Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things Read online

  “But I’m not broken,” I explained to my psychiatrist. “I just … I just hurt … inside. And when I tear at the outside it makes me feel less torn up on the inside.”

  She nodded, waiting.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  She waited.

  “Really, I don’t. It’s not a lie. I’m not suicidal. I just feel like sometimes I can’t keep myself from hurting me. It’s like there’s someone else inside of me who needs to physically peel those bad thoughts out of my head and there’s no other way to get in there. The physical pain distracts me from the mental pain.”

  She waited.

  “It sounds crazy when I say it out loud,” I whispered. “Sometimes I think I might really be crazy.”

  “If you were crazy you wouldn’t realize how crazy it sounds,” she said gently but insistently. “You’re recognizing a problem and you’re getting help for it, the same way any sane person with a medical problem would.”

  My hands itched to pull at my hair but I forced them to lie on my lap. There was dried blood under my nails. “This is why they put people in straitjackets,” I thought to myself, “to stop them from hurting themselves.”

  And then we started a very long process of behavioral therapy, of drugs and of meetings with doctors. I read books with twelve-step programs designed to stem unhealthy needs.

  Sometimes the impulse ended with a twinge … just a thought that I needed to scratch or to hurt myself, and then I was able to stop myself by redirecting the thought. Sometimes it was harder and I’d wear rubber bands around my hands, snapping them against my wrists to mimic the pain of cutting without the risk of infection or worse. Some nights I’d find myself hunched over the kitchen sink, crying pathetically as I forced myself to squeeze handfuls of ice until it burned like I’d stuck my arm in a fire. And sometimes … I’d relapse. Those nights are dark. They shine like broken glass in my memory, as I flirted with danger and allowed myself to cut, and bleed, and shed pieces of this body that has so betrayed me.

  Sometimes Victor finds me the next morning with bloody hands, or a thin spot in my hair that I’ll have to comb over, and he asks me, “Why can’t you just stop?” He asks me why I would victimize myself intentionally, and he looks at me as if he thinks I could actually explain.

  I can’t.

  I can’t even tell myself why I am this way. I just know that it’s how I’m made … and maybe one day someone will crack open this head of mine and find out what’s wrong in there … and also what is right.

  Because it’s both.

  Without the dark there isn’t light. Without the pain there is no relief. And I remind myself that I’m lucky to be able to feel such great sorrow, and also such great happiness. I can grab on to each moment of joy and live in those moments because I have seen the bright contrast from dark to light and back again. I am privileged to be able to recognize that the sound of laughter is a blessing and a song, and to realize that the bright hours spent with my family and friends are extraordinary treasures to be saved, because those same moments are a medicine, a balm. Those moments are a promise that life is worth fighting for, and that promise is what pulls me through when depression distorts reality and tries to convince me otherwise.

  Maybe the scales that weigh everyone else’s emotions don’t work for me. Maybe my scales are greater. Or less. Maybe instead of a scale I’ve wandered off to one of those nowhere places where you wait. And maybe one day I’ll be found, and someone will explain to me why I am the way that I am.

  Or maybe not.

  After all, some stories aren’t meant to be told.

  Skinterventions and Bangtox

  I’ve never been much of one for cosmetic enhancements or additions. I don’t understand the need to stuff yourself with Botox, or implants, or collagen injections; however, I can completely understand the urge to strip stuff away in the name of beauty. I am a sucker for PedEggs, getting the fat pummeled out of you with high-frequency radio waves, wraps that make you sweat out your toxins, and cleanses that make you shit out your colon. Somehow that all seems healthier to me. Or at least more likely to make me less of who I am. Which is probably pretty unhealthy, now that I think about it.

  * * *

  I think I may need to call my shrink to tell her I just had a breakthrough. Hang on.

  * * *

  Okay, I’m back. Turns out that my shrink sends all her calls to her answering service after ten p.m. and they were disappointingly unimpressed with my epiphany about why I have dermatillomania. Probably because they don’t even know what dermatillomania is. In fact, even spell-check doesn’t know what it is and when I asked it for suggestions it just said “LEARN SPELLING.” Which is both rude and unhelpful, spell-check. Dermatillomania is an impulse control disorder that makes you want to scratch your skin off. It flares up when I’m stressed out and I find myself scratching at any imperfections. I usually pick at my scalp until it won’t stop bleeding, or at my thumb, which is now permanently deformed from years of self-damage. It’s sort of shitty and I don’t recommend it.

