This Is Just My Face is the whirlwind tour of Gabourey Sidibe’s life so far. In it, we meet her polygamous father, her gifted mother who fed the family by busking on the subway, and the psychic who told her she’d one day be ‘famous like Oprah’. Gabby shows us round the Harlem studio apartment where she grew up, relives the debilitating depression that hit her at college, and reminisces about her first ever job as a phone sex ‘talker’ (less creepy than you’d think).
With exhilaratingly honest and often hilarious dispatches on friendship, depression, celebrity, haters, fashion, race, and weight, This Is Just My Face will resonate with anyone who has ever felt different, and with anyone who has ever felt inspired to make a dream come true.
Gabourey Sidibe is an award-winning actress who shot to fame when she took the title role of Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire. She has since starred in American Horror Story and Empire and has recently made her directorial debut with the short film The Tale of Four. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Harlem, New York. This Is Just My Face is her first book.
‘A book you will want to give your daughter’
New York Times
‘Here, Gabourey Sidibe cements her status as gives-zero-effs queen of Hollywood AND perceptive best friend in your head. Frank, funny, and insanely charming, these stories reveal the girl behind the gown and show Hollywood for what it really is: a wet t-shirt contest of an industry that sometimes redeems itself by picking the right star. Gabby is that star, and you’ll root for her on every page – we are blessed by her honesty, passion and wit’
Lena Dunham
‘Sidibe’s hilarious Twitter account is no fluke – the Empire actress’ memoir about growing up in New York City and finding unexpected fame in Hollywood is sharp, witty, and wonderfully substantive’
Entertainment Weekly
‘Gabourey Sidibe’s delightful memoir This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare offers a memorable look into what happens when a black girl’s dreams come true, from the inside out. From her unique childhood as the daughter of a subway singer mother and polygamous father to struggling with depression to getting the role of Precious, Sidibe is fearless, incredibly funny and gorgeously open. What she offers of herself in these pages is a gift’
Roxane Gay
‘A mix of complexity, intelligence and humor, Gabby’s book promises to be as big a success as her acting’
People
‘“I just wrote the truth, and it made me feel better.” That is the theme of this unique and universal book by a young woman who is both a total surprise and an instant classic. Gabby combines New York and Senegal, the streets and the heights, bravery and self-doubt, laughing and seriousness. Her truth helps us to find ours – and what could be a bigger gift than that?’
Gloria Steinem
‘Gabourey Sidibe’s memoir isn’t your average celebrity memoir. It’s good. Really good. And not just because it’s revealing (although that it is), but because it’s well-written… Observant and funny, but not indulgent or try-hard’
Cosmopolitan
‘To know Gabby is to love Gabby. To read her book is to love her even more. It is bold, brave, on-your-front-foot writing. Her story inspires you to step up and own your life with a compassion and confidence so potent that it will break down any door’
Laura Linney
‘A funny, smart memoir’
Nylon
‘You’re the BOMB, girl!’
President Barack Obama
HALLOWEEN NIGHT A year ago. I hadn’t been home for months, so when my favorite friend, Kia, said to me, “Boo! GO TO BED! Put your phone in the guest bathroom and take yo ass to sleep!” I knew she was right. Our friendship started on the film Precious. Kia was the production assistant who was mostly in charge of babysitting me. Years later, she has become one of my best friends, my producing partner, and one of the people who knows me better than I know myself. Like right now when she knows that even though I say I’m fine I’m not. Truth is, I was tired. I didn’t want to run around the city drunk. The e-mail I’d just received said … shit, two days, and I had to fly out again. I’d have barely enough time to see my mom and my brother, and have brunch with my Main Gay.
