When I was twenty-seven, I went to visit my mom, who was still living in the apartment in Harlem I grew up in. I sat while she ran around the kitchen cooking food for me, getting a glass of tea for me, asking if there was something else she could do for me. She waits on me now because I’m a guest. My mother always makes such a huge fuss over me, and it makes me feel like an adult and a child at the same time. When I first moved out, I thought the apartment would feel like home as long as my family still lived there. Not the case. It’s actually a huge disappointment to go back and feel like a visitor instead of like a daughter to my mother and a little sister to my brother. Everything feels smaller. The doorways are shorter, the toilet is closer to the ground, and I no longer know how to turn on the TV. I’m grown now.
So we were in the kitchen discussing rape, as usual, when my mother said, “You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity.”
???
It was a total record-scratch moment! She called me a virgin, and she said it with sincerity and a touch of pity. Here I was, twenty-seven years old, having lived on my own for two years, and she just knew for a fact that I was a virgin. I even had a boyfriend at the time, and she still felt confident in her belief that I was a virgin—confident enough to bring it up as obvious in a conversation about a completely different subject. Well, she was wrong. I wasn’t a virgin. I’m still not a virgin. That’s right. I’ve gone all the way.
However, I am fascinated by virginity. Losing it, keeping it, only doing hand and mouth stuff because you regard your vag as a delicate little prize for your husband on your wedding night. Sacrificing your butt hole to save your porcelain-baby vagina from being smushed and crushed by some dude who barely knows what he’s doing. Hey, girl, I get it! Kind of. Wait . . . no. I don’t really get it, but I’m not here to judge you. Everyone has his or her reasons for holding on to it—until they don’t. Frankly, that’s the way it should be. Letting some dude put his stuff in you is actually pretty heavy. It’s serious. But I didn’t think about my virginity that way before I lost it. I didn’t see it as a treasure or a precious jewel. I had felt the burden of my virginity ever since my friend, a guy, told me when I was sixteen that if I was still a virgin at twenty-one he’d do me a favor and take it from me. He said it out of nowhere! Like he was so sure that I was so undesirable that he’d have to go ahead and lie on the cross and take my virginity from me as an act of charity. Bless him. I couldn’t think of anything sadder than being a pity fuck. That’s not normal. I couldn’t let it happen. I saw it as a burden that I had to get rid of so that I could be normal like my friends. A few years later, I looked around and I was the only virgin left and I basically panicked.
If you think that’s a story I’m about to tell you, you’re wrong. There is no story. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t a child bride. I wasn’t being forced, but I hadn’t figured it out any more than my friends had. I just thought, Well . . . that’s enough. And then boom, I wasn’t a virgin anymore. And then came the regret. Not regret over losing my virginity—regret over my rush to do it. It had seemed so important that it had become a project for me. How would it happen? Who would it happen with? Where would it happen? Would I be a grown-up afterward? Would I suddenly become a sexy woman with a small waist, big boobs, and a big ass? Would I be Jessica Rabbit or Beyoncé? The answer was no. I didn’t become any of those things, and the where, how, and who of it all left me disappointed as well.
Don’t worry! At least I got the dude’s full age and name beforehand. He didn’t have a middle name, and I thought, Wow. Your parents didn’t love you enough to give you a middle name. What a shame. And just to make sure I’d never have to see him again, I shared that thought with him.
He looked at me, and then he laughed. He thought I was funny. That was enough for me so I banged him.
Are you judging me? Remember, you were super shitty at twenty years old, possibly shittier than I was. You remember that!
For a while afterward, I kept trying to make sex feel good, but it didn’t. Not with anyone. And I really tried. I’d go after guys who were very attractive, but they didn’t feel any better than ugly guys. I’d try guys who really wanted to be in a relationship with me, but they didn’t feel any better than the guys just looking for something to do on a Friday night. I tried to make a game out of it. I’d try on a character to see if she had more fun, but she did not. I kept thinking that the problem was each individual guy. Like I said, I really tried. But it always felt the same. Cold. Emotionless. Empty.
This was a very strange time in my life. I was slipping into a depression, and while I didn’t super love sex, every encounter at least became something I could focus on to distract me from the fact that I was severely unhappy with everything in my life.
I didn’t see it then, but that phase of pseudopromiscuity was a part of my depression, not a distraction from it. Poor, stupid, slutty Gabby. To be clear, it wasn’t a lot of men. It was a few. This is what I did, though, off and on between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. I call it my Hoe Phase.
Here’s the thing about therapy and why it is so important. I love my mom, but there’s so much I couldn’t talk to her about during my Hoe Phase. I couldn’t tell her that I couldn’t stop crying and that I hated everything about myself. My mom has always been an independent person with lots of friends who love her and think she is the most talented person ever. Her life at the age of twenty was nothing like mine. Whenever I did try to open up, my mom seemed unconcerned. When I was sad about something, she told me to “get a thicker skin”; when I was upset, she told me to “stop nitpicking.” My mom has always had faith that things would be okay—but saying “Tomorrow will be a better day” wasn’t enough for me. When I first told her I was depressed, she laughed. Literally. Not because she’s a terrible person, but because she thought it was a joke. How could I not be able to feel better on my own—like her, like her friends, like normal people?
