| |  | | | | May 24, 2016 | Letter No. 35 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hola Lennys!
I love that it's getting warm here in New York, because it's the start of beach weather, and the only thing I care about in the summer is going to the beach as much as possible. Mostly because when I'm there, I really disconnect from the world — a.k.a. social media — and just get to, like, live in the moment, you know? This will become an especially important ritual as the news in this election season continues to be trash. It's hard to be a person who likes to stay informed about what's going on in the world while simultaneously being 100 percent exhausted and, perhaps saddest of all, unsurprised at the new levels of human indecency that American politicians keep trying to reach. SIGH.
BUT! BUT. That is also one of the things I love about Lenny. The fact that for the time it takes you to read the newsletter you can escape all the garbage tendencies of the outside world. You can bury yourself in a beautiful essay like the one Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote about her obsession with dollhouses: with YouTube videos of people creating tiny foods for the tiny people who inhabit them, with the one she owned as a child, with the dollhouse-fantasy home she wishes to buy for her mom one day. I could lavish even more agreeable adjectives on Kaitlyn's essay, but suffice to say it will stay with you. Just as Kaitlyn is staying with us: we are so thrilled to announce that she is Lenny's new contributing writer! I cannot wait to read more from her beautiful brain.
But there's even more beauty in this issue! In makeup queen Florence Adepoju's morning routine, where the MDMflow-beauty-line founder tells us about what she does after she wakes up each day. Then we have the novelist Katy Smith writing about her longing for that most human connection: a hug. Where Katy thinks about her physicality, Amanda Palley tried to ignore hers. She writes movingly about how ignoring her increasingly sick body while trying to get ahead in her job nearly killed her.
Finally, we have TV writer Leila Gerstein, who shares the challenges of trying to portray an abortion on-screen. She describes the resistance she received from skittish entertainment executives and her struggles to get past them. As we enter another cycle of women's lives being put in jeopardy by ridiculous laws — most recently in Oklahoma, where a bill passed that would make performing an abortion a felony — the need to show women having this safe, legal, and even mundane experience on our screens is more important than ever. Though Oklahoma's Gov. Mary Fallin vetoed that bill shortly after its passage, there are only two abortion clinics currently open in the state, and it's much harder than it should be to get the procedure. If you want to help Oklahoma women directly, click here to donate to the Oklahoma Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice's Roe Fund, which helps low- and no-income women get the reproductive-health services they need.
xx
Laia | | | | | | | | | | | | A Small Place for Us | | | | By Kaitlyn Greenidge | | |
On the Internet, there is a video of an unidentified hand preparing miniature tacos. For scale, we see the hand light a tea candle, open a miniature stove's door, place the lit candle within, close the door, and then set a thimble full of oil on the stove's burner to boil.
The hand uses a bent paper clip to grasp four thumbprints' worth of dough, drop them in the oil, and then carefully fold them into shell shapes. The hand sautés a minuscule saucepan full of kernels of ground beef, and then it very carefully, with an almost-imperceptible shiver, slices a fingernail of lettuce into shreds. Finally, it arranges everything on a small table: four tacos, sized for a doll or pet rodent to eat, warm and waiting before the video ends.
This video has been viewed 25,000 times on YouTube. It's over a year old, but I first watched it this spring. And then watched it again. And then emailed it to everyone I knew. I did not watch it because I love tacos (although I did send it to my taco-loving friends). I did not watch it because I wanted to eat the meal prepared (which is rare: I spend many hours looking at recipes I know I would like to eat but don't really have the patience to gather the ingredients to cook). When I watched the video, I felt only a deep, intense longing. Not for food or for comfort, but for that very, very small world. It was a longing to shrink down and enter the screen and sit at the tiny table, stand by the stove, feel the heat of a votive candle as if it were a bonfire and not a single, flickering flame.
One of my most-read books when I was a child was a retelling of "Thumbelina" — a picture-book version, where Thumbelina was tucked into a walnut shell each night and gently rocked to sleep. She was also nearly married off to a blind, hideous, and oblivious mole. This last part I spent a lot of time thinking about. I sympathized with the mole, who was just looking for companionship, who must have heard Thumbelina's voice, finally at a timbre that his ears could register, who must have felt her soft hand in his paw, finally a size he could squeeze, and thought to himself in the dim twilight of his inner thoughts, This is it!
Although I understood Thumbelina's horror at her prospective spouse, at the thought of having to live underground with him and sully her gossamer clothes with dust, I still didn't think it was such a bad life. It seemed a bit unfair when the mole was portrayed, toward the end of their disastrous affair, as a grasping and jealous mate, one who should have been aware of his own inherent unattractiveness and let Thumbelina go.
