I am obsessed with baking yeast breads. This is unusual for me, as I’ve never had success with traditional yeast breads before now, nor expressed any desire to learn to make them properly. I am notoriously impatient with recipes and prone to just start eyeballing measurements and ingredients. This mania started around Christmas, when I saw the most glorious recipe for a sandworm-shaped cinnamon bread that I just HAD to make. (I must not fear yeast breads. Fear is the mindkiller.) This led to a whirlwind of bread-making over the past several months. I bake several times a week, everything from challah (rich and versatile) to olive fougasse (so much work, but worth it) to brioches stuffed with ridiculous sweets (my own inventions.) I usually take two fancy loaves of bread to my new church each Sunday, explaining that I can’t possibly eat all the bread I bake. It gives me something to talk about in a high-stress situation, a way to keep from bolting and hiding in the bathroom. I jokingly tell people that baking bread is my therapy, but this is more true than most people suspect. 

About five years ago, I lost my job and my car within a single week. A few months later, the worst depressive episode of my life spun me into a world of darkness and misery. I woke up one morning in April of 2012 to find myself in a state of dissociation. I felt as though a stranger were in my head, looking out from behind my eyes. The person I had always known as “I” was simply gone. This feeling persisted for several months; it finally faded, but nothing was normal again. Shortly after the depressive episode ended, I discovered that my beloved priest was leaving his wife to marry my housemate, and my entire faith community fell apart. The stress of the situation crystallized into intense anxiety. Ever since that time, I’ve had smaller, less intense dissociative episodes almost constantly, in addition to chest pains, anxiety attacks, and other symptoms. I have difficulty believing that I am really here, that my life is real, that the world around me isn’t a dream. I feel like I flicker in and out of reality. 

But baking helps. Baking is something that knits my body and soul together, calming the mind that is so desperate to escape. My body becomes an anchor to the real world. Baking is tactile, purposeful, and produces a usable result (most of the time.) Due to years of unemployment, under-employment, and abusive workplaces, food has not always been a guarantee. I’ve had to choose between keeping my phone connected, feeding my cat, or buying groceries for myself. Things are still tight. I have no hope of owning a car any time soon. I’ll never own a house or be able to retire. Some weeks, all I can afford to eat is cheap pasta. But as long as I have flour, water, yeast, and salt, I can make bread. Bread takes on a new importance when it is an essential part of a meal plan. It may not be exciting, but it’s always nourishing, always filling, always simply there. It’s not a feast, but it is food. It keeps me going. 

And that’s what “daily bread” is. It’s not ecstatic experiences or emotional highs; it’s just enough to get you to the next day. And then you do it all over again. And so I bake my daily bread, and eat it with soup, pasta, or whatever else I can afford this week. I bake bread to keep my mind and my body in some kind of truce, to convince my mind to stick around for just one more day, to power the body it so badly wants to leave behind. I go to church every week, in spite of the anxiety and panic attacks, because that is also daily bread. And so it goes. 

Give us this day our daily bread; for some of us, it’s all we have.

I don’t usually get a lot of Tumblr traffic, so I didn’t check the blog like I should have the past few days. Thank you to everyone who reblogged my last post, and special thanks to everyone who contacted me about it! 

To those who have been single and feeling very alone: I promise you, you aren’t. Over the past week, I have talked to scores of people with similar stories. The only reason we feel alone is because no one talks about this narrative; there are a lot of us out there. Take heart! It really isn’t just you!

My messages and ask box are open, if you want to talk. I promise to be better about checking in the future. 

And please no more anonymous asks for sex. That’s just never going to work. 

Oh no, not another post about depression!

Well, yes and no.

I get it. A lot of people are talking about depression these days; while there’s still some stigma surrounding it, more and more people are opening up about their struggles. And that’s great! The more people say, ‘Hey, I deal with this, too,” the less alone any of us feels.

But in all the talk about depression, there’s something that still lurks in the shadows, rarely coming out into the open. It’s still spoken of in whispers, in terms of weakness and selfishness, like a moral failing.

Yes, I’m going to be talking about suicide. I’m not looking for attention, or to scare anyone. I am not currently in any danger. Please don’t try to call the police or the hospital for me. All I want is to be honest about what it is like to live with frequent thoughts of suicide. Even writers well-known for writing about depression rarely discuss the realities of suicidal ideation, preferring to simply encourage their audiences to keep fighting, and remember that “depression lies.” And that’s good! It’s important. But we also need to talk about what it’s really like to live this struggle. Not all people who suffer from depression have thoughts of suicide, but I do, and always have.

Let me be very blunt: I have had suicidal episodes since I was 13 years old. I have, on several occasions, made actual plans to kill myself, though I never ended up following through on any of them. When I do something wrong or accidentally commit a social faux pas, my instant mental image is of pointing a gun at my head and pulling the trigger. I once braided a length of rope into a basket so that I would not hang myself from a beam in the garage; I knew the delay of undoing the basket would give me enough time to stop myself.

I don’t deal with these thoughts every day; I have gone years without them, though the intervals are decreasing. But they always come back. There will probably always be times when I think the solution to my problems (and everyone else’s problems with me) is simply to die. To remove myself from the equation.

