Manuscript Monday: Embarrassing backstory

Here's a secret we world travelers don't often admit: almost no one gives away everything they own, leaves family and friends behind, and flies halfway around the world because their lives are going well. Intrepid international exploration is not born of total domestic fulfillment.

Before I decided to leave for India, I was suffering from burnout due to 60-hour work weeks and a shatteringly dysfunctional love life. Today's Manuscript Monday is a semi-humiliating glimpse at a defining low moment in my life. Uh...enjoy?

I developed frequent migraine headaches, unpredictable crying jags, and the strong desire to do nothing but sleep and eat Tater Tots. In an effort to hide these new behaviors, I abandoned my colorful vintage wardrobe and wore the same gray turtleneck sweater as often as basic hygiene standards allowed. (I nicknamed it my “depression sweater” and I positively hid in it.)

I started seeing a therapist to help me cope with my increasing tendency to weep in my office. I paid $75 a week to weep in her office instead, which seemed more legitimate. Every Wednesday afternoon, I snuck out of work early to sob on her IKEA sofa while she handed me tissues and waited for me to decide my health and happiness were worth more than my job or my boyfriend. A year passed—a year I privately refer to as the Great Depression (Sweater) of 2007.

At the tail end of the GDS, a lovely newlywed couple moved into the apartment next door to mine. They were both in graduate school. They jogged in the mornings and made pancakes on Sundays. They spoke multiple languages and hoped to go into law—the kind that makes the world a better place. They glowed with health, mutual affection, and an impressive aptitude for neighborly small talk.

Two days after they moved in, they left a bottle of wine and a card on my doorstep suggesting we have a cookout. I was completely unequipped to handle such mature and friendly social interaction. In two years at that place, I’d yet to learn the names of my downstairs neighbors.

Common decency said I should return the gesture—and soon. But a cookout? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something that hadn’t been shredded and frozen by Ore Ida.

Two weeks passed. I baked them oatmeal cookies, but I burned the bottoms and was too embarrassed to deliver them. (Although not too embarrassed to eat the entire batch while weeping my way through America’s Next Top Model.)

I intended to buy more oats and try again, but another week went by. Then another. Before long, it was obvious I’d officially snubbed my neighbors’ wine overture. The only remaining recourse was to avoid them as much as possible.

It was a poor strategy, but it was all I had. Our apartments shared a back deck, where I often sat to read and meditate. Now, whenever I saw them out there grilling grass-fed beef to accompany their organic merlot, I’d wave and smile, and then draw the blinds so they wouldn’t see me zoning out in front of the TV with a box of tissues.

One Wednesday afternoon, I returned from an appointment with my therapist feeling lower than I ever had. After months of attempting to stall the inevitable by combing through my childhood history and poking at old wounds, our sessions had finally made it clear that I could not recover from the migraines and depression without making major changes. I needed to end my dysfunctional romantic relationship. I had to step away from the job that had taken over my life.

It was as obvious as it was terrifying. My entire identity was based on my work and my romantic status. Without them, who would I be? What would I do for money? What would keep me from ending up homeless and forgotten?

A crying tsunami gathered force behind my eyes as I walked into my apartment. There wasn’t even time to find the depression sweater. I ran down the hall, threw myself on my bed and let it all out. My body shook with loud sobs and moans. I screamed into my pillow. I cried, loud and long, until snot poured down my face in small streams.

After a good 10 minutes of cathartic banshee wailing, I stood up to get some tissue and noticed my bedroom windows were open. I’d left them that way in hopes of catching a spring breeze. The windows stretched across the entire back wall. On the other side of that wall was the deck I shared with my neighbors.

I peered out the windows through red, swollen eyes. My gaze was returned by three smartly dressed couples holding wine glasses. My newlywed neighbors were hosting a dinner party.

I dove onto the floor like a criminal dodging a bullet. I didn’t want them to see me, even though it was obvious they already had. My God, I thought, how long had I been sobbing? Had I uttered any profanity? Perhaps more importantly, how was I going to get out of my bedroom now?

I scooted on my belly towards the door and peeked around the corner. Damn! The door to the deck was wide open. I’d left it ajar for my cat, and I could see the couples’ feet just beyond. There was no way to leave my bedroom without walking directly past them.

I pictured myself casually saying hello as I shut the door—with puffy red-rimmed eyes, mascara skid marks across my cheeks, and dried snot flaking off my upper lip. I couldn’t do it. I had to wait them out. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

After acute embarrassment settled into a familiar low-level shame, I began to wonder how things had turned out like this. Why did my neighbors get to be the happily married, upwardly mobile duo while I ended up a hysterical single lady pressed against the floor to avoid social interaction?

Where did I go wrong? I’d asked myself that question over and over during the Great Depression (Sweater) of 2007. So far, it hadn't yielded a helpful answer. Lying there as the dust bunnies hopped by, a new question arose.

If you’re so unhappy with this life, if you’re literally hiding in shame, then why are you holding onto it so hard?

I suddenly knew I could not cry anymore. I could not worm my way through life—or even my apartment—on my belly. I’d been so busy begging for a great cosmic answer to the question, “What should I do?” that I failed to see I had already one: This is not working. Try something else. Anything else.

“Hey, let me show you our new flat-screen!” I heard my male neighbor’s voice call out on the back deck. I listened as the couples filed inside, chatting and laughing. Then I leapt up, pulled the blinds, and went hunting for my sweater.

Despite my epiphany, that night looked the same as all the others in the GDS: bad teen soaps, Tater Tots and tears. But the next morning I woke up, pushed up the sleeves of my depression sweater and wrote a letter of resignation to my boss.



P.S. Here I am, in the middle of the Great Depression (Sweater) of 2007, wearing the famous turtleneck. I carried it with me all the way to India, where I left it under a tree at a Hindu temple in Goa. I wonder who has it now?