But there was something about the visceral impact of sending what I was feeling out into the universe that felt different than just writing in a journal. It gave me relief. Maybe it was just the dopamine of hitting Send, but I felt like things were starting to move and clear out of me. Then people started following, in rapid numbers. The account grew and grew.
Then a really weird thing happened. I began to come out of my all-consuming anxiety and depression. But what I found was that there were always daily sadnesses to tweet about. I had never acknowledged this before, how sad things were. I guess I had always felt that to admit to myself that I was sad meant it was real. It made me feel like a loser. Who wants to be sad? But all of those sadnesses, unacknowledged over time, were pushing up against the Band-Aids I put over them. As anxiety and depression, they were screaming to get out.
As I mined my feelings for the account, which grew bigger and bigger, I felt like the opposite of a loser. I felt popular. I felt popular based on my truth. I began to celebrate this sensitive part of me—the things that I thought were most despicable: my need for constant validation, disappointment, feeling gross and fat and ugly. Also more essential things like, Why are we here? And what’s the point? The more real I was, the more people could relate. It seemed like there were a shitload of people who were scared of life and death, also people who were disappointed when they tried to partake in activities to cover over these fears and the activities didn’t work out, and they were forced once again to return to their primal sadnesses.
There were other Twitter accounts in this vein that seemed stupid to me. There were accounts where people were saying, If you’re depressed or sad, just get up and dance. That’s a crazy fucking thing to tell a depressed person. I felt that in the reality of what I had experienced, it was a lot more helpful to just lie there and share experiences with others who understood. What worked for me was to maybe make myself laugh about my plight, and through the grace of the Internet, make other people laugh.
The experience of being alive, its isness, maybe in relation to the future isn’tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes. Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die. I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.
Why aren’t we all walking around and acknowledging this all the time? Maybe we can’t afford to. Maybe when we’re not in the fear and sadness, we run from it. We don’t want to think about it.
I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue—a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn’t someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn’t someone have said, “Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it,” so I didn’t have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says, I’m alive and it’s real. It says, I’m going to die and it’s real.
With a name like So Sad Today, I feel pressure to write the perfect essay about anxiety and depression. But it’s the illusion of perfection that catalyzes my anxiety and depression. Perfectionism turns a minor shift in body temperature, a missed breath, into a full-fledged panic attack, especially when I am in the company of people for whom I feel I need to perform. The beginnings of a panic attack—the shortness of breath, the tightness in my chest, the unreality—are simply sensations. They will escalate or dissolve based on how fearfully I respond to them. Thus far, I’ve usually responded fearfully.
Perfectionism, of course, is not the sole culprit in my anxiety and depression. There is also chemistry, sensitivity, history, nurture, DNA, and questions existential and mystic—questions I have been discouraged from thinking about too hard, like, Why am I here? What is all of this? Am I going to die? Am I going to die right now? If I die right now, is that all there is? If I don’t die right now, is this all there is?
It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?
In the name of perfectionism, I have tried to stick to a linear narrative in describing my history of anxiety and depression, as it is a trajectory that most of us can follow in our surface comings and goings. Hopefully I was able to transcend it just a little. Maybe you relate to my what the fuckness and feel a little better about your own. All I want from you is to be liked. Of course, that is a scared woman’s way of saying what I really want, which is to connect with you on a deep and true level while I am still on this earth, and maybe even after I am off it.
Acknowledgments
Love and thanks to:
Sara Weiss, for bringing me on
Karah Preiss, for moving and shaking
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, for being more than an agent
Libby Burton, for edits on fleek
Jonathan Smith, for VICE cool and unexpected kindness
The first SST followers, for finding me in a dark corner of the Internet
THE TEENS, I love you most of all!!! <3 <3 <3
Liz Pelly, Jenn Pelly, Brandon Stosuy, Gabby Bess, James Montgomery, Preteen Gallery, Hazel Cills, Nimrod Kamer, Simon Vozick-Levinson, Safy Hallan-Farrah, Sky Ferreira, and Dev Hynes, for blowing my shit up
Brad Listi, for dreaming big. Bush did 9/11. #chalupa
Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, for publicizing a publicist
Carolyn Kurek, best copyedits ever
Geoff Kloske, for Meredith (and also just being nice)
Kristen Iskandrian and Lorian Long, for witchin’ out
Tyler Crawford, ilysm bae
Hayley, for going through it all with me, I love you
Mom and Dad, I love you (and sorry)
Nicky, for the comprehensive love package and keeping it the most real
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others. Thanks to VICE and The Fanzine, where some of the material in So Sad Today first appeared in a different form.
About the Author
MELISSA BRODER is the author of four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House, 2016). Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Guernica, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. She lives in Venice, California.
Also by Melissa Broder
Last Sext
Scarecrone
Meat Heart
When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
How to Never Be Enough
Love in the Time of Chakras
I Want to Be a Whole Person but Really Thin
Help Me Not Be a Human Being
Love Like You Are Trying to Fill an Insatiable Spiritual Hole with Another Person Who Will Suffocate in There
Honk If There’s a Committee in Your Head Trying to Kill You
I Took the Internet Addiction Quiz and I Won
I Don’t Feel Bad About My Neck
The Patron Saint of Nicotine Gum
My Vomit Fetish, Myself
One Text Is Too Many and a Thousand Are Never Enough
Hello 911, I Can’t Stop Time
Google Hangout with My Higher Self
&nbs
p; The Terror in My Heart Says Hi
Never Getting Over the Fantasy of You Is Going Okay
Keep Your Friends Close but Your Anxiety Closer
I Told You Not to Get the Knish: Thoughts on Open Marriage and Illness
Under the Anxiety Is Sadness but Who Would Go Under There
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Melissa Broder
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Melissa Broder
Cover design: Brigid Pearson
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: March 2016
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ISBN 978-1-4555-6271-8
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