The tough thing about staying in on Halloween is seeing all the tweets, instagrams, and texts from people cooler than I am who are all dressed up and out partying. This is more fun for them than it is for me because they don’t get to dress up for a living like I do—this is what I was trying to convince myself, but it wasn’t working. Dressing up is still really fun for me. I heard my phone buzz. I should’ve put it in the bathroom like Kia suggested but … I’m not addicted to my phone or anything … you are! Shut up! Anyway, among the pictures of slutty outfits showing up on my feed were texts from friends saying, “What do you mean you’re staying in? Come out with us, you whore!” There were also a few pictures and videos of people dressed up as Precious for Halloween. Precious, the character I’d played in my first-ever film. The character who people seemed to think that it was hilarious to confuse with me … ME.
Someone sent a picture featuring a black man wearing jeans and a sweater. He had a pillow under his shirt and more pillows down his legs so he looked both pregnant and fat. His face was made up so he appeared to be even darker than he already was—the almost-never-seen blacker blackface. In one hand he held a composition notebook and in the other an empty bucket of fried chicken as his props. He was standing next to a black woman in a gray jogging suit smoking a cigarette and holding a skillet as if it were a bat. Mary, Precious’s mother. Hilarious.
When I was in the fourth grade, I borrowed an evening gown from my mother and went trick or treating dressed as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. Never did I think, ever, that one day people would dress up as me for Halloween. What an honor, right?
But I didn’t feel honored. I felt offended. So offended that I planned to ignore for the next few weeks the “friends” who’d sent me those pictures. (I’m very organized in my pettiness, and I like to plan ahead.)
Here’s the thing: what offends me is not that people are dressing up as me. I know they’re just dressing up as a character I played. That character is iconic in her way and probably means more to the people dressing up as her than she means to me. I am really clear about the fact that, while I played Precious, she’s not me. We may have the same face and body, but we stand for two completely different things. Precious is a survivor, and I refuse to be anyone’s survivor because I prefer to think of myself as a winner. So even though the blacker black-faces and fat-pillow costumes hit me like a skillet in the face, that’s actually beside the point here. I can understand that the average viewer might see them as homage, fantasy, authenticity. My beef isn’t with them; it’s with my friends who are laughing at the costumes and wanting me to laugh with them. My beef is with feeling forced to have a sense of humor about what I look like. Well, I don’t fucking feel like it.
Before I met Lee Daniels, who cast and directed me in the role of Precious, my life was very different. Meeting him set off a domino effect so strong that I can very easily trace the life I’m living typing in my MacBook in my Upper West Side apartment—back to him. Every yes I get in my life from now on will be because he said yes first. He was the first man ever to say, “You’re beautiful, and here’s what we’re going to do with it.” He’s done more for me than my own father. He’s taught me more with grunts than any teacher has ever taught me with words. All of his compliments feel like heaven, and all of his negative comments feel like a thousand knives to my gut. (I often tell him that what I feel for him is Stockholm syndrome.)
One day while I was sitting around waiting for Precious to come out so that I could finally tell everyone who’d ever been mean to me that they could suck it, Lee called. He told me that a friend of his, a major fashion editor, had just seen a screening of the film for the third time, and he loved it. And he loved me! I had no idea who this fashion editor was and even less of an understanding of what a fashion editor did, but Lee seemed super excited so I opened my computer to look him up while Lee went on and on.
“Oh, that’s so cool!” I said, pretending to know exactly what was happening.
“You don’t know who that is, do you?” Lee asked.
I wasn’t typing fast enough.
“No, but I’m still really excited! Is he your buddy?”
“No, dummy! Well, yes! He’s fashion, Miss Honey! HE IS FASHION! He is EVERYTHING! He wants to put you on the cover of his magazine!”
By then I had Wikipedia up. Turns out, he’s a legend! My ignorance about him could only be explained by the fact that I am ignorant of most things fashion.
My response: “Aww, shit … cool!”
I was still putting together what this meant. It was only just dawning on me that someone could want me on the cover of any magazine, let alone fashion magazines. Holy hell! Those people who’d been mean to me were really going to suffer now.
“Hello? Gabby? Girl, it’s MAJOR,” Lee yelled into the phone.
