The Squeeze

Seven years in, I’m finally holding my book in my hands, and I kind of feel like I’m disintegrating. That’s a good thing, actually. Here’s why.

Not a depiction of me, but a manifestation of my wish that my father could’ve delved into his own trauma and grief. Artwork by Adriana Cordero (after my clumsy sketch).

At the sound of the doorbell I jumped to my feet and fast-walked to the door.

Peering between the blinds, I saw the towering brown flank of a UPS truck. I opened the door hoping to see Jamarcy, the usual driver who always has a kind word (and is actually sort of distractingly handsome). It was a sub instead. I waved at him, but he didn’t see it. I bent down and picked up the cardboard-sheathed package.

It was finally here.

I stared at it for a moment, wondering if I should submit to the emptiness of an unboxing video. Then I opened the box.

Now that I’m actually holding my book in my own two hands, the feelings are a bit overwhelming. It’s intense and strangely anticlimactic, all at the same time. Behind the satisfaction of my pride in having made a cool and strange artifact is a feeling of dread, a sensation like I’m slowly being squeezed to death. This feeling is familiar. In fact, what I see now is how hard I’ve worked all these years to suppress it.

Wait! That’s not a problem! Really! Mostly.

Let me explain.

It all began in preschool, in the little low-slung building off Woodley Road. I was only four then, but I remember it still: Molded fiberglass chairs in cheery colors, the muted crunch of graham crackers, Dixie cups of tepid orange juice at snacktime.

One crystal-clear memory stands out from the others, though repeated viewings have burnished its truthful edges. I’m facing a semi-circle of the other kids. I even remember some of them: Biard, Miranda, Ben, Kim, though the others’ names have faded. What hasn’t gone away—the suffocating leather bands compressing my chest and pinning my arms to my sides—is the knowledge that I’m not like them. I know I’ll never really belong here. Not in this school, maybe not even on this earth.

It wasn’t that I was sensitive and a bit odd; it wasn’t that I had no interest in throwing balls, or that all I really wanted was to hang out with the adults. It was that just a week or two into my first year of school, my mother suddenly took ill. Over the course of a single, vertiginous week, she tumbled from mild flu-like symptoms into severe headaches and finally a near-paralyzing lethargy. No one yet knew it, but on a recent family vacation to Sea Island, Georgia, she’d been bitten by a mosquito carrying encephalitis. On Friday, my father took her to the hospital. By Tuesday she was gone.

That wasn’t the problem. I mean, no—that was absolutely, incontrovertibly, a huge, huge problem.

But the real problem was that the ones who were left—my father and my grandmother—couldn’t put her death into some kind of context, to explain it in terms appropriate to a four-year-old and then show up to let him know it was going to be okay. Soon, all the photos of my mother were taken down. And so it was like she had simply disappeared.

I don’t blame them, in case it matters. My father and my grandmother were unrehabilitated Holocaust Survivors, and neither of them possessed the emotional architecture to approach their unexamined grief. But the devastating aloneness I felt all throughout my childhood—and yes, I use that word advisedly—implanted a lifelong sense that the world was to be feared, and that I’d never find a home here anyway.

Which brings me back—hey!—to the topic of my book. The process of sharing it makes me feel like I’m right back on the nubby, navy blue carpet of that preschool, face to face with a gauntlet of 4-year-olds. Uncomfortable though it may be, it’s also a profound gift: a chance to rewrite a very old story that’s long needed to change.

When I began writing my book—SEVEN YEARS AGO (did I mention that part yet?)—I leaned into my grandiose side.

Agents would fight to represent me! Publishers would launch a furious bidding war! Never mind that I’d never written anything personal before, or that my “author platform” consisted of 500 Instagram followers who either were actually my friends or, attracted by the psychedelic angle, had handles like “420ShroomDude” and really wanted to hook me up.

At first, a few agents actually showed interest, but all of them more or less said “someone else is already writing this book” and dropped off. Then, when my writing partner Beth Adele Long suggested we form a publishing collective instead, it felt like a slap in the face, a challenge I couldn’t refuse. All I’d wanted from the world was a stamp of approval. Could I give it to myself instead?

That’s currently a work in progress. I imagine that having a publisher and an agent shields you, at least in part, from the crushing nothingness of launching and promoting a book: The fact that nearly no one responds to your artful pitches for reviews and interviews. The dawning realization that, literally, no one in the world actually needs my book.

I’m no longer a bewildered four-year-old, and I’m no longer trapped in a sarcophagus of unattended grief. As I approach the pub date—it’s May 21, by the way—I only expect the process will grow more challenging, and yet behind the discomfort is a fragile but ever-growing glow: the quiet knowing that if can truly detach from my need to be acknowledged, beyond it lies a freedom and an expansiveness I’ve never known before.

That the writing of the book was my path to belonging, and that no one gets to grant it but me.

Years ago, a therapist asked me what self-publishing would feel like. “Suicide,” I answered, surprising myself more than her. Now, I see that some part of me really did have to die to get here. Painful though it is, I’m grateful beyond words to be here.