by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)
There is only one person I could do without. On my last day in the hospital, a dark-haired, pinched-mouthed nurse comes in to open my curtains and take my vitals. As she squeezes my wrist between her fingers to check my pulse, she reprimands me for being so upbeat all the time. “You need to stop that. You’re going to have to deal with these feelings, you know.” It registers like a slap. At this moment, I have no idea what lies ahead, no idea about the years of surgeries—the bone and cartilage grafts taken from ribs and ears, the attempts to reconfigure my eye socket and nose again and again. I’m just grateful to still be alive. Whether she “means well” (the most damning of sentences) or is a sadistic bitch doesn’t matter. Whatever her motivations, she has no right to tell me how to feel, what to feel, and when I need to feel it. That is mine alone to determine. I say this less to condemn her and more to tell you that you have a right to arrive at your feelings in your own way and in your own time, and that’s nobody’s business but yours and, if needed, a trained therapist’s. (And even there, you are still in control of that particular feelings bus.) So, we’ll leave it at “she meant well but should have kept her mouth shut.”
The bandages come off. I’m handed a mirror. The last time I’d seen myself was a glimpse in the rearview mirror of my car when I’d thought, in that fleeting moment, that I was pretty. It’s oddly fascinating to view my swollen, sutured face. Like seeing somebody else’s. Our faces are part of our identities, and this part of my identity has now been altered forever. There are stitches keeping my top lip together. Braces and wires holding my jaw shut. A permanently lopsided smile thanks to severed nerves. There’s a temporary nose, flat as a pancake. And a sunken hollow where my left eye used to be. A clear conformer—a piece of plastic—holds the shape until I can be fitted for a prosthesis in two months’ time. The nurses tape an eye patch on me and help me to a wheelchair. We hug goodbye. And I go home to heal.
That summer, nothing seems real or permanent just yet. I’m still hopeful that I’ll be “fixed.” I go to countless doctors’ appointments. People come to visit. They tell me that I’m strong. So strong. Really, really strong. And because they say it enough, I feel that I’ve got to be that strong girl. I sense the unspoken message swimming under their words: Don’t be sad or angry. There’s nothing worse than a sad or angry misshapen girl. No one wants to be around that. My mother spends her summer having to take care of me—putting all my food into a blender, helping me into and out of the tub, cleaning the wounds I can’t reach. It’s a tremendous strain on her, I know. “I guess I’m just not supposed to go back to school and get my master’s!” she says angrily one day in frustration. And I get it even as I absorb the guilt.
In August, my jaw is unwired. The cast comes off my leg. And I’m fitted for my first prosthesis. That’s when reality slinks in and sits down hard. I don’t know what I expected. That’s a lie. I do know. I expected that everything would be just like before. The prosthesis would magically work, like Steve Austin’s bionic eye on the show The Six Million Dollar Man. On TV, everything works out. But my new eye is nothing like that. The crash obliterated not just my left eye but all the bones around it as well as the nerves that make an eye blink and track. The unmoving prosthesis sinks back deep into the damaged socket, and the baffled doctors can’t figure out how to make it come forward in my face. It’s no more than a painted rock stuck into the hole where I used to have an eye.
“Looks great. So realistic! I can’t even tell,” everyone says.
They’re lying. I know they’re lying, but I need them to lie. Besides, word on the street is that I’m strong and brave and not angry or sad, and I want to play my part like the good actress I am, like the actress I will never become. Actresses need working eyes, I tell myself. Only my mother says nothing. Because she is the most honest person I know.
Summer ends. With the exception of EJ, most of my friends leave for various colleges in far-flung cities. Numb, I pack up my clothes, books, records and record player, and, at the last minute, a little yellow journal, a graduation gift from the man who’d been fixing my mother’s roof at the time. Often, our salvation comes from the unlikeliest of people and connections. I drive across town to North Texas State University and move into the dorm. As planned, I tape my Cheap Trick and Led Zeppelin posters on my side of the room, prep my shower caddy with shampoo and soap.
And then I descend into hell.
* * *
• • •
Every day, I’m breaking inside. I watch the girls preening for the boys. Watch them wanding mascara through the perfect eyelashes of their perfect eyes, and I would give anything to be one of them. I’m not pretty anymore. I will never be pretty. Never be “normal.” I’m disfigured. A freak. And my freakish appearance makes most people uncomfortable, as if, simply by being in my presence, they might catch the bad luck of me. Looking at me makes them feel guilty for having escaped one of fate’s cruel turns in the road. People are not to be hated for this. A certain amount of denial is necessary for getting through life. At its best, it allows us to ride the roller coaster, drive cars, fly in planes. At its worst, it ignores the humanness of other humans. It denies that misfortune happens, and that sometimes people need help, not scorn or shame. “You have a great personality” has never felt so awful to hear. Fact: Freshman boys are not judging your personality first. I am mostly invisible. When I am visible, it’s worse. A girl on my floor sees my driver’s license with the “before” picture of me. “What happened to you?” she asks with obvious distaste, as if my face were a messy table in a restaurant that needs cleaning before she’ll even think of sitting down. And then, with a shake of her head, “You were so pretty.”