Finally, I yelled back, “Oh, my God! Really?? Me!?”
This was the response he was looking for.
“Yes! YOU, Gabbala! YOU! He’s crazy about you. He loves the film. LOVES IT. You’re a star now, Gabby. A star!” Lee’s words were pumping my ego with oxygen.
I’d had too little to do after Precious was filmed and before it was released. Sitting around and knowing that something good was coming was just as unnerving for me as sitting around and feeling that something bad was coming. It drove me nuts. I’d be excited one minute and then depressed the next. I’d wait for calls from Lee to remind me that I wasn’t a loser—that I was a winner and that something good was coming for me soon. This was one of those calls.
“I’m a star!” I yelled back.
I only half believed my own statement. It was still an insane notion that I was anybody’s star. But as long as Lee had said it first, it started to feel like the truth.
“That’s right, kid! I have a ton of things to discuss with you, so come over and meet me at my apartment.”
“When?”
“Right now! Get over here.”
I truly lived for these moments during what seemed like a forever-long wait for that film to come out. I was on a train headed over to his apartment in less than ten minutes.
The entire way to Lee’s, I was super excited that a fashion bigwig I’d never heard of wanted to put me on the cover of this exclusive magazine. I fantasized about how fun my fashion cover photo shoot would be. I imagined myself dressed as a mermaid lounging in an empty claw-foot tub, a long string of pearls hanging around my neck and twirled around the fingers of my left hand. My smiling face would be resting on the back of my right hand while my elbow would perch on the edge of the tub. My hair would be blowing up and away from my face for that Ariel/Beyoncé look. My purple and turquoise tail fins would caress the edge of the tub. The floor and the walls would be gold, and a beautiful red-satin shower curtain would be pulled open to reveal the wonder that is me. ME! Large diamonds would be strewn about the floor. Why on the floor? Because I’d be so rich that I’d be careless with my things.
By the time I got to Lee’s building, I had come up with the perfect headline for my cover. At this point, I’d been at Lee’s place so often that I just waved to security as I entered the elevator. On the way up, I saw it all forming above my head in big letters. The headline would read: “Gabourey Sidibe. You Should’ve Been Nicer to Her,” and then the name of the magazine in smaller letters under my name or, ya know, wherever they could fit it.
Often I would get off the elevator at Lee’s floor to the sound of his disco music pumping through his closed door, or I’d hear him yelling excitedly to someone about one of his films. This time I heard a big voice over speakerphone shrieking, “That fat bitch is going on the cover!” The words were coming from Lee’s apartment, and they sliced right through my fantasy. I froze where I was. froze where I was.
“You hear me, Lee? I’m putting that fat bitch right on the cover. I love her. That black bitch WILL be on the cover!” the editor yelled.
“YES!!!! She is EVERYTHING!” Lee screeched in agreement.
“I don’t care what I have to do, I’m putting that fat bitch on the cover!”
They cackled together and made plans for me and my fat ass and the cover. Not the cover of just any magazine, but a fashion magazine. I stood silently. I was sneaking in on a conversation I wasn’t meant to hear about sneaking into a world I wasn’t meant to be a part of. Not feeling horrible, but no longer feeling super excited, I waited for it to be over.
I’d been called a fat bitch before. I’d been called a fat black bitch before. But this was different. André loved me in the film, loved my performance, and wanted to put me on the cover of his magazine.But I was still a fat bitch.A fat black bitch
I knew what I looked like. I had mirrors in my home. I’d seen myself in pictures. I wasn’t in the dark about it. I just assumed at the time that if I could display a talent worthy of praise, if I could prove that I was worthy of attention, that I wasn’t just who you thought I was … I guess I thought I wouldn’t be fat anymore. That may seem silly. I know that now. But at the time I thought that if I could just get the world to see me the way I saw myself then my body wouldn’t be the thing you walked away thinking about. I wouldn’t be that fat girl. I wouldn’t be that dark-skinned girl. I’d be Gabby. I’d be human.
