For Ned and all the books that helped me. Seriously because. . .
“I’m smart but not enough—just smart enough to have problems.”
-Ned Vizzini
TW: depression, grief, suicide, mania, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, mentions of sexuality
I like to hang out at the bookstore with no intention of buying anything. When I slink my body out of my door, I make sure to wear a comfy outfit. Sensible shoes are a given for this aim. Tennis sneakers or vans worn down to the nub. I cosplay a former self, a younger self who cuffs her straight-legged jeans, dons t-shirts from defunct bands and lets a queasy smile occupy her face. Often, I walk in and out of different bookstores back-to-back searching for something and sometimes I find a permanent place there. Bookstores are all like home to me, in their own special complicated way. Strand reminds me of friends. Barnes and Noble reminds me of family. McNally Jackson reminds me of lovers. Greenlight reminds me of pain. I contour my body through the big tight shelves where stories stay and memories fade from my past lives. Selves with a little more naivete and a smidge of undiagnosed clinical depression.
The best times are when I find something in the crawlspace of a half-off bin or a vintage store or a marked-down section. Recently, I found a bent-over copy of It’s Kind of a Funny Story in the dusty basement of BOOKOFF, and my eyes glossed over. Then they became wet. The smell of moldy old paper nestled into my nose hairs as I cracked open the first page.
I remembered the first line before I even looked at it and I remembered the first place I read it at.
“It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself.”
My body fell back onto the grassy Great Lawn then, mid-July, mid-angst, sixteen. My friends, all pretty, mouthy brown girls, were all stretched out on a damp blanket stolen from someone’s mother’s linen closet. There was alcohol we were too young to be drinking and weed that was surely oregano passed from person to person. Crystalized by the XX hummed on someone’s shitty iPod speaker almost too low to hear.
We were all reading books. It was the artsy thing to do: to look like we were reading. To appear older, more sophisticated, well-read, and well-traveled. They say kids from New York grow up faster and maybe this is true. But we mostly are propelled to stifle down the awkward bits of our childish bodies and melt into the harshness of the city. To become tougher, so we won’t break as quickly.
We were reading.
We were smoking.
We were cool.
We were chic.
We were older than you thought.
We were younger than we looked, but that didn’t stop the men.
That didn’t stop any of them.
Someone was skimming Bad Behavior and plucking out all the sexy parts. Someone was texting their boyfriend furiously with Catching Fire flush over their pale legs. Undoubtedly someone was reading Twilight and lampooning it. Certainly, the intellectual of the group had a Baldwin tucked under their chin. The two-timer, trying to catch up on some homework, was reading the Odyssey.
But I was reading It’s Kind of a Funny Story. I was holding onto some grief, some melancholy, some violence deep down within my belly. I was thinking about my parents. I was thinking about someone who hurt me. I was thinking about wanting to hurt myself.
This complex sort of reluctance settles in your small intestines early. The pricks of “something is wrong” settled under my skin and slowly grew. Sometimes I felt hyperactive, over-sexual, yelling and screaming through the streets for no reason. But more often than not, I felt embolized, under-water, watching my body from a distance. These depressive episodes would last months, years even, and upend my life.
“Depression starts slow.”
And it does. I disappear from friends first. Obligations second. Retreat from life, forget to do homework, forget to shower, and eat till I want to throw up. Sometimes I do. But mostly the nauseous settles back behind my throat and in the belly, resulting in painful excruciation. Acid reflux still plagues me to this day. When I feel that bile stabbing the surface underneath my teeth, and I am unable to curb it with drugs or rest, I know something big is coming. Typically, the next few months are spent under a blanket or in a hospital.
I become nothing. And I want to be everything. So, I force myself to get help.
It’s Kind of a Funny Story taught me how to get help. The power of literature, I guess. Set in New York, it was people who looked like me, sounded like me, hurt like me. I could identify where the pain might end with something like help and eventually, I got it.
When I tell people that I’ve been in therapy for over ten years, they always look puzzled.