In retrospect, I identified with the mole specifically because of his longing. I knew what it was like to encounter the miniature and wish to have it for yourself. What you would actually do with it once you got it was unclear. It somehow was both enough, and not nearly enough, simply to possess it. But I understood the longing of the hairy and squinting and wriggling mess of self to want something so tiny that its smallness became a signifier for something else, an emblem of a kind of perfection that is always out of reach.
Growing up, my sisters and I had a dollhouse. It was unpainted, made of a dark, rough wood and styled as a Victorian monstrosity, gloomy looking, with high, sharp gables that could give you a splinter or cut your elbow if you grazed against them. The windows of that house had thick pieces of cellophane in them, to simulate glass, and the rooms were narrow and dark. But my two older sisters and I loved that dollhouse and played with it constantly. Our aunt had painstakingly sewn a cloth family to live in it: a mother in a beautiful red gingham dress with a lovely, tight little Afro of yarn along her skull; a father in tight black pants and a black suit coat, slim cut, so that he looked ever-stylish and debonair; and various cloth children, boys and girls, as well as a sack of brown fabric that had been carefully stitched over to replicate the folds and lumps of a fat cloud of a toddler.
We had many games, but what I remember liking to do the most was to make miniature meals for the dollhouse's dining room. My mother bought me polymer clay and I would spend hours happily rolling and rerolling pebbles of it between my fingers, trying to fashion a bowl of oranges for the tiny dining-room table. I made miniature cherry pies and miniature turkeys with miniature drumsticks. I would place them carefully in the dark, rough rooms and then wait. The emotion I felt was some combination of a gloating and longing: gloating because I had the tiny thing in my possession and a longing because the possession was not complete and I did not know how to make it so. Sometimes, I reached my hand back into the room, took the little clay pie into my palm, and then placed it on my tongue. The taste, though pleasurable, did nothing to stop the longing. My tongue was coated with clay, but I wanted something else.
The Christmas I was eight or nine, my sister announced she was going to build me another dollhouse, all by herself. I did not ask her for one, but I was delighted with this present: it was one of those rare moments in life when you receive a gift you do not even know you want. There happened to be a shop the next town over that specialized in dollhouses and train sets. It was a pleasure to go there, and that is where she picked out the house she would build for me.
I don't remember getting a say in the matter, but she picked the perfect house. It was wide and had balconies, with little French doors that opened out onto them. The dollhouse kit came with expensive-feeling heavy glass to insert into these doors, to make them more real. It came with so many yards of trim, for the gables and the eaves and the doorways. My sister spent weeks taking each piece out of the kit and arranging it on the carpet in the TV room, making sure each aligned with its number in the directions. She put it together entirely herself, and she designed the color scheme, too: a cheerful canary yellow, with bright white for the curling borders.
Toward the end of the house's construction, my sister was painting the back wall when she overturned the paint can. There was a moment of silence in the room, and then a lot of lamenting. The paint spread over the rose-colored area rug, and despite our best efforts to scrub it clean, the stain remained for years, brittle and rough, a stiff, raised pond of gold over pink.
It was a big deal that the rug was stained because, by then, the rug was one of the few possessions our family owned. The year before, we had lost our house in my parents' divorce. We now lived in essentially three rooms in my grandparents' house — a large master bedroom that my grandparents gave up for my sisters and me, a smaller garret bedroom where my mother slept, and a room that for many years was used as a playroom for visiting grandchildren but was now converted into a kind of living room for my family.
My grandparents' house was a stately Victorian farmhouse, more impressive on the outside than on the in. The bedrooms were comfortable but small, and the hallways were dark and narrow. The whole house was oriented to the large, airy living room on the first floor, with its puffy, heavy white couches and Oriental carpets and fine pottery and wood-encased electronics. The room was dominated by two huge gilt mirrors that reflected the glamour of the room back to each other in an endless conversation. It was very much my grandmother's pride and joy and very much not ours.
My grandmother was a kind and generous person, loving to a fault, so it was not as if we were made to feel that it did not belong to us. But nothing could have been further from the cheerfully messy, determinedly '80s-style domesticity of what had been my mother's own living room, now lost in the divorce. In my grandmother's living room, there was an entire suite of porcelain and china and marble elephants and fisherman figures, all marching resolutely along the mahogany edges of her end tables. My mother's living room, in contrast, usually had a laundry basket in the corner and was littered with the detritus of girlhood — black Barbie-doll bodies twisted into triumphant, athletic poses and then dropped on the rug; brown baby dolls left to sweat out imaginary fevers on phantom hospital beds near the hi-fi stereo.