I thought that starring in a movie would change that.Shouldn’t it? Wouldn’t being on the cover of a magazine change that? But how could it if the very person putting me on the cover was the person calling me a fat black bitch behind my back? They’d all be nice to my face, but it was dawning on me that they’d still have their private opinions, that I was still too fat and still too black. The world wasn’t different just because I’d made a movie.
I was different. Maybe that needed to be enough.
Lee and André finished their conversation, and I got back on the elevator and went down to ask security to buzz me up as if I’d just gotten there. A big part of me wanted a redo, to have missed hearing what I’d now never forget. Once I was in Lee’s apartment, he greeted me excitedly. He told me that André had just called and that they were both so excited about what would become of me.
“Can you just DIE?! Can you believe it? YOU! On the cover of Vogue! I’m gagging.” He was just as excited as before. He didn’t say anything about André calling me a fat black bitch, and I didn’t say anything about hearing him do it. Lee hadn’t called me a fat bitch, but he hadn’t defended me. Though I wasn’t sure what he could’ve said to defend me. I am fat and black, and often I refer to myself as a bitch. Where’s the lie? How do you defend that? He preferred to celebrate.
“YES! I’m gagging! I’m so excited!” I answered.
I wasn’t sure if I should admit to what I heard. And if I did, I wasn’t sure I was allowed to feel offended anymore. Yes, André had called me a fat bitch a bunch (like one hundred times), but he’d also said he’d make me a cover girl. He’d said I was a star. How could I be offended? I should be grateful. There were plenty of fat black bitches out there who’d never be on the cover of a magazine.
Perhaps I had to change my idea of what an insult sounds like. Was this insult the best compliment I could ever garner from the fashion industry (which would eventually call me and my body a “joke”)? Had my eavesdropping helped me to stumble on an important message? One that said I should love the hate. Is this how you become a celebrity? Don’t be offended. Be glad they know who you are.
Well, I just have to say: I was offended. When someone says something negative about me, it hurts my feelings. It always has, and it probably always will. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did when I was younger, but it still hurts. I’ll never feel glad that someone says something awful about me. I’ll never bask in the negative attention. It’s ridiculous that I’m asked to do so. I’m a fucking human being! I’m not weak. But I am human.
I don’t think it’s funny when people stuff pillows in their clothing to look like me. I don’t think it’s funny when people paint their faces to look like me. I don’t think it’s funny when a stranger calls me a fat bitch no matter what they’re offering to do for me. I don’t think it’s funny that I’m not allowed to say that my feelings are hurt. Feelings aren’t an absence of strength. I know this for sure. So why should I pretend to have a sense of humor just to allow someone else to take a shot at me?
People have their opinions about me. For now, their opinions are basically about my body. It seems as though if I cured cancer and won a Nobel Prize someone would say, “Sure, cancer sucks and I’m glad there’s a cure, but her body is just disgusting. She needs to spend less time in the science lab and more time in the gym!” Even people who want to put me on the covers of magazines will wonder how much I eat or how I fit through a door. The best thing to do with those opinions is to ignore them and listen to my own. I could lose weight. That is a fact. But I am dope at any and every size. I am smart. I am funny. I am talented. I am gorgeous. I am black. I am fat.Sometimes I’m a bitch.At all times,I am a bad bitch(The word bitch is pretty confusing,right?)
I have yet to grace the cover of this particular magazine. I guess they couldn’t find a claw-foot tub big enough for me and my mermaid tail. I had to settle for being in the pages in a CoverGirl feature instead. I still consider it a win for fat black bitches everywhere.