  I’ve found healthier ways of dealing with this need to pick my skin off, like wrapping my fingers with tape, or coating my hair with coconut oil so it reminds me not to unconsciously scratch. I’ve also found not-so-healthy ways, like when I heard about “microdermabrasion,” which I suspect is Latin for “I want to pull off your skin and turn it into a jacket.” My dermatologist sent me an e-mail about it, saying something about how my new skin was suffocating underneath layers of my old, dead skin, and I suddenly felt like I was wearing a mask of dust mites and dirt. I needed to have this done immediately and I couldn’t go alone.

  “SO THERE’S THIS NEW THING I HEARD ABOUT WHERE THEY RIP YOUR SKIN OFF,” I may have screamed over the phone to my friend Laura.

  She was silent for a bit and so I explained, “BECAUSE IT MAKES YOU PRETTIER.”

  She still seemed slightly unconvinced so I continued. “I got a coupon for this microdermabrasion thingie. As I understand it, they rip off your face skin to make you look nice. I don’t know what they have against face skin but apparently it’s very out of style. Much like pubic hair. And Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  “What does everyone have against Gwyneth?” Laura asked, slightly annoyed.

  We’d gotten off track. Clearly I wasn’t describing this right. I continued: “Laura, they rub your face off using DIAMONDS. It’s like a giant FUCK-YOU to the homeless. Like, I’M USING DIAMONDS TO RIP MY OWN FACE OFF. That’s how little I care for diamonds or my face. Except that personally I plan to keep my bloody diamond waste and strain it out like the miners do when they pan for gold. That way I get a pan full of diamonds and some face skin. IT’S ALMOST LIKE THE FACE RIPPERS ARE PAYING ME TO DO THIS. Plus, you get a skin consultation and analysis so basically you get your face ripped off and then they tell you how shitty you look. But that’s the price of beauty. That and forty-five dollars with Groupon. Apparently.”

  “Wait a second,” Laura replied. “So I’m paying to have someone rip off my face and then shame me? It’s like this was made for women. COUNT ME IN.”

  “Right?” I said. “They’ll probably bring people in off the street to laugh at us. It’s gonna be like high school all over again. WHO SAYS NO TO THIS?”

  Laura was in. “Sign me up. I’m going to hang up now before you convince me that being friends with you is too good for my self-esteem. Call me if something else medieval and torturous opens up. Like nipple waxing. Or bloodletting.”

  And that was all it took. Because we were broken women who were all about paying stupid amounts of money to protect our sensitive face skin until someone offered to burn it all off for even more money.

  I’m not sure why women are often so vulnerable to every suggestion involving our faces but for me it’s like I’m having an abusive relationship with my own head. I use nothing but soap and water until one of those mall beauticians stops me on my way to buy a pretzel to tell me how bad I look and convinces me to lavish my fa
ce with an expensive cream that makes me immediately break out, probably because my face is not used to being cared for and is panicking. Then I have to buy different expensive creams to fix the breakout. I’m told I need something to open up my pores so they can breathe, and the next week I’m assailed by shame-based commercials telling me that my pores are so big gophers have fallen into them, so I buy something for that too and suddenly I look like I have very fancy leprosy. Then my dermatologist says, “What have you done to your skin? Stop everything you’re doing. Just use this cream to clear this all up.” But when I put it in my medicine cabinet I realize it’s the exact same cream that started this mess, but ten times as expensive because it came from my doctor. Then I’m like, “FUCK YOU, FACE. I’LL BURN YOU OFF WITH FRUIT ACIDS AND DIAMONDS.”

  In truth though, I was a bit concerned about the whole process. I remembered watching Slim Goodbody on TV, an odd white guy with a small Afro who wore a full-body leotard with the inside of the human body painted on it, which made him look as if he’d been flayed alive. He was like a terrible precursor to those Body Worlds corpses they show at museums-that-have-given-up-on-being-actual-museums, and I worried that I might end up looking like Slim Goodbody’s estranged sister, Fatty Noskin.