The upstairs room in my grandmother's house, where my sister was constructing the dollhouse for me, was supposed to be ours, was supposed to be a place for us to be girls together, still, uncramped and unedited. My mother did her best with the little money she had to decorate it just for us. She bought that rose-colored area rug, complaining all the while about the atrocious color and the poor quality, for $19.99 at Building 19, the local discount department store. She'd cursed that rug and mocked it, and we had, too, but when my sister spilled that lake of yellow on it, we all knew what it meant: we would now have this rose carpet with a yellow stain for a long, long time, because it would be ages before any of us could afford another one.
For the years afterward that we had that rug, in all the apartments we were evicted from, I would rub my bare feet and legs against the rough paint surface while watching TV and think about the moment the paint spilled, that moment of frustration and sadness and anticipation. I thought, too, about my dollhouse, which my sister finished for me, despite the accident. It was my pride and joy for many years, and many, many times I looked at it, at the foot of my bed in the room I shared with my sisters, and wished and wished that the house were real. That I could live inside a place that fine, that we could live in a place with doors along a balcony to carefully pull closed. It never occurred to me, the sadness of that gift she made, the beauty of the gesture: she literally tried to build me a home at a time when it felt that we had none.
That dollhouse is long gone: my mother made me throw it away when I was 13, after another eviction, and this time a move that felt final, to the projects. I hadn't played with it in years, but I still resented getting rid of it, and I have blocked out all memory of placing it on the curb for the trash. I only know that the perfect dollhouse family of brown cloth and black yarn went into Ziploc bags in a basement, along with a few of their ossified meals of brightly colored clay.
But the desire for that house remains. My sister, the one who built me the dollhouse, and I watch Tiny House Nation together when I come home to Boston. We talk about what it would take to live in one. Both of us have a dream, the same dream any kid who grew up poor has had: that one day, we will buy our mother a house. We reason we cannot afford a whole house for her in Boston, gentrification has ensured that, so a tiny house will be the answer. We will buy some undeveloped land somewhere, Concord, maybe, and we'll put up a little village of tiny houses for my sister and her husband and her children and our other sister and mother and me to live in. "I don't want to live in one of those," my mother laughs. "I've lived in small spaces for most of my life." And our other sister, the historian, says, "Slavery times are over. No one needs to live in a tiny house anymore."
The dream persists: a tiny house for each of us, with a loft bed and shelves, arranged around a center yard where we could meet and laugh and play before we retire at the end of the day, pulling the doors behind us on our own perfect, small place.
Kaitlyn Greenidge's novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman was published in March by Algonquin. | | | | | | | | | | | | Morning Routine | | | | By Florence Adepoju | | |
A recurring feature in which Lenny follows a woman we love through the start of her day.
My morning can go two ways.
There's the morning when I set my alarm for 6:00, 6:15, 6:30, and 7:00, when I finally get up. I get in the shower and stand under the warm water for 20 minutes, reflecting on my company's future, on why diversity and representation matter in the beauty industry, while also convincing myself that I won't totally fluff up my interview with BBC's Women's Hour or whatever other press appointment I've got later that day. Then I'm out of the shower and I've got 30 more minutes to get ready. That's enough time to charge my phone, put on my contact lenses. I paint my face, using a small angled brush and Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow to define my eyebrows, as taught by the gurus on YouTube, and apply my power shade vamp.
I slather on edge control and use a hard bristle to style, before finally leaving my house at 8 a.m.
I count the brisk 15-minute walk to the train station as my morning's exercise and listen to my power playlist to psych myself up: Rick Ross's "Rich Forever," Notorious BIG's "Warning," and Nicki Minaj's "I'm the Best." At the train station I order my latte (one brown sugar) and get to Platform 1 with two minutes to spare. I can count this as my first morning's victory. It's the small things, isn't it? Ha-ha.
