The next time I was at a taqueria, some drunk guy cut in front of me, demanded food, then meandered away, oblivious. My whole body burned with the desire to yell, to call him pathetic, rude, bald. Not doing so felt like leaving a chunk of rice at the bottom of the bowl, like dipping out without paying the bill—unfinished business, a miscarriage of justice. And yet. What would it accomplish? I let it go. I strong-armed myself into normalcy.
As part of my big forgiveness journey, I even called my father and asked him to take me out to dinner in San Francisco. I tried to be patient and listen the whole time as he talked about his new estate-sale finds: a letter signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, an excellent Persian rug. I tried to slip in details of my own successes. I tried not to be disappointed when he didn’t hear me.
Several months after my decision to let go of my anger, I started seeing Samantha, my therapist, to learn to love better. Slowly, she taught me the basics of healthy communication. To listen more than yell. To assert myself in calm, measured tones. Armed with her techniques, I practiced punching down my anger like a ball of dough, flattening it out. After a couple hundred times, it became a reflex—my eyes unfocused, my voice went flat, and I floated somewhere near the ceiling, far away from the conflict. I let it go.
* * *
—
Samantha helped me see that the loop kept happening because I was repeating behaviors taught to me by my mother—that her voice remained inside my head. And so, tenaciously, I fought to erase her. I stopped myself from asking for much. I engaged in conflicts that ended peaceably. I learned how to listen a little better. I promoted kindness over vengeance.
Miraculously, this worked. My circle expanded to include a large collection of lovely, loyal individuals. I could find a party easily every Saturday night; I was always invited. And everyone attended the huge rooftop parties I threw, during which I was held by dozens of tight arms when LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” came on and we bounced gleefully, screaming the lyrics out over San Francisco, too young and na?ve to notice it is a sad song.
My friends let go of me when the song ended, and I drunkenly meandered to the railing. My roof had a majestic view of Civic Center and the Bay Bridge, and I stared out into that milky, glittering expanse, feeling like royalty. In that moment, I decided I had conquered my past. I’d earned this love, through sheer determination. At last, I was healed.
* * *
—
When I told people this story about my life—that I was abused and abandoned when I was a child, but I was all better now—they always believed me. Why wouldn’t they? Everyone loves a happy ending, and my résumé was superb: I had friends, a nice apartment, a cute wardrobe, a 401(k). And, of course, my career. Nothing lent more credibility to my healing than my career.
When we say someone is resilient, we mean that they adapt well to conditions of adversity—they are strong, in possession of “emotional toughness.” But how do you measure someone’s emotional toughness, exactly?
When scientists and psychologists provide case studies of resilient individuals, they do not showcase a housekeeper who has overcome personal tragedy and now has impressive talents at self-regulation. They write about individuals who survived and became doctors, teachers, therapists, motivational speakers—sparkly members of society. Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success.
Which of course made me resilient as fuck. Like a good Protestant American, I continued to save myself through work.
I graduated during the Great Recession of 2008, when none of my peers were getting jobs. I landed a couple of unpaid print internships, but the newspapers I worked for kept folding. Luckily, I had begun falling in love with a storytelling radio show called This American Life. Every episode made me laugh or cry, so I made my own podcast and called it Get Me On This American Life. I snagged rides on Craigslist to porn conventions and medieval war reenactments and tried to fashion stories that would one day attract TAL’s attention.
They were too busy running the biggest podcast on the planet to listen to a show that had a whopping fifteen listeners, but my crappy podcast did catch the attention of a brand-new, Oakland-based storytelling public radio show called Snap Judgment. They hired me as a paid intern at first, and I came in on my first day with twenty pitches for stories. Three months in, I was making half the content on the show, so they hired me as a producer.
At Snap, I worked fifty-to seventy-hour weeks. Long weekdays and weekends. And every Wednesday, the night before the show aired, I worked a twenty-one-hour day, staying at the office until four a.m. if we were lucky and seven a.m. if we weren’t. I did graphic design and web content. I made short films. And I produced hundreds of stories.
I helped build the show from the ground up. We went from being on 2 stations, to 20, to 250. More than half a million people listened to me talk every week. Slowly, I climbed the Bay Area’s spires to become a member of the San Francisco glitterati. I got free tickets to the best shows and festivals and events, where I slipped hors d’oeuvres into my purse. I was invited to mansions in the hills and opera halls, and fancy famous people would shake my hand and say they were a fan of me.
There, see? That’s resilience. That’s what I call healed.
CHAPTER 8
Even though I was loved and loving, successful and happy—even though I’d actually suggested to Samantha that we no longer needed to work together—there were some…inconsistencies. It was mostly fine, really it was. Just, there were times when I got this feeling.
I woke in my apartment at seven a.m., last night’s makeup staining my pillowcase. I was twenty-five and covered in glitter because the day before I’d gone to an excellent all-day music festival, after which I’d sampled all the flavors of Four Loko at a friend’s apartment while watching mustachioed dudes do whippets at the kitchen table.
But now it was morning and there was no music, just silence, which twisted something at the base of my scalp. I tried to recall all the good things from the night before, moments of dancing with old friends, sharing intimate confessions with new ones, thinking of the VIP press passes I had. Proof, proof, proof of my worth. I am awesome, I am powerful, I am okay. I am okay.