I wake up at noon, and I’m ready to go back to sleep. When I’m not visiting my father, all I want to do is sleep. I’ve always loved a nap (depression), but now I have full-on performance anxiety about staying awake. No matter what I’m doing, a voice inside me is saying, But you could be sleeping. Why not sleep instead?
My answer to the voice is, I am afraid that I will become nothing.
When interviewed about my “writing process,” I always say that I don’t believe a person has to suffer to make art. But that’s only because I imagine it’s true for others (also, I don’t want to be accused of inspiring teen suicide). If ever I attempt to make the inside of my skull a softer place to live (i.e., by saying kind and gentle words to myself), a counter-alert pops up inside my head that says, This is dangerous. Do not tread here. Also, you’re wrong.
The counter-alert comes from a primal place, rooted in my survival instinct. Its message may ultimately be more destructive than helpful, but it feels like protection: self-preservation through self-flagellation. It’s as though I’m wired to believe that if I say something nice to myself, cut myself any slack, it will lead to me dying.
My husband is gentle with me, the counter-voice to the counter-alert.
“You’re going through a lot; you need to let yourself rest, just let yourself rest,” he says.
But how can I trust him? Of course he wants me to rest, to sleep all day—don’t we all want people to be like us? If we are both sleeping all the time, side by side, my husband and me, then his own depletion seems more normal to him.
“All I want,” he says, “is for you to let go of your fears and worries, your self-criticism, and just relax for five minutes.”
I fear we will both be sucked into the chasm of his illness, trapped there, sharing one pair of footie pajamas, no toehold, nobody to give us a leg up. I fear that I will follow him there (fall there?) only to regret having followed him—suffocation, disintegration, a dying, but no death—as I fear that I cannot follow my father (who I want to follow) where he is going.
Still, the urge to sleep all day is becoming harder to fight. Most days, I end up in a sort of no-man’s-land (the Internet), where I click and scroll for hours, not writing, but not sleeping. Propelled by intermittent bursts of dopamine that punctuate my haze, I live an Internet life—one that feels like moving forward but mostly amounts to its own kind of nothing. Sometimes I wonder if I’m genuinely the introvert I think I am, or if it’s just that my Internet addiction has become a substitute for needing people. Without the Internet I might be a very social person.
My third novel, the one I’m here to work on, is the story of a marriage, kind of like my marriage: the husband has a mystery illness; the doctors can’t fix him; the wife is dealing with emotional fatigue (exacerbated by people asking questions for which she has no answers and prescribing podcast-y cures like “he needs to cut out wheat” and other remedies the husband tried already in a long list of ineffective remedies: rifaximin, acupuncture, dicyclomine, B-12 drip, elimination diet, amoxicillin, testosterone, probiotics, Valtrex, turmeric, fish oil, famotidine, biofeedback, Zoloft, prednisone, coffee enema, bowel rest).
Unlike my husband and me, the couple are New Yorkers who have only been together a few years. They journey to Venice Beach in search of the California dream, which appears in the form of the young man who lives upstairs. A skater and surfer (he owns multiple boards), the young man is everything they are not—healthy, mellow, hot—and they both grow increasingly obsessed with him.
In the climax of the novel, the wife is busted stealing from Sephora (skin-care fanatic; history of acne), gets in a fight with the husband, and runs away with the skater-surfer to a music festival in the California desert, where something happens to reveal that he is not the sort of golden archangel figure she hoped he was (preferably: one who could relieve her of her own humanity) but just another boring human like the rest of us, thus demystifying both the illusion of the California dream and the value of newness, and catalyzing the kind of character transformation I’m told is necessary for a successful novel (in this case: the realization that love is not always a feeling, sometimes it’s a verb, and that she loves her husband).
I don’t yet know what will go down in the desert to trigger the epiphany. I’m less concerned with the inciting incident than I am with a more overarching fear that the book is too earthbound. That I am.
Before I can further grapple with such questions, I must fortify myself with a little in-room coffee (the window to pick up Grab N’ Go is long past). Then I call my mother to see if she has any news about my father’s condition.
“I’m worried about the sweatpants,” she says.
“What?”
“The sweatpants! They’ve been sitting in the house for weeks.”
“Oh.”
Somewhere between Unconsciousness One and Unconsciousness Three, my mother’s yenta friend told her that if my father was going to go to rehab after the ICU he would need multiple pairs of sweatpants. I was assigned the job of procuring the sweatpants. Unfortunately, he never made it to rehab.
“Have you heard anything from the hospital?” I ask her.
“I don’t like to bother the nurses. I’ll call over in a bit. I think you jumped the gun.”
“What do you mean?”
“The sweatpants!”
“You told me to buy them!”
“I know,” she says. “But I should have trusted my instincts and had you wait. It’s like buying a gift for an unborn baby. You don’t do it. Something might happen to the baby before it’s born.”
“So you’re saying Dad got pneumonia and fell unconscious again because I bought four pairs of sweatpants on Amazon and had them shipped to your house.”
“I’ll just feel better if we return them.”
“But he’s conscious now. What if by returning them we—”
“Please.”
“Fine. I’ll e-mail you the return codes. Just go drop them off. You don’t even have to box them up.”
“I don’t have to box them up?”
“No, no boxing,” I say.
“Who ever heard of such a thing?”
“How are you doing otherwise? Besides the sweatpants.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Why?”
Whenever I try to emotionally connect with my mother, she acts like I’m crazy to think she has feelings to express. It makes me self-conscious of my own sensitivity, like anything resembling a feeling is dramatic, frivolous, unnecessary.
People always say that it’s good to feel your feelings, that if you don’t feel them now, they’ll come out later. But throughout this crisis, I have yet to see hers come out. And who’s to say what it means to handle something well? Here I am with a full emotional range, and I’m paralyzed. Meanwhile, my mother is staying very busy with her business, the house, financial stuff. Some days I think she’s headed for a fall. Most days, I feel like she’s handling this well—and that her lack of an emotional response is proof that something is wrong with me.
“Oh my god!” she says. “Oh no!”
“What’s wrong?!”
“Nothing,” she says. “I just remembered. I have to go to Home Depot and get a hose.”