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The Final Five Percent

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Tim Requarth| Longreads | October 2019 | 27 minutes (6,723 words)

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

When the motorcycle accident dealt my brother’s brain an irreversible blow, he and his wife were living in their newly purchased farmhouse on the fringes of suburban Chicago. Conway* had been waiting to move out of the city’s inner-ring suburbs for years, and each morning on the forested property he woke up exuberant. Shortly after moving in, he built an extraordinary tree house some 60 feet in the air, spanning two trees, with sliding joists under the floor to accommodate sway and a hammock to lie in during sunsets. He loved riding his motorcycle, and before work he’d sometimes take his bike out for a spin on the open roads just a few miles away. His wife, Caroline, loved antiques, and the area was full of shops. They were in their 50s and living in a house they planned to grow old in together. Then, after dinner on a fall day in 2007, Conway hopped on his Harley Softail Classic to go buy ice cream and cigarettes. A drunk driver barreled into him. Conway’s left femur snapped and his skull struck the traffic-warmed asphalt, splattering blood all the way to the road’s shoulder. 

Conway’s body was battered, but the real threat, the injury warranting a helicopter ride to the closest hospital with a neurosurgeon on call, was a hemorrhage beneath the subarachnoid membrane, a thin sheath of triple-helixed collagen fibers intertwined with blood vessels that protects the brain’s private chemical harbor of cerebrospinal fluid from the open waters of the body’s blood. The sons of a doctor ourselves, my brother and I had heard stories about neurosurgeons called in at midnight, and those stories didn’t have happy endings.

In the weeks after the accident, I watched Conway wake, recognize familiar faces, and begin to walk. Some signs of progress were cause for celebration; other developments were more worrisome. He’d rarely ever raised his voice at Caroline, but now he called her a “worthless cunt” and a “bitch.” He was lewd to the nurses, exposing himself and laughing. When a speech therapist gently reminded him that she would return for another session later that afternoon, Conway retorted, “No you won’t, because I’ll be fucking you in my van outside!”

At first, the doctors assured us that this inappropriate behavior was a passing recovery phase of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The lewd remarks eventually subsided, but his behavior took another ominous turn. “He always had a wild streak,” Caroline told me. It’s true that before the accident, Conway had loved flouting the rules. He’d cut across an empty park on his motorcycle to avoid traffic, or build a towering bonfire in his backyard for kicks. “But there was no violence,” she said. After the accident, Conway flew into rages so vicious the hospital staff put a cage over his bed to contain him. When he finally left the hospital, Conway attempted to return to his former life, but he struggled to run his business and pay the bills. He and Caroline’s marriage began to fray. Hopes for a full recovery waned, and eventually Conway’s neuropsychologist confirmed our fears that the personality change might be permanent. “He’s recovered 95 percent brain function,” she said, “But the final 5 percent, it might never return.” Read more…

Research and Rescue: Saving Species from Ourselves

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Ashley Braun | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (4,191 words)

 

On a crisp December afternoon, I convince my sister’s family to visit an unusual exhibit in the Cincinnati Zoo. Countless holiday lights glow in the surrounding trees as we walk toward a statue roughly the size of a chicken. The sculpture is of a pigeon, and we stand admiring how it gracefully arcs its smooth, bronze neck toward the sky while bending down its saw-toothed tail.

This memory of a bird recalls Martha, the very last passenger pigeon on earth, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in 1914. Most zoo-goers breeze past the sculpture, as if this pigeon were of no more interest than the kind that pecks through garbage. After we approach, my nieces, ages 5 and 11, flank the statue, downhill from a quiet Japanese-style pagoda, the aviary where Martha had spent her final years.
Read more…

Location, Location, Location: Six Stories on Moving House

Getty Images

 In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion muses on how her perception of New York City –– and who she is as a result of living there –– has evolved over the span of eight years. When she first arrives in New York City she describes herself as “twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.”

Didion’s exquisite sentence brims with a preemptive nostalgia, one that I have experienced often but struggle to put into words. When I was a child, I used to look forward to moving because it meant for a brief period of time –– during the miles that unfurled between the sticky heat of Louisiana and the crisp blue summer sky of Alaska, for example –– I could suspend myself in the allure of who I might become in any new place. I would often dream that I might shed my tendencies toward introversion or that I would find my true self reflected back to me in ways I didn’t know existed, not realizing that I had to do the work of growth on my own. Before I learned language for any geography and before I sullied the dream of myself with who I was in reality, I could exist as a figment of imagination passing through an unfamiliar world. 

Like the shine of any silver exposed to too much air, the idealized version of myself –– and any new place I came to –– was inevitably tarnished the longer I lived anywhere. But then my family would move again, and I would be free to once again imagine that a place would be enough to change me. My childhood was one of moving boxes and beige walls; divide my age by the number of places I’ve lived, and the answer comes to 2.25. And I have not stopped moving: I attended college in North Carolina, graduate schools in Oregon and Oklahoma, and now live in Pennsylvania, where I hope to put down roots. But even here, I live in an apartment with unpainted walls. A hallway downstairs is stacked with plastic bins and boxes I keep telling myself I’ll unpack soon, though it’s been months since I moved in. And I still use a GPS to get to the grocery store, some sign I’m scared of committing to knowing this geography, the many circuitous routes that point toward home.

What does it mean to always be leaving a place –– and the sense of self created there? What does it mean to have the privilege to move? How do we idealize locations –– both where we are and where we hope to be? What effect does perpetual transition –– both desired and undesired –– have on a person? A family? A community of people? 

1.  This Hell Not Mine: On Moving From Nigeria to America (Kenechi Uzor, July 7, 2017, Catapult)

After Kenechi Uzor leaves his home in Lagos, he wonders if the opportunities advertised about the U.S. –– opportunities, literary magazines, freedom, safety –– are really what they’re made out to be. Uzor bears witness to injustices against “brown souls and unknown bodies, and trans and cis and more. All suffering from the other” and weighs the cost of a life lived in the U.S.

So we sought escape, convinced that to leave was to live. We fled for dry eyes, for a sigh, for firm handshakes and raised heads, for two closed eyelids, we fled. For our babies and grannies. For light.

2.  Two Moms Share Stories of Migration and Breastfeeding (Sarah Mirk, August 5, 2019, Bitch Magazine)

Realizing that stories about migrating across borders during parenthood are underrepresented, a group of Portland-based Latina and Indigenous immigrant parents created a bilingual exhibit, Amamantar y Migrar, to share their stories through audio narratives, videos, and photographs. Sarah Mirk curated two narratives –– one from Minerva, whose mother made the difficult decision to leave her in Mexico for a time, and Maria Elena, who was taken to an immigration center even though she was breastfeeding –– for this multimodal piece. 

I tried to breastfeed, but since I didn’t get enough to eat, I didn’t have breast milk to feed my baby. We arrived here, I gave birth to my third daughter, and nine months after she was born, immigration agents showed up at my work. I was still breastfeeding my daughter.

3.  Location, Location, Location (Jeannie Vanasco, October 15, 2017, The Believer)

Part personal memory of her upbringing in an uneven saltbox house, part reflection on the significance of a moveable dollhouse her late father built for her, and part history of the house moving industry in Chicago –– and the violences that accompanied such an industry –– Jeannie Vanasco explores what it means when the stable walls of a home become transportable, and what types of grief exist in both the construction and loss of a place. 

Pressured to accept food, whiskey, and cash, they signed the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, agreeing to move west of the Mississippi River within the next two years. The wigwams and wooden lodges would be replaced with thousands of new homes for white people. White men would become rich moving them.

