to the sniffing and/or mounting, which occasionally results in loud scary baring of teeth at which point their humans jump in and we all have a little lesson on being part of a community—which frankly I think is more necessary for those of us with two legs than those of them with four—and then back to the running and the splashing and the grand ol’ goddamn time.

  Up front: I am a person who loves dogs.

  That said: shout-out to the cat people who think a dog beach is hell on earth. I see you. You’re still welcome in this essay, which is not at all about dogs and yet totally is.

  * * *

  One night—this feels like a lifetime ago—I went early to Montrose, 2:00 a.m., maybe 3:00. I’d been up feeding the baby and couldn’t get back to sleep, didn’t sleep much then, a dead zombie fog. Our condo was teeny tiny, all of us on top of each other, and I was scared that if I turned on the TV or turned the page of a book or moved too fast or breathed too loud or thought too hard I’d wake them: my perfect, months-old little boy please go to sleep baby, please please please and his exhausted dad, working two full-time jobs to keep us afloat. Mojo and I tiptoed through the dark hallway then out the door, down three flights of stairs, and into the street-lit city life of late-night Uptown, bodies lined up for shows at the Aragon across the street and the Riv down the block and the Green Mill around the corner, everyone drinking and dancing and laughing and partying and Lord knows what other wonderful and terrible things. It was too much, too bright, too loud, too alive. So instead we headed east—are you crazy?—down Lawrence. Walking that street? Under the overpass in the middle of the night? Through the park alone? Over the hill—fucking stupid—and onto to the dog beach. It was early summer. The lakefront was empty. Gloriously, breathtakingly empty. Wide and open and empty. And quiet. So quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat.