Nothing Helps, Except Love . . .
C.O. MOED
Planning my suicide was the only thing that kept me going.
For years.
From that first night, at age four or five or four, crushed and buried alive by feelings I didn’t even know how to spell, watching the shadows of the trains on the Williamsburg Bridge, thinking over and over again that if I died if I died if I . . . could get really sick—until that night, at age thirty-nine, when something finally shattered and broke and I stood up, freed—I planned.
• Staring at a bottle of aspirins, the only drugs my parents allowed in the house besides cigarettes and booze, and the once-a-week bag of potato chips, thinking maybe taking all of those little white pills would become a portal out of the silent insanity I knew I was living in, no matter what anyone said.
• Wandering through 1970s East Village streets in the middle of a cold night because I just couldn’t bear another moment of watching my sister’s head get slammed against a wall.
• Walking away from a screaming relative, usually my sister or my mother or my father or my sister or my mother or my . . . there is no escape there is no escape there is no escape . . . except out. Out now. NOW NOW! Get one last drink at the bar and then . . .
• Drinking my weight in alcohol and then shoving tons of chemically produced baked goods and salty crunchy things down my throat, egging myself on, Just Do It! stopped only by my body throwing me into the bathroom for hours of puking.
• Promises made staring out the kitchen window of my own apartment during a happy Thanksgiving meal, a HAPPY one, thinking, Okay, next year I don’t have to be here I don’t have to be here in this hell next year I will be dead, and suddenly feeling so relieved I offer to make everyone coffee. Best Thanksgiving ever.
• Forcing myself to go to work because I wanted to die in my apartment, so I had to get paid so I could pay the rent because getting evicted would really fuck up my suicide plans, and as I turned the corner of 12th Street I suddenly felt like I had wings and I flew to work at the office of the biggest dickhead lawyers in New York City because I. Had. A Plan. Skipped around the office for weeks after that.
And on and on and on . . .
Back then, I couldn’t tell you why I had such a fierce desire to kill myself. What I could tell you was that teetering on a high thin ledge, contemplating flight, was normal—like breathing or drinking or walking.
So how the fuck did I stay alive, one might ask?
In the movies we went to long ago, I watched him sing and dance and smile and love. Every time we got on the F train I kept waiting for him to dance onto the platform, swoop me up, and take me the fuck away from my family.
I believed this. I looked for him every time the doors opened. Soon, that looking for him became something inside me saying over and over again, Stay alive a little bit longer and I promise you I’ll make your life like Gene Kelly’s heart and soul. Just hang on. Maybe he’s on the D train.
So each time I made a Plan, this something inside would start tap dancing away like crazy. Why don’t you try this tippity-tap tippity-tap why don’t you try that tippity-tap tippity-tap, you got rhythm you got music just hold on, everybody is going to start dancing with you in a second tippity-tap tippity-tap.”
Dancing on that high thin ledge that beckoned escape and liberation was an exhausting war to fight day in, day out. For decades.
But somehow, tippity-tapping just wouldn’t give up. If there was something it could tippity-tap to and keep me going a bit longer, it did:
• A teacher, after another exasperating reading of my great dramatic thesis about suicide, saying, “You know suicide is a double homicide. You’re not just killing yourself. You’re killing someone else.” That not only ruined my plans, it pissed me off because it painted me as a vengeful loser instead of a tragic heroine. Also, it was too late to rewrite my thesis.
• The make-or-break moment with a really good therapist. It was summer and I hated summer, not just because it was the ONE season that epitomized a dateless Saturday night. Summer was when everyone’s lives stepped outside. Watching happy families and loving relationships on the streets, in the shops, everywhere I turned, only proved how viciously incapable I was of being a human being. As it got hotter, I got worse and started saying over and over again, “I don’t want to live anymore I don’t want to live anymore I don’t want to . . ” Finally the therapist said, “If you keep talking about killing yourself, I’m going to have you committed.” Gene Kelly started tippity-tapping like crazy because only Jack Nicholson hung out in locked wards and he was not my type. At least not then.
• Getting involved with a new-age spiritual community promising complete freedom from crippling scars. It kept me off the streets and gave me amazing food, shelter, and life-long friends. It also made sure that every cent I earned, from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-eight when I left, went to being there. When you are giving all your money away, there’s never quite enough to buy expensive drugs to overdose on.
• Black ankle boots—so what if all six pairs look alike. I had fat calves and couldn’t fit into the knee-high black boots all the pretty girls with boyfriends and real lives and happiness had. So, no matter how horrifyingly inhuman I felt with my bovine legs, nothing said “one more day” like black ankle boots. They made me look like I belonged in the world too.
• The born-again church the cute coworker went to; the synagogue my father, uncle, friends became bar mitzvah in; the Buddhist retreat in the mountains I found online; the transformative workshops, the other transformative workshops.
• The peer-support groups that seemed to only meet in cold basements.
• The late-night panicked phone calls to strangers I met in those cold basements.
• The late-night panicked phone calls to friends who still tolerated me.
• The willingness to go out on a date with anyone no matter how uninterested or unwilling I was.
• The millions of words poured into tons of diaries.
• The sobbing through hundreds of movies, racked with knowing that I was watching my life. So what if I couldn’t figure out how to find the door into it? It had to be there somewhere because someone made a movie about it.
• The debate in the New York Times Magazine about choosing your own death in the face of incurable disease. A hospice nurse said that her big question to sick patients wasn’t “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” it was “Do you want to die or do you want the pain to stop?” Most just wanted the pain to stop.
During these decades of tippity-tapping, I heard about a book called The Final Leap, which of course I didn’t read. Someone else read it and told me the most important part. It was about the people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and then lived. Each and every one of them, as they moved from steel to air, suddenly wished they hadn’t taken that one step of only a couple of inches.
Every single one of them.
It began to slowly dawn on me. It would have just been a matter of time. Regardless of my serious or not serious planning, one day in the near or far future, I’d plan an inch or two too much and find myself flying through irreversible air. Because you see, the thing about suicide plans is that they are like plaque on your teeth. You don’t floss that shit off every day? All your teeth fall out. And in between, you reek of decay each time you open your mouth.
Here’s another thing about tippity-tapping. Like flossing it changes things.
Each time I tippity-tapped, the proverbial ledge got wider. I began to have more room to tippity-tap back to life.
And each time I stepped back, there was space for other experiences. I didn’t know I was having them until one day a woman said, “Every night, write three things you are grateful for.”
Fuck you, I said, and then found an index card.
My three things: 1. paper, 2. pencil, 3. didn’t kill myself today.
Every day, for weeks, that’s all I wrote.
Then one day I wrote, “the wind on my face.”
A couple of days later, “the sun felt good.”
A week later, “coffee,” and then after that . . .
Every extra line I wrote began building an even deeper wider ledge. I started noticing other things besides raging destruction.
But, you know, not committing suicide isn’t the sunset in some stupid movie with big silent men and their horses. It’s plaque and it’s floss. Even as time went on and my ledge got bigger, I was still standing on it.
I saw this on 60 Minutes. A North Korean guy escaped from an internment camp literally crawling over dead bodies. He said what made him want to attempt the impossible was the description someone told him about chicken and how delicious it tasted.
All he had eaten his entire life was gruel. But this story, told to him by another prisoner who loved him enough to share such dangerous secrets, was enough to inspire him to crawl over his friend’s dead body to get to freedom and chicken.
As my ledge grew, I began to understand how I had stepped out onto it in the first place, and I began to learn words for all those feelings, that at age four or five or four I didn’t know how to spell. I began to recognize the beginning of it all.
