You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  If you want something, give yourself permission to go all out for the opportunity and leave your heart in the room. I love watching people add music to a pitch, and visuals as a seasoning to the mix. They can stand up and be animated because they respect themselves; they’re presenting passion, not clownery. Let’s say you’re in one place and you want to get to the next level. Stand up and be animated. Don’t worry about how you look or how you are being received. Focus only on your intention, which is to put your whole, full, passionate self into the pitch. How it’s received is none of your business. Granted, if the feedback is, “You walked in there and you were a damn clown,” rethink it. I don’t want to send you down the wrong path. But you might be great, if you dare.

  I hear my shy friends getting nervous out there. If you’re someone who is scared of public speaking or speaking one-on-one with a boss or someone hiring you, you need to acknowledge that to yourself and, if you need to, to them. Do not be afraid to use notecards. Here’s the secret: if you want to be seen in a leadership role, the thing about good leaders is they acknowledge their weaknesses. Those notecards are an acknowledgment that (a) it’s something that I’m working on and (b) I am staying on track so I can keep this meeting on track and I don’t waste your time. They are no reflection of a lack of preparedness or passion.

  6. BE ON TIME

  That’s it. Whatever you’re trying to do, just be on time. It’s such a rarity in the world that people will trust you more. It’ll be you and the sun—the only things people count on to show up. So, shine.

  18

  The Voice of Wisdom

  People make fun of trigger warnings, I know. There are a lot of assholes out there.

  For me, content warnings give me the opportunity to assess my state of being and whether I want to engage with the author or speaker in that moment. It’s the respect of consent. I want to provide one here: in this chapter I will be discussing thoughts of suicide. Passive suicidal ideation, to give you the term that was given to me.

  * * *

  Some years back, I began having irregular periods. Which, if you have gotten this far in the book, you know means that I was having my period. They were so painful that I was diagnosed with perimenopause. I had never heard that term, though I knew what menopause was. Or at least I thought I did. Looking back, I realize I had only a vague notion, one that was based on bits of asides overheard from my mother when she was in her fifties, or jokes on TV about older women. Not sexy young bitches who post thirst traps and want people to see their ass.

  So, I learned perimenopause is the time before menopause, characterized by irregular periods. Not much else. For some women, this phase is very short, and for some it can stretch over years. I had never had regular periods, so I didn’t investigate it any further since I didn’t really notice symptoms. You can also have hot flashes, hair loss, mood swings—basically the classic symptoms used to describe menopause, except for one critical thing: the way you know you’re going from perimenopause to menopause is when you don’t have your period for twelve months. If you go a full year without your period, it’s on.

  This fall, I was at the eleven-and-a-half-month mark without my period.

  Well, I guess I will be in menopause in my forties, I said to myself.

  And then, out of the motherfucking blue, my period showed up. “Hey girl! It’s been so long, let’s catch up. Cancel your plans, because we need to make up for lost time.”

  Oh, she was back. This was painful, with heavy bleeding, and along with it came additional hair loss. The crazy hormonal fluctuation made me bloated to a point that I looked like I was either back for another round of IVF or well into my second trimester.

  In the midst of this joy, I had a massive blowout with Dwyane. He has a friend who I do not care for, and he had invited this man over to our house knowing I didn’t want his energy in my home. I didn’t even know until the motherfucker arrived. I felt blindsided, but Dwyane has a filing cabinet of things labeled: “The Absence of Truth Is Not a Lie.” Basically, he feels an omission of information is not a lie, and if I am curious about something, say, a guest list, I have a responsibility to ask. He shrugged, storing it with omissions he found harmless, and I seethed. The situation was something he found so small, but to my mind, it represented a fundamental problem in our marriage.

  I punished him with silence, which is extreme for me. I was conscious enough to know that my reaction didn’t actually match what happened. But once I stopped talking to him, it made sense. I had a vague feeling that I needed to cut him out. That if he was ever going to understand how angry I was, I needed to make him feel bad.

  Two days into silence, maybe three, I was at the sink when it came to me.

  If you were dead, he would feel really bad. It was a phrase in my mind, clear, calm, and direct.

  I physically shook my head, turned the water off and then on again.

  You should probably die. Then your point would be made. The voice was final. It had gone through the options, run the numbers. This was the answer.

  I recognized that voice. It wasn’t scary or the least bit foreign to me, because it was the voice that has walked me through my entire life. We all have it. When you’re young, it’s the voice of pure instinct. You’re walking down the street and pass a house that has bad juju. The voice says, Watch yourself. It’s the voice inside you that knows the deal before you do.

  When I haven’t listened to that voice, bad things have happened. I’ve pretended not to hear it tell me someone was lying to me, to cut my losses when I kept investing in something broken. That voice said, Run out the back, when my rapist walked in the store when I was nineteen. I walked to the front.

  By the time a woman gets to her upper forties, she has learned to trust that voice, or she regrets it. It’s no longer just instinct, but wisdom. You know exactly how this is gonna go, it says. Or, Passive aggressive is the way to go with this one. Sometimes, the voice takes stock of a situation you can’t imagine coming back from, and it gives you the final answer. You’ve survived worse. And Go on, bitch. Show them.