One day on campus, I run into a man who used to frequent the independent bookstore where I worked the summer before my senior year of high school. He doesn’t recognize me, and I have to tell him who I am. “I was in an accident,” I say, the words a reflex now. “Oh, I wondered,” he says, after I give him the CliffsNotes version. “I mean, one side of your face is still beautiful, but the other side looks like Frankenstein.”
Every night I go to bed with the same prayer: “Please, God, make this go away.” And every morning, for those first few seconds before reality creeps in, I dream that I’m my old self and everything is as it was. But it’s not. It’s the new normal, which is not normal, but fucked up and frightening and alienating. I know that I’m mortal now. Eighteen-year-olds are not supposed to have a firm grasp on just how easily they can die. They’re supposed to take risks. Each time I get into a car as either a passenger or driver is a full-on panic attack. I can’t drive above forty miles an hour, can’t even think about getting on the highway. With no depth perception, I can’t judge how near or far the car in front of me is. And looking to my left to merge into oncoming traffic is a nightmare.
It becomes my routine to wait for my roommate to leave, then anesthetize myself by getting high—booze, pills, pot, speed, whatever’s handy—and listen to side four of The Who’s Quadrophenia. It’s the musical story of Jimmy, a working-class speed-freak mod in mid-1960s England, alienated from his family, desperate for more than the world offers, rejected by the girl he loves, and lost in his own fractured mind (“I’m not schizophrenic; I’m bleeding quadrophenic”). The music is beautiful and sharp with pain and longing. It’s an exquisite sadness that makes me feel seen and understood. Sometimes, hope is an album written by an angry British rock star about an angry, alienated speed-freak boy who understands your pain. Sometimes, hope is a song or a book or TV show, anything that makes you feel connected to the rest of the world. Something that reminds you that you are not alone in your pain.
“Is it me for a moment?” the song asks. “The stars are falling. The heat is rising. The past is calling.”
Like the stars in the song, I am falling. It’s getting harder and harder for me to attend classes. Get out of bed. Change clothes. Take a shower. EJ stops by one day after her las
t class and tries to pull me from the bed. “You have to get up!” Her blond perfection is an affront. She is my best friend, and I resent her for her beauty, for the boys who follow her around like eager puppies. It’s unfair, of course. She’s had plenty of bad breaks and will go on to have many more. But that’s what the absence of hope does in the throes of a deep depression: It works like a Pro Tools vocal compressor, squeezing all the highs and lows into a flat tonality. I am alone. More fundamentally alone than I have ever been in my life. Like an astronaut whose line has come untethered in space, I float into a vast, silent dark.
* * *
• • •
On the worst of these nights, I go to a party with EJ and a few other girls from my dorm. While they primp and prep excitedly, I keep trying to put eyeliner on my left eye. The prosthesis waters constantly, washing away my work until I give up. I don’t want to go to this party. I’m so raw around the edges, it’s as if my messy pain is on the outside, falling around me in sickening glops as I walk; the brave-not-sad act is wearing out. EJ alters the dates on our driver’s licenses with an X-Acto knife so we appear to be above the drinking age. As she performs surgery on my ID, it feels symbolic somehow. I’m no longer the girl in that DMV photo. I feel older. Older than I should. My roommate, who is dating my brother, has gone to Waco for the weekend with him. She’s left behind her purse, which has a slot in front with a plastic covering for an ID. It will further obscure the X-Acto knife work. Perfect, I think, slinging the purse over my shoulder.
At the party, my cute friends are surrounded by flirtatious boys. But no boy will talk to me for longer than is politely necessary. It’s as if my damaged face has rendered me invisible. I stand on the outside of the circle. As it turns out, my roommate has forgotten her birth control pills in the purse I’ve borrowed. After an hour of searching, she finally tracks me down at the party, furious. “I’m sorry. I thought you were gone,” I say over and over. The commotion is embarrassing me. I don’t want to draw attention. Don’t want people looking at me. At my face. She flounces off toward my brother’s waiting car, purse in tow. He rises from the driver’s side and yells across the front lawn: “You stupid fucking . . .” Well, let’s just say it’s a word that rhymes with punt. Then they peel out, leaving me there on the lawn. Everyone turns to look now. Everyone turns to look at the freak who is also a stupid effing rhymes-with-punt. Someone nearby laughs, “Oh my God.” My humiliation is complete. When everyone turns back to their keg-pumping and mating rituals, I leave the party. No one notices. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I tell myself with each slap of my sandals on the sidewalk. As I climb the stairs to my floor, I consider taking all the painkillers I’ve got left—ten, fifteen pills—and checking out for good. Why not? What’s left? This will be my life forever. This pain will never end. The thought of that future squeezes the air from my lungs. Alone in my dorm room, I put on side four of Quadrophenia. I grip the pill bottle in one hand. And then I sob as if something has come loose inside me. As if I am so broken, there will never be any putting me back together.
As if there is no chance of hope ever again.
