So Sad Today

by Melissa Broder

  Amid the loss of my friend group, the greatest heartache was the loss of my best friend. The year before, we had gotten into her father’s Playboy magazines. We would masturbate to them together, never touching each other, but in the same room: she on the bed and me in a sleeping bag on the floor. It wasn’t a sexual union that we experienced between us, but a humanistic bond: I do this, you do this too, I’m okay, you’re okay. She even let me wear one of her bras while I masturbated, because it made me feel sexy. I didn’t have my own bra yet.

  But now she said that was disgusting. I was disgusting. She was over masturbation and had discovered pot and a new best friend. I didn’t stop masturbating. But I felt like the only one.

  In my isolation, I had this weird intuition that if I could just make it to my Bat Mitzvah I could both prevent the Holocaust from happening again and also get all my friends back. Strangely, my intuition was right.

  When my Bat Mitzvah came in late fall of eighth grade, all the girls suddenly decided that I was “so cute” as to be liked again. Sometimes it takes outside advertising to frame you as “cute.” An American Bat Mitzvah is just that kind of advertising. I got to make an entrance and “march in” to the song of my choosing (“Let the Sunshine In” from Hair). I was applauded by family and received a standing ovation. I got to “honor” my friends, who must have felt bad about no longer speaking to me, with a candle-lighting ceremony. The illusion of specialness and adolescent friendship were re-created.

  The illusion of safety, as a potential Holocaust victim, was also restored. How could anything terrible come after that party? I still refused to see Schindler’s List. But my hallucinations subsided. They say that the Bat Mitzvah is about becoming a woman. For me it was about just becoming okay again.

  In high school, I channeled my anxiety into an eating disorder. Anorexia, with its counting of calories—the busyness of all that math in my head—became a wonderful place to focus my fear. Then when I was seventeen I discovered drugs and alcohol. That was the real solution.

  Drugs and alcohol were the best thing that ever happened to me. For the first time, I was okay to be on the planet and completely comfortable in my own skin. Weed made my brain a playground, a new earth to be explored. Liquor, beer, and wine gave me the peace of mind I’d always sought. Psychedelics allowed me to connect with other human beings in a way where I could finally address the question of What is going on here? MDMA was union with these human beings in spite of the not knowing. Amphetamines kept me skinny and made me untouchable to sadness. Benzos and opiates made me impervious to the world.

  I found new best friends in my substances that could protect me from my thoughts. The world became a magical place, not lonely or fearful or harsh. With my friends by my side, nobody could touch me. But then the anxiety found its way around the drugs and alcohol. Or, in the case of psychedelics and weed, it began reminding me that not only did I not know what was going on but what was going on might be more dark than benevolent. For the first time, I started getting panic attacks.

  My first panic attack came shortly after I got an abortion at twenty-one. I had grown up in a household that was very liberal: socially and politically. I didn’t have any hang-ups around abortion. So when I found out I was pregnant, like two days after a missed period, I called Planned Parenthood very casually.

  I wanted the thing out of me as soon as possible. I had gotten pregnant by a blunt-smoking kid who ripped the sleeves off his T-shirts to make tank tops that showed his nipples. I wasn’t having this kid’s baby. He asked me if I would mind if he took acid on the day of the abortion.

  I remember my friend Anna driving me to Planned Parenthood. I remember not being scared. I remember declining counseling. Why would I need counseling? I remember lying down on what looked like a gynecologist’s table. I remember complimenting the doctor on her earrings and talking about Maine, then being administered some kind of drug. I remember going to space.

  I remember coming to in a room filled with fifteen or so other women, some of them crying, some of them vomiting. I remember feeling sick and nauseous, but most of all I remember feeling fear about the sickness and nausea.

  I remember getting in the car with Anna. It felt like the first time I had ever allowed myself to be vulnerable. I remember not wanting to tell any of the girls in my college house what had happened. I remember them all going out that night. I remember smoking weed and getting drunk by myself and then suddenly seeing a vision of myself going to hell. I remember not knowing where the fear had come from. I didn’t even believe in hell. But the fear was there, not intellectual, but coming from someplace else. I remember seeing darkness. I remember feeling like I had crossed over a line that I could never cross back over.

  A few weeks later, I went to dinner with the kid who got me pregnant and his mother. I remember her talking. I remember having food in my mouth. Suddenly, I felt like I could not swallow my food. I was scared that if I swallowed my food I would choke. I didn’t know what was happening. Had I forgotten how to swallow? I wasn’t sure whether to spit out the food into a napkin or keep trying to swallow. Then, in addition to being unable to swallow, I forgot how to breathe. This was my first panic attack.

  Over the next few years, the panic attacks became more and more frequent. The symptoms included various combinations of dizziness, adrenaline surges, suffocation, rapid heartbeat, and the worst, a feeling of hyperreality, where people looked like plastic versions of themselves. My drinking escalated in an attempt to manage this thing that was happening to me. I didn’t know that what I was experiencing were panic attacks. I just knew that every morning, ten minutes after waking up, I felt like I was dying. I would say to myself, You felt like you were dying yesterday. But you didn’t die. So even though you feel like you are dying today, you probably won’t die. But intellect couldn’t refute the panic attacks.

