Summer Madness

Stubbornly, I thought, if my mental health was going to suffer, so too was my body.

I spent most of my Introduction to Linguistics class staring at myself on Zoom and silently admonishing the 19-year-olds who rudely kept their cameras off for the entirety of the course. My professor in training was a cute blonde German native who, by her own admission, couldn’t pronounce “squirrel”, and it pained me to see her grasping for even an iota of participation from her students. Myself and another girl who was committed to the bit in wearing shiny lipgloss that sparkled in her laptop’s blue light overcompensated with cameras on, silent laughs, smiles, and head nods so our teacher wouldn’t feel like she made a terrible career choice. Per usual, I retained nothing of use from the class, just that the English language is a beautiful, fucked up bitch (just like your ex, am I right?)

One benefit of working for Penn is that I get free tuition* (*for a very limited pool of select Summer session classes) (*if you can manage to snag a spot in the class you actually want) (*if it has no prerequisites) (*if it aligns with your 9-5 work schedule), so I spent 11 classes, spanning Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout May/June from 7-9pm, sipping wine Mac-side and taking diligent notes on syntax and semantics, morphology and pragmatics, phonology and phonetics.

Don’t bother asking me the difference between any of those studies of linguistics – the knowledge was washed away with the deluge of near-apocalyptic thunderstorms that plagued the Northeast for the entire first half of the summer – but for approximately one month I deleted the Instagram app off my phone and gaslit myself into thinking this was it: this was the turning point in my thirties where I stopped scrolling my phone and picked up a fucking book (PDF version of the Linguistics textbook I mercifully did not have to purchase), learned something entirely new, rented out and restored dusty areas of my brain previously occupied by those pesky 5th grade grammar trees.

Stir-crazy is one thing. Opting to subject yourself to assigned readings and homework is another; but if I spent one more night crunching my neck to my chest and thumbing through hours of uninspired videos with captions like “POV you have high functioning anxiety and your curls aren’t curling the way they should curl,” I was, respectfully, going to throw myself into traffic.

I participated in the dreaded Zoom breakout rooms to collaborate on Google Docs worksheets with college freshmen fourteen years my junior and one Boomer: debating implied versus entailed sentences, marking phonetic transcriptions of words like “psychology” [saɪkɑləd͡ʒi], differentiating between flaps and glottal stops (that’s the catch in your throat when you pronounce Scranton like Scra-uhn, by the way), reckoning with violations of co-occurrence requirements.

Breaking down sentences to their subject/verb/tense/noun phrases – down to their single words – down to their morphemes – down to their syllabic components – was a cathartic release I didn’t know possible when essentially dealing with the MATH of words. Moreover, much like math it was a cathartic control, the best kind, the kind I get when I’m washing dishes and have free will to choose the spoon over the pot next, the conscious choice to use the words “spoon” and “pot” just then. I could control the words that came out of my mouth, and the words I spoke – the very words my instructor was using to talk about words – were the tried and true words our ancestors once spoke, too: fricative grunts turned bilabial babbling turned rudimentary rounded and unrounded vowels turned ill-formed then grammatical sentences turned whatever syntactically correct but semantically meaningless the better part of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was (it just was not that good, sorry!)

Perhaps, I thought, as the familiar ache from dishwashing while tall crept into the approximate T2-3 region of my thoracic spine (the jagged stormcloud lining of a disability is becoming the type of layperson cursed with a hyper-specific knowledge of terminology in precisely one medical area), I could turn my words into something poignant and meaningful, not quite the Ian McEwan prose I had been reading all year, but close. I had had this epiphany a couple of classes in, feeling rather giddy off whatever wine I had in my glass that we had purchased from our ritualistic first-of-the-month Mix-Six haul from the Total Wine in Cherry Hill.

Truth is, I was bored. Bored in the most extreme way one can be, the restless kind where you consider going for a walk in the sun and decide in the next breath that you’ve already seen enough sunshine for one week, instead re-reading every single one of your journal entries from middle school, fervently unassembling the neatly packed away Tetris stack that is your old writing because you swore you wrote an entry about your childhood crush you just remembered, shamelessly indulging in a moment of regression when you smell the exact page you know you once spritzed with his Curve cologne.

Truth is, I fumbled the bag in not booking a vacation, weekend trip, or even a single day of outdoor activities for the entire summer: absolute non-negotiables when you have, as I historically and jokingly refer to it, “seasonal depression, but all year long.” We had visited Dewey Beach the summer prior and so I spent a couple nights angrily moving two fingers around the Booking app map in the hopes that an accessible beachside accommodation any time in July or August (I wasn’t gonna be picky about dates) would become available and also not run me close to $2,000 for four days in fuckin’ Delaware. (I then made the curmudgeonly mental side note of what the hell happened to an affordable family trip to the shore? If I’m still in the vicinity of the I-95 corridor, I shouldn’t be paying Miami prices.)

