Content warning: This essay has descriptions of mental health struggles including suicidality and eating disorders. Please take good care in reading, and abstain if you need to.
In 2018, the tiny sometimes-voice that popped up every-so-often with a helpful,
“Maybe you’re gay?” became more urgent. First a nagging refrain, then a blaring Sousa march, and finally, this perfect scene in WHAT ABOUT BOB?:
“Maybe you’re gay?” over and over turned into,
“YOU ARE DEFINITELY GAY—but you can’t do anything about it!”
What a relief! Maybe I could just exist in a peaceful bubble, knowing deep down that I was queer, and that would be enough. That just the barest amount of self-acceptance could elevate me to a nirvana where this wouldn’t even rock my boat.
I was good, very good, at punitive restriction. I knew how to crash diet with the best of them—and if being queer but not BEING queer was my lot, I knew I could put it way up high on a glowing nuclear haz-mat shelf with all the other cookies, cakes, and pastries that my eating disorder was built around.
I did all the crash diet-y things I could to Be Queer but not really BE queer. I watched queer movies and TV shows, I listened to queer music—from the Indigo Girls to lilting, music-box girlypop. I started to queer my wardrobe, vacillating between Betty Crocker and Gay-From-Space. All the new scripts I was writing were gay, and the old ones just got gayer. I worked myself rabid watching fellow queer actors with the freedom to be themselves on-screen and at events. At Pride, something inside me breaks when I am identified as “an ally.”
But like all diets, this one is gonna WORK. Nevermind the constant jittery fevers and the recurring hives!
It was around this manic, skin-full-of-bees time that I knew I wanted to make a podcast. I could only sense the general form of it, like holding onto a dream as you wake. With a whisper of its theme—vulnerability—I held this in my pocket, thumbing the smooth rock of it. The idea persisted, but only that. Who was I to champion radical vulnerability when I could barely go there myself?
Fast forward through the months as they get harder and harder, and the scripts go cold, and the bees leave, and the hives, and finally the joy. My envy breaks the surge protectors of my body, shorting out, leaving me in a catatonic brownout, devoid of color and light. It is no more unpleasant than it is pleasant; it is simply nothing.
The Nothing keeps me running on autopilot—auditioning, doing dishes, walking the dog, my hands working while The Nothing makes its plans to send me into the darkness forever.
I make my final plans with The Nothing at my throat. I visit my best friend and attempt to do one more good thing in this world for Project HEAL, facilitating an eating disorder recovery camp.
You are not in recovery anymore, The Nothing says.
Your disease is going to wring the life out of you.
I bring my starving heart to the alien planet of Palmdale, where the Earth so often shakes herself like a wet dog. These exhilarating canyon roads should scare me senseless, but the volume is a murmur, packed with cotton. My belly flips as the one-lane trail crumbles down the face of a cliff, and I dimly wonder if I should really be considering dying at a time like this.
My heart is racing by the time I set foot on land, and cedar and soil flood my senses, slapping at The Nothing and its hold on me. I remember childhood, and Girl Scout Camp. I am descended upon by a camp full of beautiful, queer people—a sisterhood of adventurers in recovery, a new and precious tender-hearted friend who shares their expansive queerness with me.
The aching sensation of looking from the outside in fades.
The Nothing starts falling away in great, frozen heaps, warming from the inside, this feeling finally about more than just what I can’t have or can’t be. These three days at camp rebuild me from the inside out, not through the gritty discipline of survivalism, but in the soft earth of belonging.
When I come back from camp, I know two things:
I need to go to therapy,
and
I’m ready to start this podcast.
(To be continued.)
xx Jen