Getting on the train I bump into an old school friend. "How are things?" she asks, Fine thank you, how are you? Here, I realize that she actually wants to hear more about my life beyond the pleasant auto-response, so I give her a brief update on start-up life and my last press trip to New York, and then we discuss why British press are always seemingly late to the party. Almost three-quarters of the way to my destination and I notice that we've mostly talked about me. What are you up to? Where are you headed? She tells me about her job and very terrible boss, her dreams to travel the world, and the savings account that's taking her there. We wax lyrical on dreams and how fervently they should be chased. I hop off the train at Tower Hill and on the London Underground to Central London. My boyfriend will meet me on the way to my press appointment, and after a bit of a pep talk I'll feel the adrenaline drip in, all my anxiety left on the train I just hopped out of. Or perhaps it's the pheromones?
| (Courtesy Florence Adepoju) |
Then there's the morning where I don't set my alarm because I'm working from home and I'd rather not start the day with a dose of hypertension if I can help it. Plus, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that uninterrupted sleep increases productivity, so, y'know, that's actually a bit of a boss move, isn't it? Ha.
Usually around eight, I'll reach for my iPhone. I'll check under my pillow first, then dig around for it under my duvet before eventually finding it wedged in the tight gap between my bed and wall. If I'm lucky, it's been charging from last night and I can use the wire to fish it out.
My first port of call is Tumblr, where I'll reblog the awesome content my US-based homies have curated whilst I slept, then it's Pinterest, where I'll read over my inspirational quote board, filling myself with positive quotes. I'll find one I like and make a mental note to post it to Instagram, where I head to next. I'll respond to questions from customers, show love to tagged photos, and geek out if Nasty Gal posted my lipsticks on its page again. After a 45-minute stint, I wean myself off social media and consider checking my ever-growing unread-email list. I'll start with the longest and hardest journalist questions first, but then midway through the first question I'll convince myself I need a power nap.
At ten I'll wake back up, finally feeling like I'm ready to begin my day. I sit up in bed, say a prayer out loud, and reflect, generally just psyching myself up: Flow, you can do this!, Today will be a good day!, #MDMflowIsTheIllest, etcetera. I have a quick shower, with Jhené Aiko, WSTRN, and Bryson Tiller serenading me from Spotify, before running downstairs to eat my omelet and avocado salad, and I'm in the lab by 11, ready to formulate lipsticks for the fiery crew of MDMflow girls who run the world.
Florence Adepoju is the founder and CEO of MDM Flow. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Occasional Ardent Hug | | | | By Katy Simpson Smith | | |
I was on a stroll in New Orleans a few days ago when I saw a couple standing on the edge of a busy street, between parked cars, having a discussion that seemed serious. I thought they were fighting. I looked the other way for a few strides to see if my neighbor was out watering his yew trees, and when I looked back, the couple had erased all distance between them. Their arms were entangled, their faces showed something deeper than happiness, and they didn't let each other go for as long as I allowed myself to stare. My stomach went hollow. I wanted that.
As a writer, I spend most of my time within a hundred square feet — desk, sofa, bookshelf, fridge — the bones of a life. I have found that men do not tend to wander through this space. Friends say love happens when you're not looking for it, so I don't, going so far as to pat myself on the back for staying in on yet another weekend night rather than prowling the neighborhood bars. Love must be imminent, I think, for I am not even bothering to leave the house. But the larger question, one that friends rarely ask, is what kind of love I'm after.
If sexuality is a spectrum, then love too must be a sliding scale.
This week — and many weeks, though not all — I don't want someone to come home to, someone to share the day's events with, someone to sleep beside. But I'm not wholly content with my solitary, hundred-square-foot life either. I want the occasional ardent hug. I want what that couple in the street had. A feeling of envelopment that lasts just long enough to warm the skin, and the inside of the skin, but not long enough to signal protection or possession.
In my short life, I have spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out where the arms go in a proper embrace. Both above the other person's shoulders? Both below? Half and half (the old double-dutch)? If your right hand accidentally lands on the embracee's neck, and lingers, is that too intimate? Can you retreat from that position while maintaining your platonic stance? I won't even get into hip placement, or my bafflement as to where the feet go (why don't they bump into each other?). Once begun, can a hug just last and last? At some point, do you have to get married?
No. That's the beauty of hugs; they're the ephemera of attachment.
But I have had my arms wrapped around another person and thought, If he lets go, my cells will lose their glue. There are weeks when I want the longest hug. The shared stories, the nighttime body. But that's harder to come by, and I don't have the inclination to hunt for it, not yet. Mostly what I want is my family, and my friends, and my desk. At the desk, where I write, is all manner of love: children, widowers, monogamists, grandparents, wanderers. What's missing, or what I feel the lack of, is touch. A heartbeat running, foreign, across from mine. The living equivalent of what I invent. Perhaps it's not ephemera, then, but essence. And perhaps I should not feel so guilty when I say I don't want a boyfriend, I want a hug.