4. The Barriers Stopping Poor People From Moving to Better Jobs (Alana Semuels, October 12, 2017, The Atlantic)

The percentage of people who move within the U.S. has been cut nearly in half since the 1950’s. Why? As Alana Semuels reports, factors like zoning in certain states, lack of incentives for low-income workers, and proximity to family affect people’s decisions on whether or not to move, and have led to shifts in the populations of cities across the country.

The supply of workers isn’t increasing fast enough in the rich areas to bring wages down, and isn’t falling fast enough in the poor areas to bring wages up. Why is this? Why have people stopped moving? The reason, economists believe, is that while there are good wages in economically vibrant cities like New York and San Francisco, housing prices are so high that they outweigh any gains people stand to make in earnings.

5. They’re Fed Up With America’s Racism. So They’re Moving to Africa. (Mark Beckford, May 20, 2019, Narratively)

When Lakeshia Ford decided she was going to pack up her life and her budding career and move from New Jersey to Ghana, her family could not understand why she wanted to make the trek to a country thousands of miles from home. Even more surprising, to some, was Ford’s reason: the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ghana’s fast-growing economy and “Year of Return” initiative in 2019, under which the Ghanaian government hopes to encourage people of African descent to move to Ghana, have attracted many African-Americans to the country. As Mark Beckford reports, Lakeshia Ford is one of a growing number of African-Americans relocating to Ghana in search of community, job opportunities, and freedom from the violence prevalent in the United States. 

6. Keep Moving: The Nomadic Life of an Assistant Basketball Coach (Michael Croley, November 12, 2014, Sports Illustrated)

What does it take to be a Division I head coach? What sacrifices is a person willing to make –– in regard to uprooting family, turning down other lucrative career options, etc., –– to vie for an elusive spot? Michael Croley, in this profile of assistant coach Gus Hauser, who has moved six times in 11 years, seeks to answer these questions and more.

Like their colleagues in academia, they give up nearly all control of their life in order to move where the jobs are and more often than not, like Gus, uproot their families every two or three years. The sight of Brown, the success he’s had and the stir his presence caused, leads me to believe every single coach, except for a handful, is always working for his next job, and that next job will be dependent upon who he can sign, how many of those signees he steals from the other men in the gym that day, and then if they can turn those guys into players within their system.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’

Graffiti on a wall in South Central Los Angeles, 1992. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

On March 16, 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins went to a local convenience store in South Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. Owner Soon Ja Du accused the teenage girl of shoplifting, an altercation ensued, and in a split-second captured on video, Du shot Harlins in the back of the head. She died with two dollars in her hand. A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but against their recommendation, the judge sentenced the Korean-born woman to a $500 fine, probation, and community service.

Harlins’ murder, which occurred two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers, was a major contributing factor to the city’s 1992 uprising—LA’s deadliest year—which resulted in 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, and more than 800 million in material losses. By the end of the unrest, known as Saigu among Koreans, rioters had looted, set fire, and damaged more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, based on the murder of Harlins, is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of two southern California families forever connected by violence and tragedy. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the novel is centered on Korean American Grace Park, a naïve and dutiful daughter who lives and works in the Valley with her secret-keeping parents, and Shawn Matthews, an African American ex-con whose sister was murdered by a Korean grocery store owner.

A new shocking crime sends the Parks and Matthews on a collision course to face their shared history against the backdrop of an already tense city on the cusp of more racial violence. Taut and razor-sharp, Your House Will Pay masterfully examines themes of racism, revenge, incarceration, grief, shame, injustice, and social movements. Read more…

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo-Hoo

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Christy Lynch | Longreads | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

On my 27th birthday, I had a fever dream about Disney World. It was my third day feeling sick, and I was floating on the edge of sleep, swimming through a blur of mouse ears and castle spires. I thought I heard the clap of fireworks, and my eyes blinked against a flash of sunlight. I woke up looking around for a shower of gold sparks but saw only the crooked towers of repurposed liquor store boxes spread across my new bedroom, slicing up the morning light.

Two months earlier, my previous apartment complex went the way of New Nashville — when an investor installs energy-efficient toilets, doubles the rent, and forces out all the tenants. In the four years I’d lived in Nashville, rent across the city had exploded. Now anything comparable to my two-bedroom, no-dishwasher takeout box of an apartment cost 60 percent of my monthly take-home pay. I got a real estate agent and started looking at properties for sale on the outskirts of town.

The day before my birthday, I closed on a small condo with an HVAC unit older than I was. My real estate agent brought champagne to the title company’s office, and I signed my name to a stack of contracts until my ring finger went numb. Afterward she handed me the key to my new house, and I drove to my next appointment: the gynecologist, to find out why it burned when I peed.
Read more…

Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage

creative commons / Pegasus Books

Andrea J. Buchanan | excerpted from The Beginning of Everything: The Year I Lost My Mind and Found Myself | Pegasus Books | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

This is what I do when I am startled, or confronted by an argument: I freeze. If I can become very still and wait it out, become invisible, then it will stop, and I will be safe.

This is not a great strategy for dealing with confrontation. And yet it is a powerful reflex, one against which I have to actively work to fight in a moment when I find myself in a combative conversation or stressful dynamic. This is why I end up staying longer than I intend to, or agreeing to things I don’t necessarily want to do, or losing an argument I should win. This is not a pattern that works in my favor in the long run.

My marriage has been a long argument, and I am perpetually freezing. It’s true that over the years I have gotten better at responding, at not holding myself so still that I can barely breathe.

And it’s true that when the argument is about something that’s not me, when it’s about the kids and what’s right for them, for instance, I am able to resist the urge to hide and instead fight on their behalf, or for what I know is the right thing. But my first instinct is always to not break, to not allow myself to shatter. And so often, against my better judgment, I agree, I soothe, I capitulate. I freeze.
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Under the Knife

Margot Harris | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (3,346 words)

I was scrolling through my usual Instagram cache of impeccably staged dessert photos when I saw the cupcakes. Vulva cupcakes, decorated to celebrate a wide range of yonic beauty. With frosting. Buttercream, chocolate ganache, fondant, and raspberry-flavored labia of varying sizes, fresh from the oven. Edible pearl clitorises perched neatly at the apex. The self-proclaimed body-positive account featured whimsical tableaus: oranges, apples, cherries, and bananas were arranged in pairs to celebrate diversity in breast size and shape. Sliced papaya, honeydew melon, and grapefruit rivaled the blatancy of Georgia O’Keefe. And yet, as I searched the grid of suggestive snacks, I couldn’t find a fruit or baked good to match my own anatomy. Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top? Was that shape so far from the norm that it couldn’t be included in a shrine to body diversity? I bit my tongue until I tasted salt. 

***

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

“It’s a cupcake,” my friend Chloe* hissed at me over room temperature white wine, “get a grip.” She was right, of course. Women across the country were reeling from the appointment of an all-but-certain rapist to the Supreme Court, hence our meeting at a dingy bar on a Thursday afternoon, and I was busy vocalizing my fears that my labia didn’t match ones made of buttercream. Vanity at this particular moment felt inappropriate, a glaring indication of my privilege, but days of tense political bickering and nights without sleep had eroded my filter. I was tired, tired of everything, so why not slur my wine-soaked truth to a college friend? Especially one I could always count on to redirect my priorities. But the theoretically inclusive vulva cakes, however stupid, were just another image to taunt me and shape that incessant internal monologue; I will never look normal. I gulped the rest of my wine so I could tell Chloe before the embarrassment took over. I was considering aesthetic surgery. Labiaplasty. Definition: plastic surgery performed to alter the appearance of the labia minora, usually in the form of trimming. Yes, there would be a scalpel involved. No, it wouldn’t be covered by health insurance. No, there would be no general anesthesia for the procedure. Yes, there would be sutures down there. I gripped the stem of my wine glass to steady my hands, leaving sweaty fingerprints at the base. Chloe’s eyes widened at the mention of scalpels and she almost looked sympathetic for a minute. But her eyes darted to the TV behind my head, and she finished her wine. “Well,” she said, examining her empty glass, “at least no one can accuse you of being a crazy feminist anymore.” 

