Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  So I studied the bad music like a hard-to-parse text. The drummer wasn’t listening to the lead singer or the singer wasn’t heeding the drummer’s lead. The bassist was in his own zone, stoned. The white singer had an ugly, scratchy voice. In the middle of one song, the musicians stopped after the second chorus and the singer yelled, “We haven’t finished writing the next verse, so we’ll end it there. Good night!”

  That was Adam.

  While my date got me another plastic cup of cheap wine, I watched the sweaty musicians congratulate each other. Their joy was something they created, by making up words to go along with a loud noise that only they could appreciate. It was hard to imagine a female singer ending a set because she hadn’t finished writing all the words to her song, but at the same time I admired their arrogance, their lack of self-consciousness.

  “Bad, right?” my date said.

  “Ugh.” I held the cup to my forehead like I was cooling a fever.

  The second time I saw Adam was at a barbecue in June. His voice was familiar even before I recognized his ruddy cheeks.

  “I think I might have seen your band play,” I said.

  “Terrible, right?” He answered his own question with his laugh.

  “So what do you do,” I said, “besides . . . sing?”

  “I’m a carpenter.”

  I thought about saying something about Jesus but that seemed too obvious.

  “When you tell people that, do they ask you to come over to their apartment and fix their cabinets?” I asked.

  “What’s wrong with your cabinets?”

  I cringed. The door to the bathroom medicine cabinet had been broken for as long as I’d lived in my apartment. My roommate and I just kept it on the bathroom floor, leaning up against a wall, mirroring our feet when we stepped in and out of the shower.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’re definitely not asking me to come over to your apartment.”

  “Uh, no.”

  The skin on his shoulders was freckled and sunburned, stenciled in the shape of his retro yellow tank top that bore Lionel Richie’s face and the word “Hello.” I would have swiped left. And yet, I gave him my number, to enter into an old flip phone. When I got home that night I searched for him online and found his band’s website, but he had no Facebook profile, no Twitter handle, no LinkedIn page. It was like he didn’t exist outside the moments we spent together in the same room.

  Adam had a navy Volvo wagon, manual transmission, with a hatchback for hauling band gear, materials, and the custom furniture he built at a workshop in Gowanus. After work and on weekends, Adam gave me something better to do than stare at a screen.

  We went for drives. My eyes reacquainted themselves with distance. There was another New York that existed aboveground, at the speed of a car and not a bus, Manhattan’s fairy lights throwing gold against the starless sky. There were pockets of the city you could only get to in a car. On an unusually cold and drizzly summer day, we drove to Fort Tilden with a couple of bodega sandwiches and sweaty bottles of Red Stripe. No one else was at the beach and Adam went skinny-dipping in the ocean, while I stood on the sand, still in shoes and socks, clutching a folded umbrella.

  To be with Adam was to be constantly trespassing beyond the borders of what I thought was appropriate. It was wild to watch how much another person could get away with, just because he’d spent his whole life in skin a different color than yours. Adam was five-and-a-half-feet tall, same as me. He wasn’t the first white guy I’d dated, but he was the first one who didn’t automatically abbreviate my name to “K.”

  The more time I spent with him, the more—this sounds unbelievable, but it was the summer of 2016 and everything was unbelievable—I felt his magic rubbing off on me. There was the New York you knew from movies and then there was the real New York. Real New York was mysterious wet drips on your head when you walked under scaffolding, the blackened soles of your feet in summer, the gust of wind from the subway tunnel that made the hem of your skirt fly toward your chin, how frequently you passed young women crying into their cell phones, blowing their noses on deli napkins. Adam bridged the gap between the cinematic and the real.

  When we were together, nothing bad seemed to happen. Parking spots appeared wherever we went. The subway car arrived just as we got to the platform. At a crowded brunch spot, Adam mentioned to the maître d’ that he was a friend of “Michael’s” and we were seated right away; when I asked who Michael was, he said, “Lucky guess.” Outside the Brooklyn Museum, a little light-skinned girl with braids and pink barrettes ran up to us and handed me a yellow rose before running away, laughing at her own private joke.

  All I had to do was take one pink pill at the same time every night, but the sticker with the days of the week fell off and got lost at the bottom of my purse, and instead of looking for it, I told myself this isn’t rocket science, just take one pill and then another.

  In September, I had lunch with Maren.

  “I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a crazy stalker,” she said, “but I’ve been following you for a long time.” She knew I was vegan and had asked Devin to recommend a restaurant, called XYST.

  Maren was wearing a slightly wrinkled black blazer over a white T-shirt. She carried a canvas WNYC tote. She used to work in the nonprofit sector, she said, trying to end gender-based oppression by placing sculptures of vaginas in high-trafficked public areas, but she realized the greater impact she could have with a for-profit venture. Maren had a dark intensity that was compelling, but also a little wack, like Aubrey Plaza’s character on Parks and Rec.

  “Every brand tells you they’re changing the world,” she said. “But has anyone thought of changing the world by actually giving women a break?” She handed me her phone and let me experience Richual for myself, scrolling through all the varieties of self-care, stumbling upon nutritionists and sober life coaches and professional cuddlers.