  The next day, Laura and I arrived at the clinic and immediately felt out of our element as we huddled together on the couch and gazed at women who looked as if they’d had fat sucked out of their clavicles and injected directly into their lips.

  We signed a pamphlet that explained the risks but that also promised we’d end up with “thicker skin,” which I think meant our faces would get huge and our feelings wouldn’t get hurt as much. I felt conflicted. “So I’ll gain inches … but on my face. I’m paying to get fat-faced.” Laura looked at me uneasily and we considered running, but then a nurse came to bring us back to the exam room. She was sweet and nice and she looked like she was thirty-five but she said she was in her fifties. Laura assumed she was a poster child for the process. I assumed that she was a compulsive liar.

  The nurse had each of us put her head into a glowing machine that took a series of pictures of our faces and then she used those pictures to scare the ever-loving shit out of us. She showed us sun damage and scarring, and then she showed us the picture that made me stand up and shout, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”

  It was a colony of bacteria living on my face.

  “Holy shit,” I said, while peering in at the large green clusters across my nose and forehead. “There’s an entire alien race camping out on my face. It’s like a fucked-up version of Horton Hears a Who! EXCEPT THAT THE WHOS ARE SQUATTERS LIVING ON MY FACE.”

  “It’s pretty normal,” the nurse tried to assure me. “It’s just bacteria.”

  I stared at the nurse. “THERE ARE LIVE CREATURES SQUATTING ON MY FACE AND YOU ARE GOING TO KILL THEM.”

  “Well. That’s a … strange way to look at it,” said the nurse uneasily. Apparently she’d had a lot of people grossed out by these pictures, but none had ever had an ethical crisis about them.

  “EVACUATE, YOU GUYS!” I tried to yell at my own face. “GO TO THE NECK,” I offered.

  “Wait,” I asked the nurse, “you aren’t doing my neck, are you?”

  “Oh, stop being such a hoarder,” Laura said.

  “I’m not a hoarder,” I countered. “I’m trying to stop a mass murder on my face.”

  “No,” she replied. “You’re a face hoarder. You’re hoarding bacteria on your face. We’re going to have to have a skintervention.”

  I looked at the nurse, who seemed baffled and slightly unnerved (probably because of Laura’s terrible pun). “Does PETA ever have a problem with this since you’re killing all these tiny life forms?”

  She shook her head. “I can honestly say I’ve never had anyone have a problem with this until now. They’re really not good to have on your face. Your porphyrins are unhealthy and can—”

  “What the shit?” I interrupted. “THEY’RE CALLED ‘POOR FRIENDS’? You want me to murder my ‘poor friends’?”

  “No. You’re pronouncing it wrong. Honestly, it’s just a routine cleaning.”

  “IT’S A GENOCIDE.”

  The nurse took a deep breath and tried to change the subject. “So, what would you expect to have happen as a result of this treatment?”

  I paused and thought about it for a second. “I sort of expect to have my face ripped off and find John Travolta’s underneath it. But just for the day. After that it wouldn’t be funny anymore.”

  Laura had a much more normal reason why she wanted the treatment. “I want to get rid of some of these wrinkles, but I don’t ever want to get Botox.”

  “Well, Botox can be very helpful,” explained the nurse.

  “I don’t need Botox,” Laura countered. “I got Bangtox. It’s when you decide to get bangs to cover your forehead wrinkles. It totally works and no one injects poison in your face.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Yes. I would also like to avoid getting poison shot near my brain.”

  Laura concurred: “I need my brain. It’s where I keep all my best stuff.”

  The nurse looked a little lost and did our treatments quickly. It was much like getting your teeth cleaned, but for your whole face.

  The nurse reluctantly gave me the filter after she was done but there was hardly any face in it and pretty much no diamond dust. It wasn’t even enough to pan for. So in the end I was left with a small vial of face dust filled with now-homeless Whos, an expensive face toothbrush, and hundreds of dollars’ worth of what I assume is Vaseline.

  I also ended up with a newfound appreciation of what my dermatillomania was doing to my face and I went an entire month without scratching it open. Mostly because I didn’t want to disturb the “poor friends” who were probably valiantly trying to rebuild after the tragic act of God they’d just encountered.

