take a minute; take a breath

Here is an unsexy fact: most of the writing I’ve done since I graduated has been for work, articles about the publishing industry turned out roughly  as often as I feel knowledgeable enough to say I understand something, i.e., not very often. The rest of my job is small things, orders to make and calls to transfer and bills to sort. There is, thank God, not much to understand, mostly just tasks to remember. And mostly I remember.

But I do write those articles sometimes. And I still write like myself, i.e., with a set variety of grammatical tics, and so I still make use of a trick I picked up in undergrad: auto-searching each document for those tics and replacing them by hand. Today it was the word worth and then the word consider. Today it was also – as ever – semicolons.

I love semicolons. If I were a punctuation mark, I would be a semicolon; my number-two choice is maybe an ampersand. Did you see how casually I slotted one in? Semicolons are, in my opinion, the great metaphysicians of the written language. Is the sentence over or is there more to come? What is this juxtaposition meant to imply? This pause, what does it signify? Have I been overcome by emotion, or am I simply testing your patience? (The Nina Sabak Story.)

There’s a famous Kurt Vonnegut line about semicolons – and Kurt knew punctuation, particularly a well-timed asterisk:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

If this was meant to dissuade me, it has only done the opposite. I had this advice in the “Favorite Quotes” section of my Facebook profile way back in the early days of 2007, when I was in high school and had a flip phone with T9 text prediction. Were we ever so young? Did I really send all my texts with full parentheticals and occasional semicolons? I did, to the friends I had somehow hoodwinked into putting up with me.

Over the last few years, I started seeing photos online of a particular tattoo. It makes sense that tattoos can be trendy; anything humans can do to themselves or others could conceivably be trendy. The tattoos were of semicolons.

For a brief moment, that first time, I was convinced that other people had really gotten into typefaces and design too. Not so, minus a few really dedicated librarians who blog their life choices. (Librarians, I salute you.) Instead, the semicolons – behind ears, on ankles, on wrists, on arms – were monuments to mental health struggles, inked into people who were surviving. Is the sentence over or is there more to come? There is more to come.

This was back when we on the internet were still gluttons for positivity, and I had mixed feelings about the resulting articles. There’s a kind of rah-rah Upworthy style to them (no kidding). I am grateful for the pop cultural shift around mental illness, which mostly just means depression and anxiety, but still: grateful. Some words are less frightening to say. Some words are easier. As a person who loves and fears words, this means a lot. But it doesn’t mean everything. The moment after you claim those words, they are still in your skin and blood; they are your skin and blood. At various points of my life, I have been more and less comfortable describing myself in terms of mental illness, just as I have been more or less medicated, but I have always had the same symbiotic relationship with whatever is in my head. We don’t know how to leave each other.

And so, grouch that I sometimes am, I shook out my morning Prozac and bah-humbugged my way through another feel-good share from someone’s mom on Facebook. Look at these depressed people, persevering! It felt like reassurance or like resilience porn, depending on the kind of day I was having.

Don’t let this make you think I didn’t think about how easy it would be to do, about how in a different moment I might want to. Multiple doctors have told me that I am a real trooper when it comes to pain. This is the kind of thing doctors tell you when you have run out of conventional small talk and must turn to the fact that one of you is touching the other with a scalpel.

For a while, my first semester of grad school, I wrote on myself in black Sharpie. It was a difficult time, that month or so between October and November, and I wasn’t sleeping much. Not difficult for any particular reason, really. Just that whatever is in my head and I were at war with each other and it was winning.

What did I write? A lot of things, all on my left forearm because I’m right-handed. Parts of poems, sometimes. Little pep talks. Things I was having trouble believing. Like: you are worthy. Like: you are okay.

For a long time, it was much easier for me to write autobiographically in the second person, and my fiction took a distinct second-person turn too. I had so much to say to this girl I had just finished being, sometimes so recently that she felt like she was still there. There were so many instructions to pass on. Never mind that she was the only reason I knew anything.

So I wrote the word you on the skin of my wrist. You are smart. You are beautiful. It was fall, and I kept my sleeves rolled down so no one would see that I needed kindness so badly that I was etching it into my bloodstream. How embarrassing, my capacity for need. You are enough.

In the Cathedral of the Learning, I locked different bathroom stalls between classes and pushed my sleeves up so I could read myself into being the way I wanted to be. Multiple doctors have told me that I am a real trooper when it comes to pain, but in that cold and sleepless month I thought about the pain I could be suffering, how easy it would be to do. And I didn’t. But I thought about it, and you are a different person after you’ve thought about it.

This pause, what does it signify? Have I been overcome by emotion, or am I simply testing your patience?

I thought about getting a tattoo for a while. It would have saved me time, honestly, because one of my notes to myself was constant, touched up with fresh Sharpie as needed. Three words from America’s semicolon king, David Foster Wallace: this is water.

Sure, I could explain why, but the salient point is that these were words I wanted enough that I considered paying someone to put them under my skin. To be frank, aside from that one brief flirtation, I haven’t ever wanted a tattoo, and I doubt I ever will. They are so often beautiful on other people. For whatever reason, I’m happy just to look.

So little of my life has marked me physically. I have a scar on one hand from a kitchen mishap; I used to have a birthmark on my forehead, till it faded. I cut off all my hair one summer but you’d never know now. My freckles are countable. My shins have healed from several hundred leg-shaving incidents. Sometimes I pick my lips until they bleed, an old habit from my anxious childhood, and they always heal too.

Maybe whatever is in my head is actually me, and I’m the thing that lives in my body. Or maybe my body is me. Or maybe it’s all me and I am going to have to learn to get along with myself.

As a kid, I used to want to change the shape of my head. That’s another unsexy fact. I have high cheekbones, Slavic bone structure, a wide and flat face. I thought it made me ugly for a long time. Like maybe into my twenties. Like maybe I still check the mirror sometimes to see if I look okay, and I do; I look okay.

There’s a peculiar narcissism to depression. You think about yourself constantly, mean and terrible thoughts, then worry if your self-obsession makes you kind of a bad person. Then you worry that your self-obsession has gone meta. Then you write a blog post and check your face in the mirror. (That’s a joke. I promise.)

I said that mostly I’ve been writing for work, but that isn’t true. Actually, I write all the time. I wrote in the checkout line at Food Bazaar earlier tonight, and sometimes I write while I’m making copies, and sometimes I write while I’m walking to the subway or back from it. My brain is a machine that runs on words, and I am forever drafting something, leaving myself notes on my phone that don’t make sense come morning. Recently I saw a panhandler holding a sign that said seeking human kindness, and I wrote that down, too.

My life is full of instructions from myself, tasks I am trying to remember, and mostly I remember.

I wanted to tell you about semicolons. I still text with them, you know. I still text the same friends. Either I have continued to hoodwink them or I am worth putting up with. I think I might be; I think I might be; I think I might be.