  What was happening, I later learned, was a hybrid of untreated anxiety and morning withdrawals from the same alcohol that temporarily quelled it. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with panic disorder and gave me benzodiazepines. Then I became dependent on both the benzos and the alcohol. I blacked out every night. I woke up in strange beds. My legs were covered with bruises from my blood having been so thinned by vodka. I couldn’t do anything without being drunk or on pills. The thought of going to coffee with another human being while sober seemed impossible. I was either fucked up on drugs and alcohol or I felt like I was dying.

  One thing that’s especially sad about alcoholism and drug addiction is the way something so beautiful and sacred turns so ugly. The thing that saved my life, that made the world magical and livable, had turned on me. Alcohol and drugs worked so perfectly until they didn’t work anymore. I kept trying and trying to get back to that beauty, back to the being okay.

  I knew that I was tying knots that I would someday have to untie. I knew that I was going deeper and getting worse. But if you were in my head, had experienced my overwhelming feelings, you would drink too. If you felt like me, you would stay fucked up. The act of not drinking was an impossibility.

  Then when I was twenty-five I got sober. I had begun practicing yoga. I didn’t know it at the time, but my yoga teachers, Lisa and Yasmin, had, like, thirty years of sobriety between the two of them. I would come to class every day, high and hung over. They would smell the alcohol leaking out of my pores and gently bend me into my next pose. One day, one of them said something to me. She said, You don’t have to drink. I was like, Yeah right. That was it. That was all that was said and we moved on.

  A few months later I had a bad weekend. It wasn’t that extreme, just sort of your usual weekend for the average twenty-five-year-old alcoholic/addict. I woke up in the bed of a person who I’d sworn I would never sleep with again. I lied to my boyfriend about my whereabouts. I dragged the person who I swore I would never sleep with again to the pharmacy. I sweated in line filling drug prescriptions. I decided to maybe only drink beer from then on. I drank a beer at eleven a.m. I started dr
inking liquor by evening. I got fucked up again that night. I went home in a cab at three in the morning with a bar bottle of Amstel Light in my hand. I couldn’t leave it behind, because god forbid I waste any of that precious nectar. I didn’t know that it would be my last drink.

  The next morning I was in my teacher’s yoga class again. I cannot say what happened. I only know that I heard her voice inside my head. She wasn’t speaking but I heard it. I remembered what she had said to me, that I did not have to drink. I’d been called many names in my addiction: an alcoholic, cunty McDrinksalot, drunk slut. But no one had ever said it like that to me before. That I didn’t have to drink. Something clicked inside me. I wondered, what if I really didn’t have to drink? What about just for that day?

  After yoga I went to brunch with some people. I didn’t drink, which was crazy. I always drank at places where you weren’t even supposed to drink. So how was it that I wasn’t drinking at brunch, where drinking was sanctioned? It was the first of several miracles. The next day I didn’t drink either. Or the next day.

  Of course, I didn’t quit everything. I continued to take pills: those prescribed to me and those not prescribed. I picked up weed again. I remember sitting by a fireplace in upstate New York, fucked up out of my mind on morphine, thinking, This sobriety is great.

  Then, one night, I was walking home in the East Village where I lived. I passed by a church. Standing outside was a group of people, mostly gay men, smoking cigarettes. It was eight thirty on a Tuesday night. I kind of knew they weren’t going to church.

  I asked the men who they were. I don’t know what compelled me to ask. That was the second miracle.

  The men told me who they were. The third miracle is that I followed them into the church.

  I have not had a drink or a drug since.

  I’m not going to tell you exactly who these people were, because I’m not a spokesperson for them. I will say that they got me sober and continue to keep me sober. I will say that they are most likely in your town or city too. I think that you probably know who they are. If you can’t figure it out, and you really want to know, you can email me directly at sosadtoday29@gmail.com and I will tell you one-on-one.

  After I got sober, I stopped going into withdrawal every morning and no longer felt like I was dying within twenty minutes of waking up. But my anxiety was still triggered, from time to time, by the new hyperclarity of the world. When I experienced my feelings deeply, I thought that I was going crazy. The only frame of reference I had for contextualizing emotional experiences was in terms of drugs. Now, when I felt a shift in my feelings, I could no longer attribute the change to drugs and alcohol. So I assumed either I was losing it or was dying.

  I’m still very scared of my feelings and never wholly convinced that they are not going to kill me. But the panic attacks are no longer daily occurrences. Rather, they come in cycles. I’ll be feeling okay for a number of months and think that I will never have one again. Then I’ll have a really bad one and get scared of having more, thus triggering a cycle.

  Also, I don’t really get panic attacks when I’m alone anymore, only when I’m with people. My fear among people is that I will be judged for revealing what is going on inside me. I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.