  Still, my face does feel very clean.

  Clean and terribly, terribly lonely.

  It’s Like Your Pants Are Bragging at Me

  There are few things in the world that make me angrier than poverty, the lack of basic human civil rights, and the fact that most women’s clothes don’t have pockets. Obviously the first two are more pressing, but the pockets thing is pretty irritating too.

  Victor claims girls don’t need pockets because they have purses, so I had to explain, “No. We are forced into purses because we don’t have pockets. Imagine if I ripped all of your pockets off of your sweet pocket-pants right now and you had to carry them around with you everywhere. You have like … seven pockets in those pants. Imagine carrying seven pockets with you at the carnival. You can’t. You’d need a purse. Then you’d get on the Zipper and it’d be fine for a minute until your purse popped open and all of your stuff was being poltergeisted around the cage at you like you were a kitten in a dryer full of batteries, and then your phone gave you a black eye. This is all based on real life, by the way.”

  Victor seemed a bit taken aback but argued that “pocket-pants” don’t exist and that “they’re called cargo pants.” But that’s just semantics.

  “You have pants with multiple, masculine purses all over them,” I may have screamed. “Frankly, it’s like your pants are bragging at me.” Then Victor gave up, probably because he didn’t want to look like he was taking his pants’ side.

  The closest equivalent women have to pocket-pants are pocketbooks and honestly that’s just insulting. Pocketbooks aren’t pockets or books. They’re liars. Basically they’re pockets you have to carry around with your hands until you get tired of it and give up and buy a purse to put it in. It’s as if the clothing industry just came out of a bad breakup and was brainstorming during a bitter drunken rage and was all, “Hey, you know how girls hate carrying purses and they just use you to carry their lipstick and shit in your pocket and then they leave you for Brad? Let’s make a purse in the shape of a pocket. But we’ll make it too big to fit in a pocket so you have to buy another purse. AND WE’LL CALL IT A POCKETBOO
K. THOSE BITCHES WILL NEVER SEE IT COMING AND THEY’LL PAY FOR IT.” I might be overreacting but it feels like they did it on purpose. I don’t even know Brad.

  And yes, you might be thinking that girls can totally wear cargo pants if they want to, but I disagree. Skinny girls might be able to wear those things, but girls like me look like they’re wearing pants with a bunch of purses stapled to them, and that’s really the last thing you need when you’re looking for something slimming in the plus-size section. In fact, most of the pockets you see on women’s pants are just illusions made to taunt you. Or sometimes they really are pockets but they are intentionally sewn closed, as if to say, “I’m letting you have these pockets but I’m sewing them shut for your own good.” And most of us leave them sewn shut because we’d rather look thin than have pockets.

  Really the only way it would work is if the pockets in the pocket-pants made me look thinner and still held tons of stuff. I guess basically I want magic. In a size sixteen. I want my pockets to be like a TARDIS, or Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. Also, why did Mary Poppins even need such a huge bag if it’s magically designed to fit everything? Seriously. I’m guessing that Mary asked for a magic pocket and the wizards were like, “What, like a dude? Nah. I don’t think so, lady. You’ll get a purse.” Those guys were motherfuckers. They were probably the same guys who were like, “So, let’s get this straight … you need to magically travel long distances to find young children, and society says you’re not allowed to wear anything other than dresses? Got it. FUCKING FLYING UMBRELLA.” Thanks, wizards. I didn’t think you could come up with a worse design than Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, but you did it. Thank God cell phones didn’t exist then because there would be a shit-ton of Mary Poppins up-skirt pics all over the Internet now. This is exactly why I don’t trust wizards.

  On the upside, yesterday I taped a Ziploc bag to the inside of my skirt so I’d have someplace to store my everything-that-didn’t-fit-in-my-bra and it worked really well, so now I’m working on a cape made solely from stapled-together Ziploc bags. It’ll be awesome because I’ll be able to see all the stuff in my Ziploc pockets (unlike my purse, which just eats everything, like a tiny black hole). And it’ll also double as a rain poncho. And I can put a stiletto knife and a “How to Stab People” pamphlet in it so assholes know not to fuck with me and I don’t even have to pull it out and threaten them. There is no downside to this.