So Much I Want to Tell You

by Anna Akana

  Copyright © 2017 by Anna Akana

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN 9780399594939

  Ebook ISBN 9780399594922

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Ruby Levesque

  Cover photograph: © Amanda Demme

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part 1: Creativity

  Find Your Voice

  Once You’ve Found Your Voice, Let It Evolve

  If You Want to Be the Star, Create the Show

  The Only Way to Start Is to Start

  It’s Called Work for a Reason

  Ideas Are a Dime a Dozen

  It’s Okay If It Sucks

  Fail More

  You Are Not Your Art

  Develop a Thick Skin

  Part 2: Identity

  When It Comes to Self-Care, Find What Works for You

  Succeed Because of Your Race, Not Despite It

  It’s Okay to Want to Be Beautiful as Long as It’s Your Definition of Beauty

  You Can’t Treat an Emotional Problem Physically

  Part 3: Money, Work, and Career

  More Money, More Independence

  On Being an Internet Personality

  How to Be a Boss

  Give Yourself Permission

  You Don’t Need Balls

  Take Care of Your People

  Crunch the Numbers

  Stand Up for Yourself; No One Else Is Going To

  Don’t Sign Anything Unless You Understand What It Means

  Do Every Job

  Work Hard, Work Smart

  Know Your Shit

  If You Don’t Know How to Do Something, Find Someone Who Does

  Part 4: Relationships

  You Don’t Realize How Important Friends Are Until You’re Friendless

  Don’t Be Afraid to Cross People Off the List

  Love

  If He Doesn’t Listen, Ditch Him

  Take Your Birth Control

  The Hardest Part of Being in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship Is Actually Admitting That You’re in One

  Nice Guys Don’t Finish Last

  Choose Life

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  OUR LIFE IS MADE BY THE DEATH OF OTHERS.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  A lot has happened since my sister killed herself.

  She was thirteen years old when she died in 2007. If she were still alive, she’d be in her twenties. She’d be old enough to drink, drive, get married, have kids. I sometimes can’t believe she’s gone. It feels like she was this person I knew who just disappeared. Kinda like in a romantic relationship. You spend every day with a person for years, until one day you break up. Then they’re just gone. Your best friend, your roommate, the person you spent a chunk of your life with. Gone.

  Why exactly Kristina killed herself will always be a mystery. Was her suicide an impulsive adolescent decision? Or was it something more? In 2007, the suicide epidemic had only just begun to sweep the nation’s teen population. She was bullied in school before bullying was taken seriously and, worse, punished for trying to defend herself. When a group of boys threatened to beat her up after school, Kristina did what she was supposed to do—she told her teachers. For whatever reason, her teachers didn’t take the threat seriously. They told her it was probably a joke. It wasn’t a joke to Kris, though. She brought an airsoft gun to school for protection and was expelled because of it. This caused a lot of trouble for her at home.

  Kristina was able to change schools, but she had a hard time adjusting. She didn’t get along well with the kids in her new school, although she was usually great at making friends. When she began to fall behind in her classes, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. Instead of considering treatment, my family approached the diagnosis as an obstacle Kristina could overcome with time and didn’t offer her much support.

  I’d always had my suspicions that Kristina might have suffered from bipolar disorder, or some other mood disorder. People didn’t talk about mental health as much as they should have ten years ago. They still don’t, in my opinion. But I’ll never know. Maybe she was so hurt and alone and scared that she made choices without fully understanding how permanent they were. Maybe she could no longer handle being bullied and misunderstood by her family. Maybe, if she exists somewhere, she regrets her choice. Maybe it’s all of it. Everything.

  —

  KRISTINA DIED ON VALENTINE’S DAY. I was on a picnic with my boyfriend at our local park when a terrible feeling came over me in a wave. I leapt to my feet, screaming that we needed to leave immediately. Something was wrong. I packed up our picnic and bolted for the car. That’s when my brother, Will, called. He told me Kristina had tried to take her own life. At the time he didn’t know that she’d succeeded. But I knew. I felt it.

  Weeks later I told my mom that, somehow, I’d known something was wrong. Mom was always the one who had a little bit of a third eye. When she was a kid in the Philippines, she’d have dreams of relatives saying goodbye, only to wake up and find out that they’d passed away in the night. She’d see ghostly figures standing on dirt roads, looking lost and confused. But when Kristina died, Mom said she hadn’t felt anything. “I was just sitting downstairs knitting,” she said, beginning to cry. Later my sister came to my mom in a dream, to say she was sorry.

  She appeared in my dreams too, except my dreams were nightmares: Me and Kristina in a bug-infested house, my arms wrapped around her, trying to protect her, but the bugs kept crawling into her eyes anyway. Then I’d see her standing on the edge of a cliff, body distorted, looking back at me before falling off. These images still haunt me, even ten years later.