***

Growing up, I was educated by the standard syllabus. Venus shaving ads, glowing from the pages of Teen Vogue, informed me that my legs were worthless unless smooth to the touch — even at the hard-to-reach spots on the knees and ankles. Laguna Beach and MTV reality shows taught me that real self-improvement took the form of spray tans and weekly pedicures. America’s Next Top Model preached the value of high cheekbones, clear skin, and expressive eyes (I couldn’t make mine smile like Tyra said, despite concerted efforts in the bathroom mirror). Romantic comedies and horror movies alike demonstrated how my breasts should be perfectly round and bounce in slow motion when running, either in soccer practice or away from serial-rapist-murderers. I took notes dutifully, rubbing tanning lotion on my raw shins and sneaking away to Victoria’s Secret with friends to buy padded bras. The ones with gel inserts for natural bounce factor. Clear skin was simply out of the question, thanks to genetics, but I owed the world my best efforts: at the recommendation of a dermatologist, I singed every oil gland on my face with UV radiation once a month. 

Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top?

High school arrived with an even more specific mold that didn’t fit my body. Standards of beauty didn’t just apply to your legs, I deduced, but what was between them. The real truth, the one free of classroom and parental naiveté, could be found on the Internet. Meme culture arose with a vengeance, and it quickly became an easy platform to dictate the genital gold standard. The knots in my stomach turned to lead when I saw a photo of sandwich meat spilling out of a deli sub — an unnervingly familiar visual — with the caption “when she takes off her panties and you know you’ve made a huge mistake.” Porn, the primary educator of insecure and under-informed teens, confirmed my fears. I hid under a tent of blankets, an overheating laptop burning the tops of my thighs, and I researched. Sasha Grey and her PornHub contemporaries had something in common beyond their stamina, nonexistent gag reflexes, and incomprehensible enthusiasm: camera-worthy labia. Small, pink, smooth, and completely unrecognizable to me. Had those vulvas been honored in dessert-themed Instagram accounts, they could be represented with half a pink macaron. 

Once aware of my deviant labia, I took precautions. While my friends shimmied carelessly into tiny bikinis in open locker rooms, I fumbled into oversize one-pieces from the bathroom stall, carefully arranging myself so everything would stay in place. When my boyfriend tugged at the waistband of my jeans during our make-out sessions on the L-shaped couch in his basement, I immediately shut off the overhead light exposing us. He bit my lower lip and moaned into my neck, grinding into my hip bones until he came. I watched the ceiling fan circle relentlessly, feeling nothing but overexposed and dry, praying he wouldn’t reach for the light. At least I could be small and pink — worthy of his sexual enthusiasm — in the dark. 

***

In college, I began a long pattern of using my academic work to sort through my issues with inadequacy. I sat doe-eyed in freshman year sociology classes, devouring professors’ condemnation of social constructs and snapping along with my classmates at the mention of toxic masculinity. I pored gleefully over the textbook chapter defining the sexual double standard. I gasped along with my Introduction to Gender Studies class when we learned of a radical feminist theory that heterosexual sex could not truly be consensual under the current patriarchal structure of society. I felt vindicated by my selective interpretation of the texts before me — determining that my physical shortcomings weren’t my fault, but a reflection of a deeply flawed system. Most importantly, I felt, academia promised me that we could unlearn carefully cultivated notions of beauty. 

But the warped photocopies of Andrea Dworkin essays and peer-reviewed studies about the role of attractiveness in the economy hardly mattered when I looked into the lighted magnification mirror that taunted me from my dresser. There were the craters marring my forehead from years of pimple-popping. Then those deepening stretch marks creeping up my hips from 2 AM stress pizza (I never dabbed the oil off with a napkin like my roommate from the softball team). And there was the constant, lurking anxiety of knowing I wasn’t “normal.” In fact, I was grotesque — grotesque enough for a sexual partner to view fucking me as a mistake. Academia — or, more accurately, the projection of my insecurities onto my assigned readings — assured me that these features were not inherently unattractive. Distaste for them was the product of a larger system with a social, political, and economic agenda in mind. But I lay awake on my twin extra-long mattress wondering when knowing this might translate to hating my body less. 


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In an effort to avoid the disconnect, I dragged my male friends to gender studies seminars until they acknowledged the brilliance of Catharine MacKinnon. I encouraged unsuspecting students tanning on the Green to take part in the university’s nude yoga class — all about body positivity! — and huddled in the back of the studio taking attendance while a sea of sweaty, body-glittered legs spread and intertwined in front of me. I hoped they couldn’t see my fraudulence from my hideout in the corner. I wore my “feminist killjoy” tank top well into the winter months. Despite the desperation to live in perfect coherence with my newfound values, my reverence for the bodies of others never coincided with forgiveness for my own. I tutored friends in introductory gender studies and used my earnings to laser the hair off my underarms.

***

The performative feminism as a deflection from my confusion continued after college. I donned sloppily-made pussy hats to march on Washington and passively tweeted my outrage. I donated a small percentage of my paycheck every month to Planned Parenthood. I bickered valiantly with my parents over Thanksgiving dinner about body shaming. And I believed what I said. But I demanded empowerment and resistance from everyone but myself. I researched aesthetic surgeons every night before falling asleep. 

It took two years of investigating genital surgery before I made the decision. I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia. According to the photographic evidence, labia that looked like mine — protruding, asymmetrical, and discolored — could be rejuvenated to more closely resemble the fruit and candy interpretations on Instagram than the heinous deli meat memes. I imagined the sex. Wet and sticky, completely exposed with the lights on. I pictured my legs splayed apart — shamelessly, carelessly — while a nondescript face with a square jaw kissed my inner thighs and moved upward to a silky pink crevice, recognizable from any porn industry fantasy. I pictured orgasms, intense as the ones I gave myself in my empty bedroom, when I felt my heartbeat between my legs and kicked the fitted sheet off the corner of the mattress. Isn’t that what my feminist predecessors would have wanted? Well, at least the ones who believed consensual sex could exist at all. 

***

Ben and I didn’t make eye contact when I told him. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the red couch in his living room, staring at the cookie tin my grandmother gave him that he’d converted to a coffee table ashtray. We’d been dating for five months, but we didn’t trust each other. I combed through his text messages while he slept, wondering who Sarah was and if she had a flat stomach and high cheekbones. She probably liked his favorite brand of sour beer that tasted like dead Sour Patch Kids. Maybe she was someone he used to, or still did, sleep with. I wondered if he devoured every inch of her body, leaving no patch of skin unbitten, no crevice unattended to. Was he astounded by how symmetrical her breasts were or how she always looked powerful and elegant, even bent over his bed, sweat dripping down her neck? Maybe, when they were finished, he even grinned at her and told her how perfect her body was. He never said anything about mine. After sex, he’d roll over and peruse the fantasy baseball app on his phone, grinding his teeth in frustration over batting averages and shoulder injuries. I stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the paint so I wouldn’t slip up and ask if he’d enjoyed himself. If there was something wrong with me. 

