by The Concessionist

The Concessionist gives advice each weekend about the sordid choices of real life. Trouble? Write today.

Hi Concessionist,

I grew up in a family where most things were Never Discussed, like The Quiet Man except everyone’s John Wayne. Now that I’m 30 bottling up emotions and never talking about how I feel is pretty much all I know how to do, but of course I’m pretty aware that it’s not healthy or good or useful.

I… think… the normal healthy thing to do is have friends who you can talk to when you’re depressed or having a problem or needing to vent, but it’s impossible for me. I guess on some level I fear judgment and/or betrayal, but mostly I feel like once I uncork the bottle everything’s going to come out and it’ll be just too much to dump on one person. Especially someone who’s a “friend” in the sense that I am more than happy to listen to them but always get really evasive when talking about my own stuff.

I used to see a therapist, but I even lied to her about some things, and she just kind of became my dumping ground for “opening up;” it never made me any better at talking to other people. And because of the bottling and the pushing down I only really want to talk when things are pretty bad.

So…how do I start opening up to people? How do I answer “How are you doing?” with something between “I’m fine” and “HERE IS EVERY PROBLEM THAT HAS KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT FOR THE LAST YEAR I AM SO LONELY”? I’m starting to realize I’m never going to have a real friendship if I keep everyone at arm’s length. Well, unless I build a chatbot, which suddenly seems like a great idea.

Yours,

Chatty

Dear Chatty,

I also hate talking to other people about myself. I don’t really do it that often.

At first, I actually… couldn’t. So first, we have to learn. I can’t stress enough the value of impersonation. First I had to identify human emotions by observing them in others and matching them up. It was like “OH those are PANTS, I also have PANTS,” except the pants were tears. WHAT LIQUID IS THIS ON FACE???

And then I watched people talk about these feelings with each other. Then, like that nice lady in Species, I hopped into action. Now I’m so used to pretending I’m not even sure if I’m pretending or not! SOLVED.

I realize that doesn’t make me sound great but I no longer care.

You’re gonna be fine. Not everyone is supposed to be an emotional barfer. But you do wanna get some practice in, and you do want people to know that you’re actually alive on the inside. You’re like one of those tiny glass closed water ecosystems. They need the right amount of darkness and sunlight, or else the ecosystem goes haywire and gets all moldy, or turns into a desert. YOU HAVE TO KEEP THE TINY BRINE SHRIMP INSIDE YOU ALIVE.

Stop rattling your shame cage. Some of us are private. Some of us are shy. Some of us are introverts. And lots of us are making up for all those people who take up too much space. I hate long-talkers, and narcissists, and people who narrate the psychodrama of themselves endlessly. I mean, it might be useful for some of them, but it’s overall just got to be exhausting right? And because I’m one of THOSE people, I feel them impinging on my space, and sucking all the air out of the room.

And so I overcompensate, and I’m like “YUP I’M FINE ALL GOOD HERE DID YOU WATCH ‘THE AMERICANS.’”

But! Like you, I also recognized I was 1. giving nothing to other people and also 2. not really helping people know me in case some shit goes down and then I’ll really need them but they won’t be there because they’re like BUT BORG, YOU ARE FINE, YOU ARE MACHINE. So I have done enough sharing to know that this — “once I uncork the bottle everything’s going to come out and it’ll be just too much to dump on one person,” which is one of those GREAT wonderful informative sentences — absolutely doesn’t exist.

In therapy (lol don’t lie to your therapists people!!!) they tell you to visualize this idea. Let’s see, you’re having a sandwich with a friend outside (it’s not fucking winter any more in my visualization!) in midtown, say on a nice bench, and your friend is all “So hey did you ever ask out that person you liked???” and then you open your mouth to start talking about it and you CAN’T STOP and it’s all like BATS FLYING OUT OF SCARY CAVE FOREVER.

So…. that doesn’t happen. It’s never happened to anyone. This is often how people describe anger. Like “but if I get angry I’ll turn into the Incredible Hulk and I’ll NEVER STOP.” That’s just a miscasting of how afraid you are of other people’s anger, and how afraid you are of expressing your own. Sometimes also people describe sadness like this. Like there’s some infinite well of sadness and if they tap a bit of it, OMG EVERYONE DROWNS. Just doesn’t happen. Does not exist. Never happened to anyone. Total self-involved fabrication, in fact. It’s so self-aggrandizing!