  And now this voice that had proven itself worthy of all my trust was telling me to die.

  “I don’t want to,” I almost said aloud. Not in a scared or dramatic way. More confused that this was now an option on the table when I’d never been suicidal before. And now it was not an option, it was the option. My inner voice responded to this confusion as it always does, with a clear plan that cut through any wishful thinking.

  You should die.

  * * *

  I continued with the day, distracting myself. I was still bleeding heavily from my period. I breezed by Dwyane like a ghost with a shake of my head, thinking, If I was dead, he would feel really terrible.

  Somewhere in the part of my mind that wasn’t under this dark fog another, quieter voice spoke up. “That’s not right, girl,” it said. “You don’t really wanna die, bitch.”

  The voice, calm: Yeah, but it’s not about what you want.

  I busied myself, but kept returning to the feeling that I’d gotten bad news. News that mattered to me, but to no one else. Nothing to share. Kaavia James fussed about something, and I handed her my phone to quiet her. I was conscious enough to wait for that inner voice to run its usual cost-benefit analysis about my parenting decisions. The voice would usually say, Look, do what you need to do. Or more pointedly, You just played yourself. Now she’ll always expect the phone.

  Silence.

  Later, I turned down the light in Kaavia James’s room for her nap. Standing at her doorframe, I looked back at her.

  They’d all be better off, the voice said. If you disappear, everyone’s life gets better.

  The smaller part of my brain again piped in. “That’s not how that works,” it said. “Wait, hold on.” I picked up my phone. I called my therapist.

  I need to say here that I have had a lifetime of therapy. I am privileged with that experience, and I believe it helped me override the system.r />
  “Something’s not right,” I said. I explained these thoughts. “This isn’t me. But it is. It’s real, and it keeps coming. I’m sure it has something to do with my period returning after eleven and a half months. It’s crazy painful.”

  My therapist told me it was likely perimenopausal depression, and as we talked more, it was clear I was having passive suicidal ideation. The word “passive” implies that this is more a hopeless wish than an “active” one where there are plans and methods considered. We started with increased talk therapy and treating some of my other symptoms holistically, which I will get to. But first I went down the rabbit hole researching perimenopause and depression.

  One of the first things I learned was that perimenopausal depression exists. I had never heard of it. But I certainly had the related symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and difficulty concentrating. According to a ten-year study published by the CDC in 2020, the suicide rate among females is highest for those aged forty-five to sixty-four. (If anyone asks you, male suicide is highest for those aged seventy-five and over.) I thought about women in the public eye who had died by suicide—like fashion designers Kate Spade, fifty-five, and L’Wren Scott, forty-nine. In the aftermath, each had people, both journalists and friends, piece together their lives to figure out how their circumstances drove their actions. People centered on the men in their lives, and I realized how often women’s depression is ascribed to the actions of men and families around them. This is the time long-term marriages break up, kids leave nests. We focus on the external features of women’s lives, and ignore the interior. There’s this huge surge and retreat of hormones, not seen most likely since puberty and pregnancy and childbirth, but no one pays any attention to how that affects your brain chemistry and mental health. Like all of women’s work, it’s invisible.

  That’s because while perimenopause and menopause happen in women’s bodies, science has focused on treating the symptoms that matter most to men and whether or not they want to fuck us. Low libido, fertility, vaginal dryness, signs of aging, hair loss . . . We even focus on hot flashes because it’s a spectacle that others have to witness. People are embarrassed for you, and you have to dig deep into medical studies to find hot flashes’ relation to cardiovascular health risks and energy depletion. You can’t expect much, since modern science still doesn’t fully know what role hormonal changes play in hot flashes. Even the Mayo fucking Clinic has to rely on a hunch. Instead, we only need fixes for those symptoms a man will notice and care about. “How’s your pussy feeling? No, not to you, silly. To a penis.”

  We put money and research into what we value. Half of the human race has been hitting menopause since we’ve lived long enough to get there. And what do we have to show for it? Even the existing literature about “the Change” is full of rah-rah books that amount to handing you a mug with the label, “It’s not a hot flash! It’s a power surge.” They focus on hiding symptoms and still being sexy. Remaining an option for a man. And it’s confusing because this is a time that we are often cast aside and made to feel invisible. “I’m glad you no longer have vaginal dryness, ma’am, but I’m gonna trade you in for the eighteen-year-old anyway. Her face doesn’t have any stress lines.” Misogyny is already enough of a fucking stressor.

  And because no one is talking about the internal changes, you start to feel like what is happening is just in your head, and you are going crazy. Feelings of isolation and paranoia take hold. You rack your brain trying to think of the thing you did to deserve this, because this has to be a consequence of some sort of action. But your action is just living. Aging.

