I would take the hour-and-a-half, three-bus trip to school. I would spend six hours at school. And then I’d take the hour-and-a-half bus trip home. I would do my homework while I tried not to listen to the screaming. And then I would take another bus out at around 10:30, across the bridge to 24-hour bakery, so I could do my job until one in the morning. And then I would come home, praying it would be peaceful now, that it would be at least be quiet, and I would sit in my bathroom for an hour and cry, picking up and putting down the bottles of lithium I had stockpiled in case I ever felt like I needed to kill myself again. Picking them up and putting them down. Counting and recounting. I knew the minimum lethal dose off by heart. I’ve known it since I was 16. I cried until my chest hurt, until I thought my ribs would break.
And then I would get back up and keep working. What choice did I have? And it wasn’t that bad, anyway. I had it easy.
I did this every day, even as my body started to attack itself. My hands and feet swelled up to the point where they couldn’t move. I was covered in an angry red rash. My jaw kept locking itself shut. The pain was coming from so many different sources that it began to seem atmospheric, like something I was breathing in.
I was 20 when I was living like that. That’s how I was spending my one life on this earth. Now, of course, it all makes sense; now I know that I couldn’t have stopped. Because if I had stopped, where would I be now? I wouldn’t have my degree. I wouldn’t have my job, one of the few I could possibly have that accommodates my sickness. Perhaps I wouldn’t still carry the same pain in my body, the random attacks of swelling and fatigue — most likely, whatever I’d be dealing with in a world where I had stopped working would be worse. It would be compounded by poverty and instability. The stress of overwork was a preferable alternative to the other options. The truth, the horrible truth of the world we work in, is that I had to suffer that much. It was a necessary condition of me being in less pain now.
Two things I know:
I am extraordinarily lucky to have the peace in my life that I do now.
My peace is entirely conditional; it could disappear at any moment.
I was never a good retail employee. I was good at the detail-oriented stuff, the sorting and organizing; I knew a lot about the products; I was a good teacher, when I had to teach. But I couldn’t stand on my feet for the full eight hours. I couldn’t scan quickly. If I knew I was being monitored, it would make my performance a hundred times worse. And, of course, there was the sickness of it all: the crying, the exhaustion. Right before I quit my last job, I had a meltdown that lasted an entire weekend at work. This is all I can do, I thought, and I’m not even fucking good at it.
Would I have felt that desperate if I had been getting paid more than ten dollars an hour? As soon as I started doing something that paid me even modestly more, that particular variation on panic disappeared — replaced, of course, by other kinds of panic: the all-encompassing stress of having a job that demands constant mental attention. And, more than that, the fear — lurking around every corner — that if I lapsed even for a moment, I would be back to the old place, sitting so deep in the pit that it wasn’t even worth the strain on my neck to look up at the light coming in. Now, my face was in the light; I was clinging to the edge by my fingertips. It was excruciating, and the prospect of doing that forever made me want to give up and let go.
I’ve gained 50 pounds since I started the job I have now because I used to only eat one meal a day. (I’m still thin.) I used to walk home because I couldn’t afford to take the bus. I lived with my family, even though that environment was so toxic that my high school counselor had once tried to get me emancipated. (I ended up killing that idea; I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad.) When I saw my own face back then, all I saw was that I looked unbearably ugly; now, looking back at pictures, all I see is someone who was profoundly sick.
I don’t live like that anymore, but the memory of those years is still alive in my body. And I could feel it, the beating heart of that fear and stress, every night I sat at the cafe, trying to make my one cup of coffee and single donut last the night, struggling to write through the fatigue. I could feel it as the pandemic destroyed my meager savings, even as I ate rice and stewed tomatoes for dinner three nights a week. I cried when I realized the grocery store job I applied to rejected me. All of these years, I thought, wasting my time writing and worrying, when I had known all along what I should have been doing. I should have stayed at the store. I should have known better. Ten dollars an hour — my worth had already been measured out exactly. Things always regress to their true level.
I could survive if all of this went away. I’m stronger now than I was, and I got through it back then. I’m not being ironic when I say I had it easy. I have seen what it’s like when things are worse than that. But I’ve also seen what it’s like when it’s not. At the same school cafeteria where I shamefully explained that I was on the free lunch list, people paid for their shitty frozen fries with hundred dollar bills. For our graduation dinner and dance, I wore a donated suit, picked out for me by my friend while I was lying in a hospital bed; on the class Facebook group, people bragged about spending thousands of dollars on their dresses. People parked their custom convertibles outside the university quad where I ate my daily 99-cent croissant.
When I go out for my walk today, I will look at the sky and the birds and the pale pink blossoms, and I will feel so, so lucky to be alive, to be able to live here, to have my worst problems be my student loans and my own body. But I can’t forget what came before. I can’t forget what might still be in my future, just a month or two of missed work away. I can’t forget the people who are still working themselves sick, working themselves literally to death — and the people who could make it all stop.