MY MOM AND I are always discussing how we’d deal with attempted rape. Sometimes we decide that we’d fight tooth and nail. We’d bite our attacker in the dick; in our minds, the rapist is insistent on foreplay and surely wants to be pleasured orally. We bite his dick, he goes down in pain, and we run out of the house or down the alley screaming, blood dripping down the sides of our mouths. Other times we go along with all of our attacker’s requests. We lull him into a false sense of security, and when he least expects it, we claw at his face and genitals, and then run out of the house or down the alley screaming, blood dripping from our fingernails. We are never together in the scenarios we envision. We can’t imagine that an attacker would look at the two of us together and think gangbang. No. We are always alone, at home or getting on the subway very late at night.
I admit, my mom and I don’t take into account the scenarios in which our strategies could get us killed. Nor do we ever consider being paralyzed by fear. But we are genuinely discussing how we envision ourselves fighting off an attack. Really, it’s something that all mothers and daughters should discuss. The same way that all fathers and sons should discuss why no one should ever be raped in the first place. It’s my theory that not enough fathers and sons discuss rape, and so my mother and I have to discuss it just about every time I go see her.
When I was twenty-seven, I went to visit my mom, who was still living in the apartment in Harlem I grew up in. I sat while she ran around the kitchen cooking food for me, getting a glass of tea for me, asking if there was something else she could do for me. She waits on me now because I’m a guest. My mother always makes such a huge fuss over me, and it makes me feel like an adult and a child at the same time. When I first moved out, I thought the apartment would feel like home as long as my family still lived there. Not the case. It’s actually a huge disappointment to go back and feel like a visitor instead of like a daughter to my mother and a little sister to my brother. Everything feels smaller. The doorways are shorter, the toilet is closer to the ground, and I no longer know how to turn on the TV. I’m grown now.
So we were in the kitchen discussing rape, as usual, when my mother said, “You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity.”
???
It was a total record-scratch moment! She called me a virgin, and she said it with sincerity and a touch of pity. Here I was, twenty-seven years old, having lived on my own for two years, and she just knew for a fact that I was a virgin. I even had a boyfriend at the time, and she still felt confident in her belief that I was a virgin—confident enough to bring it up as obvious in a conversation about a completely different subject. Well, she was wrong. I wasn’t a virgin. I’m still not a virgin. That’s right. I’ve gone all the way.
However, I am fascinated by virginity. Losing it, keeping it, only doing hand and mouth stuff because you regard your vag as a delicate little prize for your husband on your wedding night. Sacrificing your butt hole to save your porcelain-baby vagina from being smushed and crushed by some dude who barely knows what he’s doing. Hey, girl, I get it! Kind of. Wait … no. I don’t really get it, but I’m not here to judge you. Everyone has his or her reasons for holding on to it—until they don’t. Frankly, that’s the way it should be. Letting some dude put his stuff in you is actually pretty heavy. It’s serious. But I didn’t think about my virginity that way before I lost it. I didn’t see it as a treasure or a precious jewel. I had felt the burden of my virginity ever since my friend, a guy, told me when I was sixteen that if I was still a virgin at twenty-one he’d do me a favor and take it from me. He said it out of nowhere! Like he was so sure that I was so undesirable that he’d have to go ahead and lie on the cross and take my virginity from me as an act of charity. Bless him. I couldn’t think of anything sadder than being a pity fuck. That’s not normal. I couldn’t let it happen. I saw it as a burden that I had to get rid of so that I could be normal like my friends. A few years later, I looked around and I was the only virgin left and I basically panicked.
If you think that’s a story I’m about to tell you, you’re wrong. There is no story. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t a child bride. I wasn’t being forced, but I hadn’t figured it out any more than my friends had. I just thought, Well … that’s enough. And then boom, I wasn’t a virgin anymore. And then came the regret. Not regret over losing my virginity—regret over my rush to do it. It had seemed so important that it had become a project for me. How would it happen? Who would it happen with? Where would it happen? Would I be a grown-up afterward? Would I suddenly become a sexy woman with a small waist, big boobs, and a big ass? Would I be Jessica Rabbit or Beyoncé? The answer was no. I didn’t become any of those things, and the where, how, and who of it all left me disappointed as well.
