It was the end of 2017, and every morning when I walked into my office, I hung up my coat, sat down, and cried. I wasn’t exactly sure why, though if pressed, I harbored a miasma of suspicions—my own ineptitude and uselessness, racism, the collapse of democracy. But instead of trying to figure out the most likely reason for the dread this particular morning, I decided that would be wasted time. I had to calm down like a normal person who goes to work and does stuff. So I started scrolling through Twitter. It was like swimming through kelp, painfully pushing my way past apocalyptic predictions by talking heads and stupid hot takes on even stupider tweets from our president, searching desperately for the respite of a cat video.
Cat with Roomba. I began to be placated. Cat with owl. I felt merely dead inside instead of incomprehensibly sad. Cat reunited with its owner. Well, fuck. Tears again. Back to the drawing board. Fat chinchilla. Fat frog. Fat goiter on fat pug. An hour passed. I stared at the Post-it stuck to the bottom of my computer screen, on which I had written the most optimistic idea I could possibly muster: NO ONE ELSE IS HAPPY EITHER. How could anyone be truly happy in a world filled with unrelenting suffering?
I told myself I’d be ready to be productive in five minutes, then ten, then somehow it was almost noon, so I got lunch and a Diet Coke, which gave me the energy to work. I brought up a draft of something I was working on, picked at it for a couple of hours, watched a video of someone getting shot by the police, hastily shut it down. I was feeling a little less tired, but it was almost time to go home. I stood up, grabbed my coat, and left.
* * *
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It had been a long year. The week of the 2016 election, I worked so hard on covering it that I barely had time to process what happened…so Trump’s inauguration in January felt like a bomb. That weekend, two of my best friends and I went to our favorite café and ordered burgers and fries.
“I knew America was racist. That’s not a surprise,” one of my friends said. “But I guess I didn’t know how racist. It feels like they really don’t want us here.” We at the table were all immigrants.
“Remember, Trump didn’t win the popular vote,” my other friend piped in, squirting ketchup over her fries. “More people want us here than not. We belong here.”
“But I’ve met people in, like, rural Georgia who don’t personally know any immigrants,” I added. “They don’t know whether we belong or not because they don’t know us. I think it’s our job to engage them and show them that we are human and have similar struggles, to create a dialogue so things won’t be so binary.”
My friends both went quiet. The clinking of forks on other people’s plates was unbearably loud. Then, after a few moments, one friend said slowly, “You’re putting a lot of the onus on people of color, Stephanie. That’s a lot of emotional labor for a group of people who didn’t create this mess. Maybe that’s some people’s jobs. But that’s not my job.”
“I agree,” the other said. “I don’t think that has to be everyone’s responsibility if they’re not emotionally there. That seems like it could be dangerous. Or unhealthy.”
I could not back down now. I had momentum. “It’s everyone’s job now!” I cried. “What’s the alternative? Civil war? We can’t just shut ourselves into factions and not talk to each other! It’s my job, and it’s your job, too. We have to! The stakes are too high!”
That was my last brunch with those two friends. They stopped returning my texts and calls after that day. I was wrong. They didn’t have to do anything.
Still, I engaged in the dialogue as promised. I spent hours on the phone with cops and border patrol agents and ex-KKK members and current white supremacists. I searched and searched for an ounce of humanity in one overt white supremacist until eventually he conceded, “You seem like a perfectly nice, intelligent woman, and I’m happy to talk to you now. But when the race war happens, I won’t hesitate before shooting you in the head.” So that really improved race relations in America.
In time, I learned that putting white supremacists on the radio was emotional terrorism for both myself and listeners of color, and it actively aided the KKK’s agenda. But it seemed like raging racial injustice was the only thing my bosses wanted to hear about. They were no longer interested in my pitches about human joys and foibles if they didn’t include a contrarian political angle. And everyone kept talking about the importance of this kind of journalism, even in goddamn Super Bowl ads. So I bought into its importance and kept thinking about that Spider-Man quote: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I was glued to the news all day, every day, trying to find the right political story that would solve everything. My boss never green-lit any of my pitches.
* * *
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In the beginning of 2018, my anxiety reached a fever pitch.
In January, I started getting weird around others. A friend held a cassoulet party where she prepared dutch ovens full of meat and beans and invited a hearty group of revelers. I brought french onion dip made from sour cream and a packet of dry mix, which seemed underwhelming next to the truffled cheese dip and port-wine chicken liver paté. When the conversation turned toward RuPaul’s Drag Race (never seen it), to nostalgic stories from New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School (grew up in California), to Le Creuset cocottes (yeah right, I found my cookware on the street), I tried to interject with some joke about Asians that nobody thought was funny. Chastised, I went to stand near the cheese dip and paté, which I accidentally ate way too much of by standards of common courtesy and also by standards of my own lactose intolerance. Eventually, I found myself sequestered alone reading Jamie Oliver cookbooks and farting violently into a corner until Joey was ready to leave. I kept feeling the pressure of shame, regret, and gas long after we’d gone to bed. Talk about dutch ovens.
* * *
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During my entire tenure at TAL, I had a habit of barging into co-workers’ offices and asking if they would go downstairs and smoke with me so I could complain about my mean boss. But the last few times I’d done that, my co-workers’ faces fell. I was exhausting, I realized. I should keep my negativity to myself, but also, I had nothing positive to say. So I drew my blinds and stopped talking to anyone, choosing instead to wallow alone. The one time I forced myself to go out with co-workers, I found myself whining miserably the whole time, like an unstoppable train.
I started crying every day on the subway while listening to The Daily. My panic attacks were getting longer and longer, the sobbing more violent and uncontrollable.
* * *