It’s Season 2, Episode 11 of Shameless, and William H. Macy’s paterfamilial trainwreck Frank Gallagher has abandoned his bipolar wife Monica (the exquisitely cast Chloe Webb) for maybe 10 seconds to grab a beer. When he comes back, she’s nowhere to be found.
He looks for her outside; nope. He calls up the staircase; no answer. He starts back toward the kitchen, which is when he notices her right where I would’ve told him to look first: in the dark, curtained-off crawl space under the stairs.
From which hideout she delivers a quietly desperate line, an expression of despair so familiar it rocks me back in my seat:
“I don’t wanna be me anymore.”
I feel ya, Monica. Honest to God, there are days when I’d rather be anybody else.
I’m Not Always Great, And I Feel Stupid About That
It’s not that I think I, in particular, am awful. That’s not how my depression-anxiety cocktail works. Most days I’m mostly fine. Or at least most days I’m able to recognize that I’m mostly fine. Or that I’m kind of a fried-out shell at the moment, but I’ll be mostly fine after a nap.
It’s that it’s exhausting being me. Being mostly fine is so much work.
Because being mostly fine is a place I can only get to after a lot of thinking about whether I’m doing life right today, whether I’ll be able to do it right tomorrow, whether something I did wrong yesterday is gonna bite me in the ass before sundown.
That’s the anxiety part. The depression part kicks in when I do fuck it up, when tomorrow seems like it’ll be a rolling disaster because of today’s missteps, when my ass is tender from not getting far enough ahead of yesterday’s mean dog of a mistake.
The depression part comes after dark, when I’ve spent another day being mostly fine while somehow having roughly zero human interactions with anyone I genuinely care about, when the Noonday Demon (with me, he works nights) begins to whisper that this means roughly zero humans genuinely care much about me.
If you know me, especially if you know me casually, you may find this surprising. Because I usually fake it reasonably well — “it” being competency, cheerfulness, a general casual OK-ness.
Do you have any idea how much energy that takes?
Even writing all this down, wondering as I describe it whether I just need better meds, has involved several days’ worth of stop-start emotional circling, of deciding it’s all too boringly self-absorbed and stepping away in disgust, of thinking that I sound like a godawful whiner when I’m perfectly aware there’s a pandemic and a massive social reckoning going on. Trust me, I wish I had something interesting to say about those things. I wish I could do something about those things.
Look, I’m not Monica Gallagher. I’m not bipolar, at least not that I know of. (Note to self: maybe look into that?) I’m not—spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched Shameless— going to open my wrists at Thanksgiving dinner.
I’m incredibly lucky, in my mildly messed-up way, that my particular brand of crazy is manageable by and large. And that I have health insurance to help me manage it. Which isn’t a thing that should require luck in the wealthiest nation in the world. But I digress.
And yet man, do I sometimes wish I didn’t have to be me anymore.
Still Chasing The Click (Just Not With Basil Hayden)
No, that’s not quite right. It’s not that I don’t want to be me.
For sure I don’t want to be anybody else — I’m grown enough to recognize that we’ve all got our various bullshits, that precious few of us are really happy all the time, that asking for someone else’s life is asking for their secret threadbare patches as well as for the shiny happy things they wear for feast days.
So it’s not that I don’t want to be me anymore. It’s just that sometimes I’d like, temporarily, simply not to be.
Just for a minute or five, honestly. Not permanently, not in anything approaching an “I can’t go on anymore” way. Again, I’m aware of how lucky I am in that.
But sometimes, I think something like “Dear God, could I just stop for a bit?”
It’s part of why I sleep so much. Sweet, dissociative sleep; you can’t be self-conscious, it turns out, when you’re not conscious.
(Cleopatra knew — Give me to drink mandragora/that I may sleep out that great gap of time/my Antony is away! — though now that I’m thinking of Elizabeth Taylor, Cleo was more a combustibly horny Maggie the Cat type, while I’ve always been more of a Brick, too agonizingly aware of himself and endlessly chasing that blessedly numbing click. Unlike Brick I’ve stopped trying to find it at the bottom of a bourbon bottle. These days I suppose I’m more Alexandra del Lago, sleeping through sweltering afternoons and occasionally chasing youth in the arms of, well, a comely youth.)
Like sleep, reading can still deliver the click. Since before I can remember, really, I’ve had a way of disappearing into books so thoroughly that people can’t get my attention. Used to drive my mama crazy. She’d think I was ignoring her, and I’d get in trouble for it. Honest truth is I couldn’t hear her over the wake-hiss of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus or the hum of Tom Swift’s Ultrasonic Cycloplane or the clatter of D’Artagnan’s sword.
It’s not as easy as it used to be, that vanishing. Reading doesn’t offer the quick serotonin hits that a serious social-media addict needs. And I am a serious social-media addict: It’s embarrassing how difficult it is these days for me, a onetime theater and movie critic, to sit through anything longer than a half-hour sitcom without interrupting it for a Twitter fix.
But when I can find a groove, the limitless, shoulder-bunching weight of me will still lift. The real world will still recede, and when it does it still takes all my awkwardness with it. (Even now I have to make sure to set timers on my watch when I’m working and we’ve reached cruising altitude, just in case I disappear into The Song of Achilles or Dying of Whiteness and forget to walk the aisle.*)
It’s never forever. I will never be one of those people who moves blithely through life. I’ll never assume the email got through, never expect the call to be good news, never not check my fly furtively, anxiously, when I’m halfway back to the table.
I will never not be me, I know that. Not really. But the same work, the same therapy, the same pills and practices that keep me safely on the right side of OK-with-that-reality can’t entirely keep me from wanting to just be able to put me, every now and then, on pause.
On the bookshelf, just for a bit, while I crack a novel and disappear into someone else’s story.
On the other side of that click.
Watching: Shameless, on Showtime via Netflix.
Reading: The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, via the DC Public Library
Listening: Imploding the Mirage, by The Killers, via Apple Music
*Every 10 minutes, per airline policy. It’s a customer-service thing, to be sure, but it’s also a safety and security thing. We’re passing by to bring you a drink and pick up your disposables, but we’re also sniffing for a hint of smoke from the cargo hold, keeping an eye out for the asshole taking advantage of the woman dozing next to him, even looking for signs that the gentleman in 6C has quietly expired. (Yes, it happens.) And if you think we can’t tell what you’re doing under that blanket, you’re fooling yourself.
This is everything. Wrecked and moved by your savage honesty, intoxicating humor and gut wrenching reflections. What a gift you are to the world! A Genius writer and beautiful human. ❤️ Adrienne