So I just kept thinking my sad thoughts. Thoughts about dying. I couldn’t sleep at night. Eventually, morning would come, and it would be time to go to class. I was attending City College of New York, a five-minute walk from my apartment, but by the time I’d get to school every morning, I’d be crying and sweating profusely, struggling to breathe, thinking I was going to die. For a while, I thought I was having asthma attacks. I didn’t realize until later that these were actually panic attacks. I was a mess.
I stopped eating. For days at a time, I wouldn’t eat anything at all. Often, when I was too sad to stop crying, I drank a glass of water and ate a slice of bread, and then I threw it up. After I did, I wasn’t as sad anymore. I finally relaxed. So I never ate anything until I wanted to throw up, and only when I did could I distract myself from whatever thought was swirling around my head. I was a real joy to be around.
Eventually, I decided to get a doctor involved. I was a college student and poor, which meant I had really good health care: Medicaid. (Oddly enough, as a thirty-three-year-old working actor, I can’t afford now what I could afford at the age of twenty-two. America yo!) I found a doctor and told her everything that was wrong with me. I’d never run down the entire list before, but as I heard myself, I could sense that dealing with this on my own was definitely no longer an option.
The doctor asked me if I wanted to kill myself.
I said, “Meh. Not yet, but when I do, I know how I’ll do it.”
I wasn’t afraid to die, and if there was a button I could’ve pushed to erase my existence from Earth, I would’ve pushed it, because it would’ve been easier and less messy than offing myself. According to the doctor, that was enough. She prescribed an antidepressant and also suggested therapy. Dialectical behavioral therapy. I know, right? What’s that?!
My doctor explained that dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) was a cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help treat borderline personality disorder. I was eligible for a six-month treat
ment program with group-therapy classes designed to help manage emotions and behaviors that could be symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Classes were Monday through Friday, from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Did I have borderline personality disorder? Nope. Not at all. But my doctor thought it was the best treatment my bomb-ass insurance could buy for me. And because I was failing out of college anyway, I had nothing but time. I was basically the perfect candidate for DBT even though my actual diagnosis was only depression with a bit of an eating disorder. (I say “only” and “a bit” like this wasn’t absolutely ruining my life. I was going to die. LOL.) My doctor was really excited to get me into the program. Possibly too excited, I remember thinking at the time.
As my doctor described DBT and what it could do for me, I sort of stopped listening. I nodded my head whenever she paused; every now and then, I said, “Oh. Okay.” But I couldn’t focus on anything back then. Not even someone talking directly to me in a quiet room. I was thinking about how I’d have to drop out of school to do this therapy and whether or not it would be worth it. I was thinking about how I’d tell my family.
I got home from the doctor’s with a bottle full of antidepressants and a new lease on life. I broke the news to my brother first. I told Ahmed how I’d been feeling and how I had to get help for it. He suggested that I read the Bible and watch church on TV with him on Sunday mornings. He also told me he was sorry to know how badly I felt and that he wished he’d known, wished he could have helped. I should’ve told him sooner. I’d figured my brother was as self-centered as any twenty-something guy. I didn’t trust other people to care about me. In the case of Ahmed, I was wrong.
I chose to tell my mom while she was lying in bed asleep. I poked her until she was about half-awake, and then I proceeded to relay the super important fact of my treatment for depression as though she were fully awake and able to receive the news. I was counting on her not being able to respond.
Look. My mom loves me more than I’ll probably ever be able to comprehend. She wants the best life possible for me, and her fears for me come from love. With that in mind . . . my mom’s first instinct was to tell me that what I was feeling I actually wasn’t feeling—that I was just being dramatic. It felt like a slap in the face, but I realize now that she just wanted me not to feel like dying. She’d spent so much time trying to keep me alive that it broke her heart to imagine that I preferred she hadn’t. It hurt her to know I was hurting. She took it personally.
Her second instinct was to share a time in her life when she was upset and couldn’t sleep. Just like me. She said that she just kept getting up and believing that God would pull her through and that He did. I was grateful that she opened up, but what she described was actually nothing like what I was going through. I couldn’t make her understand that for me God wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make her understand that I couldn’t get up on my own anymore.
So I started DBT: five days a week, three classes a day, each run by a different therapist. On two of those days I went to group therapy, and on Thursdays I went to one-on-one therapy. I was the youngest in the group by about ten years. A lot of the people in the group had gone through a few different cocktails of medication and therapy before DBT. Some had lived through suicide attempts and hospital stays in the psych ward. Some had spent years on a waiting list and had maxed out their savings to be able to attend the DBT classes. I, on the other hand, had basically waltzed in a day after mentioning my feelings to my doctor. I was on the lowest dosage of a bottom-shelf antidepressant, which was already working. And I was only twenty, so I had yet to ruin my life.
For me, the classes were fun! A lot of the program centered on keeping a diary and writing down my thoughts and feelings and then reading them aloud to everyone. I excelled at writing down my thoughts and feelings and reading them aloud to everyone! (Have you seen my Twitter?) I took to the program fast and was basically kicking my depression’s ass. I was quickly becoming the Happiest Person at Sad Camp (that’s literally what they called me).
This one woman hated me. She said that I was too perfect, that I was everyone’s favorite, and that she was sick of it. She was a real bitch, but to be fair, she was suffering from borderline personality disorder. She was having a more difficult time than I was, and it must have been rough for her to see me smiling and laughing. Aside from her, most people in our class liked me. I made jokes about my pain and spent the first month of the program secretly feeling like I was mentally healthier than everyone else there and that I didn’t need help as much as they did. (Oh, now I get why that bitch hated me.) Whether I was healthier or not, I was there with my DBT classmates because I did, in fact, need help. Most of my “happiness” was pretend and the jokes a cover-up. One of my therapists called it the “onion.” He’d laugh at my inappropriate jokes, and then say, “Okay, Gabby, but peel the onion. What’s under that joke? Hmm? Is it fear? Peel the onion.” Hippie.
At first I’d think, Shut up, Jacob! I saw you smoking a cigarette outside. You can’t tell me shit! But by the third month I was less judgmental. I was trying my best to be honest with everyone about my feelings, including myself. I was peeling the onion. I was also way more emotionally stable. I was still trying to shake the eating disorder, but I no longer wanted to die. I was grateful to the program and the doctor who had suggested it. The thoughts I’d had, the absence of any fear of death, the uncontrollable emotional sadness . . . I didn’t know anymore who the fuck that girl was, but she was no longer me. And she’s definitely not the person writing this today.
One thing didn’t change, though: I was still hooking up with random dudes. It took a while longer to learn that I deserved to at least like someone before letting him rub up against me. In time I started to believe I was worth more than being fucked and forgotten. I decided to try celibacy for a while. Except I wasn’t going to be a weirdo about it and tell everyone.
“You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity,” my mother repeated. This is how much she believed her own statement: she said it twice. She peered at me, waiting for a response.
I suddenly realized, in the midst of my stunned silence, that my mom thought we were a lot closer than we actually were. She thought that since telling her about my depression had been such a success I would have told her about losing my virginity when it happened. She thought I was a delicate little flower. And she thought I was a little bit sad for being twenty-seven and still a virgin.
How could I tell her?
“True, I’ll fight like hell, Mom. Could you make me a sandwich?”
3
Why You Shouldn’t Marry for a Green Card
The story of two people who got married, met and then fell in love.
—tagline from the movie Green Card
THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS I could describe my mom, Alice Tan Ridley. Free-spirited hippie is one (actually, I’m the only one who calls her a hippie, and never have I done it to her face). She doesn’t care about rules and breaks them often. She wants other people to live their lives the way they want to. She wishes it was socially acceptable for straight men to cry and wear dresses and skirts. (That being said, she told me to have her buried in pants.)
My mom is everyone’s favorite aunt. She was the youngest girl of nine kids, all born and raised on a dirt road in a town you’ve never heard of in Georgia. She has a ton of sisters who had children when she was a little girl, so she’s been helping raise kids all her life. She became an assistant preschool teacher at the age of thirteen. Really, she’s been trained in the art of fun since birth.
She’s comfortable in her own skin and knows how gorgeous she is. If you happen to think she’s not gorgeous, you’re wrong. She’s the most confident person in the room. Any room. She’s the most talented person around for miles. Perhaps for a thousand miles. Definitely in the city. She shines as bright as a diamond because she is a goddamned STAR! That’s another phrase I use
to describe my mother—again, never to her face.
Whether what I’ve said about my mom is objectively true or not, it’s the way she feels about herself, and so, in a very “I think, therefore I am” way, it becomes true because it’s her truth. That kind of confidence is rare. I’ve been trying to feel that special brand of confidence all my life, but I still fall short of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m great! But Mom’s confidence is incredible and hypnotic, like a magic show. Can you imagine being her daughter? It’s annoying. Like a magic show.
When Ahmed and I came along, my mom worked in the New York City Public Schools as a paraprofessional, teaching in a class of differently abled children. Her students had Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities. Whenever her class went on a trip to the zoo or the circus or even to see a WWF match at Madison Square Garden, she’d take us along, too. When I started going to school, it was to the same one where my mom taught. At least once a day I’d ask for the bathroom pass, and I’d go visit her in her classroom, grab a snack, say what up to my homies, and then go back to my own classroom.
Alice has worked as a professional singer since childhood, and even while she was teaching, she had her own show: a gospel brunch every Sunday at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. She was always singing. She would sing the national anthem at school assemblies and perform in choirs at different churches, but her Cotton Club show was an actual job. She had an amazing voice that she certainly didn’t intend to waste.
This Is Just My Face Page 2