 The tips of his ears glowed red at the word “labia” and his jaw clenched when I added the part about the surgery’s six-week recovery time, which meant no sex. I sensed him adding another tally to my invisible scoresheet, marking me down for another deviation from the confident, low-maintenance girlfriend image I’d so carefully curated on the Bumble profile he swiped. The girl in the photos had subtle purple streaks in her hair, boasted a nipple piercing, and never got jealous. She liked sex and spontaneity and wouldn’t ask how she was in bed. That’s what he was promised. How many more tallies before that girl was gone — and Ben with her? 

“Do you want to say anything?” I asked after a few minutes of icy silence.

“You should spend that money on therapy instead,” he said. 

***

The Internet offered me little validation. Reddit revealed a disappointing alliance between Incels and intersectional feminists. Granted, the two groups had markedly different concerns. Incels feared my deceiving ways — my stealthy attempt to revive the ravaged remnants of promiscuity. The self-proclaimed feminists decreed the procedure of “designer vaginas” a response to brainwashing and deeply internalized misogyny. I remembered the photocopies collecting dust in my old college folders and pictured Andrea Dworkin seizing in her grave. 

I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia.

More disturbing than the ranting of vulva purists were the articles from the experts. Gynecologists referred to labiaplasty — the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic surgery, according to one devastating headline — as a deeply disturbing trend, with procedures up 45% in 2016 alone. Some made the case that long-term effects of labia reduction surgery are “criminally under-researched” and the procedure’s existence is nothing more than a lack of consideration for the vulva as anything beyond a visual stimulant to men. One pediatrician described being “heartbroken” by the puberty-aged girls showing up to her door wanting to sever their labia. I could rationalize away misogynistic Reddit criticisms of my deception, but I didn’t enjoy the weight of responsibility for underage girls wanting to remove their organs. 

More specific googling yielded women’s magazines reminding plastic surgery skeptics that feminism is all about making your own choices now! But I perused them half-heartedly, focusing on their typos and unforgivable use of the passive voice. Hardly credible sources, I determined. I returned to my critics’ articles constantly, keeping their searing headlines open in separate tabs on my computer. Despite stumbling on an occasional article to the contrary, I deduced a general consensus among the medical and progressive communities: getting this surgery wasn’t really okay. But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex. Or to sit through a class or meeting without constantly visualizing the Internet-condemned roast beef spilling out between their legs. 

***

The day of my procedure, I repeated my rationale to the mirror in the bathroom of the plastic surgeon’s office. First, the half-true elevator pitch, given to the surgeon: I get uncomfortable riding a bike! I don’t want to live in physical discomfort anymore. Second, the defense: Who cares if it’s aesthetic surgery, anyway? No one else gets to have an opinion. I am in control of my body. This is what agency looks like. Third, the half-hearted reassurance: This procedure will turn out well—I picked the best surgeon in the country! No one will have to know I did it, anyway. Unless I tell them. 

The last question on the intake forms asked for an emergency contact. I left it blank. “If I die on the table, just don’t tell anyone,” I begged the nurse who returned the incomplete paperwork. 

“Make me pretty,” I slurred to Dr. Hunter as the painkillers took hold and I fumbled with the tie on my hospital gown. In my Percocet-induced clarity, I knew: I wanted to be pretty. Neat. Dainty. Worthy. Yes, I chose one side of the conflicting messages I’d been bombarded with — taunted by — my entire life. What did I have to defend? But lying on the icy, sanitized operating table, the Ativan slowing my pulse and loosening my jaw, I heard myself whisper, “Sorry.” Thanks to a shot of local anesthetic, I felt nothing during the procedure but an eerie pressure somewhere between my legs. 

The contours of the pain became much clearer on the fifty-block cab ride home, the numbing medications wearing off with each excruciating jolt of a speed bump or crunch of gravel under the tires. I tried to remember the terms I’d heard doctors use to categorize pain: burning, radiating, sharp. What words did they use for the pain of being gutted by a butcher knife, genitals first? “If you’re going to throw up, get out,” the driver warned. 

But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex.

Against the doctor’s advice, I peeked under the carefully-arranged bandage as soon as I arrived home. I winced at the sight of the dried blood collecting on the stitching, but amidst the carnage and swelling, I could see it. A glimpse of worthiness. 

***

I decided my penance for the surgery would have to go beyond the three-month payment plan and the tearful weekend in bed with a bag of frozen peas clamped between my thighs and a bottle of Percocet adhered to my palm. The price for my fraudulent labia, my rejection of ideology and general medical advice in pursuit of twisted perfection, would be my humiliation. I told everyone. I mentioned it offhand to classmates over Chinese food. To the pharmacist prescribing painkillers. To a Tinder date who looked like he wanted to disappear into his untouched wine. 

 “You know, you’re not required to tell everybody,” one friend told me between stale beers at his apartment when I blurted it out. “They probably don’t want to know, anyway.” But I relished the pounding in my chest, the flush in their cheeks, the darting glances to anywhere but my eyes. The palpable discomfort. This was my punishment: the distress of sitting with public culpability. 

“I didn’t know that was something you could do,” my mom said, her tone only tinged with disapproval — no more so than when I told her I would be graduating a semester late. But her mouth pinched shut the way it did when she was afraid she might blurt out an honest opinion, wrinkles collecting on her upper lip. I knew how she felt about image-conscious women. Beauty is skin deep, she’d clucked at me since the first time she caught me hovering by the flavored lip gloss in Sullivan’s Toy Store. What a waste of money and brain cells, we’d muttered with eye rolls in response to the mothers of my high school classmates who often appeared at school events with tighter faces and unassuming noses. Watching her silence, I felt it. The rush of humiliation; the heat in my face, the numbness in my toes, the quickening of my pulse. Embarrassment for talking about my vulva. Shame for being one of those women who wasn’t serious. Wasting money and brain cells. This was the shame I deserved. 

I even showed Chloe the eight sutures before they dissolved into discrete oblivion. My repentance could only be completed with total exposure. “That’s crazy,” she whispered, inspecting the stitching.

Throughout my six-week healing period, as the sutures dissolved and my own silky pink macaron anatomy took shape, I brought up the surgery constantly. Compulsively. Paying close attention to my own retelling of the story — searching for clues, but still unable to identify what embarrassed me most: that I’d been so ‘unattractive’ in the first place, that I’d gone through with the surgery, or that I was pleased with the results.

***

I had plans for the grand unveiling of my downstairs renovations. Ben was gone — after ten months of staring at our phones instead of each other, we returned college sweatshirts and shared a final beer sitting cross-legged on the floor of my apartment. I was excited for sex with someone who might approve of, or even be excited by, me. And if anyone had something to say about my body, I had a rehearsed response at my disposal: “Yeah, it’s new.” Perhaps it was the final acceptance of what I’d done, one last embarrassing step toward ownership. Toward something. And when it happened — a vague, crude observation from a graduate student who tasted like popcorn and didn’t own a bedframe — my mouth felt dry. No defiant joke or witty response. So, like many times before, I said nothing and stared at the bone-white ceiling, counting backward from one hundred.

***

Margot Harris is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Happiness is Fleeting

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell / Penguin Random House

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell | excerpt from The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life | Penguin Random House | October 2019 | 12 minutes (3,277 words)

 

There are so many topics and themes and recurring jokes in the wonderful world of Peanuts; if it were allowed I would just sit here and write a list of all my favorite cartoons.

But since I don’t have a podcast called My Favorite Peanuts (yet), and since we all have short attention spans, I’m going to write about my two favorite topics, which I believe are intrinsically connected: disappointment and dancing.

