Nobody Cares

by Anne T. Donahue

  Have you eaten? You have to eat something. Even if your stomach is staging a coup, have a banana or some crackers. You need something in your bod, dude. You don’t need to eat a meal. Just snack it up! Give yourself some fuel. (Also if your stomach does what mine does, start with the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, toast. Then work your way up. It’s fine! You’re okay! Also: Imodium and Pepto Bismol are helpful choices if you’re in a situation where you would rather walk into the ocean — and poop there — than use the bathroom right now.)

  Are you eating what you’re craving? My new M.O. is literally to eat anything I’m craving because I figure there’s a reason. Fuck it. (Ed. note: We feel it is our responsibility to add that this might be ill-advised since Anne has the flu, like, 78% of the time.) Most of the time, it’s avocado rolls. Often, it’s all-dressed chips. Once it was a Cherry Coke. Life is short; eat the thing you would like to eat. Enjoy the goddamn candy you can’t stop thinking about. Make some brownies. Eat some cabbage. Yesterday I popped frozen appetizers into the oven and ate them all by myself for dinner.

  When was the last time you went outside? I’m not going to tell you to hike, because I would rather die than go on a hike (or do most activities), but I will say that a second outside can be a nice break from staring at your computer and screaming “WHY!!!!!!!” Put your feet on the concrete or grass, and take some breaths, and look at the sky and at the trees or the cars or the driveway or the deck, and think about what you’re doing: you are standing outside. That is it. That is what you are doing. Look around and name the shit around you. “I am on the driveway. The car across the street is brown. There is a bird chirping.” Keep it simple. Remind yourself how big the world is and how, in this particular second, you are whole and breathing and this is the only thing you need to do right now.

  Can you take a second to walk around the block or sit outside, sipping some tea? Is that possible? If not, can you do it tonight? I am asking you this, but also I am asking myself because typing this made me realize I’ve been cooped up for about 29,428,525 days and “driving someplace” is an accurate descriptor for my only non-indoor activity.

  What are you watching? Is it comforting? I don’t have the bandwidth to give a fuck about anything not comforting to me most of the time. I know that’s “uncultured,” but also I don’t care because who are you, person challenging me? I want to watch Veep before bed because it makes me laugh, and I want to watch true crime documentaries, and I want to watch British actors in terrific costumes battling through emotions they weren’t even aware they had. That’s all. I’m tired. Find your comforting shit. Build your mental fort and hang out there.

  Are you hate-reading anything? STOP THIS NOW. You don’t have the time for this, what are you doing? (Especially if it’s this book. Please don’t hate-read my book. Burn it for kindling, but don’t you dare keep reading it.) Are you hate-following anyone? Cut them out of your life.

  Do you have boundaries? Bask in those boundaries. Fuck saying yes to things you don’t want to do. Oh my Lord, you do not have the time for that. Can I tell you what makes me anxious on top of my existing anxiousness? Thinking, “Shit, now I have to go to [THIS THING I WOULD RATHER SLIP INTO A COMA THAN ATTEND].” And you know what? No. Nope! No thanks. No one is ever cooler or more successful because they went to that one party at that girl they hate’s house that one time. They are usually just annoyed they didn’t make dinner plans with a friend they actually like.

  Do you have someone to talk to? Talk to them. A pal, a parent, a therapist — whomever. They may not have a solution to your problems, but don’t underestimate how validating it is to have someone just to listen. It’s okay to be like, “Wow, I am feeling feelings about things that are happening in my world.” Articulate your thoughts. They’re valid! Expressing your feelings can help you understand them better, even if your first instinct is to deny that you have feelings at all.

  Do you believe you can get through it? “It” being life? Because guess what: you can. You can because you don’t have a choice. Everything may be shitty right now, but you know what? Everything has always been shitty. There has always been a shitstorm upon us. And, as with shitstorms of yore, you will prevail. You will get through it, and you will help other people through theirs, and you have to believe that — or just repeat this until you do. Actively pep talk yourself. You have been through your share of shit, and this is just another share. Then it will end and there will be another wave, and you will have to remind yourself again that this is old hat: you’ve done it before, and you’ll do it again because you are a tough motherfucker.