I can already hear you offering solutions. There are professional cuddlers, providing their services for up to $100 an hour. (There's even an app: Cuddlr. Don't laugh.) There is Temple Grandin's genius hug machine. There's the Free Hugs movement. A recent instance of this made the rounds on the Internet a few months ago, in which an aboriginal Australian woman stood blindfolded on a beach, her arms out, with a sign: "I trust you. Do you trust me? Let's hug." It was a defiant stance on race and culture. My face got hot with tears when I saw it, not just because of the courage on display, or the obvious sentimental appeal, or its link to centuries of oppression, but because it was a reminder that touch is human, and hugs have no agenda beyond connection. They needn't be romantic; they needn't even come from someone you know. (Though paying for them seems to defeat the purpose.) Their success is dependent on nothing but the intent to listen for that neighboring heartbeat, to turn the foreign into the familiar. And so strangers, after years of hugging, become beloved. That is what I want my arms to do, of all the things they're not doing. In a Wall Street Journal article on professional huggers, one commenter observed, "There's more to this than just the physical act of cuddling. There's the illusion that someone wants to cuddle you."
I came up with a plan to make friends. I was going to traipse into my local coffee shop in New Orleans with a dozen printed surveys to pass out to all and sundry; after answering my overly personal questions, they'd return them to me, one by one, and with each exchange there'd be a smile. I'd read their answers and then — the fantasy playing itself out — I'd go sit with each customer in turn, shifting the survey into a conversation. The initial questions were these:
1. What are you doing/working on/discussing in this coffee shop?
2. What's the best book you've read recently?
3. Are you basically happy? What would your dream life be like?
4. I just saw these people embracing lengthily in the street; if someone said to you, "Look, I like you, but I don't want to date you; I just want you every now and then to give me deeply meaningful hugs," would you be fine with that?
Surely some people would answer yes to No. 4. Isn't there some adage about just asking for what you want? On the one hand, how stupid to think that some patron would rise to her or his feet in an inspiration of affection; on the other, is this any shot-in-the-darker than online dating? Is a one-minute hug any more objectionable than a one-night stand?
You'll want to know how the survey turned out. Didn't I tell you I was a coward? I can't even walk into a coffee shop without blushing; turns out distributing fliers was asking too much of my fragile system. There's the rub: the stratagem of intentionally not looking for love may not work for the timid.
Which brings us to the potentially gaping divide between what I want and what is good for me. My friends have strong opinions on this; it seems obvious to them that I'm afraid of a normally functioning relationship, that my instincts for self-sabotage lead me to unavailable men, and that my singleness is not a choice (which, in truth, it isn't) but a failure to engage. I disagree. If anything, I'd say it's a failure of imagination. It's hard to envision a Normally Functioning Relationship that's more pleasurable than my life now, or a process toward partnership in which the costs don't outweigh the benefits. I possess an independence that's endlessly precious to me. I can write into the early hours of the morning without disturbing a soul; I can eat lunch while reading in silence; I can get in the car and drive for hours — or weeks — without asking permission. As a woman, I recognize how historically hard-won this freedom is.
This winter I bought a Christmas tree — the first on my own — and felt very grown-up; an hour later, having wrestled the Fraser fir into my house and maneuvered the leaning trunk into the stand by myself, I wiped my forehead with a sap-stained arm and genuinely wished for a live-in tree helper. I thought of all the couples who do this domestic business together, who use their combined strength to tackle yard work and lift furniture and change lightbulbs, one person holding the ladder while the other teeters on top. But that evening I rewatched Roman Holiday — particularly noticing the Peck-Hepburn hugs, arguably more passionate than their two chaste kisses — and was reminded that what feels so right about the film is that the lovers end up parting. They share this beautiful day, Vespa-ing around the Eternal City, and then diverge. This is not a tragic ending to me.
Did you know that "to hug" comes from the Old Norse hugr, meaning "courage"? In ancient politics, it was a sign that you were unarmed. Grab my torso; marvel at my lack of weapons; trust me. Let us admit our mutual vulnerability, our fear, and hold each other anyway. If the trick is asking for what you want, let this be an expression of my current attitude, and not an apology. Begone, friends who yearn for my happiness. Begone, parents who yearn for grandbabies. Begone, instincts toward guilt when another Saturday night sees me at home. Begone, loneliness.