I’d lay on my side in bed, phone balancing on my forearm, blind with fury that everything is ableist and expensive, until I’d finally force-close out of everything and toss my phone across the bed, resigning myself to the fact that this was going to be a miserable summer. Remaining in a purposefully uncomfortable position, head crooked in my arm, mouth dry and bladder full, would become the defiant mark of a week that would have more bad than good days, a month that would have more bad than good weeks, a season that would have more bad than good months.

Stubbornly, I thought, if my mental health was going to suffer, so too was my body. I puttered about the apartment on my three summer remote workdays, all weeknights, the entire weekend. I cried so much into my pillow, the kind where your tears are feeding the reservoir of your pained, open mouth, the kind where you can’t even be arsed to lift your head and free your cheeks from the salty puddle of saliva forming lest you be forced to sit up and reasonably think – really think – why it is you’re crying in the first place and how to find its off switch, if there were such a thing.

I cried so much one night, I woke up the next day with a painful, itchy eczema on and around my eyelids that I have yet to fully get rid of.

Regardless, for those two hours every Tuesday and Thursday night during Introduction to Linguistics – and forgive me for paraphrasing The Fast and the Furious – I was free.

Free from the nightly couple obligation to start yet another Netflix or Prime show, ticking off the next item on the saddest short-term bucket list, bulleted only with longstanding TV dramas with a healthy 25 episodes per season and maybe taking a drive to Glenside to scope out ranch homes we’ll never be able to afford.

Free from Instagram and its geyser of sensory overload that was TikTok audio bytes past their prime, general societal drivel, and rooftop bar-inspired FOMO. (Ashamedly, I did keep Twitter on my phone, mainly because I follow some funny motherfuckers, but also to witness in real time the collapse of its former genius branding into [shudder] X – a hackneyed shell of its former self. Word to the wise: if you’re going to take a social media break, go full throttle, Charlie’s Angels II).

Mostly, for four hours a week, I was free from thinking about anything else in my life but being the first one to break the ice in the Zoom breakout rooms. I was older, I did not need the course credit, I did not wear makeup or do my hair, I did not change out of the Philadelphia Union t-shirt with the comically stretched neck hole, I did not give a fuck if my earnestness was cheugy. Hell, I didn’t even need to pass the class. Not only that, I got laughs! Genuine laughs from my classmates at my self-deprecating confusion about a language I’ve spoken my whole ass life.

When it was time to write the final paper, set at a maximum word limit of 1,000 words (for an over-writer such as myself, you may as well be telling me I had to get a root canal), I told myself I wouldn’t overthink it. I, of course, spent the next 6 nights in front of my laptop, legs pretzeled at the kitchen table while Stephen placed dinner in front of me, loosely – and I mean loosely – linking the study of linguistics to poetry. In trying to make the association between a sample ungrammatical sentence I came up with on the fly, “Writing, I am a poem”, and the style of some long-ago Greek poet, I threw together a beautiful little ditty of my own, an identity crisis in what it feels like to be a writer who, frankly, doesn’t write all that much (I’d go into the symbolism of what the stanza means, but ThAt’S nOt ThE pOiNt of poetry):

Writing, I am a poem.
I am!
…Writing?

A poem about?

I turned in the paper, got a 19/20 on it (I think she phoned that one in because, despite it being a hilariously valiant attempt that just fell short at being an actual academic paper, it was well-written), and an overall grade of 92% in the class.

Then, it was the last week of June, and I had…nothing else. No plans. Nothing lined up. No other summer classes. No purpose other than to dutifully log onto work, run a load of laundry, wash some dishes, buy proteins and veg for the week, shit and shower and shave and smear serum on my face and then repeat it all the fuck over.

It became clear to me that becoming mildly obsessed with one particular area of study for one very particular three-week moment in time was serving as a distraction – a helpful distraction, but a distraction nonetheless – from the very obvious truth that I was suffering from depression, debilitating at that, and not in the previously sucky but still manageable SADD kind of way.

Cornerstones of a wet hot American July in our former life, such as Stephen’s birthday and the Fourth holiday, came and went in the most underwhelming of ways, dud fireworks that fizzled out before they even had the chance to take off from the damp ground. Sure, we celebrated his 35th year with an always-incredible meal at Fiorella (where else?). Sure, I damn near passed out from heat exhaustion cry-shouting HEATED at Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour. Sure, we navigated uneven gravel and adaptive technology that over-promised and under-delivered at Grounds for Sculpture and the Morris Arboretum, day jaunts borne only of, as my Aunt likes to say, “not wanting to look at the same four walls.” But there were so few of these good weather moments that in cross-referencing my Google photos for material to aid in writing this, I came up short.

Throughout all of July, it was a chore most nights to watch TV or scroll my phone. Stephen, attuned as ever to even the most imperceptible shifts in my body language and tone, telegraphed my needs nightly with a home-cooked meal, a glass of red wine, and a painfully drawn-out game of Scrabble splayed across the gap spanning our split-King mattresses, just to kill a few hours before bedtime. We played a lot of fucking Scrabble in July. He won every single game. Not for the first time, I feared my brain had faltered some time in the past two and a half years.