Amongst the thousands of life lessons found throughout Peanuts, I believe there is one that stands out amongst the rest: At the end of the day, you can either be disappointed, or you can be dancing, but you cannot be disappointed while you’re dancing. So take your pick.

To begin to explain this, I have to go back and start at the beginning of me and Peanuts. The beginning is often a good place to start.

I was born into a family that was already very into Schulz. I’m sure there are many of these types of families. You’re probably from one, or maybe you will start one, or maybe you wish you were from one. In which case, feel free to join mine! Each of my parents is one of seven children, I am the youngest of four. There are so many cousins, we wouldn’t notice or question your presence at the family reunion.

My maternal grandfather, Dr. Daniel Vaughan, was golfing buddies with Charles Schulz, Sparky to his friends. In 1964 Grandpa Dan co-founded a pro-am charity tournament in San Jose and Sparky did custom drawings for it for the following twenty or so years. I grew up inside a home filled with Schulz sketches addressed to my mother and original cartoons that referenced an ophthalmologist in San Jose, that of course being my grandfather. I already, and quite literally, had someone to look up to.

But that someone, at first, was not Sparky. It was Snoopy. Here we have not only an adorable cartoon dog, but one that dances. I loved dogs and dancing, so, I believe that is what they call “kismet.”

Grandpa Dan gave me my first Snoopy doll when I was probably about six or seven. It was one of those authentic Snoopys. Not those plush things you see at every drugstore across the world these days. This Snoopy was made in San Francisco in 1968 (now that I think about it, it’s incredibly impressive Grandpa Dan hung on to this thing until 1997). I have slept with it in my arms nearly every night since. As a twenty-seven-year-old, I’ve even boarded planes clutching it. It elicits a certain concerned look from the flight attendants and, like Charlie Brown, I’m almost always looking for sympathy.

Snoopy was essentially a god. His style, his moves. I wanted to dance just like him. His hands in the air, his feet, everywhere! He always embraced the music, and usually alone. Who needs a partner when you’ve got two feet? Between Snoopy and my mother, I had two dancing role models to set me up for complete success, at least on the dance floor.

Second to dancing, the thing I loved the most was drawing. When I began to draw, I was extremely concerned with my ability to draw Snoopy and Charlie Brown just like Schulz did. No tracing! I needed to be able to do it myself. Get all the strokes and shapes just right. Schulz, without knowing it, taught me how to draw. I think a lot of his expressions (and well, his whole outlook on life) still exist in my work today.

In an effort to keep me entertained, my parents bought me many Peanuts books for me to copy. The more I copied, the more I read, and the more I read, the more my connection grew. This was more than cool drawings of a beagle around our home. I still loved the dancing bits, but this stuff was hitting little my little soul. Hard.

By age 10, I was in the height of my “copying Snoopy” phase. I believed myself to be a young artist. Fully equipped with self confidence and self doubt, with contradicting thoughts like, I’m incredibly unique and important,” and “No one really wants me here, maybe I should go home and watch a movie instead?” And then, one day in the 4th grade, something happened. Sammy Wallace told me that I was, in fact, not a real artist because I was copying someone else’s work. Plus, I used an eraser. His sister Carly did not use an eraser, and she was definitely a real artist. I was horrified. I was embarrassed. I was Charlie Brown.

All my fears were confirmed. Clearly, everyone at school thought I was a joke, the laughingstock of all the other 4th grade artists. No one liked me, in fact, everyone hated me.

That was the moment Peanuts started to change for me. I like to think all Peanuts readers have some sort of pivotal memory in their life when the cartoon took on new relevance. Almost too much relevance. I wanted so badly to be liked by everyone, just like Charlie Brown, and somehow nothing was working out for either of us. It seemed it never would. And yet… there was still this hope inside of me, that maybe things would change? Maybe one day, I’d be as cool as my big brother, maybe I’d be the best dancer at the party, or even know how to tell a good joke without messing up the punchline! That push and pull of hope and despair, expectation and disappointment, in a nutshell, is life. And life is a Peanuts cartoon.

This revelation wasn’t exactly funny to me at first, but I did feel very understood by the gang. What started off as an innocent love affair with a group of kids and their beagle, soon became a heavy-duty, serious relationship that would shape my understanding of myself and the world around me. These weren’t jokes, but tales of love, loss and the human condition! Peanuts taught me that despite the little engine of hope inside you convincing you otherwise, you know timing will always be a little off with you and the Little Red-haired girl, Christmas will never be quite as amazing as you expected, and you’ll never be satisfied with what’s in your bowl. So you better take what you can get because, happiness is… fleeting.

Or as Linus would put it, “Good things last eight seconds. Bad things last three weeks.”

There are so many ways you can be disappointed in a Peanuts cartoon. You can be disappointed at home, in love, at school, on vacation, over holiday, during baseball, golf, or any sport under and out of the sun. You can be disappointed in a kate, a book, a play, your classmates, your parents, your friends, and even your dog.

Most importantly, for each of these lil’ folks, if all else fails you can always be disappointed in yourself. Who else is there to blame, Charlie Brown, when you’re the one setting the expectations so high?

Every day they have a list of great expectations of how their day will go, and by age five they are already learning that life is mostly not going to go as planned. Lucy will “probably never get married” and as much as Peppermint Patty studies she will somehow always know less than before. I think Schulz could have written a great self help book titled, “How To Be Disappointed.” In fact if he were coming up today, literary agents would probably be forcing him to do so.

Let’s examine some of my favorite examples of disappointment in Peanuts

Charlie Brown is the king of disappointment. He’s been disappointed in everything and everyone. His dog has forgotten his name, his kite can’t keep away from the trees, and no matter how much they practice, his baseball team will never win a game.

If the world is not disappointing Charlie Brown, he’s disappointing them. Why can’t he just take his therapist’s advice and “snap out of it” already?

More than anything, Charlie brown is disappointed in love. Will he ever be loved by the Little Red-Haired Girl or will he have to settle for a peanut butter sandwich? Luckily, Charlie has an amazing ability to turn the disappointment in his relationship (or lack thereof) into a complete dissatisfaction with himself. One of the best examples of this being when Charlie is so mad at himself for not talking to the Little Red-Haired Girl, telling himself as he walks away “I hate myself for not having enough nerve to talk to her!” and then after a moment, “Well, that isn’t exactly true… I hate myself for a lot of other reasons too…”

That’s what I love about Peanuts. The disappointment is the joke. When you learn that, you learn to laugh at yourself and that is so important for survival.

It’s not just Charlie who has been let down, time and time again. Lucy is also frequently disappointed. If it isn’t with one of her patients, it’s always with her brother. She cannot get him to ditch that blanket. If only she could’ve had a better brother, one with more personality. In one strip, Linus confronts Lucy, asking, “Why should you care if I have any opinions or personality or character?” Lucy responds, “Because if you don’t have any character, it’s a reflection on me!”

Like Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl, Lucy’s love life with Schroeder continues to fall short. Try as she might, she may never convince him to pay more attention to her than to the piano.

Sally, though innocent, is no stranger to disappointment. Her latest field trip was nothing to write home about, literally, and “What’s so much fun about a balloon” anyway? According to Sally, nothing. What a let down.

Along with her brother and Lucy and pretty much the whole cast, love is a disappointment for Sally. Linus, her sweet babboo, still hasn’t asked her out yet. Even when she’s dropped so many hints! And who can forget when she practiced all week for her role in the Christmas play, only to get on stage and recite “HOCKEY STICK!” instead of “hark!”

Sally is not the only one to be let down by the buildup of the holiday. Lucy waits for what seems like forever for Christmas to arrive, counting down the months, the days, the hours, the minutes… only to leave her completely unsatisfied…sigh. Will we ever be happy?

