Send It

 

I’m not so social, I said to a girl from Tenerife in between puffs of a cigarette at a club in London when she asked why I was traveling alone. I prefer to be alone. She nodded while using my zippo to light the ciggie I bummed her from one of those packs of smokes they sell outside of the states that have horrible photos of babies smoking, blackened hearts, and throats with a hole in them, meant to frighten whoever was stupid enough to still be smoking in 2022. Weirdly enough, I’m not scared of shit. Apparently neither is the girl I was smoking with. 

You are brave, she smiled. You don’t give a fuck.

What’s to give a fuck about? I’m in a great city with good company. Traveling alone is never a bad idea, in my opinion. Unless you’re going to get really drunk, like I used to do. Then you might end up learning how to eat with your hands before being pressured into sex by an Indian man in a sketchy hotel room in Mumbai. How did I end up with this loser anyways? And why is he in my hotel room? I managed to finagle my way out of the situation by lying and saying that I needed him to go get some liquor and cigarettes before getting into any kind of sexual encounter. Never once have I needed liquor to have sex. It’s a terrible combo. LSD or even a strong edible is a much more pleasurable experience, but I’m obviously not going to send a stranger out to find me LSD in India. I didn’t want to sleep with him anyways, high or not. Once he left I snuck out the back door unscathed. Not paying for the room was a plus. It’s obviously smarter to not get wasted in a foreign country alone and let strange men into your hotel room, but that’s part of being brave, I guess. There’s always some stupidity involved. 

It’s situations like that, the smoking cigarettes without a care in the world, dancing alone in a club so big you could get lost in it, getting myself into a little bit of trouble when I find myself in strange places, that give people the idea that I’m down for whatever, wherever, whenever, but this is totally false. I’ve seen people attach themselves to the side of a cliff with nothing but carabiners keeping them from sudden death. Some people I met in Switzerland did that and showed me photos of the views they had. Via ferrata it’s called. I was probably reading a book or taking a nap when they did all that, and I’m grateful no one tried to rope me into that experience. I really don’t care how pretty it was up there. No way in hell am I doing that. 

On that same trip I saw a little whisper of a girl jump into an ice cold lake without thinking twice about it. I myself just stumbled in like an awkward little duck following its mom. I’ve met people who went bungee jumping in between large mountains. Others climb up those mountains without a rope or anything. Because I’m perceived as someone who doesn’t give a fuck, people assume I’d crush that sort of thing. My coworkers said I’m the most likely to climb Mt. Everest. I’ve had many people tell me they wouldn’t wanna face me in a fight. Certainly you would kick my ass. You’re a badass, they all say, even the big guys. Give me a break! I let a skinny little heroin addict of a man who couldn’t even help me carry my dresser up the stairs rape me daily for years. I don’t know how to fight even if it means saving me from a lifetime of trauma. I absolutely will not be jumping off cliffs or climbing up mountains any time soon, either. I’m not that much of a badass. I’m just a girl who has lived. I never had to do something too adventurous to make that happen. As a general rule, I don’t do anything that requires a helmet. There’s not much of a story to tell there. I once jumped off a cliff while attached to a rope and lived to tell the tale. Nice! I just kind of stumble into situations that fuck me up mentally and let the story unfold from there. 

I don’t think “doing things” is all that interesting, anyways. I prefer to be bold with my words. They can last forever if you put them on the internet. Experiences like skydiving last less than an hour. If you do that, decades down the road you could say “I used to be wild,” but I’ll be wild until the day I die. I’m a writer. The need to find interesting stories never really goes away. Naturally, the most interesting ones come from those who have lived on the fringe of society, never really able to find their place in the world. Of course that applies to me, having both a mood disorder and a personality disorder. Those scary parts of the mind that don’t function in a way that’s considered normal can lead you to some pretty fascinating places.  

I spent a week in a psych ward after a life changing moment of steering my car towards the edge of a cliff and pressing on the gas while on what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation in one of the US Virgin Islands. My therapist said I had to head back to NYC immediately and check myself into NYU hospital. The nurses put a yellow wristband on me that said “fall risk” because I had been drinking so much I could have had a seizure. They got my meds right, upping my dose of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. Once I leveled out all the doctors said the only way I could leave the hospital is if I went to rehab straight from there. After my 30 days were up I lived in a sober house for a while. Me and the other brave, stupid girls of the world who didn’t give a fuck about anything other than getting frighteningly drunk and high spent our time gathered around a kitchen table talking about relationships, the ugly parts of addiction, why we hate AA and why we love fucking. Or we were in front of the TV watching 12 straight hours of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Sometimes we were outside chain smoking cigarettes bitching about the heroin addict we used to date who owes us money, as if we ourselves didn’t owe anyone shit for the years we spent using. All that was only in my 20's. 

In my teen years I spent three months in a mental hospital where they told me I had to go to a therapeutic boarding school, a place where you have to wear button down shirts and ugly pants and no jewelry and can’t use your phone. Of course I didn’t even spend one day in that place. I ran off into a blizzard snowstorm wearing a bathrobe underneath a winter coat. I tried to get into a stranger's car but the woman from the school wouldn’t let me. She was following me and trying to get me to come back to safety. I laid down in a snow bank instead until a car pulled up with a few weirdos in it who were affiliated with the school. They didn’t tell me where they were taking me but at that point I didn’t care. I ended up staying for three months in the woods during the coldest winter on record in Utah as part of a rehabilitation program for troubled teens. Such tumultuous events for someone who was only 16 at the time! 

All that bungee jumping, via ferrata, ice cold lake nonsense is for those who are searching for freedom from the constraints of the world. They want to feel their heart pumping fast in their chest as proof that the way they’re living is fulfilling, that they’re living in a way that frightens them, which makes them a brave and exciting person. As for me I’ll be in the smoking section, on the dance floor, deep within the pages of a book not giving a fuck. I know the type of shit that goes down when you go too deep into the darkness of one’s own mind which has probably made me wiser than those adventurous people, maybe even a little more brave, having stared death in the face without flinching.