“But you look so happy. But you are so productive.”
That’s called masking. Or sometimes, that’s called medicating. Without medicine, I become a dribble of emotional exhaustion. A secret sort of sorrow that is held close to my body. I don’t know where my disorders end and I begin. I’m not sure who this self really is. The blankets and the acid reflux and the lying and the concealing. My mom asks me if I’m okay. My friends ask me if I’m okay. My lovers ask me if I’m okay. And for a long time, I’d say yes, as my bones collapsed inward.
I wanted to appear functional. Normal even. For many years I’d put Lexapro bottles in the small of my purse. I’d hide my Lamictal in hollowed out books. When I had to be put on Klonopin because my panic disorder was so disruptive, the doctor advised me to tell my work what was happening. I refused. I didn’t want to be labeled. As what? I’m not sure, but it felt real. It felt too dangerous to admit or explain. Ned taught me that was okay.
“Your depression doesn’t have to make sense.”
When I think about Ned’s own end and I don’t like to, I feel a sharp sense of gratitude. Ned Vizzini died by suicide on December 19, 2013. I was nineteen years old reeling from my own string of traumatic experiences that would change my life forever. I was in therapy, but I wasn’t really doing “the work.” I didn’t have the best support system. I pushed people away who could’ve helped me. I regret the time I spent lying about my mental health. I lived my life in a state of digital obsession, comparison, and revictimization. It wasn’t a great time.
When I heard the news, I was scrolling on Tumblr looking at triggering pictures of thin white women and horrible cosplay. One text message came in, then another, then another, and another. Soon it was on news sites. Twitter messages came flooding in.
I didn’t know until then that he touched so many people.
Other authors, celebrities, and friends in my real life, all had things to say about the impact of that book. As I read through the messages flooding in, I felt this boulder fill my stomach and cloud cast over my screen.
Darkness.
Haze.
The pull of hiding.
The pull of retreating.
The burning acid filling my chest floundered up into something like guilt.
Why did I make it and he didn’t? How could someone who helped me through, fall to the same devices? If he couldn’t make it, could I? Would I make it? The odds didn’t seem likely.
But then I stopped. Quiet crept in. Calm. Words. Pulled directly from the book.
“What’s a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to live. That’s a triumph.”
I didn’t know Ned Vizzini. I don’t know what he was going through. I didn’t know why he did what he did. I didn’t know anything, but. . .
I felt his words, fill my ears and push me into understanding. He would’ve wanted us to move, to do, to work, to feel and I needed to feel outside of my room.
I needed to feel surrounded by books to be really at home.
So, I got up. Walked out my door. No explanation to anyone around me, and I went to a bookstore. My favorite one possibly. The now defunct St. Mark’s Bookstore which sat where Coffee Bean currently spits out NYU students. St Mark’s Bookstore was special with its old smelly dusty interior brick and its arthouse books. Even when they tried to remodel it, the stench lingered underneath your clothes. Mothballs and books and dirt and happiness. You could find mountains of special edition comic books in bins and stacks of feminist zines on the front table hosting Queer bodies with masking tape covering their bits. Tina, one of the tiny punk booksellers with an aggressive green Mohawk, only made eye-contact if she knew you. Daniel was wispy and pretty. He never suggested books by white people. Lani was my favorite. She wore James Baldwin t-shirts that she made herself and had an immense collection of pretty hats and pins and shoes.
I found a copy of It’s Kind of a Funny Story easily in a section mimicking Young Adult novels.
Big, burly, wet tears streamed down my face as I flipped through the pages. There he was. Craig. There I was. Me. There he was. Ned. Falling through the pages.
Did we fail you?
When I looked up, beside me and all around me, people seemed to be holding It’s Kind of a Funny Story, and some of them?
Well, they were crying too.
And I never felt more at home
or alive
or understood.
And I think that they’d
all say the same.
We weren’t perfect or fixed or less depressed, but we felt known
and I’ll always thank Ned for that.
“Life can’t be cured, but it can be managed.”