Linus has great resilience for his disappointment in The Great Pumpkin. My favorite example: He starts off writing a letter to express just how disappointed he is that the Great Pumpkin did not show up yet again, noting “If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.” But before he can finish the letter and save some dignity, hope finds its way back in. After writing the Great Pumpkin off for good, Linus adds, “P.S. See you next year.”

That is the thing about disappointment; it cannot exist without expectation. Try as they might, these kids are never going to get rid of expectation. One day, while sitting at the brick wall, Linus shares his worries about his worries, lamenting “I guess it’s wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. / Maybe we should only think about today.” Charlie responds, “No, that’s giving up…/ I’m still hoping that yesterday will get better.”

Hope lives on… and so must disappointment.

Schroeder’s friends will never understand Beethoven. No one will want to listen to Woodstock’s long winded stories. Peppermint Patty will never be appreciated as the great caddy she knows she is and her gal Friday, Marcie, will probably never stop being disappointed in, well, Peppermint Pattie. “Always an embarrassment, sir.”

So it would appear that, according to Schulz, just about anything can and will let you down.

As dark as all of this was for a pre-teen to come to terms with, there was one thing that stood out in the comic, one sigh of relief from the existential crises of childhood and beyond. While everyone’s life was going horribly downhill (Sally signed up for conversational French, not controversial French like she thought), there is this dog. And there was a lot of frustration with this dog because he is too happy and always dancing.

Lucy, honestly, can’t stand it. On more than one occasion she’s yelled at a dancing Snoopy, “With all the trouble in this world, you have no right to be so happy!” It drives Charlie nuts as well. “What makes you think you’re happy?”

By default, dancing then becomes one of the only pure moments of bliss: The rare time when you cannot worry or take yourself too seriously, you simply cannot be upset! Lucy could shout, “Floods, fire and famine! / Doom, defeat and despair!” but dancing saves you from all life’s downers. “Nothing seems to disturb him!”

Dancing can never be a disappointment. It is the savior of sadness.

It is no surprise that the one who dances the most is a dog. As Lucy says, “It’s easy for him to be so happy… he doesn’t have any worries!” The deep irony is the idea that Snoopy is a ball of pure happiness, unaffected by consciousness. That is wildly untrue. Snoopy has so many disappointments of his own. He wishes he were anything but a dog. Why couldn’t he be an alligator or a snake! Or better yet, a World War I fighter pilot?

I particularly love the contrast between Snoopy’s hopes and dreams, which are way out of the realm of possibility, and someone like Lucy, who wants to be a psychiatrist. She could very well become one but Snoopy will always be a dog.

“Yesterday I was a dog… today I’m a dog… / tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog…/ *sigh* / there’s so little hope for advancement!”

Even though his aspirations may be futile, they embody the crises of consciousness we all know too well. There is no satisfaction? Even when Snoopy does try to live out his fantasies, he usually comes to the conclusion that he isn’t suited for the role. Can’t be a hunter because of his “weed-claustrophobia.” Can’t be a giraffe because it’s “too hard on the neck.”

As much as he loves to golf and get some quality time in on the typewriter, all these activities often leave him a little discouraged. He may never be satisfied with life or food — “Needs salt!”– but dancing is one guarantee of a good time. With dancing, Snoopy can be himself! He can let it all go! Sure, he still hasn’t gotten his invite to play in the Masters, but it must be in the mail. Anyway, none of this worldly stuff matters while you’re doing the Charleston!

Though the whole gang likes to act as if they are very annoyed by all of Snoopy’s dancing, the fact of the matter is they are quite jealous. They wish they didn’t have to worry about being alive. Or do they?

One day as Snoopy dances around, Charlie comments, “I sure wish I could be that happy all the time.” Lucy replies, “Not me… / it’s too hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re happy.”

Lucy’s response here might be the most definitive cartoon in defense of my argument. Sure, they could be happy, but they are choosing not to, because it’s much more entertaining to live the emotional rollercoaster of hope and despair. But you do always have the option to dance.

Every once in awhile, they give in to Snoopy’s ways and when they do, they love it. In one strip Schroeder presses a frustrated Lucy, “What in the world do you have to worry about?” Lucy thinks a moment, realizes the answer (nothing), then joins Snoopy dancing with huge smile on her face. And why wouldn’t she love it? Dancing is great! If only they’d let themselves do it more often…

“To dance is to live! / For me, dancing is an emotional outlet… / I feel sorry for people who can’t dance… / If you can’t dance you should at least be able to do a happy hop!”

Snoopy’s words, not mine.

Lucy is usually the one who succumbs to Snoopy’s carefree calypso, “if you can’t lick em, join em!” Though she tries very hard to resist most of the time. One of my favorite dancing cartoons that has really stuck with me has Lucy screaming at Snoopy, “Just because you’re happy today, doesn’t mean you’ll be happy tomorrow!”

Isn’t that the whole reason Snoopy chooses to dance? Who knows what small disaster is on the horizon. Your novel could be rejected, someone might call you “fuzzy face,” or even worse, you could find out there’s a new “No Dogs Allowed” sign at the beach.

What is life but a series of small disasters with a little dancing in between!

They say don’t sweat the small stuff. But for the Peanuts gang, small stuff is all they’ve got and they are sweating. When each day is another question of whether to be disappointed or to dance, the answer is simply which kind of sweat you’re looking for.

Of course there has to be a balance. As much as we’d like to, we can’t always be dancing. And I never meant to suggest there is any problem with being disappointed. It’s good for you. I don’t know who I’d be if I wasn’t always just a little let down. I would probably be a very boring person. Peanuts would be a very boring cartoon. They say comedy is tragedy, plus time. The great comedy (and tragedy) in Peanuts is that every day there is newfound hope, as Linus puts it, they will grow up to be “outrageously happy!” despite all the evidence that points to the contrary. As if total satisfaction were something to be desired. If we were all outrageously happy, I have no idea what we’d talk about. And yet, the idea of happiness… sure sounds nice.

Maybe it’s because I read so much Peanuts as a kid or maybe it’s just who I am, but I find the balancing act between the fountain of hope and the forecast of disappointment to be the essence of life. It seems I wake up every morning cheerfully wondering…

Big or small, I know something will. Charlie knows something will. Linus knows something will. We all know something will. But it’s fun to believe otherwise. It’s fun to believe Lucy won’t pull the football out from under you, even when you know better.

As an adult my hero has shifted from Snoopy to the creator of Snoopy. Through his work, Schulz taught me that in the middle of the mess of day-to-day life, the one thing I (and the Peanuts gang) can rely on for a truly good time, is to dance. Like Lucy, it’s just a matter of whether or not I want to be pulled out of my pity party.

We’ve all got a little Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and ultimately Schulz in us. Sometimes our similarities scare me. When I saw the new Peanuts movie a couple years back, I recognized myself so much in Charlie Brown that I came home in tears. My mother had to put her 25 year old daughter to bed, crying…

 

And… that very well may be true, but, the next day, we had a glass of wine and ended up dancing all night to The Beach Boys and that was great, so I think that’s what Snoopy would call “par for the course.”

* * *

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is a cartoonist, writer and comedian living in Brooklyn. Her cartoons have been in The New Yorker, The New York Times and more. She is currently working on her first graphic memoir, Murder Book. Follow her on Instagram @cartoonsbyhilary.

Excerpted from The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life, available from Library of America on October 22, 2019.