  The platform was ready to launch, but she needed someone to be in charge of all the content, both editorial and branded, to keep users signing in on a daily basis. I’d never been an editor before, but she promised me I’d have freelancers and interns at my disposal. I wouldn’t have to write about myself—unless I wanted to. The starting salary was higher than what I was making at BuzzFeed and she was offering one point of equity in the company.

  “If we grow to even a fraction of the size of Instagram or Facebook? That equity share could be worth millions someday.”

  I was twenty-six years old, eating twenty-two-dollar wild mushrooms with kale polenta, thinking, I bet they don’t even eat like this in the Condé Nast cafeteria, already mentally rehearsing the so much gratitude for my work family post I would write when I gave notice at BuzzFeed.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I told Maren.

  At the table next to us, a white woman with dreads was explaining to her bald lunch date why Hillary’s Wall Street connections were a bigger deal than Gary Johnson not knowing what Aleppo was. In the car, I recounted the whole scene for Adam, climaxing in an impression of her speaking to management at Whole Foods, demanding justice for collard greens, marginalized at the expense of kale. That made him laugh hard enough he hit the steering wheel like a drum.

  We kept saying “anything could happen,” but secretly we were sure we were right: Hillary would win. We stayed afloat on our stupid hope.

  I asked Maren for 5 percent equity. She offered 2.5 and I accepted and celebrated in my cubicle by listening to Drake and watching videos of golden retrievers on skateboards.

  I swallowed the white placebos. One, two, three, four. My period usually came on three. Four at the latest. After four, you start a new pack of pink. One, two, three, four.

  Still no blood.

  Adam drove us across the Brooklyn Bridge and looking up at the arches though the windshield, I started to cry. “It’s so beautiful,” I said
. He reached over to squeeze my bare knee.

  That was the first night it really felt like fall. Adam hated air-conditioning and liked to sleep with the window open. I said I was too cold and he tucked the sheet around me tight as a straitjacket.

  “Still cold.”

  He rubbed his hands up and down my arms, kissed my forehead.

  “Okay?”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, too.”

  “You first.”

  “I said I’d go upstate for a few months,” Adam said, “to help my friend Oscar build his tiny house.”

  I didn’t know how afraid I was until he said that. “That’s cool,” I said, and turned my back to him in bed.

  “That’s cool?” he said, and tried tickling under my arms.

  “Stop,” I snapped. “Don’t. Tiny houses? Seriously?”

  “Here we go,” he said.

  “They’re upper-middle-class mobile homes.” I couldn’t remember where I read that online, but it came out of my mouth like I was an internet recycling machine.

  “I’ve known Oscar since second grade. What’s the big deal?”

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  For a second, we were both frozen. I waited for him to exhale, say, That’s too bad, and offer to drive me home. I wondered how many abortions were paid for with Venmo. I was already planning how I would turn this moment in my life into content: “The Best Worst Time I Had Being Impregnated by Jesus’s Doppelgänger,” “Seven Misconceptions About the Class Politics of Tiny Living,” “To Celebrate Our First Female President I’m Having a Baby and She Fucking Better Be a Girl.”

  Then Adam started singing, “Baby, baby, where did our love go?” in his rough, funny voice, wrapping his legs and arms around me in a trap, and that’s when I decided I could make this work. All I had to do was work harder than anyone else. If Richual succeeded, a piece of that was mine.

  Maren

  On our first night in the country, I slept for fourteen hours. Our apartment building in Brooklyn was in the LaGuardia flight path, which added another layer of noise to the normal cacophony of street traffic, sirens, and drunk proclamations of “But, baby, I love you!” when the bars closed at four. We usually slept to the sound of a white noise app on my phone that cost $9.99 for unlimited hairdryer or vacuum cleaner, forest at dusk or womb.

  John was already working at the kitchen island. “You slept through the birds,” he said.

  “What birds?”

  Without raising his eyes from his MacBook, he gestured at the French doors that led to the deck off the kitchen.

  I went out barefoot in the cold damp morning. Aside from one weekend in Miami, when we rented bikes to ride along the beach and then I got a phone call to say our servers had crashed because a post about live bee sting acupuncture for depression got too much traffic after an influential MD criticized us on Twitter for “risky mental health quackery,” John and I hadn’t been on vacation in years. I knew I was unbelievably lucky to stay here. I was hashtag blessed. I watched as a dark bird flew, squawking angrily, from the top of one distant tree to a spruce right in front of me. A second bird followed, either in pursuit or out of habit. When the branch where they perched stopped bouncing, I saw the birds weren’t black but midnight blue, with an iridescent sheen like an oil spill across their backs.

  “Five in the morning,” John told me, and then did his impression of their sound, a repetitive grating call. Nothing like birdsong.

  “Poor baby,” I said, kissing his head, which smelled like the herbal tonic rinse I got him to thicken his hair.

  We still hadn’t talked about what I posted on Twitter. Not really. Maybe if I had actually asked him, he would have said that joking about taking down a member of the oligarchy was the least I could do and welcome me to the #resistance. While John licked his wounds over Bernie’s loss and what-could-have-been, I (according to him) devoted my every waking hour to building a community of self-absorbed narcissists whose definition of political action was serving as brand ambassadors for the first-ever pubic hair conditioner designed for all gender identities that costs sixty-nine dollars an ounce.

