—
“Aren’t you having a heart attack?” Carmen asked, looking up from a magazine as I approached. I shrugged and slumped in a chair next to her while apologizing to the air for those Little Debbie oatmeal pies I stole from the corner store when I was a kid. WHAT IF THERE IS A HELL, OKAY?
A dude with a black eye and severed thumb he held against his hand with a dish towel sat down across from us. My heart was seconds away from stopping and homeboy’s thumb was indisputably detached from his hand, and they had us just sitting out here with all the stomachaches and bee stings?! A tech came to get me, guiding me through a crowd of influenza and broken arms to a small room in back. He explained that the hospital was undergoing some construction and that he’d be administering my echocardiogram in this closet while I sat in a recliner. There were no ill-fitting gowns, no drawers full of gauze, no dispenser full of crinkly blue vomit bags. I took off my shirt so he could try to affix electrodes under my sweaty boobs, then sat in the recliner and closed my eyes while trying to picture something relaxing. The tech suggested a beach, in Tahiti. But I hate the beach, that dirty sand getting in all your moist cracks and bugs feasting on your sunburned skin, so instead I focused on something that would actually calm me: one of my enemies choking on a salad.
Twenty minutes later I was in a real room with a bed, my sister Jane, who’d met us in the waiting room, next to me yammering into her phone. The doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me one of those condescending sad smiles. The kind you give a child who says 2 + 2 = 7 and believes it. Apparently, I hadn’t had a heart attack. No, instead of “life-threatening cardiac event” the reading on the EKG came out “not right emotionally.” Not kidding, all those lines and squiggles on that mile-long piece of tape spelled out the words “MENTALLY ILL” like an electric Ouija board. Did you know that a panic attack can feel just like a heart attack? I didn’t, but I learned that shit quick as the phlebotomist jammed an IV into my arm and the doctor loaded a big dose of Ativan into my veins and knit his eyebrows together with concern while batting around words like “therapy” and “anxiety.”
When I have a panic attack, my throat closes up like someone has a big, meaty hand clasped around it, and my chest hurts and I can’t breathe and I become 100 percent certain that I am going to wither and die right then and there. I know when you feel it coming on, you’re supposed to relax and do the breathing exercises your very sensible doctor taught you, but it feels like if I lie down or close my eyes for even a second, I will never open them again. And most of the time I’m down with that, but this shit always happens when my sheets need changing or my garbage can is full of freezer-burned Hot Pockets I tried to salvage, and I get even more stressed out at the thought of whoever finds my corpse discovering the last thing I googled was “Shark Tank bonus clips.”
Not being able to deal with your life is humiliating. It makes you feel weak. And if you’re African-American and female, not only are you expected to be resilient enough to just take the hits and keep going, but if you can’t, you’re a Black Bitch with an Attitude. You’re not mentally ill; you’re ghetto. Sitting in that hospital bed, talking with a dude who was fresh out of medical school and looked like he was playing doctor with his father’s stethoscope looped around his neck, I was so fucking embarrassed, ashamed to be talking to him about being so mad and so sad most of the time. Letting Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman down by talking about my silly little feelings.
—
I was born to one of those mythical black hero women, a single mother who somehow managed to graduate both high school and a nursing program despite having had her first child at sixteen, a woman I never saw pop a pill or take a drink or bury her head under a pillow for three days at a time. Every single time I just can’t…get…up I beat myself up a little, because it’s not like I have children or a job I hate and there’s probably nothing the matter with me other than laziness. When I was growing up, no one in my house was talking about depression. That’s something that happened to white people on television, not a thing that could take down a Strong Black Woman. Which also destroyed me on the “Why are you listening to Smashing Pumpkins instead of [insert name of popular early nineties R & B artist]? Are you even black?!” level.
So I was (1) super fucking depressed, (2) super fucking depressed with no one to talk to about it who wasn’t going to immediately suggest child services remove me from my home, and (3) super fucking depressed while clocking in on the low end of my skinfolk’s negrometers because I identified hard with Courtney Love and read Sassy magazine because Essence wasn’t really speaking to me yet, so wasn’t this whole thing yet another way I was desperately trying to be white?!
When I was young I was frequently described as “moody.” Or dismissed as “angry.” According to the social worker who routinely pulled me out of class, I was intellectually bright but “quietly hostile.” Never mind that I was basically living in squalor with my mother’s half-dead corpse, subsisting on the kind of cereal that comes in a five-pound bag and whatever nutrient-rich meals were being served for free hot lunch; I was diagnosed as having “an attitude problem.” The Black Girl curse. So I rocked with that. When you’re a kid it’s sometimes just easier to go along with other people’s definitions of who you are. They’re adults, right? So they’re smarter? I would listen to this Faith No More tape on my Walkman (DO YOUNG PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT THOSE WORDS EVEN MEAN) over and over while sulking and looking morose or whatever it is poor kids get to do when we have no access to semiautomatic firearms or prescription drugs. It was the only thing I could do to make it to the next goddamned day.
I tried to take my own life in 1993, and the general response when it failed was basically LOL TOUGHEN UP. My first-semester freshman report card:
English: C
History: C
Gym: D
Band: B+
Algebra: A (Because Kate Lewis helped me do my homework. I love you, Kate.)
Suicide: F