Longreads Editors: Sari Botton and Katie Kosma

The Thriving eBay Cheeto Community

Getty Images

The human brain searches for recognizable forms in everything from clouds to wood grain, and a fervent online culture has arisen around the uniquely shaped puffed, machine-made cheese wads known as Cheetos. Collecting Cheetos that resemble Michael Jackson or a lobster claw almost makes collecting celebrity hair seem normal, but social acceptance isn’t the issue here. Each Cheeto is one of a kind. Some consider unique ones art. As food and agriculture journalist Tove Danovich shows us in her new piece for The Outline, people charge big bucks for a Cheeto shaped like a penis and a Cheeto shaped like a lizard. In 2017, a Cheeto shaped like Harambe, the gorilla who was shot in the Cincinnati zoo, sold for $99,900 on eBay, though the transaction seems to have been canceled. As Danovich always does so skillfully and humorously, she dives into the cheddary depths of this collector community, dusting herself in orange powder so we can sit at a safe distance enjoying the show. So how did this collector culture start, and who are the people buying these things?

The story of how Cheetos made their way to eBay is a circuitous one but it traces back to Andy Huot, the man behind an Instagram account called @CheeseCurlsofInstagram Huot is a weight-lifting enthusiast who often watches what he eats but one day in 2013 he had a craving for something crunchy and savory. He bought a bag of Cheetos. That’s when everything started falling into place. First he saw a perfect number seven. Then there was a Loch Ness monster, a Sasquatch, a hammerhead shark, and a T-Rex. “Once you find one, you see them everywhere,” he said.

He wanted to share his discoveries with the world, and so he started an Instagram. Within a few months he was added to one of the app’s “ suggested users” list and started getting thousands of followers a day. At its peak, his account had roughly 44,000 followers. He started an Etsy account to sell prints of his Cheeto photos, and was featured in an Intel commercial in 2016, making about $5,000 from what amounts to a hobby. (He tried putting the group of evolving Cheetos on eBay, but they didn’t sell.)

In 2016, Frito-Lay saw the kind of engagement Cheetos could get on the internet and decided to launch a search for artifacts to add to a “Cheetos Museum.” Contestants posted photos of their Cheetos on social media and uploaded them to the museum’s website. There were weekly $10,000 prizes for a month and one $50,000 grand prize for the best Cheeto shape. With more than 100,000 posts it was “one of the brand’s most successful digital engagement programs of all time,” Ryan Matiyow, senior director of marketing at Frito-Lay, told Marketing Daily.

Read the story

I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive

Illustration by Homestead - based off photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty

Read ‘A World Where Mothers are Seen,’ an introduction to the Writing the Mother Wound series.

Elisabet Velasquez | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,943 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

This morning my phone rings, a call from a number I do not recognize. I think it must be someone I do not know or care to speak to. People who truly know me know to text me before calling. Privileged shit.  

The phone sings itself into a siren. I give in to its urgency. My mother has changed her number again. For the fifth time this year. Her mouth is working faster than her mind. She has questions. She wants to know if she can go to court to sue the demons. This time they have gone too far. They’ve resorted to attacking her physically. They keep scratching her, and she wants them out of the house. Can she take them to court?  Maybe, she suggests, I can google it. She wants to get them in trouble somehow. Evicted, arrested? What, exactly, are her options? She asks me if this is a logical thought. If they will laugh her out of the courtroom when she arrives with bruises and scratches as her only proof of spirits. She wants me to know that she has carefully considered the thought that she may sound crazy to the world. She knows I believe her, though. I am sometimes safer than her mind. She pauses for a moment to digress. She could just go to church again and pray. She wants me to know she has exhausted all of the usual answers; the spiritual realm is failing her. There must be something in the physical realm to help her. I must know. 

I am not expecting this phone call. It is the end of the school year and I am in the middle of preparing a lengthy report that showcases all of the work I have done with my students. I pause to think about how much more I do with them than with my own family. Guilt floods my throat. I pack my shame into a swallow.

Most days I avoid my mother at all costs. I’ve spent the past 18 years dedicated to my own motherhood. At 16, I gave birth to my daughter, and four months later I was homeless. When she kicked me out of the house with a newborn, I decided it would be the last time my mother hurt me.

On the other side of the call my mother is panting. There is a race happening somewhere inside her body. All of her organs are running away from her. I think it must be exhausting to occupy her body. 

* * *

I grew up across the street from Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The park is named after a mother of three who was shot through her window in her apartment across the street from the park. The newspapers reported that she was murdered in an act of vengeance by local drug dealers. Maria and her husband were known for physically removing dealers from their block. Like most Bushwick residents in the ’90s, they were dedicated to survival.  


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The park and my mother have similar names. They are both a familiar heavy on the tongue. The “no middle ground” kind of name. The kind of name that is either embraced or discarded. This small connection to my mother always made me feel like I was the park’s daughter, too. I came to expect it to mother me in ways she did not. On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide. In the summer, I entered the park’s table hockey tournaments just to see if I was better at winning something other than my mother’s affection. The park gave me moments where I was good at existing, where I was celebrated for trying. 

Everything in the hood lasts longer than it needs to. Preservation is a skill you learn when you sleep and wake up in a place that is designed to kill you. We do things environmentalists would be proud of: keep butter containers to store our food, use old clothes for rags. Even the way people love in the hood has to be sustainable. Love in the hood is a kind of loyalty to your own survival. Everyone lived by this, even Maria. Even the dealers who killed her. 

* * *

I became increasingly aware of my mother’s mental illness when I began to work in the field of mental health at the age of 22. I was part of a collaborative team that included social workers and psychiatrists. We’d conduct home visits to individuals with mental health issues who would not normally seek treatment on their own. One morning, we received a referral to evaluate a woman’s need for treatment. The referral mentioned hallucinations, both visual and auditory.

We arrived at an apartment building in the Bronx. The hallways were alive with the smell of urine and cheap cologne. The brown apartment door had a straw cross covering the peephole. We knocked with a careful hand. The intensity of the rapping is important. Too soft and you risk not being heard over the din of a New York City home: children, Caso Cerrado, Biggie Smalls or Hector Lavoe. Too loud and you’re the police or a loan shark.  

¿Quién es?” The woman we went to visit, I’ll call her Marta, wanted answers before she made a decision to open the door. We gave a brief introduction to the cross. An emaciated version of my mother slowly creaked open the door and slid her eyes through her carefully measured opening. My coworker introduced herself as someone sent to help. The great white hope. Marta dismissed her and darted her eyes my way. “I’m sorry, no hablo inglés.” My coworker flashed a knowing smile to me. The great Latin help. 

On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide.

As someone whose highest degree was a GED, I had no clinical role on the team. I was a notetaker, at most. I did, however, feel a great sense of responsibility to ensure that I was careful interpreting not just language but also culture. Cultural practice is sometimes categorized incorrectly as disordered or pathological. 

We sat across from Marta on white sofa cushions kept suffocated under clear plastic.  We conducted the intake. “Do you sometimes hear voices? What do they tell you? What do you see?” Marta was religious. The answers leaking from her mouth were a familiar church to me. My mother used them. Marta’s words spilled onto my coworker’s notepad, which drowned in words like espíritus, demonio, brujería. I watched as my coworker used clinical language to help her float over what she could not make sense of. Words like: religious preoccupation, delusions, rule out paranoid schizophrenia. I was confused. Marta was Pentecostal like mami. It was not unusual for me to hear someone say that they heard the voice of God or felt or saw spirits. It was not uncommon to go to church on a Sunday and witness an exorcism. I left Marta’s house wondering if my mother was mentally ill or just a tortured Christian?