During the periods when I have these thoughts, they are always there. There is some part of my mind that is constantly running the numbers: how much easier it would be for everyone else if I wasn’t here to mooch off them anymore. How much happier they could be without me around. How tired I am and how much I want to rest. How long I can make my funds last before I simply can’t afford to live anymore. Lately, this has been exacerbated by my toxic work situation, my inability to find other work that will let me have a stable life, and my general feeling of being completely useless.

I’m terrified to talk about any of this with anyone. How will they respond? Will they try to send me to the hospital, which I can’t afford? Will they think I’m trying to blame them? Will they think I’m asking them to fix my problems and resent me for it? So I keep quiet. I don’t want to worry them. After all, they’re good people. Of course they don’t believe they would be better off without me, even if it’s true. This isn’t anyone’s fault; it’s just something that my dysfunctional brain does. So I smile, and say I’m “hanging in there.”

I’m not asking anyone for anything with this piece. I hope to start getting help for the depression soon. My local friends have been incredibly generous with time, living space, money, and more. All I want is to shed some light on what it’s like to live with thoughts of suicide as constant background noise. 

I suddenly realized a few months ago that this is a battle I may lose. Not everyone wins the struggle against depression, no matter how hard they fight. I’ve been fighting for twenty years, and I intend to keep doing so for as long as I can, but I do not know what will happen. I take precautions and keep things that could be used for a quick death out of my living spaces. I go for long walks in the woods to clear my head and bring on some endorphins. I’m looking into low-income mental health care services. I’m trying to give myself the best chance that I can. And I know that it may not be enough.

Will people think I was weak if I lose this battle? The struggles are mostly invisible. People see the unemployment and the reluctance to get help and the irritability. No one sees the hours spent letting those thoughts of death wash over me because I can’t hold them back anymore. They don’t see the days spent just breathing and trying not to die.

If I die, will they think less of me? Will they think I was weak, that I didn’t fight hard enough? Will they think I didn’t love them enough to keep fighting? Will they think the effort they spent on me was wasted?

If I die, will the people I love remember that I fought hard, or only that I failed?

I usually keep this Tumblr strictly non-fiction, but here’s a story that came to me at 3am and demanded to be written. I hope you like it!

Alice

All my life, I have kept a bit of the mushroom in each pocket. When I feel the world pressing in on every side, when I have to fight if I want to have any space to call my own, when simply to exist is to take up too much space, I take a bite out of the bit in my right-hand pocket and grow small.

The mushroom never runs out; I think it is larger now than it was when I wrenched it from the Caterpillar’s perch. The piece in my left pocket, the one to make me grow, is a tiny shriveled thing. I have forgotten how it tasted.

Today, I walked out into the woods and found the old rabbit hole. I took the piece from my right pocket and threw it into the darkness. I trembled as I resisted the urge to scramble after it; I nearly put my fingers in my mouth to suck the last juices of the fungi for relief, for breathing room.

I stepped into the meadow and looked up at the sky. My dress used to be that vibrant attention-drawing blue; I didn’t even notice when it turned grey. I put my hand in my pocket, and took out the withered fragment from the other side of the mushroom. It was hard and dry, and my fingers brushed the bottom of my pocket for a moment before I found it.

I placed it on my tongue, shuddering at the texture, the taste of years gone to waste.

I swallowed it whole, holding nothing back, and stood in the meadow, looking down at the world spread out at my feet.

Like most of the nerdy side of the internet, I binge-watched Jessica Jones this week. I found myself trying to pin down why it felt so authentic to me, despite the superhero setting. Something about it rang true to my experience, beyond the overt images of manipulation and assault.

I appreciated Jessica’s determination and her honesty about the effects of Kilgrave using her; the show seemed to come from a very female perspective. Goodness knows there was plenty of eye candy in Luke Cage. And that’s when it hit me; this show takes female gaze seriously. 

Most of the time, when we talk about gaze, we mean it in a sexual way. And that is a big component of it. But it’s not the only thing. One of the most problematic aspects of the male gaze is the assumption of power: it assumes that men have power over women, that their desires matter more, that they hold power over the women they are looking at. Conversely, a major part of female gaze in the real world is threat assessment. When a woman is in a space with unfamiliar men, she will know where her exits are. She will generally know some basics of self defense. She will often avoid being backed into corners or otherwise cut off from the group.

This is what Jessica Jones captures. In the show, anyone can be a threat because Kilgrave’s entitlement leads him to control them. In real life, any man can be a threat because he is convinced of his power and that his desires trump whatever a woman may want. This isn’t specifically about rape, either, though that’s one form it takes. It can be control of a group activity, domination of a discussion, anything that perpetuates that Kilgravean sense of “I get what I want because I deserve it.”

We have to be wary and alert because we never know when the guy talking is going to go from harmless to toxic. That readiness is the background radiation of our lives. It colors every social interaction. And, like Kilgrave, toxic men blame their victims for their own abuse. “That’s not real abuse. Others have it so much worse. You’re just imagining things. I just said X, you’re the one who made it into something terrible. Can’t you see everything I’ve done for you?“

The creators of Jessica Jones know that gaze is about more than attraction, more than sex. It’s literally how we see other people in every interaction. For most women, that includes wariness and threat assessment; Jessica Jones communicates that complexity and shows why it’s necessary in a world that has men like Kilgrave.