Nutball Manifesto.

I feel like I need to be honest about something here. When I'm fully and openly honest about what I think about something, I almost always regret it, but due to poor impulse control on my part, here we are. What I probably should explain is this: I can't think of a time in my life when I didn't feel like I was just sitting around waiting to die. I also can't think of a time when reading and writing didn't provide a temporary sense of relief from that. Reading when I needed to be introverted and hide, and extroverted when I had something that needed to be said.

When I was young the feelings were less complex. I was just sad a lot. I felt like I never really did anything right, that I was always this close to measuring up but always fell just short. Never quite made the honor roll, never was quite an excellent tennis player, was never quite pretty, quite smart, quite a good daughter or sister or friend or girlfriend. Or pet owner, for that matter. I tried to mask it, this feeling that I never quite got the hang of life that everyone else seemed to have, by trying to copy other people. But which people? I never could figure that out, either. I tried so hard, Internet, I even lied to my diary. I don't have my diaries anymore, but if I did, you'd see me radically shift between, specifically, two girls I went to school with, who were totally different from each other and my attempt at blending them together resulted in a persona less like a Supercool teen queen and more like Jeff Goldblum at the end of The Fly.



The result was something grotesque and nauseatingly repellent. Harken back to the movie and you may recall Jeff Goldblum crawling over to a horrified Geena Davis and putting the barrel of the rifle she was holding up to his head. My plan didn't really pan out, is what I'm getting at. I just careened back and forth from a hyperactive, overeager desperation to be liked to loud, braying, uncontrollable tears. Everybody wanted to invite me to parties, I tell you!

I discovered drugs in college and spent the next ten years essentially baked. I managed to avoid the drug testing that all the scholarship athletes were randomly subjected to, how I don't know, because all they had to do was take one look at my tie-dyed shirt and my red, weasel eyes and it would be clear that, as David Sedaris said, my urine had roaches and stems floating in it.

Ten years, Internet. This is a feat I look back on with askance, not actually believing that yes, I really did devote nearly a decade of my life to the Wake and Bake. But it is true, and there goes my shot at becoming president of the PTA. (possibly even a PTA member, but truth be told, even without drugs I'm perfectly capable of alienating 90% of people in any given room at any given time.)

For the rest of my 20's I stomped around in flannel shirts and unattractive shoes, (thank you, Kurt Cobain, for making that look fashionable at the exact time I was trying to disappear inside my clothing. I still love you) wondering what the hell was going on and why can't I seem to fix it.

With Alex came undiagnosed post-partum depression on top of my as-of-yet undiagnosed major clinical depression and when that happens, as many other people out there can testify, you wind up on the floor of the bedroom closet listing, in a cool, logical manner, the ways in which your family would be much better off if you could just figure out how to assemble the hunting rifle in the attic and wondering if you were tall enough to pull the trigger with your toe.

In a lifetime of being a Depressed-American, (join us in celebrating Depressed American Heritage Day, won't you? Dress in black and snort anti-depressants!) the only stable, affirming constant has been the ability to spin out a string of words that I used as a lifeline to pull myself, hand over hand, out of the big black Nothing that was trying to swallow me up.

Several years ago when I was visiting with a family member, I tentatively raised the subject of the Nothing and its desire to eat me in a specifically and spectacularly bad way when I was twelve. Her reaction was a startled and an almost angry denial.

"No, you weren't. You were always happy!"

Fair enough, I guess, as this isn't something anybody actually wants to hear. (Sorry, Internet.)

But in the years that my private writing has become public writing, a lot of people who have known me personally have not liked what I write at all, and not so much for what I say as the way I say it. It's the voice I've always used to write with, the attitude that isn't there so much when we're face to face. It's a strong voice, and not one that anybody who knew me as a child ever heard, and to them it's off-putting and and weird, a fake voice that doesn't really exist, except that it does and it's always been there, and it's much more confident and joyful than I've ever been. It enables me to speak easily on both potty training toddlers and telling you the best way to fuck your wife in the ass. (Search the archives, you pervert. I'm not helping you now, not when I'm on a roll.)

With the exception of Steve, everyone who has ever felt they had any sort of leverage over me has asked me to stop writing, or at least, stop writing in That Way. With That Attitude. We would like that voice to shut up now, thanks.

And lucky day, it has.

I'm not depressed anymore. Someone asked me recently if my depression had lifted and I had to tell him the truth, that I had no idea whether my depression was gone because I had no idea what not being depressed was supposed to feel like. But I'm pretty sure it's gone now, and goddamn it, the Nothing blew away and took my writing voice with it. It seems that for my entire life it's been rage and anger and desperation that was behind every word I ever wrote. Even the happy stuff can't get written without the big fat hate I had on myself and the world. Especially the happy stuff. Especially the funny stuff. The hate is why I started writing a blog in the first place, and why I named it what I did, because every good thing I was able to write about staved off the Nothing for another day.

But like I said, it isn't there now. At the moment, I'm pretty angry and frustrated. My teeth have been grinding away for about 6 hours over some bullshit thing that I need to just let go, but I can't because I dwell over things. I'm a dweller.

And when I was in my car, grinding and dwelling, grinding and dwelling, I suddenly had to pull the car over to the side of the road and pull a 3x5" notepad that I lifted from Big Machine and wrote all this down. (Yes! Stealing office supplies! Yes! I admit it, Big Machine, I did it! I also used your tape to wrap all my Christmas presents! And now you know all. Please don't fire me until after my kids' dental appointment next month.) It occurred to me at that moment that I need that anger pushing me forward. It's so damned easy to write when my brain is full of the Fuck You. It's easy to write about anything. About everything.

What would you do if you were me, Internet?*

I can't have some dickhead pissing me off every day, as ideal as that may be. So honestly, this: I'm afraid if I keep on with the Happy, I'm going to kill the side of myself that I love the most, the side that's never let me down. Even though, heh, my unprofessional and unladylike writing style seems to let a certain percentage of people in my real world down quite a bit.

Sorry, motherfuckers.

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*And don't tell me to blow my head off. If you do that, I will curse you with permanently Bad Vibes and a cataclysmic dose of Boomerang Karma.