Here is one thing that does happen though! Friends who don’t ever say anything about themselves get iced as shitty friends.

But this is not a big deal. HERE’S HOW.

You start small! Pick one sentence to say about a recent event and say it to one friend that you actually like while you are with them. (I mean also, you have to make sure you’re trying to be friends with good people? Are you sure? Would you even know?)

BONUS PRO TIP: You can actually do this first over IM or email. Why not try experimenting with letting people know about your feelings at a distance? You can work your way up later.

So you do some homework. Prepare for a “how was your weekend” question with a little morsel. Like, “Oh, I talked to my mom, and she was a total beast.” Add something that indicates your human emotion along with that. “She makes me so mad!” Period. Or like “I love her but OMG.” The end. “That’s parents though AM I RIGHT! How are you?”

Or like “I met a cute human being and might ask them out, eeee!” And then, you can stop. It’s okay if it feels awkward! It probably is.

Later you can work your way up to actual feelings. Heh. And expressing those IRL. It’ll be fine! It’ll take some time. Don’t beat yourself up.

Okay bye, I’m going to go lay in bed for a while because I’m sad. Then I’m going to go to yoga because I’m sad. See how easy that was? So relatable! So human. Such a perfect simulacrum. After yoga I guess I’ll come home and plug myself into my recharging station till I feel better.

The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me.

★★★★ A sky that seemed irreconcilably divided between a high clearing blue and a low-lying murky winter gray found, for a moment, a gray but glowing balance between them. The glow faded and huge, gorgeous snowflakes floated by, sparsely at first and then with a ridiculous polka-dotted density, streaming from south to north, splatting into slowly fading spots on the not-quite-freezing surface of the balcony next door. The three-year-old demanded that the window be opened so he could stick a hand out and grab hold of the excitement whirling by. Not long after that activity palled, the stormlet was over, and the brightness and even the blue returned. Everything was just a phase; by elementary-school pickup, a heavy shadow like a summer storm was moving in. Mist began to fall and turned into tiny, unattractive snowflakes. That squall passed, in turn, and the clouds began to split apart and stay apart. At dusk a rugged pale-blue pile of cumulus stood in the north against the darker sky, with shapeless sheets of lilac at its feet. A deepening chill carried on the breeze. In the night, all at once, the breeze became a wind, slamming into the building with a sound like heavy paper tearing. It was in the forecast, but still it was shocking to hear.

How cold will it be this weekend? The birds in the trees will cease to sing their songs and the only sounds you will hear are the slow susurrations of starlings descending to the ground forever in a grim display of death. How cold will it be this weekend? The horns from cars that almost always signal impatience or displeasure will fall into disuse as the angry drivers who are so frequently prone to hammer upon them clutch their gloved hands together to conserve energy and warmth. How cold will it be this weekend? The urine that streams down city sidewalks will freeze and shatter, failing to even emit a small amount of steam upon its exit from bodies which will themselves immediately crack and collapse, victims of a titanic, inescapable cold the likes of which we have never seen before, a harsh, relentless chill which will show no mercy and yield no succor nor assistance to the afflicted or the comforted both. How cold will it be this weekend? It’s going to be pretty fucking cold. I bet this is the first you’re hearing about it.

A steam-bath for a frozen weekend.

by Lindsay Robertson

5. Bayer
4. Aleve
3. Excedrin
2. Tylenol
1. Advil

Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself…. So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent. For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

— The outpouring of shock and sorrow that accompanied the initial announcement of David Carr’s death yesterday centered mostly around how kind and generous and open he was as a colleague, mentor and friend to so many. This is both correct and appropriate, but an even more important component of his personality was his ability to face the future with complete curiosity and a fearlessness that allowed him to be skeptical (but not dismissive) when necessary but enthusiastic and optimistic about things that few other people of his position or experience were able to contend with. Part of his brilliance was that, in having already lived two lives, he was fully able to embrace the second one no matter what challenges or struggles he faced. Carr was 58.