Don’t worry! At least I got the dude’s full age and name beforehand. He didn’t have a middle name, and I thought, Wow. Your parents didn’t love you enough to give you a middle name. What a shame. And just to make sure I’d never have to see him again, I shared that thought with him.
He looked at me, and then he laughed. He thought I was funny. That was enough for me so I banged him.
Are you judging me? Remember, you were super shitty at twenty years old, possibly shittier than I was. You remember that!
For a while afterward, I kept trying to make sex feel good, but it didn’t. Not with anyone. And I really tried. I’d go after guys who were very attractive, but they didn’t feel any better than ugly guys. I’d try guys who really wanted to be in a relationship with me, but they didn’t feel any better than the guys just looking for something to do on a Friday night. I tried to make a game out of it. I’d try on a character to see if she had more fun, but she did not. I kept thinking that the problem was each individual guy. Like I said, I really tried. But it always felt the same. Cold. Emotionless. Empty.
This was a very strange time in my life. I was slipping into a depression, and while I didn’t super love sex, every encounter at least became something I could focus on to distract me from the fact that I was severely unhappy with everything in my life.
I didn’t see it then, but that phase of pseudopromiscuity was a part of my depression, not a distraction from it. Poor, stupid, slutty Gabby. To be clear, it wasn’t a lot of men. It was a few. This is what I did, though, off and on between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. I call it my Hoe Phase.
Here’s the thing about therapy and why it is so important. I love my mom, but there’s so much I couldn’t talk to her about during my Hoe Phase. I couldn’t tell her that I couldn’t stop crying and that I hated everything about myself. My mom has always been an independent person with lots of friends who love her and think she is the most talented person ever. Her life at the age of twenty was nothing like mine. Whenever I did try to open up, my mom seemed unconcerned. When I was sad about something, she told me to “get a thicker skin”; when I was upset, she told me to “stop nitpicking.” My mom has always had faith that things would be okay—but saying “Tomorrow will be a better day” wasn’t enough for me. When I first told her I was depressed, she laughed. Literally. Not because she’s a terrible person, but because she thought it was a joke. How could I not be able to feel better on my own—like her, like her friends, like normal people?
So I just kept thinking my sad thoughts. Thoughts about dying. I couldn’t sleep at night. Eventually, morning would come, and it would be time to go to class. I was attending City College of New York, a five-minute walk from my apartment, but by the time I’d get to school every morning, I’d be crying and sweating profusely, struggling to breathe, thinking I was going to die. For a while, I thought I was having asthma attacks. I didn’t realize until later that these were actually panic attacks. I was a mess.
I stopped eating. For days at a time, I wouldn’t eat anything at all. Often, when I was too sad to stop crying, I drank a glass of water and ate a slice of bread, and then I threw it up. After I did, I wasn’t as sad anymore. I finally relaxed. So I never ate anything until I wanted to throw up, and only when I did could I distract myself from whatever thought was swirling around my head. I was a real joy to be around.
Eventually, I decided to get a doctor involved. I was a college student and poor, which meant I had really good health care: Medicaid. (Oddly enough, as a thirty-three-year-old working actor, I can’t afford now what I could afford at the age of twenty-two. America yo!) I found a doctor and told her everything that was wrong with me. I’d never run down the entire list before, but as I heard myself, I could sense that dealing with this on my own was definitely no longer an option.
The doctor asked me if I wanted to kill myself.
I said, “Meh. Not yet, but when I do, I know how I’ll do it.”
I wasn’t afraid to die, and if there was a button I could’ve pushed to erase my existence from Earth, I would’ve pushed it, because it would’ve been easier and less messy than offing myself. According to the doctor, that was enough. She prescribed an antidepressant and also suggested therapy. Dialectical behavioral therapy. I know, right? What’s that?!