Loneliness? No, that never goes. It's a disease of the long haul, to be tempered only by the short-term fix: human warmth against human warmth. The rough skin of a cheek. Elastic arms. In my imaginings, all those men and women in the coffee shop pulled out their pencils, confessed their secretest dreams, unbuttoned their souls, and wrote Yes, yes to embracing in the street. We asked nothing more of each other. When I am fulfilled by my work, when I am happy with my thoughts, when I am doing good for others, just give me this one thing, allow me this one corporeal spark. Hug me.
Katy Simpson Smith is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. | | | | | | | | | | | | Having a Type-A Disease | | | | By Amanda Palley | | | |
It's September of 2004. I'm preparing a script for submission to a fancy actor and one of the freshly printed pages slices my thumb. A paper cut that won't stop bleeding. I'm panicked, not from pain or worry, but because I'm not sure I have time to get another, non-bloody, script printed before the FedEx deadline. I call the mailroom and beg them to put a rush on the print order. I cover my thumb in Band-Aids. I keep working.
I've just been promoted from my very first Grown Up job to my second Grown Up job, going from talent agent's assistant to agency partner's assistant. Creative Artists Agency is a top firm representing players in Hollywood and beyond, so I don't mind that my tasks are secretarial: I may be at the bottom of the ladder, but I'm learning from the best. I am exhausted, more exhausted than whatever I think baseline exhaustion is, but believe without a doubt it's because I am working all the time.
The minute I learned someone would pay me not only to read and watch material but to help shape it into its final form, it's all I wanted to do. A college film major, I interned at production companies over summers, and when I graduated I went straight to CAA: per multiple mentors, it was the best place to learn fast. My résumé got me the interview, and the blind confidence of the newly graduated cinched the job; I promised to work around the clock if that's what it took. And it is indeed what it takes: I've always worked hard, but now I work harder. I'm increasingly tired. I bruise easily. I've always bruised easily, but these are different. Bigger. Occasionally I wake up with nosebleeds. I got them as a kid, so while it's odd that they've returned, it's not so odd that I need to be concerned. What I am concerned about is excelling at my assistant duties while also proving my creative acumen by reporting on material my boss doesn't have time to read. This is how I'll get a coveted executive job.
But it gets harder to ignore these things when other people start noticing. At a party, a med student does a double take at my bruised legs. I admit it isn't my best look. "You should go to the doctor," she says. I scoff. There's no way I can take time off. It's not that my boss wouldn't let me, it's that I'm 23 and a future Master of the Universe — even asking for an hour away is a chink in my assistant armor. My dedication to this job is a badge of honor.
Finally, if only to get everyone off my back, I make an appointment with a doctor my first boss recommends. The doctor, whose office walls are covered with accolades, has kind eyes and a long white beard. He tells me there's nothing to worry about, I'm probably anemic, and takes some blood. I speed back to the office. What a waste of time.
The next day, the doctor calls my work line. He believes the lab that tested my blood made an error, and he needs me to get a second opinion immediately.
Is he on drugs? "It's the middle of the day, I can't leave."
He replies that if the results aren't a mistake, I need an immediate blood transfusion, so I should probably take this seriously.
A tear escapes from my eye, a traitor to the "no crying in baseball" attitude I strive to maintain at work. The boss asks what's wrong. I explain.
"Darren will drive you." He points at my fellow assistant, my partner in long hours and dreams of promotion, who's thinking the same thing I am: Who will answer your phone? I ask the question, hating that my voice shakes as I do. He shrugs. "Honey, I'll be fine."
Eleven years later, I tell this story with equal parts horror and humor. Horror that my "make it in Hollywood" blinders were so firmly on that I couldn't see how much my health had failed or understand that it was unlikely I'd be fired for going to the doctor, and humor because the worst didn't happen. My eventual diagnosis was far from the end of my professional dreams, so perhaps making fun of my failings will dissuade others from the same mistakes.
After more blood work, the second-opinion doctor asks if Darren can drive me directly to Cedars Sinai, the nearest hospital, where I will be checked in for the emergency blood transfusion. The initial results weren't a mistake.
We get in Darren's car and I burst into tears. "It's going to be OK," says Darren. "That's not it," I say. There's no way I can sit in the hospital without any work to do. I convince Darren to drive by my place so I can pack a bag of scripts.
At Cedars, I send Darren back to the office, both of us praying our boss's day hasn't been decimated by this debacle. I wait to get admitted, emailing the assistant I'd planned networking drinks with that night ("Not feeling great, let's resked!"). I'm sure I will be out in no time.
I'm wrong. A doctor takes my blood and lays out the situation. A normal person has between 150,000 and 450,000 platelets in her body. I have 500. Not 500,000. Literally 500.