  —

  MY SISTER LEFT A SUICIDE NOTE, but I was never allowed to read it. I’ve asked Dad about it all these years later and he insists that he lost it in a move. Whether that’s true or he’s trying to protect me, I don’t know. But from what he told me, the note isn’t kind.

  “I’m sorry I make everyone so miserable” were her final words. She had a special goodbye for her friends and cousin Frank, but nothing for us. Nothing for us because she was furious with us. She’d fought with every member of my family over something trivial, a sleepover she wasn’t allowed to attend. She came into my room last, but I turned her away. The last thing I ever said to her was “I hate you.”

  Her death didn’t feel real for many, many days. I woke up the day after she died expecting her to be in her room, only to find Mom in the closet instead. Together, we cried until our heads felt like they’d cracked in half. The sick feeling in our guts only went away after several hours of sleep. Our faces, however, never changed. The blank, empty expressions remained. I had a constant headache from crying.

  —

  I AM KRISTINA’S BIG SISTER. I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to comfort her. So many times I walked by her room and I could have said something. I don’t blame myself anymore, but I do know that there were things I could have done differently. Things I could have said. And perhaps if I had, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

  I wrote her a letter. I said I was sorry, that I loved her, that I hoped she was okay wherever she was. I asked her to visit me in a dream to say goodbye, because I wanted so
badly to see her one last time. I burned the letter, because it seemed like the only way to mail it to the afterworld. And then I cried.

  —

  I WAS DESTROYED BY Kristina’s death. My whole family was. For a very long time it felt like we were broken. Like we were trying to shove the sharp, jagged pieces back together again, but they didn’t quite fit.

  Whenever someone casually mentioned suicide, hyperbolically or colloquially, I would have horrible flashbacks. I would feel a physical pain in my chest. I’d have to excuse myself to calm myself down.

  My therapist predicted I’d engage in self-destructive behavior because I blamed myself for Kristina’s death. I’d told her I hated her, so yeah, that’s gonna cause some guilt. I was the last person to see her alive before she cranked up the music in her room and slammed her door.

  And my therapist was right—I began to binge on drugs and alcohol and I made toxic choices in friendships and relationships. I looked forward to going to sleep each night because it was my only escape from the reality of Kristina’s death.

  But, somehow, I made it through those awful years. And then something amazing happened: I found comedy.

  I found a new outlet for my grief.

  I started to talk about Kristina.

  And I kept talking about her.

  God, now I talk about her in everything I do. I wrote this series called Riley Rewind years ago about a girl who could rewind time to try to save a classmate from committing suicide. I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE I WAS WRITING ABOUT HER. Seriously.

  I wrote movie pitches, pilots, Web series, poems, books—and everything, absolutely everything, has been about my sister. When I have enough distance from my work, I can see her there, in the cracks of everything I write. Hell, all of my YouTube videos are meant for her. Telling her all the things I’ve learned that she can never use. Sharing stories with her that she will never hear.

  I started to talk about her suicide in videos, in podcasts, on panels, and in conversations with friends, family, even strangers. I started to make jokes about it onstage. I became an advocate for suicide prevention. It felt good to talk about what happened. Each time I did so, her death held a little less power over me. I was finally starting to heal.

  What once was the most painful memory of my life soon became an aspiring one. I’d brought it out and talked about it so many times there was barely a sharp edge to it anymore.

  —

  I’VE HAD YOUNG WOMEN come up to me at the DMV, or VidCon, or at the grocery store. Sometimes they cry, other times they don’t, but they have to whisper to get the words out. Sometimes it’s something as simple as “Thank you” and other times it’s more dramatic, like “You saved my life.” I see Kristina in all of these girls. When they tell me that they wanted to kill themselves, or hurt themselves, until a video of mine changed their minds, I feel…well, there’s really no word for that feeling.

  There are times I shrug off my impact on people. It feels weird to have a friend say that I’m an “influencer” or a “role model” or even that I “make a difference.” I never feel like those things. I feel like me, you know? And I don’t necessarily want to feel like those things, because if I do, doesn’t that make me a pompous asshole? Who goes around saying “Yes! I’m an INFLUENCER. Model yourselves after me, girls! Let me make a difference to you!”

  But then there are the moments when I meet someone who cries the instant they see me, who radiates love and gratefulness. Some people hug me so tightly, crying so hard their entire body shakes, and tell me that they love me, that I’ve saved their lives, that I’ve made a difference.

  These moments are hard to deny. They are why I do what I do.

  Talking about Kristina and making videos that help young people has helped me heal. It’s almost as if everyone I help is a hole in my own little redemption punch card. Her death no longer haunts my life—it gives me purpose.

  —

  THIS BOOK HAS NOT been easy to write. It’s made me realize that so many of my memories are ones without Kristina. Every memory I’ll make from February 14, 2007, on is one without her. When I turned twenty-seven, I had lived more of my life without her than with her.