  One panic attack I had like this, which was almost psychedelic in nature, was the night before my wedding. I was at a dinner with my family and my soon-to-be husband’s family, but my parents were late to get there. My soon-to-be mother-in-law was talking about pepper. I was going out of my mind. I just couldn’t understand how this woman was talking about pepper so casually when I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird it was that we were real, seated around an object, wearing cloth over our bodies, and had no idea why.

  When my parents finally arrived, I took one look at them and started crying. I felt a comfort in seeing their faces that I had never felt before. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I wept and wept. Looking back, I think that I felt grief about leaving one stage of my life and entering a new stage. It had been more than ten years since I had lived under their roof. But there was something primal and archetypal about the transition from woman to wife. It was bigger than me.

  After I cried, I felt better. I was able to return to the table and function like a human being without wondering what that meant. I think it was then that I first made the connection that underneath my anxiety was a great sadness. When I suppressed the sadness, I practically shook with existential fear over simply existing. I was fighting myself. But when the tears flowed, I felt better.

  A few years later, I went through a particularly harrowing cycle of panic attacks. This one went on for months and simply wouldn’t abate. I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to “keep it together.” I would sit at my desk at work literally vibrating, and none of my usual fixes—the steps for combatting attacks I’d found in an ebook I’d relied on, my psychiatrist upping my meds—were working.

  A friend of mine recommended that I go see a shaman she’d been working with. The idea of a New York City shaman sounded nuts. Also it cost a lot. But I was desperate. Also, I trusted this friend when she said that the work they were doing was releasing shit in her that had been blocked for years. You can heal, she said to me. I used to think that I could heal a little bit or heal some things about me but not the deepest, darkest shit. But I’m discovering that you can actually really heal the worst stuff. So it’s gone for good.

  The thing that scared me most about going to see the shaman was that it would be an intimate, one-on-one experience with a stranger, for many hours. At this point, my anxiety was so intense that I was scared to be one-on-one with anyone who might get close enough to me to see what was really going on. I was scared she would judge me. But I went to her little office on the Lower East Side. It was filled with stones and crystals. Also there was a cat. I was relieved by the cat, because it was something to hold.

  The shaman was Irish. She asked me some questions about how I’d been feeling, physically. I told her that right at that moment, I felt like the area from my rib cage to my neck was going to explode. It wasn’t a heart attack–type sensation. More like a balloon full of mourning. I could not say what I was mourning.

  The shaman said, That doesn’t sound like anxiety to me. It sounds like depression.

  Then she turned off the lights and said some prayers. She spoke with some of the archangels. She asked me to close my eyes and to speak to them as well. I was like, What the fuck? But I was paying a lot, so I did it.

  I chose the archangel Michael. I didn’t know anything about him. To this day I don’t particularly feel that attached to him. He was just the one who came into my head.

  She asked if Michael could go down into my body. I was like, Okay. She asked me to go with him. She asked me to report what I saw. She also said to suspend any doubts I might have about possession or being inhabited by foreign bodies or beings. She said we all contain foreign bodies or beings—things that are not ours and not our soul within us. She said we sometimes pick them up from other people. Like there are things we are taught that aren’t ours. Or they are curses. She said that every time a parent yells at a child that it is a curse.

  The shaman, Michael, and I found a bat, two rats, and a shield-shaped being inside the walls of my sternum. She asked Michael to give them a boat to heaven so they could leave me.

  The bat and the rats left easily. They hadn’t even known they were inside me. The shield-shaped being, I discovered, was passed down from my father’s family. He was full of biting sarcasm and believed he was there to protect me. The shield-shaped being was trying to protect my soul orb, a snow-globe-type thing that lived behind my rib cage. The problem was that while the shield-shaped being
was protecting me from hurt, no light could get in either.

  The shaman talked to the shield-shaped being in shield language, which turned out to be English. She let him know I was not his home and gave him permission to leave me. He cried as he left my body.

  The shaman said I was now vacant of beings. She said my core would not stay empty. I would repopulate with me.

  When I left the shaman I felt like I could breathe again. But I didn’t feel like that for long. I can’t say whether the bats, rats, and shield I saw were real or unreal. Like, I think what I saw were archetypes. I think I entered a hypnotic place between sleep and waking where you can suspend your disbelief. But if the shaman is right—that the ideas and pains we acquire from outside ourselves are actual beings—then I think she missed some. I still feel very much populated by them.

  One thing that the shaman gave me was the ability to call what I was feeling depression. I had never called it that before. When I told my psychiatrist about the shaman, I was like, She said I had depression. The psychiatrist was like, Oh yes, you definitely do. I was like, Um, it would’ve been cool if you had said something to me before. I guess she thought I knew that when we spoke of my anxiety we were also speaking of depression.

  I was still struggling a lot, particularly at work. But I did find something else that helped a little bit. When I felt like I was dying, I began tweeting anonymously from an account that I called @sosadtoday. I was mostly tweeting into the abyss. I followed, like, three people who I had admired on weird Twitter but who I didn’t follow from my personal Twitter account. That was it.