"If you'd waited one more day, you would be dead." I understand the basic math. I realize I should probably call my parents, and I do, downplaying everything. "I'm fine, they're making a big deal over nothing, you certainly don't need to come out here." This is partially because I can't stand anyone feeling sorry for me and partially because I still haven't absorbed what's happening. It's easier to handle without concerned loved ones hovering around.
Around midnight, someone comes in with the blood transfusion and a ton of paperwork saying this blood was screened 900 times to ensure it doesn't have any diseases. Fine print follows: no guarantees, sign this so you can't sue us. I sign because what else are you going to do, and realize this is the first major decision I have made without getting someone else's opinion. I feel proud but lonely. Am I an adult now?
I wake up with someone else's blood inside my body. A doctor explains, regarding my own blood, that it looks like I could have leukemia. They need to do a bone-marrow tap to see. She elaborates: they will drill into the bone at the base of my spine to take a sample. They can numb the external area, but there isn't a way to numb the bone. I read between the lines. This is really going to hurt. Fleetingly, I wish someone were here with me, then change my mind: better that no one else sees me this vulnerable.
The bone-marrow tap is, as advertised, the worst pain I have ever felt. A med student on rotation is drilling into my bone with an actual drill. The supervising doctor is trying to distract me by talking about the time she drove by Brad Pitt's house: "You work in entertainment, have you ever met him?" What? I am trying to be chill, but it is so, so hard.
The med student finishes. And then he doesn't, because he didn't get enough marrow. Great work, Doogie Howser. Supervising Brad Pitt fan jumps in. It does not hurt any less.
They decide it's probably not cancer and release me after a week with no clear diagnosis beyond "blood disease." Frustrated that I still don't have the OK to return to the office, I'm on the way to a specialist when I hear from the first doctor I saw. He's positive he's diagnosed me. The hospital was looking at only my blood, not my entire body, and so they missed what was right in front of them: lupus.
He explains the broad strokes — your immune system is unable to distinguish between healthy tissue and foreign invaders, so it goes overboard fighting both. I am shocked to discover that type-A me has a type-A disease. It is kind of poetic justice that my body overthinks things the same way my brain does.
He theorizes that the extreme sun exposure I endured during the marathon I ran that year combined with the stress my workaholic tendencies put on my system brought on the massive flare that caused my blood to cannibalize itself. "It sounds better than cancer, right?" I respond. He laughs. I laugh. I hang up and cry out of exhaustion and relief.
I can't believe this was over a decade ago. At the same time, I can't really remember what my life was like before lupus. I've spent the past ten years faithfully seeing my doctors and taking the medication that keeps my disease mostly in check. These days my main symptom is massive fatigue, but I feel awkward even typing that — isn't everyone tired? I have joint pain, which is helped by exercise, and I try to avoid getting sick, as infections are a typical flare trigger (as are stress and sunlight).
As for my career, I'm now a television executive, overseeing four shows currently on the air and loving every moment. Being up front about my health with my boss means that I'm able to arrange my medical appointments around my work schedule. Managing lupus, it turns out, is like managing a production: diligent attention paid on a regular basis means that problems are fixed in the moment. That said, I have had some flare-ups where my immune system gets overexcited and attacks healthy cells with extra gusto. While these certainly aren't fun, they are manageable: I have a strong team of doctors looking out for me, and, more important, I'm finally looking out for myself. Monitoring my health rather than ignoring it means things are much less likely to spiral out of control the way they did in 2004.
For a long time, I was reticent to discuss my lupus. I didn't want it to define me, and I didn't want to seem like I think I have it worse than anyone else. I don't. If managing this disease is the worst thing I have on my plate, I'm still a fortunate person. But in staying silent about this, I realized I was hiding a piece of myself. And in ignoring my symptoms 11 years ago, I was also ignoring a piece of who I was, unable to see beyond my career ambitions. I was too afraid of what I imagined the short-term ramifications would be at work to realize that if I didn't focus on my health, there wouldn't be a long term, period.
What's worse, my single-minded focus on success caused me to ignore my condition, just as it caused me to ignore my loved ones who wanted to help. It took getting sick — nearly dying — for me to realize it was OK to admit weakness. Perhaps that's a lesson we all learn in our own way: it's OK for people to know you aren't indestructible. None of us are. And maybe that's what opens us up to have our deepest and truest relationships — not only with our friends and families, but with ourselves.
