The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  Dedication

  For when you are afraid.

  Epigraph

  Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

  —Ben Okri

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I Am Still Fighting with My Big and Small Fears

  ten, or The Little Girl Character

  Here Is My Heart

  F

  Stand Here to Save Lives

  twenty, or Good Lord, It’s Me, Jane.

  Come Questo

  The Buildup To and Takeaway From

  This Essay Is Done

  thirty, or Come Here Fear

  Course of One’s Life

  The Blogger’s Wife

  What Belongs to Us

  forty, or Optimist

  Real and Imaginary Ghosts

  We Say and Do Kind Things

  The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Tools or Weapons, Depending on Your Translation

  About the Author

  Advance Praise for The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

  Also by Megan Stielstra

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I Am Still Fighting with My Big and Small Fears

  A lifetime or two ago, I lived with my friends Heather and Pete on Armitage Avenue, just west of Western. Our apartment was a unicorn so far as renting in Chicago: an enormous open loft, wallpapered with windows and cheap as hell. A hallway snaked back to two smaller rooms—one for me, one for Heather—and, behind those, what Realtors call the master bedroom: huge, with high ceilings and a skylight. This was Pete’s room. He paid double. He had a nine-to-five job in an art studio with a salary and health insurance, which to me seemed so grown-up and impossible, especially for an artist, but he did it. He made art and he made a living, and if he could, I could. At twenty-three I needed that belief like food and sex and shelter.

  When he let me, I’d sit on the floor in his room while he painted, reading aloud from the novels I was studying and sometimes, if I felt brave, my own nervous starts at stories. I loved being there, part of it, the process, the mess, tubes and brushes and sketches and ashtrays overflowing so he’d ash in empty beer bottles or in mugs filled with days-old coffee or mugs filled with paint water or mugs filled with whiskey or wine. I don’t think we owned glassware. I don’t think we washed dishes. It made more sense to avoid the stacked piles in the kitchen sink and, instead, grab a mug off Pete’s floor and scrub out the moldy coffee cream in the bathtub. He didn’t have any furniture, just a mattress on the floor, a cage for his iguana, and canvases: finished pieces, half-done stuff—still dripping, newly stretched and ready to go. He painted bodies. He painted abstract. He painted me, circus poster–style, biting the head off a live chicken after I read him the scene from Geek Love where Aqua Boy preaches to the devoted: “If they love you then it must mean you’re all right. You poor baby. You just want to feel all right.”

  “Read that part again,” he said, pointing at me with a paintbrush. He was muscle and sinew, arms full sleeved with black geometric tattoos. He had a long, pointy goatee a decade before hipsters and what’s it called? Beard art. He wore a belligerent uniform of black jeans and no shirt, never a shirt. He must have owned some, at least for work, or our shitty Chicago winters. Band-logo stuff, probably: Slayer and Black Sabbath and Behold! The Living Corpse. I’m trying to see him: reaching down the line of my life, memory as portraiture, a still shot instead of a moving picture. He smelled like cigarettes. He built me bookshelves. He’d make both fists into devil horns, yell “metal!” and stick his tongue down past his chin. He pointed at me with a paintbrush: “Poor baby. You just want to feel all right.”

  For my birthday, he took me to the Art Institute. We were there for hours. He taught me to see. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious. It was actually a gift. We went painting by painting: color, context, scale. I’d be ready to move on and he’d tell me to wait, look again, look closer. “What do you see?” he’d say. “How was it made?” “When was it made?” “What was happening in the world when it was made?” “How did what was happening influence what was being made?” “What are you going to make?” and “When are you going to start?”

  “Now,” I’d say. “Today.”

  The questions we ask about art are equally vital in examining the self: memory and assumption, love and fear. I’d build on this vocabulary over two decades teaching writers and teaching teachers, but I first started thinking about it with Pete in the Art Institute, standing in front of Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Toulouse-Lautrec. My favorite is Sky Above Clouds IV, a twenty-four-foot oil painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. It hangs above the back gallery staircase, the ceiling diffused sunlight. It’s breathtaking: blue and pink and a sea of white clouds like cobblestones. I see it like a road. A path. You can walk down the stairs or up into the sky.

  The truth? I was in love with him.

  How could I not be, there under the clouds?

  Nothing happened, of course. He was my roommate. He was my friend. He didn’t like me like that. It would have gotten weird. I’d been hurt before. Everything ends badly. Breakups are awful. Divorce requires paperwork. Juliet dies in the end. The iguana smelled. I hated metal. What if he didn’t feel the same and I had to stop imagining us together, the video on demand as I fell asleep at night? “Uncertainty is better,” wrote Chekhov. “At least then there’s hope.” What if we did get together and I hurt him? I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him. So much so that I’d bug him about the cigarettes and he’d tell me to back off and I’d quote statistics about lung-related death and he’d say we could all go at any time, wiped out by a bus, a train, an explosion like lightning, a heart attack on a mountain, a tumor in the brain, the skin, the breast, by your own hand when it’s all too much, or an AR-15 in a school or park or street so who gives a shit about a cigarette, what’s healthy or right or fair?

  There are so many reasons not to try.