When I simply couldn’t take it anymore, when the depression came full circle to not just hating life, but also myself as the main character of that life, I finally ripped the bandaid off and performed the administrative task that was researching and booking a therapist within my insurance network (no surprise to anyone, mental health coverage in the States is Grade A Ass). I started seeing one on July 27th, a young, wide-eyed brunette with a massive Stanley Cup covered in therapy mantra stickers. I told her in early August I wanted to work on my codependency, especially given that the following two weekends I actually had plans! Social plans! In the summer! Summer plans! With bikinis and water to immerse myself in! With drinks and music and warm magic hour breeze!

Only this time it was by myself, for both the obvious accessibility reasons and my own adage of needing to do stuff I love so I could love myself so I could love others, and so on. I wrestled between feeling like I should just stay home because it was easier, or leaving for two long weekends in a row precisely because it was that much harder.

With the minute hand creeping closer and closer to midnight on the doomsday clock of impending September, I chose to leave, with exactly two weeks left to spare: first to my mother’s house for a weekend of dunking myself in her consistently 70 degrees and freezing inground pool, mini extended family reunions, coffee on the porch swing, a fantastic mother-daughter dinner outside at Greystone Gardens in Clarks Summit.

The following weekend, I packed a separate, sluttier bag, and headed to Atlantic City for some friends’ joint birthday celebrations at a massive beachside AirBnb that housed, at one point, roughly a dozen or more people and 5 dogs. I decided the best way to cure depression, if only for a weekend, was to become the part, that niche brand of method-acting all introverts know too well when about to be faced with a social gathering to the umpteenth degree. I drank red wine out of Sharpie-marked solo cups. I furnished Aperol spritzes for people I just met, spilling day-old champagne over the countertops. I slept a total of five hours the entire weekend, sustaining myself on Hot Bagels coffee and more wine, stale grocery store donuts, 9pm grilled chicken dinners and a messy but decadently delicious chocolate birthday cake. I shouted over the rules of Bananagrams, knelt barefoot in a mini-dress on the living room floor. I let myself be vulnerable for a moment when I stepped outside silently to have a quick cry in the driveway from a momentary panic attack, took a selfie for good measure because I drunkenly thought I kinda looked hot while crying (it now serves as my profile pic, so don’t trust a single good thing you see on social media). Called Stephen to make sure he was okay, to make sure I was okay. I pregamed at 11 and got to a nightclub at midnight. I allowed two brothers from Brooklyn at the bar to try out on me every flirting tactic in the book they knew before sauntering away to meet back up with my friends, old and new, by the firepit on the rooftop of the nightclub we didn’t leave until the ripe hour of 4am. I napped on the beach under a tarp, sharing sandy fistfuls of Goldfish crackers, talking shit and sharing stories with people I always knew I loved, people I could really find my groove with, if only I could get out of my head for one goddamned second.

I drove home delirious and sleep-deprived, after a sunburned day at the boardwalk where I hugged everyone goodbye, and played Khruangbin’s “Summer Madness” on repeat, coasting at a cool 80 in the carpool lane, head back and visor down, thinking of nothing but the pavement slipping away a mile marker at a time.

And yet, when I returned home, I wasn’t healed. I was still depressed, possibly even more so given the alcohol withdrawal. Who knew you were still the same old you despite the change of geographical location? When I resumed therapy the week I returned from AC, she decided it’s best for me and my situation to be promoted to more intensive trauma therapy sessions with someone more certified than her. As she said, “I could do the trauma therapy, but I’d probably fuck you up, and so I want to put you in the right hands.” Bless the professionals that curse, they get me.

I won’t even unpack in this now too-lengthy piece the visceral post-traumatic bodily anxiety that also spawned the need to see a therapist, but I suggest that when you’re in between a rock (nervous bowel, nausea, heartburn, teeth chattering and tremors due to said anxiety) and a hard place (refusing to eat, pee, drink water, wash your face, or brush your teeth due to the depression that follows the comedown of anxiety’s adrenaline), and you’d choose the numbness of the latter as the lesser of two evils, it’s probably high time to talk to an unbiased party with a degree.

I started my weekly sessions two weeks ago, and I have a very long way to go (likely four months to complete the process, as my new trauma-certified psychologist tells me). For me, absolute last resort will be medications, even though they’d probably be beneficial. I just can’t fathom the risk of a potential weight-gain side effect when I’ve fluctuated from a rapid 25-pound loss, to a 5-10 pound gain, to another 5-10 pound loss, to now finally back on the end of the spectrum of 10 pounds heavier and static, for now. The high-waist Everlane jeans I thrifted from Greene Street at my absolute skinniest and unhealthiest would puncture an ovary if I managed to pull them past my waist now, yet the pre-accident black denim shorts can still fit two of my arms between my stomach and the fabric.

I’m hung in the balance in body and brain, feeling very much like I’m in some weird purgatory where I’m on the precipice of something great or terrible (I’m not sure which), and the process getting there is slow and painful to boot. That’s growth, I suppose.

Stephen and I both lamented that July and August moved at the snailiest of snail’s paces. Mercifully, summer’s finally come to an end, and so has this piece.

Like dud fireworks that fizzled out before they even had the chance to take off from the damp ground.

© 2023 Andrea Festa