Where can i watch pursuit of happiness11/11/2022 ![]() ![]() I was molting.Ĭolumbia gave me many new things: a copy of the “Iliad” with a note saying the first six books should be read before orientation, a job in the oral history office, a sense of time management. I acknowledged my traumas: I was not crazy, just damaged. How did I arrive at the place where I could look at my disease and say, “Yes, you are here, but I will not let you take the joy out of looking for birds”? I like to think it was New York, or my newfound discipline, but it was a more internal revolution. School did not grow me into an adult, nor did voting for the first time or doing my own banking. I moved to New York City for college in 2007. ![]() (No, I have never been in love and I am, in fact, afraid of men I panic in Times Square I grow attached to almost everyone I meet.) I tell my therapist about Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Who isn’t searching for their people? I have a routine: oatmeal in the morning, Wednesday nights with my father. They always make it to the sky.Įvery Monday morning at 9 I see my therapist, mug of green tea and honey close at hand. When I watch birds take off, I hold my breath. My favorite might be the wood duck, with its banded neck and flat little wings. And so it was that sour February night that I took the delicate step into the adult world: realizing that I was too depressed to stay at college was realizing I had not only lost my flock I had fallen from the air entirely. The space between my skull and my irises hurts sometimes - hurts like the shatter of a tiny bird that has fallen midflight. Nor did I remember my uncle’s suicide (gun to the cerebrum) or my sister’s delicately sliced arms and hips. He asked me if I remembered the time he took too many of his antidepressants. My dad drove through four states to pick me up the next week. I found myself asking, really, how hard is it to suddenly find yourself perched on a sink, rope around your beautiful neck, ready to fly? How hard? In late January, a freshman hanged himself in my old dorm. It was five weeks into my fourth semester. I have the kind of skin that refuses to heal, just stays eternally raw and mottled. I dug my fingernails into my forearms, leaving shell-shaped trenches behind. At 3 a.m., I found myself sobbing and shaking and confused, sitting on my metal dorm bed in the bird-with-a-broken-wing position. I had been trying to fall asleep for at least four hours. It was February - always the worst month with its aching light and its slip-induced bruises. There is a specific moment in which I became a woman. Depression, for me, is when you want to be a bird, but can’t. In my dreams I am a butterfly or a fairy or a honeybee. I have always been depressed, and I have always wanted to fly - not to emulate Superman or to travel faster. In the three milliseconds of liftoff, a bird separates itself from its problems. There is one thing in this world that I envy: the hollowness of bird bones. Sometimes I find herons in Central Park and they are mysteries. I’m the kind of woman who spends entire days thinking of nothing but birds: woodcocks, goldfinches, kingfishers. ![]()
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