Amanda Palley is a television executive in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | I Will Show an Abortion on TV | | | | By Leila Gerstein | | |
Abortion has always been my big issue. In eighth grade, I founded the Women's Issues Club at my school and marched on Washington for reproductive rights with my hero, Dr. Ruth. Though one side of me was a junior activist, the other was a TV addict. I loved love. I loved soaps. However, even as a teenager, I was yelling at my TV, wondering why there were so many pregnancy-scare plotlines and no one actually had abortions. Even when characters briefly considered having an abortion, they were often guilt-tripped out of it. Remember how Andrea on 90210 was all set to go to a clinic and then "communicated" with her unborn fetus? Or when Jo on Melrose Place, who got pregnant by a man who tried to kill her, still decided to keep her baby? Or when Julia on Party of Five heroically decided she was a kid, she wasn't ready for this in her life, and then conveniently miscarried?
I knew what I would choose, on the off-chance anyone ever had sex with me and, despite my being on the pill and the condom I would no doubt insist my imaginary partner use, I actually got pregnant. And thanks to Dr. Ruth and my Women's Issues Club, I knew this was a choice being made by one in every three women. But it was nowhere on the television.
Skip ahead many years, and I am writing for TV. I'm writing teen network soaps. I figure, this is great! Finally! I can live my dream of depicting women's health and abortion in a realistic and healthy way.
And … here come the pregnancy-scare plotlines. And they made me bonkers.
"Come on, these are privileged, smart people," I'd yell in the writers' room. "No way would Blair spend six acts bemoaning how her life would change if she were knocked up. She'd grab the first cab to Planned Parenthood and tell Chuck after the fact!"
But I wasn't in charge, and the people in charge told me it was more complicated than that. There were networks, studios, advertisers, and fans to appease. That one day, when I was in charge, I'd understand.
Skip ahead again a couple of years, and I AM in charge. I've got my own show. And … it's Hart of Dixie.
Unfortunately, the show I created was not a vehicle to talk about abortion either. Hart of Dixie was a fluffy rom-com on which Rachel Bilson played a fish-out-of-water doctor in a small town called BlueBell, Alabama. And though I turned this town into a sweet little liberal utopia — post-racial, actively feminist (my fantasy Alabama school system taught evolution AND progressive, science-based sex ed) — this was network TV. With the CW brand. With a small, vocal audience that was largely based in the red states. And while I felt pretty good about subverting some of the more troubling tropes of romantic comedies, like having women pay on dates and propose to men as often as vice versa, it just wasn't the place for the dream I've had since I was a teenager of depicting routine, safe, stigma-free abortion on TV.
In fact, irony of ironies, just as we were about to start breaking what was sure to be our last season of the show, our star gives me a call to tell me she'll be five months pregnant when we start shooting. Super-pregnant! And it's wonderful, because babies are wonderful, and Rachel Bilson is wonderful, but … I've been trying to give Rachel Bilson a fictional abortion on TV since she was Summer Roberts on The OC!
So as I'm finishing my show and trying to serve my audience, I've got to concoct some scenario in which a smart, feminist, ambitious, 30-year-old doctor at the beginning of her deeply satisfying professional life, who we've seen teach BlueBell tweens about contraception, could not only plausibly accidentally get pregnant BUT ALSO opt not to get a simple medical procedure or take a pill and carry on with her life until some future time when she wants to actively choose to get pregnant.
But here is my lead actress, and she will be nine months pregnant when we wrap the season, and … let's face it, it was a great way to end the show. Dr. Zoe Hart gave birth in our series finale. It was life-affirming and shit, there was a musical number, and everyone cried. But my eighth-grade Women's Issues club would have been so disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my little show, but I looked at some of the shows on cable, shows like Girls and Please Like Me that are changing the discourse on abortion, and I felt really jealous. Those writers were living my dream! So this year, I developed a pilot with Lena and Jenni that we sold to HBO that was basically M*A*S*H set at the last abortion clinic in Texas. But even though the script was (obviously) exceptionally excellent, HBO passed. It's possible even the most progressive of networks wasn't ready to treat an abortion clinic like another doctor's office.
But I am not giving up. One day we will show an actual clinic on the air, with kind, caring professionals, where women will go to take care of a problem and leave without guilt or anxiety but with relief. And maybe this woman won't even be a teenager, maybe she'll be a grown woman, a mother, like 60 percent of the women who actually do have the procedure, choosing to put the needs of her family before those of an unborn child. I know it's what Dr. Ruth would want.
Leila Gerstein is a writer and a mother (by choice), living in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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