★★★ Light went back and forth across Broadway. There were and evidently had always been leaf-vein patterns in the narrow windows of the Mormon temple, details now shining vivid and salient glass blue at a distance. Only the taxis and trucks still fuzzed with salt and grime were immune to the generalized gleaming. A tour bus let off a crowd of Chinese youth, the girls in matching long black puffy coats with white furry hoods, followed by boys with gray-furred hoods, heading up the stairs to Lincoln Center. They wore scarves in identical reindeer patterns but with various color schemes. A bearded man in an immense shaggy fur, practically pelts, crossed back and forth in front of the cafe window. The sun was near blinding off the dull-finished kickplates of the Juilliard doors, completely blinding off the mobile device dangling in the hand of a leather-jacketed young woman smoking a cigarette. The fur-hooded youths reappeared and streamed into Juilliard. That particular patch of sun had moved well up the block by the time they streamed back out, not much later. Soon enough, more sunlight claimed the spot.

“i thought it would be cool to turn a situation that hurt me
into something i could dance to. troy and i took a bunch of old nintendo video game samples and tucked them behind a trap/pop beat..listen closely :P”

How the sausage gets made!

Around the time that my daughter turned four months old, a lot of things changed. The weather, which had been disgustingly abysmal for her entire life, suddenly became quite wonderful; there were days where we could see the sun. Zelda was changing too: She could roll onto her belly from her back; she could hold her head up and look around; and she could focus without crossing her eyes anymore. And I felt better, too. Physically, my C-section wound felt truly healed, and mentally — well, I was sleeping well and feeling much better.

Zelda and I had also developed a pretty bad case of cabin fever. We were kind of tired of one another. Despite thirty-six years as a true loner — a person with almost zero need for daily contact with friends — I suddenly and desperately wanted to be around people. I found myself making eye contact with mothers at the park, smiling maniacally. I’d scoffed for months at the idea of “mommy meetups” but began reading the emails from my Brooklyn Baby list, thinking, “well, maybe we could just shoot over to the beer garden one afternoon.” Zelda seemed to want to make friends, too. It was time.

My parents were twenty-seven and twenty-five when I was born. This meant that they were comparatively younger and more full of energy, I assume, but also that their parents were much younger. My grandparents, all four of them, lived less than an hour away for my entire life at home. This was great fun for all of us kids, but also, no doubt, a blessing for my parents. We not only knew all of our neighbors, but had keys to their homes (or knew where they hid them, under the rock to the left of the door).

There are lots of perks to New York City parenting — easy access to stores and sidewalks to walk those miles and miles on. But, unless you’re a native, you’re probably far from your family. If you’re like me, most of your friends have busy careers. I learned a hard truth about becoming a parent for the first time at thirty-six and living in New York City. The “village,” as in, “it takes one,” doesn’t really exist. There’s no village.

I relented and went to a mommy meetup, which was just a few moms in the park on blankets with their still fussy and largely unsocial babies. I made a friend, Lisa. She lived just a few blocks away, and her daughter was born just one day before Zelda. We had things in common besides our newborns: We were both musicians in another life; our family backgrounds were similar. She was cool, I was forced to admit. We started hanging out, first once a week or so. Then almost daily. We started texting each other questions about the babies. She became more valuable to me than a doctor in those moments when Zelda seemed like she was teething (she was) or wasn’t sleeping very well (she wasn’t). Long mornings and afternoons became shorter as we walked our strollers around Greenpoint together, talking, sometimes while one or the other baby wailed or snoozed. We made failed attempts at actual lunches in restaurants. We took the ferry to parks farther away than walking distance. We went to museums and zoos. We became friends, and eventually, our daughters began to recognize and smile at one another.

But new friends weren’t all the help I needed. Around the same time, when Zelda was half a year old or so, I decided to work again; I couldn’t spend a hundred percent of my time caring for my baby. I knew it wasn’t good for either of us, and I wanted to get back, even slowly, to writing. To doing other things. In New York, where my brothers and family and neighbors were in short supply, that meant hiring people to help me. I did the math. I knew how much money I’d need to make to offset the expense. The numbers didn’t exactly make sense, but I wanted to work anyway. I knew that unless I got a job making a lot more than I had before Zelda was born, I would essentially be making negative money, which I am currently doing (and am fortunate to be able to do).