  They all start with I’m scared.

  * * *

  I started writing about fear in 2008. It seems impossible that this period is already history: the Great Recession, a national and global economic decline beginning with the burst of an eight-trillion-dollar housing bubble, dot dot dot.

  It sounds like a movie. A novel. Something to read about, not live through.

  My husband and I had just gotten married, just bought a condo, just had a baby, the one-two-three punch of the American dream. We were making it: me in education, him in web design. Then—snap your fingers—the market crashed. We couldn’t sell. We couldn’t rent. We couldn’t keep up with the mortgage, which had less to do with the economy and more with me being, quite literally, on the floor. There are so many metaphors about depression in general and postpartum specifically: mountains, climbing over; waves, crashing down; fog, moving through; storms, up up and away. I appreciate the need to find common language, to name the experience and feel less alone in its mess, but I have a hard time seeing the poetry. It sucked, it sucked, it sucked.

  Our condo was across the street from the Aragon Ballroom, a legendary rock club in Uptown on Chicago’s North Side. Bands played every weekend. Fans lined up around the block. You could hear the music through my windows, a weird sort of soundtrack to the most scared I’ve ever been. Marilyn Manson and my baby won’t eat. Smashing Pumpkins and my baby won’t sleep. Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the banks call every day: Do you know you’re overdue? Do you know the consequences of being overdue? Are you sure? I was scared to leave the house, scared I would hurt myself. Something is wrong, I can feel it, no i
t’s not all in my head.

  At one point, I opened my journal and wrote: i need help.

  * * *

  I climbed the stairs to the apartment on Armitage and covered my ears. The music from Pete’s room was so loud the apartment vibrated; a car with the bass cranked, a strobe light with sound. In my memory it was Rammstein. German industrial metal. They play a subgenre of rock called neue deutsche Härte or new German hardness; their name translates to “ramming stone.” That’s what my bathroom sounded like: hardness, ramming, a jackhammer.

  I went into the bathroom where Heather was getting ready: mascara and lipstick and wild red hair. She worked late-night bar shifts; I worked daytime brunch. We saw each other at 3:00 a.m. if I was up writing or 3:00 p.m. before she ran out the door. We watched Ab Fab and wuxia films. She took me to buy my first vibrator and my first window air conditioner, necessary appliances for the modern woman. I’m trying to see her: reaching down the line of my life. She smelled like honey. She loaned me dresses. She gave me music: hip-hop, house, and R&B, which in 1998 meant The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and in Chicago meant Jesse De La Pena. We’d go dancing at the Subterranean and I’d study her: hip and swerve and that wild hair. I tried to move like she moved—hands go here, feet here, ass like this—the same way I learned dialogue from Hurston, pacing from Selby, sentences from Woolf. Heather wasn’t having it. She tried to help, to loosen me up, putting her hands over my eyes and instructing me to feel. “Listen,” she said, her lips at my ear. “Being in the music is like being in a book.” I’ve danced with that idea for years: feeling as reading, the body as a text.

  “what the hell?” I yelled, gesturing at the noise.

  “i know,” Heather yelled. “somethingsomethingsomethingloud.”

  “what?”

  “i tried talking to him but—”

  “what?”

  “he told me—” she started, then gave up and made follow-me hands. We went down three flights of stairs to the driveway and leaned against her minivan, a peach-colored thing she lent to me for teaching gigs. We could hear the music through the windows but from outside it was muted, pulse instead of punch. A man sold fresh melons from a pickup truck out front. Kids chased an elotes cart down Armitage. Heather lit a cigarette and I reached for it; I didn’t smoke but what else do you do with your hands? She sounded worried as she told me a friend of Pete’s had died. She didn’t know who. Someone from before us. Someone he loved. “He went into his room and turned on the music,” she said, taking back the cigarette. “I tried to talk to him, but—” she stopped because truly, what do you say? We hold our friends’ hands as their hearts break: lost lovers, lost children, divorce and illness and addiction. There are no perfect words. We can be there. “How can I help?” we say. We say, “I’m sorry.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  We both looked up, third floor, back of the building.

  What a stupid fucking question.

  I don’t remember how long it went on: the jackhammer, the locked bedroom door. I want to say weeks, but I’m known to exaggerate, to add the extra ten feet the hero has to jump. I’d come home from night classes, from student teaching, from waiting tables, from writing in coffee shops, from hanging out at friends’ houses so mercifully still and quiet and every time I climbed the stairs, I felt the floor beneath my feet.

  “Pete!” I’d yell through his door and over the music. “Can I get you anything?” and “Do you want to talk?” and “The music is really loud!” But what I meant was: How can I help?

  “No,” and “No,” and “I know,” he’d yell back. But what he meant was: Leave me the hell alone.

  One night I came home and heard nothing. No jackhammer, no pounding bass. At the time, I was reading the novel So Far from God by Ana Castillo. I was at the part where Fe—the middle sister who’d been screaming for months, stopping only to sleep, then waking up and screaming again, “her bloodcurdling wail became part of the household’s routine so that the animals didn’t even jump or howl no more”—had suddenly stopped. There was silence. So loud a silence. I heard that book in my own apartment. My life collided with its pages.