This is what I recognize—on the street, in the subway, on a bus, in a restaurant, on the ferry, in an airport. This is what I see everywhere: the shocked look in a little kid’s baby-face watching someone they love beating the shit out of them with a word or a slap or gritted teeth dragging them by the arm. Before my eyes I watch that kid’s heart get broken for the first time. I watch that heart literally get crushed and obliterated.
When my heart broke at four or five or four and then over and over again for the next thirty-five years, every slap, every punch, every raging word, every hateful glare—inside, outside, school, play, work, streets, whether I was a little girl receiving it or an adult giving it back—it all became a jackhammer obliterating me. The pain was so great, the rage so awful, that the only way I understood how to stop it was to stop being.
It was time to make some different plans. I decided to get back to that moment right before the jackhammering started. I decided to get back to that love.
At first I tried getting it back with a boyfriend and then a girlfriend and then a boyfriend and then losing twenty pounds and then several master’s degrees and always lots of red lipstick. Nothing quite worked. I was still on that ledge.
Until one night when I was thirty-nine and something happened.
See, all that writing on an index card every night? I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing that love. Each and every word was Gene Kelly tapping furiously inside, saying, “You are your hope for joy. You are your chance for an amazing life.”
“You are.”
One day, while I was battling utter despair, that tippity-tapping decided I wanted flowers in my home.
Look, rich people get flowers for their home. Where I come from, it was plants that didn’t need watering or plastic bouquets you got on Delancy Street. But my inner Gene Kelly wanted real, smelly flowers, and I found myself crossing streets to get them.
And there was a former classmate I may have said two words to. Ever.
Within thirty seconds he was telling me how he was practicing Buddhism, and within thirty-five seconds I was laughing in his face because it sounded so stupid, and within forty seconds I was giving him my number because if I was going to stand on a ledge for the rest of my life, I wanted it to be like his ledge because his ledge sounded way better.
I, who don’t talk to people I see on the street, don’t keep in touch with anyone, never call someone who says, “Call me!” Well, I called this guy repeatedly until one night I went and learned how he practiced Buddhism.
Of course, afterward I yelled at him on the street about how full of shit it all was blah blah blah . . .
Tippity-tap, tippity-tap, Gene Kelly said. Give it ninety days.
So I did. Two minutes a night.
Now, looking back, I can say, “Oh I was finally stepping through a door called my life.” But then? It just felt weird.
And then one night, maybe a couple of nights after the first night, a feeling I had never questioned—just like I never questioned the air I breathed or how water tasted or even what made my legs move—a feeling that said, “Take another step out into air and you’ll finally be free”—that feeling flew out into its own air.
And as it flew out into its own air, old pain finally lifted, and instead of being The Plan, it became just like the long scar on my tummy that I got when they ripped out my appendix in a hurry because I was about to die. A reminder.
This isn’t some stupid sunset movie. Like my scar, that feeling is always nearby. When it acts up, it’s just like when knees ache before it rains.
I know I don’t want to die. I just want the pain to stop. Or I’m not saying out loud what I need, or I sit still for twenty minutes, or I really just want to punch someone in the face because they are treating me like I’m the reason their life isn’t going well.
People ask me a lot what it was like growing up on the Lower East Side back then. Fucking normal you fucking moron, I usually answer. Okay, without the moron part.
But what do you mean what was it like? That would require something to compare it to. Like that kid in North Korea, what I felt every day—terror, rage, panic, helplessness, fury, self-pity, back to rage, and then panic again, and underneath it all, heartbroken—was normal. You have to be told about chicken.
During the years of writing down what I was grateful for, tippity-tapping away, flossing off all the plans of destruction, I met my nephew for the first time. Well, he had just been born, so it wasn’t like it was a scheduling issue.
When I held him in my arms for the first time, I suddenly felt the Grand Canyon open up in my heart. I had never felt anything like that before and then suddenly I did.
One day, he must have been three or four or three, I scribbled something on a teeny tiny sliver of paper and then stuck it into the frame of a photo of me squeezing a billion hugs into him.
It said, “Nothing helps, except love and the experience of something different.”