Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  Cliff, realizing that I was underwater again, waited anxiously for me to come up for air. He tried to give me breathing room. When we were newly married, Jill, a writer friend, said to me, “You’ve got to give Cliff a lot of credit for marrying you.” I wasn’t offended, because I knew exactly what she meant—that I was a lot, layered and complicated and often tremendously oversensitive. Given his milieu, the world of finance, Cliff had dated lots of women who worked at careers like his. It would’ve been easier for him to marry one of them. “It says a lot about who he is, that he didn’t,” Jill had said. He wasn’t another boring suit, was what she meant.

  I’d been trying for a while now to get back into a writing routine but had to take a break to go to Ford’s concert at school. “Please, I want you to come,” he’d pleaded. I never say no when Ford asks me to come to his school. I just do it because I know it means a lot to him. Frankly, I’m so touched that he wants me—anywhere.

  Cathy from Jack and Jill had also called to ask me to bring pie and flowers for tonight’s meeting. Most people, especially nonartist types, think that if you work at home you’re not really working. So they call, they want to stop by, they ask for a favor that requires tending to during the day. When I’m really immersed in the writing, I simply say no or don’t answer the phone. But when I’m struggling, as I have been for six years now, I can let myself get dragged away. Initially, it’s easy to allow yourself be distracted, but eventually all that distraction backs up on you and you feel worse.

  As I cast around for a topic in which to immerse myself, it occurred to me that I’d probably written about social class as much as a sociologist. I think people who don’t know me personally assume I’ve written so much about upper-middle-class Blacks because either it’s my background or I endorse those social mores. The fact that my first novel was entitled Good Hair didn’t help. For the record, my original title was Good Hair and Other Plantation Luggage. My publisher thought the title was too political, too scary, and wanted to shorten it. I, being a novice and thrilled at being published, went along with the new title. I don’t regret it. The title was provocative. The concept of good hair versus bad hair is not something I subscribe to, but I know for sure that folks are going to have opinions and judgments, and it makes no sense to worry about them. I once heard someone say, “What you think about me is none of my business.” I like that. Of course as an HSP—highly sensitive person—the truth is, I do care. I want to be seen as I think I am, but that is not always possible. Some people consider me as an extrovert, but I once took the test included in The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron, PhD, and scored slightly higher on the introvert side.

  Some of the HSP traits are:

  Easily overwhelmed by bright lights, strong smells

  Rattled when asked to do a lot in a short amount of time

  Startles easily

  Avoids violent movies and TV shows

  Needs to withdraw during busy days for relief

  Parents/teachers have thought you shy

  On the test, fourteen points qualify you as an HSP. I scored nineteen. So it’s no surprise that the flack I got from some people about the title of my first book bothered me more than I liked to admit. Growing up, I had never actually heard the term “good hair.” Not once. When I’ve told this to my friends, like Eleanore, who grew up in DC, they either don’t believe me or think I’m delusional. At Howard, where I came face-to-face with judgments about skin color, hair texture, and social class for the first time, I realized that I’d been fortunate. Not knowing these distinctions existed provided me with a freedom I’ve come to value and have tried to pass on to my kids. In Newark, when I was coming of age, the zeitgeist was, the darker the better. Huge Afros were in vogue. Color was simply a description, at least in my house: light, medium, and dark. No values attached.

  I never felt inferior or that something was wrong with being Black. I felt that being Black was normal, partly because everybody around me was, but also because all of them were working, taking care of their families, planning for a better life for the next generation. Back then there were places called Area Boards, which were community centers where I’d hang out during my adolescence. We’d play checkers, my brother Duane played chess, we’d make cobra-stitched key chains. We learned to knit while the counselors played recordings of speeches by Martin Luther King. His voice boomed from speakers that hung from upper walls and outside the building, giving his words even more power and importance than the snippets we heard on the evening news.

  Postriots, Black-owned businesses began sprouting everywhere. There were many in my neighborhood, but two had a major impact: Tiffany’s, a hamburger shop with a jukebox, where we’d go at lunchtime and dance to James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Kaboobie’s Cool Spot (named by my brother Marc because he said the owner, James Sedgwick, looked like the camel from the TV show). Kaboob, as we called him, was a Hampton graduate and a race man. He first opened a record store, and then he opened an Italian ice/candy shop a few doors down. My brothers and their friends all used to hang out at the record store where Kaboob played mostly jazz, insurgent comedians like Dick Gregory, and the speeches of Malcolm X.

  Years later, when I was first married and living in South Orange, a community organizer turned lawyer I knew from my Star-Ledger days asked me how it felt to have traveled so far from where I grew up. At first what he said stung. I told him that I realized Hunterdon Street, to him, was as far as the moon from my lovely street and pretty yellow, black-shuttered center-hall Colonial, but that I didn’t see it the way he did. In addition to it having been my home, it used to be a lovely block in a beautiful neighborhood, too. What I didn’t tell him was that I never looked at him the same after that. At the time, he worked with communities in Newark and considered himself a man of the people, not separate, not looking down on the kinds of housing they lived in. He saw himself as some kind of crusader for poor Black people. His comment made me wonder what he actually thought of the people he was supposed to be helping.