My doctor explained that dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) was a cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help treat borderline personality disorder. I was eligible for a six-month treatment program with group-therapy classes designed to help manage emotions and behaviors that could be symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Classes were Monday through Friday, from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Did I have borderline personality disorder? Nope. Not at all. But my doctor thought it was the best treatment my bomb-ass insurance could buy for me. And because I was failing out of college anyway, I had nothing but time. I was basically the perfect candidate for DBT even though my actual diagnosis was only depression with a bit of an eating disorder. (I say “only” and “a bit” like this wasn’t absolutely ruining my life. I was going to die. LOL.) My doctor was really excited to get me into the program. Possibly too excited, I remember thinking at the time.
As my doctor described DBT and what it could do for me, I sort of stopped listening. I nodded my head whenever she paused; every now and then, I said, “Oh. Okay.” But I couldn’t focus on anything back then. Not even someone talking directly to me in a quiet room. I was thinking about how I’d have to drop out of school to do this therapy and whether or not it would be worth it. I was thinking about how I’d tell my family.
I got home from the doctor’s with a bottle full of antidepressants and a new lease on life. I broke the news to my brother first. I told Ahmed how I’d been feeling and how I had to get help for it. He suggested that I read the Bible and watch church on TV with him on Sunday mornings. He also told me he was sorry to know how badly I felt and that he wished he’d known, wished he could have helped. I should’ve told him sooner. I’d figured my brother was as self-centered as any twenty-something guy. I didn’t trust other people to care about me. In the case of Ahmed, I was wrong.
I chose to tell my mom while she was lying in bed asleep. I poked her until she was about half-awake, and then I proceeded to relay the super important fact of my treatment for depression as though she were fully awake and able to receive the news. I was counting on her not being able to respond.
Look. My mom loves me more than I’ll probably ever be able to comprehend. She wants the best life possible for me, and her fears for me come from love. With that in mind … my mom’s first instinct was to tell me that what I was feeling I actually wasn’t feeling—that I was just being dramatic. It felt like a slap in the face, but I realize now that she just wanted me not to feel like dying. She’d spent so much time trying to keep me alive that it broke her heart to imagine that I preferred she hadn’t. It hurt her to know I was hurting. She took it personally.
Her second instinct was to share a time in her life when she was upset and couldn’t sleep. Just like me. She said that she just kept getting up and believing that God would pull her through and that He did. I was grateful that she opened up, but what she described was actually nothing like what I was going through. I couldn’t make her understand that for me God wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make her understand that I couldn’t get up on my own anymore.
So I started DBT: five days a week, three classes a day, each run by a different therapist. On two of those days I went to group therapy, and on Thursdays I went to one-on-one therapy. I was the youngest in the group by about ten years. A lot of the people in the group had gone through a few different cocktails of medication and therapy before DBT. Some had lived through suicide attempts and hospital stays in the psych ward. Some had spent years on a waiting list and had maxed out their savings to be able to attend the DBT classes. I, on the other hand, had basically waltzed in a day after mentioning my feelings to my doctor. I was on the lowest dosage of a bottom-shelf antidepressant, which was already working. And I was only twenty, so I had yet to ruin my life.
For me, the classes were fun! A lot of the program centered on keeping a diary and writing down my thoughts and feelings and then reading them aloud to everyone. I excelled at writing down my thoughts and feelings and reading them aloud to everyone! (Have you seen my Twitter?) I took to the program fast and was basically kicking my depression’s ass. I was quickly becoming the Happiest Person at Sad Camp (that’s literally what they called me).
This one woman hated me. She said that I was too perfect, that I was everyone’s favorite, and that she was sick of it. She was a real bitch, but to be fair, she was suffering from borderline personality disorder. She was having a more difficult time than I was, and it must have been rough for her to see me smiling and laughing. Aside from her, most people in our class liked me. I made jokes about my pain and spent the first month of the program secretly feeling like I was mentally healthier than everyone else there and that I didn’t need help as much as they did. (Oh, now I get why that bitch hated me.) Whether I was healthier or not, I was there with my DBT classmates because I did, in fact, need help. Most of my “happiness” was pretend and the jokes a cover-up. One of my therapists called it the “onion.” He’d laugh at my inappropriate jokes, and then say, “Okay, Gabby, but peel the onion. What’s under that joke? Hmm? Is it fear? Peel the onion.” Hippie.
