Julia Pancake

I spent my entire youth being Individual and Subcultural because it meant I was free.  Feminist, Leftist, Atheist, Vegetarian, Queer, label me I AM a can of soup, I DO want you to know what's inside because I don't.  I wasn't going to be a part of the herd because I was Different from marriage and babies and dresses and makeup.

I brought it on myself, the way no one paid attention to my life.  I was sure of it.  I was too difficult to understand, too strange, too smart.  Maybe I was a freak, but I embraced it.  I refused to fit in.

And one day I turned 30, I discovered I could love.  I mean really Love, like in storybooks and nightmares.  I got engaged and found myself wanting a baby.  I––me, of all women–– dreamed of a wedding dress.  I looked at Facebook with a new wistfulness; all those photos of people at thanksgivings and christmases, normal women and their doting, invasive mothers and overprotective fathers––relationships I had always prided myself on avoiding.  And for a golden moment in time, I imagined that, now that I had matured, it could be mine.

But that's when I realized: I had never avoided those relationships; they were never offered in the first place.  You have to care about someone to disapprove of their choices.  My father will never be interested enough in my boyfriends to disapprove of them, and my mother will never care enough to be anything but hassled by my pregnancies.

I was never a Freak.  I was never rebellious.  I was just unwanted.

i travelled all the way home from work, and just as i pulled in, this song started playing.  i haven't heard it in at least a decade.  but when i was 15, there was a time i listened to it over and over.

depression wasn't new to me, even at that age.  i remember being ten and idly devising the most painless way to die.

but the depression i remember so vividly at 15 was taking on something new.  before, my sadness was simple: no one loved me, and i loved nothing.  but now it was getting complicated––the years piling on and the pain piling up.

i don't use Pain as an empty metaphor, either.  those who have truly felt this know what i mean; it actually hurts.  it may not be located in a tooth or in a bone, but it is pain.

for those of you who have never experienced it, i ask you to think of a bad stomachache.  now, there is an initial sensation in your middle, yes, but that's hardly where the real unpleasantness of a stomachache lies.  if it were truly only located in the stomach then you could view your pain impassively, as if it were happening inside of a jar and you weren't a part of it.

in fact, the experience of bodily pain, however horrific the injury, can sometimes leave us positively unfazed.  i myself have sustained physical pain so intense that my brain released chemicals which caused a sort of "out-of-body" experience, where i felt no pain or distress at all, only a dull pressure.  a pain that at first was a blaring fiery klaxon that made my whole awareness an unlivable hell––poof!––suddenly became more like some part of my body was just sending me an email: "oh hey, something's wrong here.  a little help please?"

so it follows that pain must connect itself somehow to our minds, to our sense of self, in order to truly be "suffered".  a vast network of tissues in the body probably does this; i'm sure i don't understand the anatomy.

what i do know is that depression is what it feels like when that entire network of pain lights up.  you get the Suffering part without a physical cause.  but where Pain at least tells you the location of an injury, in depression that location is: Everywhere.  literally everywhere, every location inside the body and out, everywhere mental and physical, everywhere in the past, present and future.  that's why the depressed often just lie there––for the same reason most people are compelled to lie down when they are in great amounts of pain.

i remember feeling so overwhelmed by this unbearably heavy physical aspect of depression.  it was so incredibly painful and it had just been so, so loud for so, so long.  where before i had felt i deserved death as a punishment, i now saw it as a mercy.  i remember a friend with a cold once joking, "i feel fine except for my nose, my throat, my eyes––if i could cut off my head i'd be perfectly healthy."  at 15 i felt my Self was sick, and i wished to be severed from it so i could stop the pain.

and this song played, over and over and over and over, deceptively upbeat, sometimes saying "so sad, so sad..." and quickly glossing over the character's stray thoughts of ending her lonely life.  it was my only comfort.  i don't know why, i just remember thinking the experience of the woman in the song was like a pinprick of light in an endless vacuum; there was nothing else that seemed familiar to me.

"Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly.  Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not."

--Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Supposedly, I'm just going through some adjustments.  But the hard fact is that I am alone, and I have been for some time.  I have no friends, and my family does not care for me.

This does not mean that I have no one in my life who enjoys my company, nor that my family has shunned me.  But it does mean there is no one in my life right now who would spare me a moment to go get a pizza.  Not right now or any other day.

It's not always been this way.  My life was pretty rich with friends for some years.  Curiously, the Bush Administration made sure of that, in its own way.  By alienating everyone outside of its neocon american wetdream, by cutting us off from our churches and families, it ensured that those of us whom it pushed out of the picture would have to turn to each other for friendship.

For years I ran with the nerds and the queers and the radical leftists.  All the vegetarians and artists and troubled minds, we literally sat at the same table.  And we grew up and some of us moved to this city here, and found work, and stuck together.  And we looked around one day and the world was different, and our nation elected a Black president and started giving out marriage certificates to my gay friends.

Then one day I wanted to get married and have children, because maybe this country isn't so bad after all, and maybe there is a little living part of me that wants to go camping and eat a hot dog at a baseball game.

Some of my friends walked away.  Some kept inviting me to parties, only I kept looking at people in drag and thinking, "this isn't fun anymore," and the brightly colored liquid they put in my cup was too sweet; suddenly it reflected me as a 30-year-old, 40, 50?  And I didn't know what I'd rather be doing but listening to their music made me feel more alone than actually being alone.

I started eating fish again, and chicken, and getting angry at Gene Roddenberry.  "Sure, right, other planets.  Cultural Sensitivity.  Fuck you.  How does that help me get health insurance?"  I started noticing self-important hispters wasting their parents' money on fedoras and PBR while I wondered how I was going to fix my car so I could get to work, and I suddenly understood when people said, "Sure, I use the F-Word, but I don't mean it like gay people."  It's true: all those asshole construction worker guys weren't saying we were Gay, they were saying we were Useless.  And they were right.

I bought a skirt.  Took up knitting, and skating, and smiling with both sides of my mouth.  Like a real girl.  Like a grown woman.  Like someone useful, whose mind is here in the hungry world, who knows how the magician does his tricks.

And I left enough parties so that now I don't get invited back.  I've been so alienated by friends that now they feel alienated back.  And it's funny, because when this started, I thought I'd opened up a whole new world of human interaction for myself.  I noticed that people make small talk and I figured out they change the subject for a reason.  Suddenly all my interactions with normal people didn't have to go badly.  And still all my friends are gone.  Because I can't have fun.

See, we weren't all real friends, I guess.  We weren't ever all the same thing.  We just weren't acolytes of BushCo, that's all.  And many of them found they had things in common.  But I guess I didn't.

And now I could make friends with normal folks, but the bitterness and the darkness makes them give you a Look.  Say "abuse" and their mind goes blank.  You can see the panic in them, how they'd rather be in any room with any other person than you right now.  And why shouldn't they?  They have nothing to say, nothing to give.  They're empty.  Absolutely empty.

And the minute you say Rape, you can see they'll never look at you as a friend again.  So I'm only welcome at the fringes of society, where stands everyone else with bleak, darkened eyes, but I know only too well that these are fair-weather friends in their own way, too burdened by their own problems.  They'll stay while you're functional, while your car is functional, while you're a source of beer, food, sex, or free therapy.