So Sad Today

by Melissa Broder

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  For Nicholas

  For if we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago.

  —Seneca

  How to Never Be Enough

  BRINGING A CHILD INTO THE world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.

  I was born two weeks late, because I didn’t want to leave the womb. When they finally kicked me out, I was like, oh hell no. I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.

  Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough. According to my mother, the doctor who delivered me said I was pretty. I wanted to believe him, because I love validation. Validation is my main bitch. But I was not the type of infant to absorb a compliment. Had I been verbal I would have extended a compliment in return so as to assuage the implicit guilt of my own existence rubbing up against praise. Instead, I created an external attribution.

  An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your own fault.

  The doctor’s perspective was only an error of opinion. He obviously had shitty taste in babies. If he’d called me ugly I would have spent the remainder of my time in the hospital trying to convince him I was hot. But he liked me. There was definitely something wrong with him.

  If you’re never going to be enough, it’s important to find a way to turn a compliment against yourself—to reconstruct it into a prison—which is precisely what I did. I decided I would have to stay pretty for the rest of my life. If I got ugly it would be my own fault. Don’t drop the ball. Don’t fuck it up. I was definitely going to fuck it up.

  Next they probably put me in a room with, like, twenty other babies. Immediately, I’m sure I compared myself to all of them and lost. The other babies probably seemed pretty chill about being on earth. They shit their diapers like no big deal. They just sort of effortlessly knew how to do existence. I, on the other hand, was definitely a wreck about being alive. Why was I here? What did it all mean? Things weren’t looking good.

  My first day on earth and I know I was already thinking about death. A lot. I was probably thinking about death enough to negate every future accomplishment, relationship, and thing that I might come to love with thoughts like what’s the point? and why bother? At the same time, I still can’t come to terms with the fact that I am actually, definitely going to die one day, as this might lead to the realization that I might as well enjoy my one brief life, and who wants that.

  The situation only got worse when my mother announced that she couldn’t breastfeed. More precisely, she told me later, I was “killing her.” Killing your mother as an infant is proof of one’s too-muchness. In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.

  I was “killing” my mother, because I was sucking too hard. Less than twenty-four hours on the planet and I was already trying to fill my many insatiable internal holes with external stuff. I was trying to sate the existential fear of what the fuck is going on here with milk. I was sucking and sucking, but there wasn’t enough milk. There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle.

  As a result of all my sucking, I ended up in a higher weight percentile than my height percentile. This was problematic, because my mother had obese parents. She needed an object upon which to project her own anxieties. I was perfect for that! The religion of the household quickly became food: me not being allowed to have it and me sneaking it.

  One of my favorite foods to sneak was me. In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my fingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between my teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

  What I loved most, though, was to pick my nose and eat it. During story hour at school I created a “shield” with my left hand to cover my nose, so I could enjoy some private refreshment. Then I’d really get in there with the right hand. Some of my happiest childhood days were spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisfied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didn’t care. The bliss was too profound.

  Unfortunately, the bliss was not going to last forever. Let’s be honest, the bliss was going to last four minutes or until my nose ran out of snot. But parents, if your kid is eating herself, you have to let her. Let your child devour herself whole. Even if she disappears completely, encourage her to vanish. Let your child eat the shit out of herself and then shit herself out. Let her eat that.

  There aren’t that many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.

  Love in the Time of Chakras

  I’VE HAD SEX WITH A lot of gross people. I’ve had sex with enough gross people that I feel like I should have gotten paid for most of them. While I’ve never gotten paid for having sex with any gross people, I have been a sex worker of sorts.

  My first office job was as the administrative assistant of a Tantric sex nonprofit, which we’ll call “Electric Yoni.” Such places exist, and they exist just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, through the rainbow tunnel, where McMansions meet divination on Highway 1, Marin County, California.

  I arrived at the job fresh off four years of psychedelics, deep in woo-woo, talking about energy, the Tao, and telekinesis—believing that an outside fix, an amethyst crystal, the proper measurement of snake oil could save me from myself. Every day I commuted back and forth from my apartment overlooking a crack dealer who swung a golf club in the lower Tenderloin, San Francisco, over that bridge, feeling sort of blessed and sort of miserable.

  I was lonely. I had fled the East Coast right after college in a number of back-and-forth trips, fancying myself as a kind of Jack Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/other widely fetishized dude-figure. I was running away from the love of my twenty-one-year-old life, who I broke up with weekly, and was trying to prove to everyone—mostly myself—that I was okay. The psychedelic peri
od had ceased and I was now drinking every day so as not to have to feel what I felt.

