I crept back into my hotel room that night so that I would not disturb my roommate. I couldn’t fall asleep, so I decided to read and propped open Melissa Broder’s essay collection, So Sad Today. Broder is the creator of the depressing, anxiety-ridden, and self-deprecating Twitter account @SoSadToday, which has over 370,000 followers (including Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus the last time I checked). Plenty of my friends retweet her posts. I don’t, but I do read them whenever they appear on my timeline, usually half smiling at their relatability before diverting my attention to something else that won’t pull me into such a dark place. For years, Melissa’s identity as the mind behind @SoSadToday was hidden. She published poetry under her real name in many renowned magazines and journals, like Guernica and the Missouri Review. When I googled an image of her, I saw a blonde-haired woman with smoldering eyes, simultaneously inaccessible and vulnerable. Reading her biography, I assumed that she was a woman who had her shit together. She was so accomplished.
Generally, I devour personal essay collections written by women in a matter of days. I’m a nosy and voyeuristic person, maybe because I have four older sisters and I know what it feels like to be banished from their conversations. I listened from the outside and vicariously lived through them. Or maybe I’m naturally curious. Whatever the reason, I love reading about women’s inner lives, traveling through the pages like a boat buoyed by a mild yet noticeable current. But reading So Sad Today was like trudging through a stalactite cave. It felt dangerous, as if I were violating Broder in some way by reading the secrets that she shared and gave permission to publish. She spent pages upon pages writing about how much she destroyed her body in her early twenties with whiskey, benzodiazepines, opiates, Ecstasy, laxatives, amphetamines, psychedelics. I sank into her accounts of blacking out all over San Francisco, waking up to blood on the walls and strange men next to her in bed who told her how much of a mess she was, going into yoga class with the alcohol oozing out of her pores, the whole time feeling more and more guilty for enjoying these darkest moments of her life. All the while I thought, How the hell is this woman still alive? Even more, How is she still alive and so successful after all that?
Then again, I already knew how her story would end: she would not only still be alive; she would be writing and producing and traveling and talking and gaining visibility. She would rise from the ashes of the fire she’d started, like the phoenix of Greek mythology. Soon, it became clear to me why I chose not to swim in the pool that night: because as a black woman, I was never taught that I possessed that kind of regenerative power.
Our culture loves young, beautiful, and drug-addicted white women. In the mid-1990s, heroin chic was all the craze in the fashion world. Characterized by the dark circles around their eyes, gaunt bodies, pale skin, and either drained or apathetic expressions, supermodels like Kate Moss and Jaime King rose to prominence. Of course, this trend was criticized by anti-drug groups and even former president Bill Clinton, but its timing was not an accident. Because of the scars from the 1980s crack epidemic and the fear of AIDS, heroin was seen as a “healthier” alternative due to its relative purity, and its use was glamorized not only in fashion but also in the music world. Aside from the reality that the fashion industry (like most industries) is overwhelmingly white, I am not surprised that white models popularized “heroin chic.” Growing up black, I was imbued with extreme hatred for Ronald Reagan and his administration; I knew nothing else of his impact on America besides the crack epidemic. Little black girls were traded by their parents for twenty-dollar rock; prostitution skyrocketed; an entire generation of low-weight “crack babies” was born to addicted mothers. Because of Reagan’s War on Drugs, by the end of 1999 over half a million black men and women were sitting in state and federal prisons, broadening the disparities in incarceration rates between blacks and whites.3
As a child, I never saw black female television characters experimenting with drugs or alcohol—only their brothers. Sure, they might have had fake IDs, multiple boyfriends, and an occasional disregard for their parents’ rules, but that was it. Yvette Henderson of Smart Guy is a straitlaced teenager who has a passion for women’s rights and eventually attends Georgetown. In one episode, her younger brother, T. J., gets drunk one night. Moesha is a witty—and often boy-crazy—teenager from Los Angeles. When her brother stores a marijuana cigarette in his room, their parents initially accuse Moesha, which catalyzes a discussion about drugs. The creators of both shows, Danny Kallis for Smart Guy and Ralph Farquhar, Sara V. Finney, and Vida Spears for Moesha, chose to keep both black female teenage characters spot-clean. The same goes for Tia Landry and Tamera Campbell of Sister, Sister, and Reagan Gomez’s character, Zaria, on The Parent ’Hood.
On the contrary, drug and alcohol use and abuse seems to have been a rite of passage of white female characters of the 1990s and 2000s. Rayanne Graff, of My So-Called Life, gets addicted to both alcohol and drugs and suffers an accidental overdose that leads to her having her stomach pumped—yet she is also a fashion icon because of her layered outfits and accessorized hair. In Degrassi: The Next Generation, Ashley Kerwin takes Ecstasy, Anya MacPherson develops a cocaine addiction (but quits on her own to join the Canadian Forces), Katie Matlin abuses OxyContin and goes to rehab, and Victoria Coyne takes crystal meth. On the other hand, Hazel Aden, one of the most prominent black female characters, never so much as lifts a bottle of vodka for the five seasons where she appears. Kelly Taylor, of Beverly Hills 90210, gets addicted to cocaine thanks to her boyfriend Colin. Andie McPhee, of Dawson’s Creek, gets accepted to Harvard and experiments with Ecstasy pills. The list goes on and on.
What all this taught me as a child was that drug and alcohol use was an “oopsy” mistake for the vast majority of middle-and upper-class white girls, who might indulge if they got bored on a Saturday night. Even if they did experiment with drugs for a little while, white girls would still go on to great colleges; they would marry well and have children, regaling their teenagers with stories of their past. Wash, rinse, and repeat. That’s not to say that white girls and women do not succumb to drug addiction. They do many times over. But as a black girl, if I so much as touched a pill there was no coming back. There is no space for “experimentation” in the world of young black women, for there are already too many obstacles to overcome. Unlike with white girls, our inherent innocence is not assumed. We don’t have the space to be reckless and carefree and then “healed,” regenerating and then returning to regular life. Blame is already draped upon us like a cloak, but not one that can be shed at will.
When I see my white female contemporaries post pictures of their asses, or facetiously call each other sluts, or share their exploits on weed, LSD, or Klonopin on social media, I know that if I did the same I would embody a historically entrenched belief that I, as a black woman, am nothing but an immoral and filthy animal at my core. I knew this quite well at that Silver Lake party. As a black woman, I knew I could not afford to make a mistake. Fulfilling the expectations of society’s white imagination would be to self-inflict an injury from which I could not recover.