In plenty of parenting circles, there is a great deal of guilt about having someone else care for your child, especially when that child is a baby. Modern motherhood seems to have regressed in this way — to “mommy knows best, and should be there, at all costs.” Reading baby forums I saw countless desperate mothers asking questions like, “how do you go to the bathroom?” or, “my baby is 8 months old and screams if I put him in his highchair to make his dinner, help!” The demands of a full-time, stay at home mother (SAHM in mommyblog speak), it seemed, have increased to where basic human needs — showers, sleep, food — must fall by the wayside to meet the demands of the little one. I’d never been on board for that; since she was quite young, I’d simply put Zelda safely into her crib with a few toys if I needed to use the bathroom or make an important phone call. She was just steps away from me. I could see her on a baby monitor. She learned quickly to entertain herself.

So I was surprised to feel the guilt that came with looking for a caregiver for her. Me, a person with a career I’d never really dreamed of giving up; a person who wasn’t sure until the age of thirty-six that I wanted to have children at all: I was now wondering, “should I just do this for a few years? Isn’t that what’s best for us?”

But it wasn’t, and it’s not. First, I got a housekeeper to come twice a week. She helped me with laundry, did the dishes, and changed our sheets. She also became a friend, happy to see us, and Zelda happy to see her. For two hours in the morning, twice a week, we had someone else to keep us company. But still, it wasn’t enough. If I was going to work, I would need a nanny, I had decided. The fact that I would work from home would make this transition easier, I told myself, but even still, I couldn’t really say the word “nanny” aloud to myself at first. I would have a “babysitter,” which made it sound less formal, more “oh she popped in for a few hours while I ran to the dentist.”

In mid-June, I interviewed nannies until I found one that I clicked with instantly. She started just two days a week, then eventually, in September, she went full-time. She is kind and intelligent and loving. She and Zelda have their own special relationship. At first, it was hard to allow that, but I am so happy for it now. Zelda’s nanny has become part of our family, just as invested in Zelda as we are. She has also become my friend, and hiring her is easily the best decision I’ve made since becoming a parent, for all of us. It gives her parents peace of mind, but also the space to relax or to talk to one another like actual adults, in private, the way we did, before. And it gives Zelda a much-needed break from her parents, with a friend that she trusts, and adores, and learns so much from.

For some of us, there are fewer villages than there used to be, maybe. Our families are far away, and our friends are just as busy as we are. But it is possible to build one, even if, like me, you are mostly averse to human contact. Building a new life, with new friends and relationships beyond the ones we have at home takes a sometimes monumental-feeling effort: I didn’t want “mom” friends, so I didn’t make any; I just made friends. And I learned how to ask for help, and how to accept it.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

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If Andrei Codrescu (56,200 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Philip Whalen (57,400 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Susan Howe (58,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Jorie Graham (58,600 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If James Laughlin (58,100 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Michael McClure (62,300 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Michael Palmer (65,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Jim Carroll (65,400 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Jack Spicer (68,400 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Natasha Trethewey (70,800 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Tom Clark (75,300 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Anne Waldman (77,300 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Ron Silliman (78,700 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Kenneth Koch (79,500 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Bill Corbett (82,600 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Jerome Rothenberg (84,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Kay Ryan (87,100 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Mark Doty (98,400 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Charles Wright (99,500 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Gregory Corso (101,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If David Lehman (112,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Charles Olson (116,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Duncan (122,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Charles Bernstein (129,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Pinsky (141,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Denise Levertov (143,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Creeley (147,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Rita Dove (148,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Charles Simic (149,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If W.S. Merwin (155,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Lawrence Ferlinghetti (158,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Audre Lorde (166,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Hass (169,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Gary Snyder (216,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Amiri Baraka (224,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Rae Armantrout (224,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If John Ashbery (243,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Mary Oliver (310,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Adrienne Rich (323,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Anne Sexton (339,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Catullus (355,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Lowell (363,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Frank O’Hara (361,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If John Cage (375,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Billy Collins (410,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Dante Alighieri (417,000) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Jack Kerouac (497,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Allen Ginsberg (521,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Charles Bukowski (523,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If William Wordsworth (526,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Sylvia Plath (547,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Maya Angelou (722,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Walt Whitman (732,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Langston Hughes (754,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Robert Frost (812,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Emily Dickinson (980,000 results) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Homer (4,160,000) is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet
If Socrates (7,700,000 results) is a poet, I’ll consider it
If Andy Warhol (16,300,000 results) is a poet, I want to be a poet

Felix Bernstein is the author of Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press) and co-editor with Vanessa Place of the forthcoming anthology Killing It: Cruel Art After the Internet. His videos and writings can be found at felixbernstein.com.