  Staying drunk seemed like a very practical solution to me. If you could drink yourself into happiness, why would you stay sad and sober? And if you could drink yourself into ultra-happiness, why would you settle for regular happiness?

  The first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, my ex-love had just come to visit me in San Francisco. At night he was very warm toward me, because we were drunk. We talked about a possible move to the Bay for him. He went down on me to the sound of my housemate’s drum and bass (everyone in SF is a DJ) always thrumming from the next room. But during the day, he would be cold and withholding of affection.

  After he left, I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, alone. I remember the giant mountain moss, rust and rocks, the kind of gargantuan beauty they didn’t make back East. I couldn’t believe the fairy-tale magnitude of it. I wanted someone to turn to and just go oh my god, but I had only myself. I was not enough.

  The founder of Electric Yoni, my boss, was a shipping heiress from New York City who had moved to Marin in the eighties in search of something bigger. She had renamed herself Judy Moon. Judy Moon’s signature look was anorexic homunculus in spandex. When I arrived, Judy Moon was deep into studying what’s known as “nonviolent communication,” which she rigorously incorporated into the Electric Yoni course curriculum. But interpersonally, Judy Moon’s communication style was still absolutely terrifying. She frequently made hissing sounds. She hissed that my behavior made her feel insecure. All of my behavior.

  For years Judy Moon had run Electric Yoni out of her Belvedere mansion, which was 100% pink. The rugs were pink, the walls were pink, the “zafus” for seating were pink. She was known for writhing on the pink floor to demonstrate varying states of Tantric ecstasy (she did this, naked, at our “board of directors” meeting). Eventually, neighbors complained to the local authorities about the blocks and blocks of VW Bugs and Priuses with Visualize Whirled Peas bumper stickers jamming up the street. Or perhaps it was the people arriving in various states of undress that bothered them: Renaissance Fair costumes, medieval bikinis, appropriated Native American dresses, and African dashikis. Whatever it was, the Belvedere rich were finally like, What the fuck is going on? So Judy Moon opened a second space—a small center in a neighboring, less ritzy Marin town—where some of the workshops would be held. She called this the Moonrise Center.

  Judy felt she had “transcended” from her root chakra to her crown chakra with age. She now sought to expand the course catalog from The Ecstatic Body; 12-Handed Massage; Watsu Rebirthing; Paths of Transcendent Loving; Yoni Yoga; Love Circle; Tantra Levels 1, 2, and 3; and Sacred Dance into a more diverse roster that included Angel Therapy, Life After Death, Reclaiming the Divine Feminine, Anti-Aging Medicine, and of course, Nonviolent Communication.

  Through Craigslist, I was hired as an administrative assistant to try to rent out the space of Moonrise Center, to register people for workshops, and to answer all of their questions by phone and email. Judy encouraged me to sample all that the Electric Yoni and Moonrise Center communities had to offer, so that I could better describe “the curriculum.”

  One of my first experiences engaging in the Electric Yoni oeuvre was to receive a vaginal massage by a man named Jeffrey Kivnik. Jeffrey offered to trade me three hours of vaginal massage in exchange for helping him promote his “practice.” Jeffrey was in his fifties and wore a do-rag on his balding white head. I was twenty-one, very pretty, and an active alcoholic and addict. The trade sounded perfect.

  I’ve always had difficulty setting boundaries. And I’ve always had difficulty reaching orgasm with another human being. So, when faced with an offer to allow Jeffrey to finger me for three hours in exchange for giving him publicity, of course I said yes.

  The vaginal massage began with a one-hour full-body massage. Then, for the next two hours, Jeffery caressed, stroked, kneaded, and tenderized my vagina—or as he called it, my Yoni—using Reiki breathing (I think) so as to aid in the healing of “past vaginal trauma.” I never reached orgasm, but I did leave there floating. I think it was the only night in San Francisco that I didn’t drink or use drugs.

  At the time of Jeffery’s vaginal massage, I had begun dating women. I still slept with cis men occasionally. But I referred to myself as a dyke. Somehow, I convinced one of my lesbian friends to get a vaginal massage from Jeffery in exchange for her help in promoting him as well. Open-minded and vaguely woo-woo herself, she, too, left Jeffery’s chamber of Yoni floating. But a few days later, she turned to me and said, I can’t believe I let that man touch my vagina.

  Somehow, I also managed to convince my butch, hipster DJ girlfriend to come take a Tantra workshop with me. I can’t tell you that I know what Tantra is, even after working at Electric Yoni for a year. But I can tell you what it isn’t.