  Surviving various catastrophes is hard and terrible, but this is how it works. So thank your brain and body for keeping you going and drink some water and take some breaths and eat a banana. Everything may feel like (and may actually be) the worst, but if it’s going to get better, we need each and every one of us in fighting form.

  I’ll Read Your Cards

  In June 1999, I was the recipient of St. Elizabeth Catholic School’s Christian Leadership Award. (Please hold your applause.) And that meant that at my eighth-grade graduation, I got a plaque, I posed for pictures, and I basked in the glow of being my elementary school’s equivalent of Miss Congeniality.

  I was 13 and I believed in God. I’d never thought not to. My parents were Catholic, and I loved and trusted them, so I’d never had reason to doubt what they taught me. I’d gone to elementary school with the same 60-odd kids since kindergarten, and year after year we’d studied our religion with the same seriousness as spelling or math. I said prayers before bed (thus perfecting my imitation of a Precious Moments figurine) and took distance-ed catechism courses on top of my Catholic school curriculum for added grace. I was still young enough to believe that faith and fact were interchangeable — and that a Christian Leadership Award was cool.

  It was the same year that my classmates and I were confirmed, continuing the long-standing Catholic tradition of pledging our eternal allegiance to the Church before we got old enough to question it. We took additional names (mine is Michaela), donned red robes, and ultimately made our parents proud with our public displays of Catholic-sanctioned affection.

  I took home the plaque, but my mom was the true Christian leader. As a little girl, she’d wanted to become a nun until the convent said she’d make a better wife and mother. So, like a small-town Ontario version of Maria von Trapp herself, she climbed a new mountain and, after she met my dad in the church choir, my parents dated, got married, and then welcomed me — Anne Theresa Donahue — a little over a year after their wedding.

  My mom’s dedication to Catholicism became my own. Because my parents were both volunteers in our parish, most of my childhood was spent going with them to choir practices or council meetings or the annual penny sales. (Where, for the record, you could buy raffle tickets for a penny and bid on everything from bath kits to homemade quilts. One year, I ran the penny sale tuck shop and was the queen of chips and soda, and, to this day, I strive for that level of power.)

  But while some of it was fun (tuck shop queen!), most of it was incredibly boring — and inescapable since, as an only child, I went wherever my parents did. As they tallied the Sunday collection or played music at endless masses, I killed time in the parish rectory where the priests lived. Sometimes I had access to their snacks and cable TV, but most of the time I’d be stuck reading in the parish office, where my mom worked as a bookkeeper and later as church secretary.

  So as an increasingly bored 11-year-old in desperate need of attention and praise, I became an altar server. I started training on a snowy November day and started serving proudly the following summer, psyched I’d have somewhere to show off my mushroom cut and Dr Pepper Lip Smackers. I was desperate to make church friends. Our parish was in another part of town, so I never saw anybody I knew from school, especially not the boy I had a crush on. Fortunately, most altar servers were boys, and I decided to fall in love with all of them. (It wasn
’t until after puberty that I clued in that they’d all have rather died than date me.) But the thing about serving is that it gets old. Mainly because you get old, and you begin to look tragically out of place as a teenager standing amongst children. I leveled up to doing readings at mass, but by the time I was 14, a certified Christian Leader and confirmed, even the glory of reciting the Bible at the pulpit wasn’t enough. So I started going to the same church as my school friends, which meant at least my school crush would finally see me in my Sunday best. (Even if he never seemed particularly dazzled by my sweater sets.)

  But it was too little too late. High school made me desperate to distance myself from the Anne who’d so proudly worn her safe and rule-abiding vanilla crown. I had begun to realize that no amount of Catholic guilt could spiritually, emotionally, or mentally tie me to Catholicism outside of my parents’ connection to it. So I started to aggressively question my parents about their devotion and resent them for subjecting me to a belief system I felt I’d never willingly subscribed to. I tried not to feel my mom’s hurt when I insulted what she held so dearly; I used her maxim that anything worth believing is also worth questioning against her.

  My mom, though always soft-spoken, willing to compromise, and a staunch opponent of strict discipline (I used to ask her to ground me so I could skip parties I didn’t feel like going to), wasn’t ready to relinquish me to complete godlessness. She made me go to mass on Saturday nights if I wanted to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I still had to attend services, but I could wear whatever I wanted — “church wardrobe” be damned — so I used the communion line as a runway for my pleather pants and dramatic sighs.

  But all of it only made me angrier. I hated church, I hated going, and I hated how much of my life had been eaten up by something I had never had any real interest in. But the priests were our family friends, and most of them had treated me like a granddaughter my whole childhood, so announcing how much I hated the world they’d devoted their lives to seemed unnecessarily hurtful — even to angsty teen me. My mom, however, was not granted the same humane treatment. Young and emotional and unable to articulate the full scope of my resentment, I unleashed my fury on her when we were alone, and continued to be business as usual around clergy, family friends, and anybody I wanted to impress.

  Part of my façade as a nondegenerate was continuing to go to confession. For most of my teen years, our priest was an old Polish man whom my uncle had nicknamed Cousin Vinny (his demeanor was surprisingly similar to Joe Pesci’s) and who’d seen some shit in WWII, believe me. He wasn’t particularly friendly to strangers, but the more he warmed up to you, the funnier and more sarcastic he was. I thought he was great: he didn’t seem to care about being approachable in any way, was laissez-faire about church rules, and when I’d go to confession, we’d usually just chit-chat. Once, I told him how my friends and I had smashed mailboxes, and he just laughed. (Likely because we both knew I’d end up doing it again.) He made going through the motions of Catholicism easy, but he wasn’t always there.

  One Sunday when I was 15, I went to church and found a visiting priest in place of our regular one. The man was old and, from what I’d gleaned from his half-screamed sermon, a little eccentric, but I still waited my turn for the confessional. The space was well lit — more like a conference room than the standard-issue, as-seen-on-TV, suffering-in-stained-glass Catholic vibe — but the windows’ blinds were drawn when I walked in and sat next to the priest.

  “Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” I started. “My last confession was . . .” I paused, trying to seem pensive, “. . . a few weeks ago.”

  He nodded solemnly.

  I began rattling off the list of whatever I thought was “bad” at 15: I’d yelled at my mom, or I’d lied about how much money I’d spent at the mall. I confessed to hating someone at school (who, in retrospect, likely deserved it).

  “And is there anything else?” he asked.

  “I do have a question, Father.”

  I’d been chatting on ICQ with a senior at high school who was trying to convince me to hook up with him. After years of being taught that premarital sex was a sin, I couldn’t shake my Catholic fear of disapproval. What constituted sex? I figured that this conveniently visiting priest could help me draw necessary lines in the sand without my having to ask Father Vinny.

  I sat up straight and looked directly ahead at the heavy oak door, determined to ask but not comfortable enough to look a messenger of God in the face as I did.

  “So, sex,” I said with purpose, channeling the confidence I normally reserved for class presentations on Canadian history. “What is sex, according to the Catholic Church? Like, is it sex-sex? Or is it blow jobs? What about hand jobs? Or . . . What about getting off if you do stuff with clothes on?”

  I was proud that I’d gotten the question out — what maturity! I sat still, my hands primly on my lap, and refused to fidget. If I was grown up enough to ask a strange priest about sex, I was most certainly grown up enough to keep making that high school senior think I was seriously considering having it one day. Maybe even with him.

  But there was no reply. After he hadn’t answered for what seemed like several hours, I looked over at him. His head was bowed down, but he must have heard me move. “Hm,” he said. “All of these are good questions, but there’s a lineup of people waiting. Why don’t you go outside, say three Hail Marys as penance, and come back inside for a talk when you see everyone’s left.”

  “Okay, sounds good,” I said, as if closing a business deal. “Thank you, Father.”

  I walked out, smiled apologetically (and yet knowingly, for I was special) to the people waiting, and sat in a nearby pew, reveling in the knowledge that I was finally an adult, that I was so advanced as a person, I had compelled a visiting priest to have a one-on-one conversation with me about the realities of sex in our modern times. I was going to get answers. I couldn’t wait until everybody left.

  A few praying stragglers remained in the pews, but eventually the confessional line cleared. It was time to go back inside and talk like adults. I walked back in, closed the door, and took my seat next to the priest, who still didn’t look directly at me. But this time, knowing we’d already broken the ice, I sat beaming.

  “Now,” he began slowly, his head down again. “When you were asking me those questions, I had a boner.”

  Time stopped. The air was sucked out of what now seemed like a dim, glorified closet. I felt cold and hot and sick at the same time. I slouched, losing my business bitch composure and shrinking from his words and my stupidity and how young I suddenly felt. Worse, I felt guilty, like I’d invited this. I felt the same way I had when my sixth grade teacher had rested his crotch on the corners of girls’ desks, or the way I did when my science teacher put his hands on my shoulders and rested his chin on my head. But this was those feelings on steroids — the word “boner” lingered in the room.

  “I want you to know,” he continued calmly, as if lecturing a petulant child, “that your words affect men. You need to be responsible for the things you say to them.”

  I held my breath and tried not to move for fear of doing anything else provocative. I stared down at my outfit — a crochet top worn over a baby-blue tank and a black skirt — and assumed that, like my words, they were responsible for this.

  “Right,” I said too quickly, too loudly, desperate to leave. “No, yes. You’re right. I got it. I’m sorry.”

  I wanted to get out of that room, and I wanted to erase the knowledge that I’d been in close proximity to the erection of that old-ass man. But I also wanted to know that I wasn’t cheap and dirty — that what this priest had said was weird and wrong, and that my growing cocktail of guilt and shame and disappointment and anger wasn’t my doing. I wanted to know that, despite what he told me, it wasn’t my fault.

  My parents, despite their Catholic affinities, have always been safe people to talk about sex
with. (Nobody in our family has time for anything but facts, and for that I am grateful.) Which is why I told them the truth the moment I got into their car, idling in the parking lot waiting for me.

  “So I asked Father What’s-His-Name about sex and what’s a sin,” I started. “And he told me he had boner? And that I shouldn’t talk about sex like that with men, because I can do that to them? I don’t know.” I laughed, trying to play down the situation while waiting for confirmation that what had happened wasn’t fine. They looked at each other, then looked back at me in the rearview mirror.

  “What?” my mom said.

  “Just that —” I immediately regretted saying anything. “I have to be careful with the way I talk to men . . . ?” I wanted the feeling to go away, and this wasn’t helping.

  Still no answer from the front seat as I saw my mom look at my dad again, then back at me, and then back at my dad, who kept his eyes on the road. As my mom opened her mouth to finally say something, I cut her off.

  “Whatever.” I sunk into my familiar terrain of teen angst and faked disinterest. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  And I didn’t. After telling my best friend, who gave the requisite best friend answer of “Gross,” I didn’t talk about it with anybody. I was as horrified at the man as I was at the institution, so I focused on getting out: out of the confessional, out of the religion, out of my Christian Leader image, and out from under my parents’ idea of who I should be spiritually.

  I switched from Catholic school to public school (no more mandatory school masses and religion classes), and when I started working part time, my shifts made it impossible to go to church every Sunday. So, I kept chipping away: soon I only attended mass if I was volunteering with the choir kids or on major holidays. Then finally, after insisting on wearing a miniskirt and Von Dutch hat to a Good Friday service, I was free. My mom resigned herself to the fact that I wasn’t a Catholic anymore.