At first I’d think, Shut up, Jacob! I saw you smoking a cigarette outside. You can’t tell me shit! But by the third month I was less judgmental. I was trying my best to be honest with everyone about my feelings, including myself. I was peeling the onion. I was also way more emotionally stable. I was still trying to shake the eating disorder, but I no longer wanted to die. I was grateful to the program and the doctor who had suggested it. The thoughts I’d had, the absence of any fear of death, the uncontrollable emotional sadness … I didn’t know anymore who the fuck that girl was, but she was no longer me. And she’s definitely not the person writing this today.
One thing didn’t change, though: I was still hooking up with random dudes. It took a while longer to learn that I deserved to at least like someone before letting him rub up against me. In time I started to believe I was worth more than being fucked and forgotten. I decided to try celibacy for a while. Except I wasn’t going to be a weirdo about it and tell everyone.
“You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity,” my mother repeated. This is how much she believed her own statement: she said it twice. She peered at me, waiting for a response.
I suddenly realized, in the midst of my stunned silence, that my mom thought we were a lot closer than we actually were. She thought that since telling her about my depression had been such a success I would have told her about losing my virginity when it happened. She thought I was a delicate little flower. And she thought I was a little bit sad for being twenty-seven and still a virgin.
How could I tell her?
“True, I’ll fight like hell, Mom. Could you make me a sandwich?”
THERE ARE LOTS of ways I could describe my mom, Alice Tan Ridley. Free-spirited hippie is one (actually, I’m the only one who calls her a hippie, and never have I done it to her face). She doesn’t care about rules and breaks them often. She wants other people to live their lives the way they want to. She wishes it was socially acceptable for straight men to cry and wear dresses and skirts. (That being said, she told me to have her buried in pants.)
My mom is everyone’s favorite aunt. She was the youngest girl of nine kids, all born and raised on a dirt road in a town you’ve never heard of in Georgia. She has a ton of sisters who had children when she was a little girl, so she’s been helping raise kids all her life. She became an assistant preschool teacher at the age of thirteen. Really, she’s been trained in the art of fun since birth.
She’s comfortable in her own skin and knows how gorgeous she is. If you happen to think she’s not gorgeous, you’re wrong. She’s the most confident person in the room. Any room. She’s the most talented person around for miles. Perhaps for a thousand miles. Definitely in the city. She shines as bright as a diamond because she is a goddamned STAR! That’s another phrase I use to describe my mother—again, never to her face.
Whether what I’ve said about my mom is objectively true or not, it’s the way she feels about herself, and so, in a very “I think, therefore I am” way, it becomes true because it’s her truth. That kind of confidence is rare. I’ve been trying to feel that special brand of confidence all my life, but I still fall short of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m great! But Mom’s confidence is incredible and hypnotic, like a magic show. Can you imagine being her daughter? It’s annoying. Like a magic show.
When Ahmed and I came along, my mom worked in the New York City Public Schools as a paraprofessional, teaching in a class of differently abled children. Her students had Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities. Whenever her class went on a trip to the zoo or the circus or even to see a WWF match at Madison Square Garden, she’d take us along, too. When I started going to school, it was to the same one where my mom taught. At least once a day I’d ask for the bathroom pass, and I’d go visit her in her classroom, grab a snack, say what up to my homies, and then go back to my own classroom.
Alice has worked as a professional singer since childhood, and even while she was teaching, she had her own show: a gospel brunch every Sunday at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. She was always singing. She would sing the national anthem at school assemblies and perform in choirs at different churches, but her Cotton Club show was an actual job. She had an amazing voice that she certainly didn’t intend to waste.