* * *

(& because you watched your mother’s hands praise the sky
you have held your god accountable for your suffering
& because you never heard I love you
it is neither a noun nor a verb but mostly a myth that you cannot trust truly exists
& because your mother’s mouth was always a grenade
you are sometimes afraid to kiss your children
& because you were always told you were wrong
you apologize for everything, even for your joy
& because no one has ever held your hand across a busy intersection
you know exactly how close you can get to death before it becomes dangerous
so close to dying
daring yourself to live.)

* * *

Sometimes I am my mother’s anger. Sometimes I am all of her monsters. I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

Growing up, my mother would often say the devil was using me. This was her way of explaining any behavior that was not agreeable to her. This was her way of justifying any reaction of hers that was abusive in nature. One Sunday, just as we were getting ready for church, my mother was ironing our church clothes. While I waited, I began clowning around with my older sister. I don’t recall what in my laugh triggered the burning or what happened moments before she pressed the iron into my arm. I do recall the moments after, the smell of melting flesh, the flap of skin hanging off my arm, the moment I first met my blood.

I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

This moment paralyzed me in such a way that I did not cry. My unemotional response to being burned with an iron made me question if I was indeed demonic. If I was used to this kind of hell. She wiped my skin off of the iron and back onto the dress as I watched the dress steam under the weight of my trauma. 

I walked solemnly to the bathroom and applied toothpaste to my open wound. I only cried when I realized I wasted the last of the toothpaste. How in the morning my skin would begin regenerating and there would be no healing for my mother’s teeth. 

* * *

Some days, I look in the mirror and search for the parts of my face that are not my mother’s madness. 

As a child, my mother’s behavior was a cruelty I learned to love. As an adult, I want to make excuses for her abuse and emotional abandonment. In my writing, I search for reasons to forgive — I need her to have a valid excuse. I need her cruelty to have a name since things with names are easier to forgive. 

At night, mami’s cruelty was transformed into a somber litany. She would kneel and pray by the edge of the bed we shared. Her prayers were a gloomy bedtime story. They were one part devotion and one part autobiographical confessional detailing her years suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse as a child. One by one, she would list every person who had done her harm. They were sinners, she was merciful. I would listen to her ask God to forgive them until I fell asleep. 

I’d very much like to talk about forgiveness, both the burden and the gift of it. When forgiveness is the only thing that is yours, it becomes a thing to be earned. I decided my mother would have to work for my forgiveness. But there was a point in my search for healing I realized I had been hoarding forgiveness as a means to receive a kind of closeness from mami — a way to get her to need me. I was so starved of her attention that I held all of her abuse hostage and used forgiveness as a negotiation tactic. If she could just apologize, if she could just acknowledge my pain, if she could just see me, then I could forgive her and heal. My mother never has and probably never will admit to hurting us so intentionally, and after that realization, came another one. For many years, I had been conflating forgiveness with absolution. I believed granting her forgiveness meant she would be free from any wrongdoing. Unlike my mother and the abusers she prayed for, there was no mercy on my tongue for her. I held onto forgiveness because I did not feel she was deserving of any release of guilt, obligation or punishment. I only recently began to think of forgiveness as a gift to myself rather than a gift to her. I began to realize that I was deserving of all the things I did not want to give: a release of guilt, obligation, and punishment. I thought of all the ways I had already granted forgiveness to my mother through my writing. How I would carefully write about the kind parts of her, real or imagined. Or how I would write poems that were empathetic to her pain. These small acts of mercy serve as examples of forgiveness as a gift to the self; validating her humanity so that I am able to believe in my own. 

* * *

I promise myself I will give my children a life full of memories they can place in albums. I will pull them out of a dusty basement and show embarrassing pictures of them at family events like I see the white people do in the movies. I buy the new iPhone because of its camera feature. I take more pictures than I have storage for. I delete apps on my phone to make room for more pictures. I take a picture of myself. It is not beautiful; I do not share it with anyone other than my sadness. I keep it, the way I have learned to keep ugly secrets. I look older. Compared to what version of myself? I do not have baby pictures. Mami could not afford to keep buying film, or she lost them all in a fire, or she is the fire, or she did not believe in archiving struggle or poverty or children from men who did not love her.

* * *

Mami is an asylum I have escaped from. I do not visit my mother as often as a daughter should. When I do, she offers me her best chair. “Can you believe they threw this out?”  I can. The chair is tired and groans underneath the insistence of my weight. Her home is full of things other people do not want. Broken radios & black & white television sets. Bibles stuffed with yellowed bills. I remember being one of these things. Her apartment smells. There is something dead here and for once it is not me. I look alive, she says. She means that I have eaten a full meal today and she has not. It is an awful feeling.

I reek of privilege and guilt. I cannot remember the last time I was hungry and it was not a choice. She is still poor. She tells me that I look whiter than before, like a gringa, which means she thinks I am successful now. I am a new kind of poor. The kind that complains they can only afford a car or an apartment but not both. The kind that makes economic decisions in the summer around using the fan or the air conditioner. The kind that skips one bill to pay another. Still, I can buy food at the supermarket without the government’s permission. I reach in my pocket and give her a $20 bill. It is not enough. I pull out another 20. This time I am not enough. I am a daughter trying to buy my mother’s smile. It is after all why I’ve come to visit. 

There is something dead here and for once it is not me.

I want to take her picture. I want proof that she is capable of happy. I want a memory I do not have. Mami does not smile in photos. She stares at the camera or away from it. Her mouth is partly open, a paralyzed prayer. Her face is grim and curious, even bold. She dares me to document her sadness, to look at the way she lets it live on her face. How she makes a home for things people do not want. I go home and take a selfie. Another. Another. Until my mother’s face disappears. 

I had to leave my mother so that I could live.  

* * *

Being unmothered means a lifetime of caring for what does not care for you. It is a funeral procession dedicated to mourning the mother archetype. In Boricua culture, the mother is a revered saint with hands like prayer and a bitter but loving mouth. In the case that my mother’s hands were ever a prayer, I am still waiting for an answer. If her mouth ever knew love, she never gave herself permission to taste it. Some days when I look in the mirror I see her torture. It is a different kind of anguish when your own eyes haunt you. A grayscale gradient in my skin reminds me of an organ disconnected from its host.

The thing about organs that make their way out of the body intended to feed them, is that their survival depends on a very specific preservation process. Organs separated from the host body can survive for a while if they are kept chilled in a preservation solution, but they can ultimately never last for longer periods without a host.

Being unmothered is a lot like this: 

  1. The exit: leaving the body that gave you life.
  2. The winter: a chilled state of unbelonging to anything or anyone while trying to maintain your vitality.   
  3. The transplant: finding new life in other bodies.

Leaving my mother so that I could survive has meant finding a page, a lover, a friend to abide with me. When I have no one to make a home of, I am the coldest winter. I lose sleep at the thought of running out of ways to love myself. I am most times the only thing keeping me alive. A tattoo of a tree in its wintered state lives on my forearm. I have been this tree. My mother has been this tree: a stump of a woman with a barren ensemble of branches, an overgrown sapling with no fruit or leaves as evidence of its existence or value. No proof of life on the body except for the body itself. Sometimes simply the idea that I exist is enough. Other times I have to tattoo it somewhere, my arm, a blank page, the deep-inked process of self-preservation. 

* * *

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua Writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Centro Voces, Latina Magazine, We Are Mitú, Tidal and more. She is a 2017 Poets House Fellow and the 2017 winner of Button Poetry Video Poetry Contest. Her work is forthcoming in Martín Espada’s anthology What Saves Us: Poems Of Empathy and Outrage In The Age Of Trump. She is currently working on her memoir. You can find more of her work on Instagram @elisabetvelasquezpoetry.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross