Over on social media (Facebook particularly) women are sharing the hashtag #metoo if they have ever been impacted by sexual harassment / assault. At first, I wasn’t going to join in, because there are so many “share this” things on Facebook and I’m really not even a fan of Facebook, but it became so powerful to me to see “me too” after “me too” in my feed. It wasn’t surprising. I can’t think of a woman who has ever shared her personal life with me who couldn’t answer “me too” to this. And yet it has affected me deeply thinking about my own “me too” experiences and those of the people in my life.

About This Project

I want to share a few of my experiences here, but first a few things:

• There are many reasons why people may not feel comfortable/ empowered / safe to share “me too” and I want to recognize and honor that. You may also just not want to and that’s okay as well.
• I don’t want to forget about the many men who have been impacted by sexual violence, as that is a huge issue as well, but to hold in this space the girls and women who have had this particular social experience again and again.
• As I wrote on Facebook this morning, I want to add the echoes of another thousand me-too’s that have touched my life. I’ve worked in group homes, foster care, with child protective services, as a mentor, in schools, with prisoners, in mental health settings and in recent years doing interviews/ writing around mental health and in all of this work I have held the stories and experiences of so many people impacted by sexual harassment / assault. These are not my stories to tell (except in the ways I’ve been given permission to share in writing) but I wanted to acknowledge these, too, because there is something about how each time it happens to someone around me there’s an echo of impact that reverberate backs to us all.
• This has happened in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein case but goes so far beyond that.

My Stories but Only a Few Of Them

Memories just keep coming back as I read everyone’s posts. There are so many, from so many years, from so many situations, that affected me to varying degrees. Here are a few in my head that won’t go away:

• Walking down the street after school in junior high and on two different occasions having strange men walking past me grab my breasts / ass.
• Getting off the bus in junior high and being followed by a group of males my age who encircled me and threatened to rape me. They did not but more than this feeling like there was no one that I could go to who would help.
• Shortly after that last-mentioned incident, watching a friend in school go through something similar. She did speak up; and both she and the boys were suspended for the same amount of time for “inappropriate behavior”.
• In that same school, a male teacher refused to hand me my school photos unless he could cut one out and put it in his wallet, which he did.
• In high school, a peer’s father was supposed to drive me home but instead convinced me to let him sneak me into a bar. I refused to drink while he got sloshed and told me how attracted he was to my best friend. She had just turned 15 and was 7 months pregnant at the time.
• The experience of having a stalker as a teenager and not even having language to explain the fear of what was going on. He showed up at my school, on my city bus route and my home (where he had followed me). He was an adult.
• Every experience I had at age 19 of visiting my then-boyfriend after he went to prison, especially when it came to male guards judging the appropriateness of my clothing and checking what I might be bringing in.
• An extremely negative harassment experience from on-campus health when I went to get STD tested for the first time. To this day I have to take anti-anxiety medication to even be able to get through that kind of exam, despite much more positive female-supported medical care since that time.
• Being an adult in my mid-late twenties with male roommates who verbally assaulted / humiliated me in reference to my consensual adult sexual choices with other people.

Internalized

I can think of so many more situations, some more blatantly severe, some subtler that actually impacted me more … some from younger ages, some more recent. And most of all what I’m thinking about right now is how so much of my experience of sex/ gender/ power in this culture caused me to become numb to so much of this, about how so many of the experiences I had in high school and college and beyond are things I barely, only-vaguely remember because they were my “normal”. The earlier ones stick out because they weren’t so normal, yet, because I was still so young that they were new. Things are coming to mind in snippets and I think, “oh yes, that too” because there were so many things.

And there were so many situations that I take some responsibility for … or maybe not responsibility but awareness of the role I played (particularly but not only in situations with chosen male partners) … that because of the experiences I had when young and the cultural messages that I received I unintentionally colluded in experiences that I chose semi-consciously but that did great damage to me nonetheless. This isn’t self-blame but rather regret for how deep those things got into me that I didn’t even know it was happening. And awareness that I unintentionally harmed others as a result of the reverberations of the many “me too” times that had come before.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t think that this is the only major issue in our society today that needs to be completely explored and dismantled in the co-creation of a new society. But I see all of these “me too” situations and I just feel so much …

I originally wrote this article for Rebelle Society, although it is no longer available on their site.

Depression came back. It walked right in through the front door while I was busy guarding all of the windows and cracks.

It ignored the sign warning that Danger, there’s a dog here to protect me. It sidled up next to my fireplace and let the smoky stench of difficulty waft throughout my home. I saw it, but I didn’t recognize it, and I was aware of it, but I ignored it.

I went to sleep, and then all I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep because its presence brings exhaustion to every limb.

I’ve been here before, in this place, detailed it in blog posts and memoirs, shared it over coffee and in classrooms. I am intimately familiar with what depression is, what it looks like in my home, what it feels like in my bones. I have training in it and professionals explaining it and experience with it.

And it doesn’t matter, because depression is this tricky thing that manages to convince me that it’s something else this time, every time.

I take synthroid because I know I’ve had low thyroid issues in the past, and that’s probably why I’m tired and feel sad. I overload on synthroid and feel anxious and upset, and think that if I just stop taking it I’ll probably feel better.

I realize that I’m not eating right, and after berating myself about that for a while and starving myself on 1000-calorie diets and trying to eat only things that are green I decide that I should probably take vitamins again. And iron, because I have a history of anemia, and that’s probably why I’m tired and feel sad. I take too much iron and my stomach feels queasy.

I see that I am too busy, my schedule is too packed, and that’s certainly why I can’t get anything done. I need time and space to be creative and feel productive and get those juices flowing. So I cancel commitments and revamp my schedule, and think that soon I’ll be done being tired and feeling sad.

But then I have too much time on my hands and the hours yawn open before me, and I can’t get myself to get going and I watch too much TV and take naps that are hours long and swear that tomorrow I’ll finish that book that’s been hanging over me for years now. I need to be busier. Or not as busy.

My beau’s mom is really sick. My best friend seems to be having a hard time. A cat died in a horrible incident at my mom’s animal rescue. A good friend from my online world committed suicide. These are some of the reasons that I’m tired and feel sad, but they are not all the reasons.

The thing about depression is that it’s not consistent. I’ve been here before but it’s different this time, even in the ways that it’s the same. When it comes out of remission, it has altered, and it doesn’t look quite the same even though it’s attacking the same cells in so many of the same ways. I am indecisive again and anxious all of the time.

But it feels different. It feels new, like it’s never been this hard, like it’s never been so difficult and devastating and so damn annoying and frustrating.

I look into my refrigerator, thinking that I should eat something, and I almost start to cry because the process of eating seems so complicated. I want carbs and sugar and feel bad about myself when I consume them, bad in my body, bad in my life.

I go to the grocery store and can’t decide what to buy and come home with $80 of produce and a bag of Fritos. I eat the bag of Fritos. Then I take a nap because I don’t want to deal with how disgusting I feel.

I don’t want to deal with the fact that I’m full but still hungry, and that there’s still this question of what I’m going to eat for dinner.

But eventually I wake up from my nap and I forage some type of dinner, and from out of nowhere comes the motivation for just a moment to do something. So I answer a few emails or message a few friends or call someone in my family. I write a blog post, apply for a new gig, celebrate the little things that are going right.

I list out my accomplishments so I can recognize that I’m doing okay despite the fact that I feel terrible. And my mind thinks, See, you’re fine, you can do this.

It begins to make grandiose plans of the next three books I’m going to write and the art project I want to work on and the things I’m going to do… just as soon as I take another nap and get that energy together.

But when I wake up, I still feel tired, and even answering one more email feels impossible, and I’m convinced I failed at all of the ten thousand things I thought I was going to do in that one moment when doing anything at all suddenly felt possible again.

This is depression, this time around. It’s too many naps and getting angry at myself for not knowing what I want and being fully aware of all of the steps that I can take to pull myself out of this while simultaneously knowing that I can’t pull myself out of it, not really, not quite yet. Because the worst isn’t over. It’s right where I’m at.

It’s big and wide and cold and dark, and I’m one hundred percent certain that I’m going to get to the other, sunnier side of it, probably even sooner than later, but I can’t see that side from where I sit.

No matter how many right things I do, I can’t propel myself directly up into the air above to get a bird’s eye view that will make this spot seem smaller and more manageable.

So I own that I am drowning. I swallow the protests and explanations of every other thing that it could be or that I should be doing, and I admit that I am wallowing right now. I accept that this is the current state of being, and I confide that I am powerless to change it.

I check in with myself and others, and make sure that there is a lifesaver at the ready in case I can’t swim out of it this time. But for now, I just bob in the dark waters, noticing that this is where I am, hoping to eventually be somewhere else again but knowing that for this moment, this is exactly where I need to be.

I curl up next to my fireplace, with a book I might not have the energy to read, and a craft project I may or may not feel better completing. I sit beside the hearth, holding hands with depression. And somehow, I feel not better but less bad. Accepting that I’m not well right now makes me feel less not well.

It puts a name and a reason to the myriad other feelings and thoughts that I can’t cope with. It tells my brain to stop trying to explain away everything because it’s all just depression talking, and depression is a language that doesn’t make a lot of sense even though it can sound romantic and soothing and convincing at times.

I don’t drown. I refuse to sink. But I don’t swim either. I rest. I lie on my back and let the waters carry me. I swallow until the lump in my throat clears and I can breathe again. And I await the day when I can put my feet down and feel the stability of sand beneath me, and…

… I realize yet again that I was able to pull myself up after all.

I received a free copy of Real American: A Memoir in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Bold. Powerful. Authentic. Touching. Moving. Raw. Honest.

These are just a few of the words that come to mind when I think about sharing the book Real American: A Memoir by Julie Lythcott-Haims. In a way, it’s frustrating, because none of these words come close to explaining how affected I was by this intelligent memoir. And yet, it’s also a great thing, because the truth is that nothing I can say in this book review is going to fully encapsulate the importance of this book. And what’s great about that is that I can honestly, genuinely, truthfully say that I encourage you to read the book itself because no review is going to be able to really show you what is so great about it.

So, what is Real American: A Memoir? It’s Julie Lythcott-Haims’ story of growing up as a biracial woman in America. It goes back into her family’s history a bit, shares the details of her childhood, and explores the various changes she went through in understanding, owning and sharing her own identity across varied life stages. It places the story within the historical context, but it is truly just her own story, filled with her own human thoughts and feelings. She speaks to a cultural experience shared by others, one that we should be aware of particularly in this atmosphere of divisive politics, but it doesn’t pretend to speak for anyone else’s experience but her own.

There are other great books about people’s individual experiences with identity, including Black identity and biracial identity. And, of course, we should read those as well. We should be informed about what experiences others around us are having, giving us a broader perspective and some cultural humility that hopefully helps us to better see the individuals in front of us each day. What makes me particularly recommend this book is that it is brand new and very relevant to today, but more than that what I love is the author’s ability to express herself so articulately without seeming to compromise her own voice. Everything from the language choice to the chapter layout speaks to a unique perspective that captured my attention from cover to cover.

Let me share just a snippet of what she writes from early in the book, after noticing that when people ask her, “where are you from?” they mean something more – trying to classify and categorize her because her hair color and skin texture aren’t easy for them to pinpoint. She begins to share some of where she’s from and writes,

“I come from people who broke the rules. Chose to live lives outside the box. Chose hope over hate as the arc of history was forced to bend a bit more toward justice.”

This is just one small bit of a nearly 300 page book filled with brilliant writing. This book is about the racism in America, how it impacts the self-esteem of so many people, especially as they are growing up, and how one woman worked through the years to accept herself exactly as she is. There were times when labels were important for her in defining her self-identity and times when they were limiting, and she is honest about these transitions. She explains the struggles and triumphs of different experiences throughout her life and how they impacted her both in the moment and later in understanding them from a different perspective. I felt lucky, as a reader, to be witness to this.

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.