  That wasn’t totally fair.

  There were really two communities of Richual users. Dewy-skinned, Glossier-Boy-Browed, chaturanga-toned young women used the platform to sell access to their “lifestyles” in the form of exclusive ayahuasca ceremonies (millennial pink puke buckets provided) or wine and cannabis pairings in Napa. Some of the most popular posts on the app were of white twentysomethings vaping on yachts or soaking in claw-foot tubs of sparkly lavender potion. Hashtag sorryiwaslateididntwanttocome. These women were digital performance artists; they performed their rituals for other women to aspire to. They meditated for the photo opp: the beautiful shaft of sunlight at the picturesque silent retreat in the Berkshires. Their cosmic smoothie bowls, garnished with chia seeds and dragon fruit balls, elevated nutrition to an art form.

  These were Devin’s users. Her #RichualSisters. She journeyed with them to the ashram in Calabasas where you hike sixteen miles on one thousand calories a day. If there was a yoga class with goats in the Hudson Valley, Devin would bring her mat. She served as liaison between the influencers and our advertising partners, and there was no one more naturally suited to this role than Devin, whether posing with a glass of low-cal rosé at the launch party for a sweat-proof cream eyeshadow you could wear to spin class, or in culottes against a step-and-repeat at a premiere for a documentary about sustainable food trucks.

  I paid more attention to the users who would never appear on a magazine cover. I found a post tagged #selfcare that showed a remote control, a box of Papa John’s, and the hand of a white user whose knuckles were scraped from bulimia. Some women shared pictures of their weekly pill organizers or their sobriety coins. @ManicBiracialPixie posted a selfie of getting a sleeve tattoo of stargazer lilies to cover up her self-harm scars. If I was jolted by any of the posts I found, it was only because I’d been culturally hypnotized to think of wellness as a rich, white, skinny, able-bodied woman nursing a green juice.

  When I compared metrics between the aspirational posts and the posts that were the most vulnerable, I found that the influencers received more comments, but they were mostly from strangers they didn’t follow back, while the posts by women that described assault, abuse, mental illness, disability, or addiction received less engagement overall but from a tighter subset of users, who all commented on each other’s content.

  I knew the formula for hitting the user engagement jackpot. A hot white influencer had to confess: her life wasn’t really as perfect as it seemed. She was broken, too. Her fans thought they knew her so well? They didn’t know the burden of secret shame she carried. With the right Brené Brown quote below a #nofilter shot of candid vulnerability—maybe a baggy sweater but no pants, hair falling over the eyes—she could share a story that made her followers feel like they had private access to a side she never showed her friends and family. That’s what the internet enabled: the illusion of intimacy. There was a fine line between authenticity and TMI, and the Richual queen bees knew just how much to reveal and conceal of their trauma to keep their followers thirsty.

  * * *

  ...

  After breakfast, John and I went outside and tramped through the damp muck. I wanted him to tell me that everything was going to be okay, that I was smart and capable and I would figure a way out of this. I wanted a pep talk from A League of Their Own, an off-the-cuff recitation of a Mary Oliver poem, or at least thirty seconds of meaningful eye contact in a grove of trees, him putting my hands in his coat pockets to keep them warm.

  “I feel like shit for asking this right now,” John said, “but can I borrow some money?”

  No, I thought. No, no, no. Possible to rewind the tape so we could try that again? “Some money for what?�
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  “I have a back-taxes payment due and I’m not getting the next part of my advance for another six weeks.” John freelanced as a ghostwriter, writing memoirs “by” D-list reality TV stars. He saw ghostwriting as a way to pay the bills while his real life’s work was a novel spanning two centuries, about the wreck of the Medusa in 1816 and the cannibalism that ensued among the survivors, a British couple stranded at sea in the 1970s who survived by eating raw turtles, and a young boy coming of age in a coastal town in the early ’80s, alienated from his peers and grieving his dead mother. If he could just finish the nine-hundred-page manuscript, if he could just somehow get a copy to Kenneth Lonergan, he knew his life would change.

  Then last year, John had his biggest commercial success yet, with a memoir by a handsome house-flipper, about his transition to life as a single dad after his wife died in a mass shooting. This led to a temporary bump in income (and taxes) and similar assignments. The novel was once again put on the back burner.

  “Ask Devin if she’ll lend you money.”

  “I’m not asking Devin,” he said. “Are you joking?”

  “I don’t know, am I?”

  “Babe,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders so we were looking right into each other’s eyes. I loved his eyes. I couldn’t go into my bank of email scripts and send my “politely decline” template to his eyes. “I love you. I hate asking you. I wish you were the one asking me for money.”

  “I’ve never asked to borrow money from you.” Even when I was at the nonprofit, I would charge groceries to my credit card before I asked for any favors.

  “I know, that’s my point. You’re better at adulting than I am.”

  “You’re forty-one years old,” I said. “I think technically it’s illegal for you to use that word.”