  25

  Blues People

  “EVERYONE IS a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody,” wrote Mark Twain, another depressive writer.

  The thing about depression is it’s invisible. And it’s chemical. No amount of family support or pride in one’s beginnings will make you immune. It could be that I am simply made this way, and my mother’s death kicked me into a deeper crisis.

  I scrolled back through memory, trying to find early clues to this dark pit of despair I’d fallen into. I suddenly remembered that when I was dating Bruce, we got on the road from his Boston apartment and took a spontaneous trip to Freeport and Kennebunkport. After we’d wandered around the towns, we found a cute motel, which had a fireplace in our room and pretty, albeit conservative, New England décor. I’d decided to take a bath and read a book I’d brought with me. It was William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a memoir of his depression. I remember lying in the tub, reading all the names of writers who’d suffered from depression—some who’d committed suicide, including Virginia Woolf and Primo Levi. For some unknown reason, I’d brought this book. It didn’t occur to me that this was an unusual choice, given that I was with the guy that I loved, in sweet surroundings. I didn’t know then that depression was different from sadness. At the time, Dr. Chisholm’s diagnosis of dysthymia (mild depression) hadn’t yet been given, even though I knew that something wasn’t right, or more specifically, that right for me didn’t seem like what it was for everyone else.

  “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description. Thus it remains incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode . . .” Styron wrote.

  Andrew Solomon, author of Noonday Demon, captured his illness this way: “Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depr
ession in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

  For a year and a half after Mom’s death, I dealt with my pain by assuring myself—and was assured by a hospice therapist and others—that it was grief over losing my mom. But the grip didn’t let up as time passed. I tried everything I could think of. I went to a naturopath, thinking maybe it was my diet, to an allergist, an acupuncturist, my ob-gyn, my internist, a hormonal specialist, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist. I tried a parade of supplements to avoid the prescription meds:

  SAMe

  St. John’s wort

  L-tryptophan and 5-HTP

  Chinese herbs

  Megadoses of vitamins B and D

  Pricey, pure fish oil

  Testosterone and estrogen creams

  Progesterone and progestin pills

  Neurotransmitter supplements—Kavinace and Avipaxin

  I also stopped eating sugar, dairy, and wheat. The not eating sugar worked, but that couldn’t be sustained. I stopped drinking. I exercised like an athlete.

  Nothing worked for long.

  I sent this email to my brother Duane on March 9, 2010, a year after Mom’s death:

  I’m sitting here now feeling so down I can’t even describe it. I’ve been having a really rough time—it’s been harder in the last two months than it was when Mommy first died. I can’t stop crying, I sleep all the time, I’m seeing a therapist and have tried various mood-lifting drugs, but nothing seems to help; I exercise, I pray, I meditate, I read spiritual literature and none of those things lift me up for more than a few minutes or an hour or two. I try really hard to hold it together around Daddy because I don’t want him to worry about me or to make him think about how much he misses her. It takes all that I have . . . I’m telling you I’m in this black hole. I don’t want to talk to most people, don’t want to go out. It’s a gorgeous day and I’m inside in the bed. I did take Charlie to the park and walked and walked and sat on a bench in the sunshine. It did feel good.

  And I sent this one to my friend Gabrielle:

  I’m okay now—it’s hour to hour. This morning, after I worked out at the gym I came home, lay on the couch, and cried out loud for probably a half an hour, begging for my mother; I talked to my mother’s picture, pressing it to my chest before I napped a little, got cold, went upstairs and got in the bed, prayed for this sadness, this heaviness to lift, went back to sleep and woke up, read a little, picked my daughter up from high school, and now I’m feeling a little better. I’m at my computer trying to write a little. Just got the nicest Facebook message from a reader who said she’d just read Who Does She Think She Is? “for like the umpteenth time” and is “dying to know what happens” with the main characters’ marriage.

  Gabrielle Glaser was one of those people with whom you feel an instant connection. When we initially met, she was visiting the pool club where I was a member. We got to know each other when our kids played an indoor soccer game. Gabrielle and I were sitting in the stands and she asked how I was and I began crying. She looked at me with a caring in her deep blue eyes that enveloped me. After that, we began emailing each other. Our emails back and forth were long letters. We got to know each other through them. She was such a comfort: having dealt with her own depression, she knew.

  In an odd way, such emails were my attempt to do what Cliff and Baldwin kept telling me to do, write my way out of the depression. And it did help when I was able to find words for what I was feeling. I just hadn’t been able to break through to writing again in any regularly structured way.

