Ozempicaresque

I lost weight three years ago and regained all of it, so basically, I'm way ahead of this whole weight loss trend.

Trigger warning: suicidal ideation

I am ashamed to admit I was relieved when a woman I know well said that taking Ozempic made her suicidal (she obviously quit taking it when things got dark and is “fine” now). I was relieved because this meant pharmaceutical weight loss is indeed problematic for those with dysmorphia, which confirms that dysmorphia is very much unsolved for through medicine. Stating as much is obvious, and of course I know these new medications are principally designed to help people with real life-threatening ailments, but that’s precisely why I’m ashamed to admit my relief in her admissions. I am relieved, though, that I have to trust my own broken relationship with my body has its own logic and timing.

I was at the end of my rope a few weeks ago. To phrase the metaphor more precisely, I was so depressed I was mentally shopping for rope and thinking about the tensile strength of door jambs and stair railings.

[Readers should know that I am increasingly writing in free format, committing zero drafts. Just straight into the CMS as it were. Bear with me. It appears to be the stuff subscribers connect most with but it will mean: rambling.]

I am embarrassed to admit that in hindsight I’ve realized my Plath-y feelings were triggered by the election. I know such an outsized reaction just means I’m human, susceptible to disappointment, but I suppose I want to be as blasé as the young people all seemed to be about the results. None of it matters. I couldn’t feel worse than I already do. Et cetera. Well I don’t need to describe it. You were there, too. I want to lose as much faith as they have in the political machinery and charade of social responsibility in this country. For a variety of reasons, I haven’t.

I’m annoyed that at this moment, I am thinking of two specific people who would say I was being naive. Naysayers who broke my heart.

Anyway, back to the Woolfy-Sextony-Arbusy night:

In the deepest pit of my depression, after putting my son to sleep for the nth night in a row, crawling out of his room swollen with tears, dreading what it would be like for him to have a mom who’s disappeared, I picked up the advance reader copy of I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer, and went to my guest room.

Youngmi’s an old friend of mine, and I was originally meant to host her at Asian Arts Initiative for her book event. I wasn’t able to make it because I’d idiotically double-booked myself to play a concert at Johnny Brendas the same night, in the trio I’ve been in since 2021 that includes at least one of the aforementioned naysayers.

I’m sharing all these details to say something important about how the people in your life are the ones who can save it, though they are also sometimes the ones you want to punch in the face. I think often about punching people in the face. O boy do I think about this. I think often about people who are goot at punching people in the face, verbally even. Youngmi’s great at it. Does it work? Do people reform after they've been punched in the face?

I fear some of these people. Especially punchers who talk shit about their friends. Youngmi was once that person. We fell out because of it. It was devastating and it changed me forever. However, it is one of my proudest accomplishments that I insisted on a confrontation. We worked some things out. Punched each other in the face, I guess you could say. I can say with confidence we came out of it stronger people. Today, you will never find me in the disingenuous company of a person I loathe. Meaning, I am either telling you you’re about to get punched, or I won’t look at you in the eye to begin with. I guarantee if I want to punch you in the face, you and I have never hung out alone. If we’ve been alone together recently, you can rest assured I harbor no conscious thoughts of lost faces.

So back to the Dalidaian-Sebergian-Monroeian night. There I am reading Youngmi’s memoir because I am sequestering myself in a guest bed trying to look alive, wanting to disappear forever, thinking about people I want to punch in the face, unable to reconcile how mean we have all become as humans, sad I never figured out the sexiest part of myself while I was sexy, feeling sorrier for myself than I ever had, and I read the “shoe drop” line in Youngmi’s second chapter, when she flips a 180 on her narrative perspective. At the top of the second chapter, she exclaims the realization that she has a hairy asshole because she’s part white.

I laughed. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I would say I was crying I was laughing so hard but I was actually crying and I did laugh—and now I’m realizing I’ve brought the title of her memoir to fruition. How convenient.