  On the pink rug at Judy Moon’s Belvedere mansion, ten forty-something single women and five horny men—all Caucasian, and many wearing harem pants—ushered in the new age of sexuality by gazing into each other’s eyes and chanting what sounded like vrom vrom vrom vrom over and over. Everyone there was seeking. The women, I think, were using sex as a gateway for the love they were seeking. The men, I think, were using love as a gateway for the sex they were seeking. My girlfriend, wearing a newsboy cap and large transparent-framed glasses, was seeking to get out of there. She did the vromming but refused to look me in the eye. I accused her of being unable to try anything new. She accused me of dragging her into a cesspool of hippie filth. We broke up a few weeks later, because I wasn’t cool enough for her.

  According to Wikipedia, “Neotantra or tantric sex is the modern, western variation of tantra often associated with new religious movements. This includes both New Age and modern Western interpretations of traditional Indian and Buddhist tantra. Some of its proponents refer to ancient and traditional texts and principles [vromming?], and many others use tantra as a catch-all phrase for ‘sacred sexuality,’ and may incorporate unorthodox practices…

  “As tantric practice became known in western culture, which has escalated since the 1960s, it has become identified with its sexual methods in the West. Consequently, its essential nature as a spiritual practice is often overlooked. The roles of sexuality in tantra and in neotantra, while related, are actually quite different.”

  The trouble with sublimating the desire for love and sex into a watered-down, reappropriated version of ancient wisdom is that sometimes shit goes down.

  I was both proud and ashamed of my job at Electric Yoni. On the one hand, it felt good to be supporting myself. At the same time, when I told my parents where I worked, my father googled it from his office and asked me why the website was blocked for sexual content.

  I met a man named Mamadou while looking for bigger spaces in which to hold our yearly roundup of teachers—a buffet of Tantra, if you will—which always drew the biggest crowd. Mamadou was a soft-spoken man in his sixties who ran a local religious center at the top of a beautiful mountain. We talked of the poets Hafiz and Rumi. He told me that he really liked being with me and asked if I would come visit him at the center again, perhaps on the weekend for lunch. I said okay. Then he asked if I could bring weed and coke.

  Mamadou said that not only would he pay for the coke and weed, but he would also pay just to spend time with me. He said a girl like me deserved to be earning more than I was earning at Electric Yoni. Despite the request for drugs, Mamadou seemed so centered, so spiritual, so into my thoughts on Rumi, that I didn’t imagine there was anything sexual about the request.

  That Saturday I went bearing the coke and weed. Mamadou gave me $700 up front—$200 for the drugs and $500 for my time. Then he poured big glasses of red wine and served a series of beautiful Persian dishes: some kind of lamb, a vegetable dish, a sweet casserole. We ate and got drunk. Mamadou showed me pictures of himself from his youth. He had actually been handsome. He told me that he was bored of his life now. His spirit
sought more fun. He asked if it would be possible that I come back weekly. He would give me $500 each time, plus money for drugs. Now I would really be financially self-sufficient.

  The next time I came back it was more of the same: the weed, the wine, the coke, the delicious Persian dishes. But then he put his hands on my waist. Then his face came in for my mouth. I was like, No fucking way. Mamadou was like, Darling. You didn’t think I enjoyed your company that much, did you? I left with my $700 and never went back.

  Why didn’t I have sex with Mamadou? Why didn’t I have sex with him regularly and get paid? He was old and unattractive, but unattractive hadn’t stopped me during my run in San Francisco. There were 300-pound men and acorn penises I had sex with for free. There was a karaoke DJ who verbally abused me for not liking Tom Waits. He never bought me shit. There was a bartender with a bowl cut who I don’t remember sleeping with, but when I saw the used condom on the windowsill the next morning and looked at him inquisitively, he said, You were a disaster. You cried the whole time. When you’re lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love.

  Ultimately, I think I didn’t sleep with Mamadou because I wanted to believe that somebody would pay $500 for my personality. Free love sounds so beautiful. I have always fetishized the sixties. But something tells me that free love was a lot easier emotionally for the men—when they could actually get some—than the women.

  I know that in her quest for the divine orgasm, Judy Moon had been hurt over and over by men. They had used her for her money, concealed their homosexuality, refused to become a primary partner (the equivalent of “he just can’t commit” in the polyamory community).

  One time, on a spiritual hike, she stopped hissing for a moment to tell me that she was a second mother to me and wanted me to consider her as such. I looked at her like, Bitch, are you crazy? But it was also sad to me—that someone who taught legions of women how to access the divine goddess had such a lack of understanding for what the love between two women could be. It was also sad that Judy believed she could simply say she was my second mother and I would believe it. Like she could do it in an affirmation. I was far from home. I needed a second mother. But I wasn’t that needy.