  But slowly, moment by moment, I was climbing up from the depths of my black hole. I remember an afternoon when I let Charlie out into the backyard. When I did look out to make sure he hadn’t squeezed under the gate and gone walking up the block, I saw his little white fluffy body galloping across the gorgeous expanse of green. He was partially blind now, but he knew where everything was in his yard. He was happy, even though he was losing his sight, and I felt the same way as I peered at him through my living room window. I was learning to appreciate these exquisite moments: Baldwin and Ford holding hands as they walked up the driveway; Ford’s tying his shoelaces, Charlie bounding free.

  July 10, 1994, Journal Entry: Just put Baldwin to bed. What a wonder she is. She’s beautiful; she’s got brown saucer eyes, curly, unruly light brown hair, golden skin, and a smile that makes my face ache. She’s beyond precious. Even when I’m tired, brain dead, and all that goes along with being a new mom, she’s a wonder. Tonight Cliff is out with a client and we’re on our own. Usually he helps with her bath and puts her to sleep (he can get her to sleep, often I can’t because she smells her food, my milk). Anyway, we played a little after her dinner. I watched The Client on HBO. She started fussing at about nine, which is bath time. I began nursing, but she wanted to play. She kicks her legs hard against the bed—it looks so cute I smile at her, which makes her smile her two-teeth smile at me. She is perfection. I kiss her constantly because she’s just so irresistible. This is love like I’ve never come close to knowing. There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for her, and all these feelings are terrifying because I know I’ll always feel this way, and when she’s older and asserting her independence I’ll need Cliff to help me let her go. She’ll have to, I know in my mind, but my heart will want to keep her the way I put her to sleep tonight, close to my chest, my heart.

  Fifteen years later, Baldwin and I entered the Princeton campus. I stopped at the guard booth and the woman said, “You must be here for the lacrosse camp.”

  “How’d you know?” I said, genuinely wanting to know.

  “I just know. That’s what everybody’s here for today.”

  “How’re you doing today? Is it driving you crazy?”

  “They got y’all parking all the way down there. I’ma give you a pass where you can park close to where you gotta go. Don’t you tell nobody where you got it.”

  She handed me the small piece of cardboard.

  I thanked her and drove off.

  Baldwin was amazed. “Go, Mom.”

  “Why do you think she did that?”

  She hunched her shoulders, not really interested but knowing I was going to tell her anyway.

  “Because I treated her with respect. That’s all people want, remember that, especially Black people, especially people who have been disenfranchised.”

  We parked the car and walked a few yards to where the registration was; the line was out the door and down a walkway. We got in the line and soon a familiar face walked up and said hello. It was a dad from Jack and Jill. He told me that his wife and daughter were inside.

  We made small talk about where his daughter played, what school she went to.

  Then he said: “How about that parking lot? Could you believe they had us park so far away?”

  Even if I hadn’t been sworn to secrecy, I wouldn’t have told him that I’d been given the pass for the lot next door. I just looked at Baldwin and didn’t have to say anything else.

  After we registered, we had to get her duffel bag, bedding, gear, snacks, and fan to her dorm. There was no way to drive right up to the building. She was carrying some of her stuff, walking behind me complaining.

  “It’s so hot.”

  “How come there’s no shuttle?”

  “This is heavy.”

  I ignored her.

  It must have been 95 degrees with almost that much humidity. My back hurt, and the duffel bag strap was digging into the skin on my shoulder. I muttered to myself: “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.” Strangely, the mantra made me feel better. I softened toward her. I turned around.

  “Come on, you’re an athlete. You can do this.”

  My words seemed to give her strength. She stopped complaining, and we hiked the hill to her dorm, which we weren’t quite sure we knew how to find. We found it, went up a short flight of stairs, and I opened the lock. Her roommates greeted us: two blondes, one a very perky girl from Colorado, the other
from Arizona. The room was a two-bedroom suite. Baldwin would have the small single to herself. Thankfully, they’d told us to bring a fan, since the rooms were not air-conditioned.

  I was happy to be leaving Baldwin for three days. I loved her to pieces, but at fifteen she took up a lot of air. We hugged a full-on body hug, wrapping our arms around each other. No one else hugs me like she does. All the intensity of our feelings toward each other is in those hugs. She had to walk back to the car with me because she’d left her iPhone in the glove compartment. When we parted this time, there was no more affection. I was in the car, in the driver’s seat, and she was walking away.

  “Hey, do I get a kiss?”

  She blew one to me. I drove away.

  I was exhausted by the time I made it home. The back of my T-shirt remained soaked in sweat during the air-conditioned hour-and-fifteen-minute drive. I imagined a glass of wine, lounging on my sectional in my basement in front of the giant TV that Cliff had to have, but my neighbor was in the softball playoffs and I’d been promising that I’d come to see her play all summer. Ford and I walked up the street to see the game, and I got lucky because they shut the other team down in six innings. I could go home and exhale. Nope. Baldwin had texted me six times telling me that I’d somehow removed one of her cleats. I went out and looked in the back of the trunk, pretty sure that when I’d repacked her bag I’d put the shoe back. No shoe in the trunk.