trigger warning for talk about major depression and suicidal thinking.
i apologize if the sudden frequency of substacks is annoying (i mean, i sent one substack in february, and this is substack number 4 in march), but we’re in quarantine, and, if i don’t keep trying to do things, i don’t know what i might do. so far, i’ve kind of just been sliding right into my night owl habits, really testing how adhd meds play with my anxiety, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, usually waking from a nightmare.
i’ve also been drinking stupid amounts of coffee, checking twitter obsessively, and doing very little work because i’m finding it impossible to focus. i’m trying my hand at propagating scallions. i still haven’t cleaned my apartment. i have unsuccessfully been trying to convince my parents not to go to church.
david chang’s memoir, eat a peach, comes out may 19, 2020, and i’ve been biting my tongue, waiting until i could start talking about this damn book, specifically waiting for when the ARC would be out, so people could start reading it and sharing it, which meant i could, too. the whole thing around this book has been strange, though, and the total silence around it when we are two months from pub date is weird. i mean, i know we’re in a global pandemic, but this ARC should theoretically have been out in the world in january.
i won’t really go into the book here. you can read more about it on eater. i only mention it because want to reference a few things because they’re related to the thing that prompted me to start writing this substack to begin with, and, again, we’re two months from pub date, so, unless the book has been pulled (or will be pulled), it should be fine to start generating conversation around it. as of now, eat a peach is available for preorder, so i’m moving forward, assuming that the book is moving forward, and i really do hope the book is indeed moving forward. chang makes himself really vulnerable in unexpected ways, and, as long as he’s ready to talk about the things he brings up, he could potentially kick off so many positive conversations around mental illness that could help decrease stigma and normalize seeking help, especially among asian american men and in the asian community at-large.
if there are two things to take away from eat a peach, they are that (1) working your ass off is way more important than any degree of natural talent and (2) you need people in your life. you need people who believe in you, who are willing to take risks on you, who care for you enough to put up with your bullshit and assholery. humans are relational beings; we need other people; so invest in people. keep good people in your life.
and then there is also this: you are so much more than your mental illness. your mental illness does not define you or limit what you can or cannot achieve, and it certainly does not take away your capacity to be loved.
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does that mean i believe that for myself? of course not.
for many years, i’ve been open about living with major depressive disorder and suicidal thinking, sharing honestly on instagram and my now-kinda-defunct blog about whatever my brain was going through. last year, i had an essay in the rumpus about the longest and darkest depressive episode i’ve gone through, which stretched from late 2015 (when i was still living in brooklyn) all way until early 2017, when i was forcibly moved back to los angeles. there was the financial aspect of the move; i’d spent much of 2016 looking for jobs, interviewing for jobs, not getting any jobs; but there was the other thing — that i had been so depressed and suicidal for so long that my parents noticed and actually staged an intervention, afraid that i would kill myself if they left me alone in brooklyn.
i went back to LA, moved back in with them. i finally got the professional help i should have gotten ten years ago. slowly, i got back to normal.
the thing with depression and suicidal depression, for me, is that these are just things i have had to learn to live with. 2015 was not the first time i was depressed and suicidal, and 2017 wasn’t the last. i wrote a substack last november that got more into this.
i’m not supposed to be here.
for whatever reason, i am still here, though, and it’s discomfiting to see the effects of 2015-2017 still echoing in my life. i moved back to brooklyn in december 2018, and i’ve been surviving for the most part, though my broken brain has often felt so much more difficult to manage now that i no longer have my dog. living with depression and suicidal thinking means, at least, that i’ve learned how to manage for the most part. i have my tricks; i’m better at reading my body; and i am more practiced at seeking out what i need to stave off as much of the depression as i can.
this need to quarantine to reduce the spread of covid-19 is one of the worst things for my broken brain. i need people, physical contact with people, and i need to be able to move around and not be confined to a space. i continue to be thankful for technology for making constant communication possible, for friends who check in on me regularly, for my parents who call and text every day, even though they’re not quarantining (OMG) or sending me any photos of my dogs.
it hit me after one of my calls with my dad, though. i’m afraid of hitting that day when i finally die, but i’m always afraid of that — even when i’m not actively suicidal, the thought of dying is just something i live with every single day.
it hits me, though, that this is now a fear my parents also live with. when i express feelings of anxiety, when i am in situations like this where isolation is necessary, they are afraid because my broken brain is something they must also carry because they love me. i tried to hide it from them for years, but, after 2017, they know — and they know how bad my brain can get. they’ve seen me shut down and become unresponsive. they’ve seen me unable to do anything but cry. they’ve seen me at some of my most precarious moments.
they’ll never say it in words, but i can hear it running under their concern. my parents are also afraid that i will die.