  As long as we don’t talk about any of this, it is so easy for that isolation to cause you to fuck around or kill or harm yourself. We talk about the repercussions of women committing suicide in their forties. They are seen as selfish for leaving their kids behind, caring more about their pain than their responsibilities to family. Their actions are attributed to a character issue, rather than a hormonal imbalance that is causing internal struggles. Challenges that could be addressed if we demanded the language and research to tackle them. I want to stand up for those women, too. Because my instinct was telling me to disappear. It told me, clear as day, in a voice that had so many times steered me right: If you care as much as you say you do, you’ll make their lives easier by killing yourself.

  The voice was still there as I did my googling. But the voice no longer knew everything, because I knew something. I did not want to kill myself. The churn of hormones in my body was temporarily making me feel hopeless. There was help, and things I could do, and most of all it was not just in my head.

  I don’t want to give the impression I think strength is what saved me. I’ve had lifelong access to therapy, and it was a life preserver I could hold on to. When I learned my issue was from perimenopause and that I shared the issue with countless people I’ve never met, I knew that it would be wrong not to at least try to push the life preserver your way. And if I’m pushing, I might as well swim it over to you. And now that we’re sharing this thing, we could look at each other and say, “We’re going to get each other through this.” And, “Ain’t this some shit?”

  * * *

  When I began talking about perimenopause, I started with my friends. The people in my grown-women group chat range in age from forty to forty-nine. We were all experiencing some symptom, mild or major, of perimenopause, but we weren’t having focused discussions around it. I was terrified that someone else might be feeling what I was. I also knew I needed their support.

  What stuns me still is that we are smart women, yet we knew so little. This reminded me of bringing my big sister’s Judy Blume book to the monkey bars to share with girls at school in order to figure out the mysteries of what happens between penises and vaginas. Or how I was completely clueless about my period and lacked basic knowledge about how to better navigate that transition. This past year we learned about the existence of UFOs, but motherfuckers who’ve been here since the dawn of time are still a fucking mystery. Literally half the population is involved in a damn mystery that no one is racing to solve.

  For now, I’m still in it. My therapist and doctor have a plan to help me. In addition to the talk therapy, we started addressing some of the other symptoms holistically, like insomnia, for one. A lack of sleep can spin you out, so I take a little cocktail of things like CBD oil, melatonin, and vitamins, and that has worked wonders. When my period came back, I had every crazy craving for gluten, alcohol, and dairy—all the things that make you feel better emotionally—but they actually exacerbated the symptoms of pain and bleeding. So now I am more careful about that. I no longer have the passive suicidal ideation, but if I ever do again, I will be able to recognize it and take steps to get in front of it.

  I began the work of separating symptoms from who I really am. Dwyane and I started speaking again, but it took six days, and was probably helped by my increase in talk therapy. And, there is another great voice in my life that has helped me. Not my instinct, but my beloved Brené Brown podcast. It was while I listened to her explain how to give a great apology and how to receive one that I realized what was really wrong. I heard that voice of instinct make a murmur of recognition of a truth: I didn’t need to die—what I needed was a simple, heartfelt apology. I seized on the clarity, and asked for one from Dwyane that I received with grace.

  See? Only when we identify the issue do we have any hope of really treating it. That’s real wisdom.

  If you need someone to talk to:

  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

  19

  Don’t Worry, Mommy

  I step back out into our yard just as Kaavia James is about to go down her slide. It’s my daughter’s favorite part of the house play set we painted to match our home. Kaav’s halfway down when she looks past Dwyane to catch sight of me. The second her feet hit the ground, she races toward me. Her arms are spread as wide as a two-and-a-half-year-old’s can get, ready to wrap aro
und me. My legs, my body if I bend to her—whatever she can get, she is coming for.

  I should note that I went inside the house for two minutes to get my water.

  “Mommy, Mommy!” she says, as if she can’t believe the luck that we both happen to be here in this moment. Like, “What are you doing here?”

  “Kaavia James,” I answer, kneeling and smiling to receive the freight train of a hug. She is in a Mommy stage. And you know what? I love it. When she first started doing it, I worried that even my own kid could tell I was stressed and was trying to cheer me up. She got an email from corporate that said, “Hey, we’re looking at the productivity numbers and this week we’d really like you to try to say ‘Mommy’ a lot. Just bring her in more, make her part of the team.”

  But it’s unmistakably genuine and I am reveling in it. She splashes joy around and lets it fall everywhere with a sureness that there will be more. You want a Kaav hug. There is nothing like her looking upon you, sizing up the essence of you, and still giving you that “whup, bring it in” embrace. You feel like you just landed a tentpole movie.

  “Mommy. Mommy? Mommy.” She says my name again and again, a different inflection each time, trying to get my attention when she already has all of it. I repeat her name back to her to show I’m listening to whatever it is she has to say, but give up and simply let her lead me by the hand. “Mommy,” she says one last time, this one low and to herself.

  Kaavia James takes me to where she has sat her dolls to watch her play in her house. There are four of them, all perfectly placed in a lawn chair she has dragged over just for them. She looks around for a second for another chair for me, then tugs my hand downward as she points to the ground.