The beautiful thing about hope is that it doesn’t give up on you. It waits around for you to notice it. Like being up early enough to catch the sunrise. Seeing that first pink light fall across a dewy spiderweb. Realizing how much beauty and life continues while you’re feeling lost. For just a moment, you’re found. A moment may be all you need to continue to the next moment. Hope is patient. And stronger than you can imagine. Emily Dickinson said that “Hope is the thing with feathers.” You ever looked at a feather? Everybody always thinks about the soft, velvety floss. But a feather’s got a fucking spine inside it. That spine is flexible enough for flight; it’s tough enough to hold all that floss together. Put enough feathers together and you’ve got wings to carry you forward. Fucking hope, man. It’s good stuff.
That night, all I know is that I need to get the pain inside me out somehow. I don’t care how. That’s when I pick up the little yellow journal still packed in my milk crate of stuff. I crack it open. Blank pages stare back at me. Where to start? How to say what must be said? I make my first entry on the second page: “I don’t know why I didn’t write on the first page. I hate to devirginize anything, I guess.”
One sentence. Then another. And just like that, it’s begun. I’m writing myself back into existence. “Is it me for a moment?” Quadrophenia asks. It is. The new me. The one emerging. The one who will keep writing, first to stay alive, then because it’s all I want to do. Because there is so much life to write about. I write as a willful act of reconstruction. I am building a self with each word, each phrase, each sentence. When I close the journal, I am exhausted. But I am also still alive.
I crawl into bed. For the first time in weeks, I sleep well.
* * *
• • •
It would be tempting to end here on this little fist pump of airbrushed hope that the magazine stories and feel-good ad campaigns really love. But that’s bullshit, and I always vowed I’d never bullshit you. The truth is, hope is a bit like a muscle you have to exercise, and mine needed plenty of help. Hope is sometimes less a freeze-frame-worthy “Hell yeah!” than it is a series of adjustments you make over time, a different way of seeing. Of being in the world. And so I think it’s important to tell you that I spent many more months trying and failing, punishing myself and feeling lost in pain.
I think it’s important to tell you two more quick stories.
* * *
• • •
At the end of that terrible year, on a night when hope bangs on the window trying to get my attention but I ignore it, I go to a party where I feel as if my soul is imploding and all my effort goes toward holding my smile in place. Look at me! I’m not sad! I am the life of the party! Along the way, I get very fucked up. Somewhere around Too-Far-Gone O’Clock, I climb up onto the bar to prove that I absolutely-positively-can-so-tap-dance-just-watch-this-y’all. The minute I stand up, I am whacked in the head by a whirring ceiling fan. The metal blades slash through my forehead fast as Ginsu knives. I tumble to the floor, laughing as, once again, blood courses over my face and down my shirt. In the emergency room, the seen-it-all doctor on call informs me, once again, that there’s good news and bad news. Bad news: I need twenty-five stitches to close the wounds in my head, and since I’m higher than a kite, he can’t give me any pain medication. The good news? I probably won’t feel it in my state. He’s right on both counts—it takes exactly twenty-five stitches and I don’t feel a thing.
In the sober light of early morning, I sure do. My skull pounds as I make my way to my mother’s house. I am lost, lost, so lost. She opens the door, takes one look at my gauze-wrapped head seeping blood and the shirt that looks as if I’ve been to an all-night massacre, and puts a hand to her mouth.
“Please don’t say anything,” I beg. I’m starting to cry now, the whole ugly year rising up inside me like a wounded animal howling in the wilderness, desperate for some small comfort. It takes a long time for the words to form in my gut and fight their way up my throat and onto my tongue. “You have to help me get out of here or I’m going to die. And I am so tired of dying.”
Sometimes hope is asking for help because you need someone else’s hope to light the way. Everyone needs help now and then. There is no shame in it, my loves. My mother calls my father. They make more calls. It seems they’ve been wanting to help but had no idea how to reach me out in space. Within weeks, I’m enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. I am starting over. Starting fresh.
In August, I move into another dorm in Austin, where I still do not feel completely at home yet. Where I still believe myself weird and ugly and unworthy and all of those lies. But I’m working on it. I’ve packed new hope for this trip. The sort of hope borne of a year of grit and hurt, of being shattered and slowly rebuilt, inside and out. I’m growing a feather’s spine. I meet others like m
e: misfits and weirdos and freaks. People who come trailing suitcases of pain but also dreams. Soon enough, I find I do belong. We begin making a world of our own. There are sing-alongs on rooftops and epic dinner parties and performances with a comedy troupe where no one tells me I need two eyes to be onstage. I’ve brought the yellow journal. Through it all, I keep writing, braiding myself a lifeline with words.
More and more, hope is a pen.
* * *
• • •
Last month, I cleaned out my desk. Its drawers were chock-full of Things I Could Not Live Without—my son’s artwork from elementary school, a parody gossip rag EJ and I wrote in middle school, letters from my college friend Laurie the year she moved to Hollywood and her life was dusted with odd magic and sometimes just the odd, love notes from my husband, birth certificates and death certificates and my grandmother’s diary from 1927 in which she wrote, on the anniversary of her fifteen-year-old brother’s death, “Today is a hard day.” Sometimes, there are hard days. Days stretched so tight with pain that they seem as if they can allow no room for hope.
But it’s there. I promise you, it is there.