  The shower turned on in the bathroom and, at the end of our snake-like hall, I saw that Pete’s door was open. I tiptoed—past my room, past Heather’s, and into his.

  Twenty years later, and this is what I see:

  The room wallpapered in dull brown, what looks like grocery bags meticulously cut at the seams, then laid flat and taped together. Look closer and there’s the imprint of folded rectangles and the thick, clear industrial tape. Over that is the paint. Dark, dark purple. Dark red and blue. Thick and globbed, like it was thrown at the wall or sludged on with a knife. It starts at the ceiling and sprays down, running off the paper and onto a tarp over the floorboards, less like you’re looking at it and more like you’re inside it. I wanted to get out of there. But at the same time, I couldn’t look away: a car crash, a bar fight, a shooting, a scandal. We have to watch. We have to see.

  “It’s a lot. I know.” Pete stood in the doorway, a towel around his waist and dripping from the shower.

  I said something then. I don’t remember what. I hope it was: I’m sorry.

  We both looked at the walls.

  “I wanted to get it out of me,” he said, and even though it would be years before I understood what he meant, before I put my own heart in the open and looked, really looked, I still nodded like I understood. “You can’t fix it if you can’t see it.”

  * * *

  I don’t know how history will remember the summer of 2016, but it will be impossible to talk about it without talking about fear.

  I want to place you here. Something happens—say, Britain votes to leave the EU or Beyoncé releases a new album or a candidate for the United States presidency talks about his dick on live television. And within the week, hell, by the end of the day, there are op-eds and essays and—what are we calling journalism now?—content. Usually I’m writing in rapid response, so it’s strange trying to describe the culture of fear leading up to the 2016 election knowing that by the time you read this, the decision has already been made. Hillary Clinton may have served her first hundred days. Donald Trump may be signing an arms agreement with Russia. The GOP may have split and now we’re a three-party system—maybe four parties, maybe five. At this stage in the game, nothing would surprise me. Secession. Aliens. Skynet. We’re at the part in the sci-fi movie when machines take over the world because humans are killing each each other and they want to save us from ourselves.

  It would be fascinating if it weren’t so terrifying.

  Twenty-four-hour news cycles and scrolling social media feeds updated to the second, no time to process, to breathe. In Orlando, forty-nine queer people of color were murdered while they were dancing. Residents of Flint, Michigan, are still drinking lead-contaminated water. So far this year, 1,023* people have been shot by the police. At Trump rallies, the predominately white crowds yell awful slurs at black, Latino, Muslim, and gay people, and shout in reference to Hillary Clinton: “Hang the bitch.” A ten-year-old child yells, “Take the bitch down.” In August, the Southern Poverty Law Center issues a report documenting how Trump’s violent rhetoric is poisoning our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools, “producing an alarming level of fear among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom.” On MSNBC, Cokie Roberts takes the question to Trump himself, bringing up incidents of white children telling their darker-skinned classmates they’ll be deported if he wins. “Are you proud?” she asks. “Is that something you’ve done in American political and social discourse that you’re proud of?” He tells her it’s a nasty question.

  I want to believe we’re moving forward as a society and this surge of bigotry and violence is the final kick and scream, a last-ditch effort to hang onto the white patriarchal systems that favor the privileged.

  If we’re going to make it, we have to look at the fear.

  We ha
ve to get into it. Throw it against the wall, stand back and take a good close look. It’s ugly: heavy, dark, and centuries in the making. You might want to move on, to turn it off, watch something else, but wait—look again. Look closer. How was it made? When was it made? What was happening when it was made? What are you going to do about it? And when are you going to start?

  Now, I think.

  Today.

  ten, or The Little Girl Character

  3

  The first thing I remember is fear. I’m in the air—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked. All I hear is heartbeat. I look down and there’s my dad reaching for me, his face blurry below his open hands.

  Later, my mom filled in the blanks: This was Alma, Michigan, the town where I was born. Our neighbors had a treehouse, one of those epic little-kid fantasylands of ladders and rope bridges—think Swiss Family Robinson or Finca Bellavista. I was always getting stuck, going up and afraid to come down. I don’t remember any of it—not the tree, the neighbors, or even myself as the little girl character in this childhood narrative, typical small-town white and mid-middle class. All that’s there is the fear—my breath, my body, my bones.

  “Jump, kid,” said my dad.

  I’m forty years old and I can still hear his voice.

  “Jump.”

  5

  New town, new house: forty-some miles south to Owosso. In the side yard was a creek full of thorns and wild blackberries, my fingers dyed forever purple with juice and blood. Fairies lived in that creek. I believed it then and I believe it still. Once, I caught a bucketful of frogs and kissed them one by one. They were bumpy and cracked dry. I remember thinking they needed ChapStick. I remember wondering why none of them turned into a prince. Was something wrong with my kisses? Was I the wrong kind of girl? We don’t question the fairy tale, we question ourselves, and I was mad at Tinker Bell and Cinderella and their dumb, frothy tulle. Then my mom read me the original Grimm’s. My favorite part, then and still: when they cut off the stepsisters’ toes to fit into that goddamn glass slipper.