I chose to tell my mom while she was lying in bed asleep. I poked her until she was about half-awake, and then I proceeded to relay the super important fact of my treatment for depression as though she were fully awake and able to receive the news. I was counting on her not being able to respond.
Look. My mom loves me more than I’ll probably ever be able to comprehend. She wants the best life possible for me, and her fears for me come from love. With that in mind . . . my mom’s first instinct was to tell me that what I was feeling I actually wasn’t feeling—that I was just being dramatic. It felt like a slap in the face, but I realize now that she just wanted me not to feel like dying. She’d spent so much time trying to keep me alive that it broke her heart to imagine that I preferred she hadn’t. It hurt her to know I was hurting. She took it personally.
Her second instinct was to share a time in her life when she was upset and couldn’t sleep. Just like me. She said that she just kept getting up and believing that God would pull her through and that He did. I was grateful that she opened up, but what she described was actually nothing like what I was going through. I couldn’t make her understand that for me God wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make her understand that I couldn’t get up on my own anymore.
So I started DBT: five days a week, three classes a day, each run by a different therapist. On two of those days I went to group therapy, and on Thursdays I went to one-on-one therapy. I was the youngest in the group by about ten years. A lot of the people in the group had gone through a few different cocktails of medication and therapy before DBT. Some had lived through suicide attempts and hospital stays in the psych ward. Some had spent years on a waiting list and had maxed out their savings to be able to attend the DBT classes. I, on the other hand, had basically waltzed in a day after mentioning my feelings to my doctor. I was on the lowest dosage of a bottom-shelf antidepressant, which was already working. And I was only twenty, so I had yet to ruin my life.
For me, the classes were fun! A lot of the program centered on keeping a diary and writing down my thoughts and feelings and then reading them aloud to everyone. I excelled at writing down my thoughts and feelings and reading them aloud to everyone! (Have you seen my Twitter?) I took to the program fast and was basically kicking my depression’s ass. I was quickly becoming the Happiest Person at Sad Camp (that’s literally what they called me).
This one woman hated me. She said that I was too perfect, that I was everyone’s favorite, and that she was sick of it. She was a real bitch, but to be fair, she was suffering from borderline personality disorder. She was having a more difficult time than I was, and it must have been rough for her to see me smiling and laughing. Aside from her, most people in our class liked me. I made jokes about my pain and spent the first month of the program secretly feeling like I was mentally healthier than everyone else there and that I didn’t need help as much as they did. (Oh, now I get why that bitch hated me.) Whether I was healthier or not, I was there with my DBT classmates because I did, in fact, need help. Most of my “happiness” was pretend and the jokes a cover-up. One of my therapists called it the “onion.” He’d laugh at my inappropriate jokes, and then say, “Okay, Gabby, but peel the onion. What’s under that joke? Hmm? Is it fear? Peel the onion.” Hippie.
At first I’d think, Shut up, Jacob! I saw you smoking a cigarette outside. You can’t tell me shit! But by the third month I was less judgmental. I was trying my best to be honest with everyone about my feelings, including myself. I was peeling the onion. I was also way more emotionally stable. I was still trying to shake the eating disorder, but I no longer wanted to die. I was grateful to the program and the doctor who had suggested it. The thoughts I’d had, the absence of any fear of death, the uncontrollable emotional sadness . . . I didn’t know anymore who the fuck that girl was, but she was no longer me. And she’s definitely not the person writing this today.
One thing didn’t change, though: I was still hooking up with random dudes. It took a while longer to learn that I deserved to at least like someone before letting him rub up against me. In time I started to believe I was worth more than being fucked and forgotten. I decided to try celibacy for a while. Except I wasn’t going to be a weirdo about it and tell everyone.
“You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity,” my mother repeated. This is how much she believed her own statement: she said it twice. She peered at me, waiting for a response.
I suddenly realized, in the midst of my stunned silence, that my mom thought we were a lot closer than we actually were. She thought that since telling her about my depression had been such a success I would have told her about losing my virginity when it happened. She thought I was a delicate little flower. And she thought I was a little bit sad for being twenty-seven and still a virgin.
How could I tell her?
“True, I’ll fight like hell, Mom. Could you make me a sandwich?”
3
Why You Shouldn’t Marry for a Green Card
The story of two people who got married, met and then fell in love.
—tagline from the movie Green Card
THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS I could describe my mom, Alice Tan Ridley. Free-spirited hippie is one (actually, I’m the only one who calls her a hippie, and never have I done it to her face). She doesn’t care about rules and breaks them often. She wants other people to live their lives the way they want to. She wishes it was socially acceptable for straight men to cry and wear dresses and skirts. (That being said, she told me to have her buried in pants.)
My mom is everyone’s favorite aunt. She was the youngest girl of nine kids, all born and raised on a dirt road in a town you’ve never heard of in Georgia. She has a ton of sisters who had children when she was a little girl, so she’s been helping raise kids all her life. She became an assistant preschool teacher at the age of thirteen. Really, she’s been trained in the art of fun since birth.
She’s comfortable in her own skin and knows how gorgeous she is. If you happen to think she’s not gorgeous, you’re wrong. She’s the most confident person in the room. Any room. She’s the most talented person around for miles. Perhaps for a thousand miles. Definitely in the city. She shines as bright as a diamond because she is a goddamned STAR! That’s another phrase I use to describe my mother—again, never to her face.