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my mother has taken to asking me about dating on the regular now, which isn’t surprising, i suppose, given that i am old and chronically single. when she brings it up, telling me i should try online dating because that’s where everyone seems to meet these days, i tend to laugh, try to shrug it off, move the conversation along.
it’s not that i like being single and am committed to spinsterdom. i would love to be partnered. i do hate dating, though, hate the whole dance of it, but the thing is that i have two very specific reasons why i am so loathe to date, to open myself up to that possibility or be the first to pursue someone even if i am interested. i won’t get into the first here, not publicly, but the other reason is this very fact that i live with major depression and suicidal thinking. i’ve seen how much that hurts the people who love me. i don’t want to make anyone else have to carry that burden.
in eat a peach, chang doesn’t give away much about his relationship and marriage with his wife, grace seo — she’s a private figure, and he absolutely should not feel like he has to share more than they’re comfortable with the public knowing. he does talk about it, though, about the positive force she’s been in his life. at one point, he admits that he feels the marriage is unbalanced, that seo gives so much more than he does, that it must be so difficult to be with someone who must constantly be reminded and made to believe that you love him. she loves him, and he loves her — you see that coming off the page.
you’d think i’d take hope away from this, hope that, yes, maybe it’s just about finding that right person, that someone who could maybe love you enough to stay up with you to make sure you don’t harm myself, to work through the ups and downs of medication and depressive, suicidal episodes, to be a stabilizing force through it all, but i don’t know. i think, right now, all i have is fear. i was let go from my job last year, a month after my company found out i was depressed and suicidal — i am not saying or claiming or implying there was any connection there because it was probably just unfortunate timing, despite my manager saying to my face that she had no problem with my job performance. that rattled me more than i like to admit because, even if there were no connection, given the timing, the whole thing still sits like a stone at the bottom of my stomach, that heavy, nauseating reminder that what i was afraid of for so long was true — that my broken brain means that i am not someone who is to be valued. i am not worth believing in or investing in. i am a liability.
i am not someone worth taking a leap of faith for.
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i’ve been more guarded about talking about my brain since, and i honestly didn’t really intend to write so openly about it again, not any time soon. quarantine, though, has loosened things up in my head, and, even as i type these words up, i question the wisdom of actually sending this out. how much more could i lose if more people know? how many more opportunities would slip away, fail to materialize? who else will want to keep away?
it, however, feels strange and hypocritical to expect someone else to be willing to be open about his brain just because he has a platform. i think it’s easy to look at public figures and expect them to be vulnerable because they must have so much more than we do, but i know how terrifying it is to open yourself up about mental illness — you’re making yourself a target, and you’re also signing yourself up to be defined by your brain things for the rest of forever. people will always look at you through the lens of mental illness, imprinting on you whatever assumptions they have of you.
at the end of his book, chang loops back to talking about suicidal thinking and depression. the point he more or less leaves us on is that surviving depression does come down to our ability and willingness to do something about it. he’s not saying that we can overcome depression on sheer willpower alone but that, when it comes to overcoming depression, to living through suicidal thinking, we have to choose to do so — no one can do it for us.
in my essay for the rumpus, i wrote:
When it comes to mental illness, we are unfortunately our best advocates. We need to speak up for ourselves, to describe the pain we’re going through in ways that people can hopefully understand, that help them tap into their reserves of basic human sympathy and compassion. It’s a daunting, terrifying task, and there’s always the risk that we won’t be believed—that we’ll be condescended to and written off—but, if we don’t speak up for ourselves, no one else will, not in any way that will actually help us.
i still stand by that. i’m not saying it’s easy — it’s not. speaking up to try to advocate for your brain is one of the most difficult, painful things to do because of stigma and shame, but, in order to live, to stay alive, we have to be the ones who make that choice. some days, that choice looks like staying in bed and crying all day. other days, that choice looks like taking a shower or going for a walk outside. that choice can also look like going out for a meal, texting a friend, going to therapy, taking meds, taking care of a dog, laughing over a stupid joke, doing a skincare routine, going in to work every day, getting dressed, staying in your pajamas all day, marathoning law and order: special victims unit, making pasta, propagating scallions — that choice to stay alive looks like anything and everything. there is no right or wrong way to practice that choice. the important thing is that we try.
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other thoughts re: eat a peach?
the structure falls apart in the second half. i still cry every time chang mentions his dad because there's nothing like angsty asian parent-child relationship stories to squeeze my heart and get me crying because i'm an child-of-immigrants cliché like that. there's a lot i want to yell about gender and how, yeah, it's cool that chang acknowledges gender inequality in the food industry on a deeper, more self-aware than other men do, but that there’s a serious disconnect when you look at momofuku, which has one! woman! executive! chef! and very male-dominant kitchens.
i’m really fucking glad he wrote this book, and i hope it makes it out into the world, and i really hope he’s ready to have some of the difficult conversations it’s going to bring up.