I don’t think I’m overstating the moment when I say laughing saved my life. And I thought to myself, oh god is this suicidal ideation just some overspent cliche of colonial bourgeoisie? (I did not actually think this, I’m just thinking it now)

I spent the next couple of hours in the guest bed watching YouTube comedy videos. Some pretty awful, most of them observational enough that I believed I was in the room having a conversation with each of these social witnesses to the end of the world.

—

I have several distinct memories of laughing my way out of obscene depression. In high school, after measuring rope the first time, I decided to reinvent myself. I started wearing obnoxious clothing I found at thrift stores, and changed my musical taste from classical and R&B to punk and alternative. As a matter of fact, just today I heard that the Jesus Lizard is playing in Philly on Friday, but I have a funny Jesus Lizard story. Back in the day, I’d decided to see them play because of the weirdly provocative band name. That’s all it took. I jumped into the deep end too soon, I quickly realized. The lead singer took off all his clothes and drunkenly waved his limp penis at the front row where I stood. I was how shall I say…deeply fucking traumatized as I had possibly never seen a dick that wasn’t my dad’s till then. Still, I was a teenager, and so I pretended to everyone else that I thought it was just “insane.” That was the best I could come up with until I did the thing almost all depressed young people do: I pretended it wasn’t a big deal at all. It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t feel worse than I already do.

In the year after my parents divorced, my mom, sister and I moved into a sequence of one bedroom apartments around the saddest parts of the San Gabriel Valley on a divorced mom’s minimum wage income. My sister was heavily into drugs and my mom was in whatever catatonic state of relived generational trauma that is triggered when immigrants experience American emancipation and menopause at the exact same time. All of us were grey. One day, I remember deciding to break up the tension in the air by coming downstairs completely naked and walking around the ground floor of the Hacienda Heights apartment like I was just a regular nudist now. My mom rolled her eyes and looked at me like “what the fuck fresh hell addition to my list of embarrassments is this?” More exasperated than shocked. I danced butt naked and tried to make her laugh. My sister was watching tv and not looking in my direction at all. But I insisted, and my mom finally smiled. She said “I need to get you more underwear.”

I still come downstairs butt naked in the company of immediate family for laughs, but it’s more staring contest—a competition to keep a straight face—than entertainment. I guess in that sense, I’ve progressed in life. I have achieved a sort of victory in my current formalized family because I can come downstairs butt naked to my husband and son and be guaranteed at least a giggle. Sometimes I follow my son around sans pants to mirror his preferred “Winnie the Pooh” state of five year old being. It is always funny to all of us.

I just went to DC to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving and thought about how funny it would be if I pranked them by streaking their breakfast. I’m fairly certain they’d call 911. In fact they’d probably ask for some Bad Apples by name.

This year, I am thankful for a mom and sister who roll their eyes when I appear butt naked for laughs.

—

I keep having the most intense sexual fantasies while I nap with my son lying on or near me. I believe there is no impropriety in the juxtaposition of my little boy and the fantasies in my subconscious because the fantasies are exclusively about cunnilingus--thankfully an act that has no adjacency to the natural relationship between anyone in this house. Even if the dichotomy is false because I am the enforcing the binary, I have to insist upon it because, I will just say: my brain is saying “mature women with full bodies are hot” and my child is a boy obsessed with trucks and dinosaurs. It’s just telling that I’m just not quite as prone to the dream in my bed alone, however rare the occasion.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cunnilingus, not just wanting it as I elucidate in this dream sequence but more academically—why something about the mutuality of feminine intercourse just seems more liberating than the mutuality of any other kind of oral sex. And listen, I’ve tried them all, so I’m saying from some limited but complete experience, that the other kinds of oral foreplay are all absolutely thankless by comparison. Can they be titillating? Why, sure. But liberating? I really do not think so.

I know now that my most onerous depressive episodes stem from shame and guilt; nothing aggravates it like my body in distress. The narrative logic of my desirous mind leads me constantly to the possibility that I wanted too much too much too much, and that the wanting is what will kill me. But I am the one who will punch you in the face. God, just don’t leave me.

It is the wildest of ironies to me that the sublime of sex is represented in the absolute misery of relationships.

My body is a tempura.