  There’s a line I once ran across that struck me the moment I read it: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” I’m not ready for Kristina to be a statistic on a teen suicide site. I’m not even ready to let her be a memory. I want people to know her, to know the brave, beautiful person she was and would have been. I want to shove her in people’s faces, even if they don’t get it. I’m beaming her face onto every lens and writing “Dear Kristina” at the beginning of every script.

  Because Kristina is the driving force behind everything I do. This book isn’t just inspired by her, it’s for her. I want to tell her what I’ve learned these past ten years. I want to tell her about all the mistakes I’ve made—and the hard-won lessons that came out of them. Lessons about creativity, love, ambition, money, work, and everything else that felt so out of my grasp growing up. This book is filled with the advice that I would give her if she were still here, the advice I want to reach out and give to young, lost, teen girls who need it.

  Most of all, I hope that Kristina, wherever she is, knows she’s a part of everything I’ve done—and everything I will do. This book is for her.

  1

  CREATIVITY

  I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the creative process and the different ways people work. It’s a way of procrastinating that I can rationalize as “research.” Once I knew I’d be writing my own book, I immediately bought every other digital influencer memoir I could get my hands on. I spent my first months of “writing time” reading, hoping that I could learn what worked and what didn’t from those who set out to do this before me.

  As much of a distraction as my “research” phases are, it has been useful to hear about other people’s routines, rituals, and processes—and how different they are. I can’t teach anyone how to do what they want to do, but I can tell you what works for me. In these chapters, you’ll find my advice on the creative process. Take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, and feel free to loosely interpret whatever you want to get what you need.

  Find Your Voice

  Most successful people will tell you to follow your dreams. I’d say fall into them, because I fell into mine.

  After my sister died, I spent two years abusing drugs and alcohol and engaging in all that escapist won’t-deal-with-my-feelings harmful stuff. LSD, MDMA, all the acronyms. But one day as I sat stoned in my room watching TV, a Comedy Central special came on. Margaret Cho was doing a routine I’d never seen before. And for the first time in a very long time, I laughed. But even better, I forgot. I forgot myself. I forgot my pain. I forgot that Kris was dead.

  Seeing that show sparked something inside of me. After a couple years of feeling dead inside, I experienced joy, hope, excitement. I became obsessed with the idea of standing on a stage and making people laugh. Seeing Margaret, an Asian woman, perform stand-up gave me the confidence that I could do it too. So I took out a notebook and began to write. I wrote down every funny thing that’d ever happened to me, every funny thing I could remember saying, stories from my childhood and teenage years, thoughts and musings and random observations. I compiled a set list and performed it in front of my old DSLR camera over and over and over and over again. When I told a co-worker what I’d been doing, he said he knew a bar owner who ran a stand-up show. He asked if I wanted to get up onstage.

  Uh, hell yes.

  My first stand-up set was eight minutes long. Looking back, I’m always amazed. Who the hell decides to give a first-timer an eight-minute set? That’s insane. Maybe if I’d realized then, I would have been more nervous. But I wasn’t nervous; I was excited. All my friends came. My mom and dad and brother, Will, came too. Make no mistake: my jokes were terrible. They were stereotypical and cheap. I compared my first time seeing an erection to a human witnessing Godzilla. I fully acted this out w
ith no shame or self-consciousness. But, hey, that’s to be expected when you are first starting out. All that mattered was how I felt telling those terrible jokes. I liked being up onstage, and I wanted my writing to get better. And I loved loved loved the adrenaline rush that surged through me when I got a laugh.

  After that night, I was hooked. I started commuting to Los Angeles from Temecula at night to do shows. It was a three-hundred-mile round-trip, but I’d practice my set in the car, sign up for the open-mic lottery at venues like the Comedy Store or the Improv, and wait to see if I got picked to go up. I did a lot of weird shows back then: shows in front of troops in their rec rooms on base, shows in coffee shops, shows in loud bars, even burlesque shows. I performed wherever I could, whether it was at an open mic, a bringer show (where you’re required to bring your own paying audience in order to get onstage), or a show that someone had scraped together in the corner of a restaurant. If the show was at a bar or a club, I’d have to wait outside until it was time for my set because I was only nineteen. I’d wait until it was my turn to perform, and then a waitress or a busser or whoever would come out and escort me to the stage, let me do my set, and then kick me out.

  My father and I even camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Hollywood Improv so I could audition for Last Comic Standing. We brought a giant pink princess tent because we thought it was hilarious. We stayed overnight, talking to the other comedians in line as I tried to choose which jokes I should tell. I didn’t make it, of course. I was still so green. I remember the look of disdain on Natasha Leggero’s face when she told me that I should keep working on it. I’m sure I gave her a completely oblivious look of hope and eagerness and Yasss, Queen, I will.