Melissa Broder - So Sad Today: Personal Essays

B RINGING A CHILD INTO THE world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. Its tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. Its a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but youre the only raver. Theres no weird New Age guide. Theres no shitty techno. Theres only you and the infinite.

I was born two weeks late, because I didnt want to leave the womb. When they finally kicked me out, I was like, oh hell no. Ive been trying to get back there ever since.

Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough. According to my mother, the doctor who delivered me said I was pretty. I wanted to believe him, because I love validation. Validation is my main bitch. But I was not the type of infant to absorb a compliment. Had I been verbal I would have extended a compliment in return so as to assuage the implicit guilt of my own existence rubbing up against praise. Instead, I created an external attribution.

An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. Its a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And theyre always your own fault.

The doctors perspective was only an error of opinion. He obviously had shitty taste in babies. If hed called me ugly I would have spent the remainder of my time in the hospital trying to convince him I was hot. But he liked me. There was definitely something wrong with him.

If youre never going to be enough, its important to find a way to turn a compliment against yourselfto reconstruct it into a prisonwhich is precisely what I did. I decided I would have to stay pretty for the rest of my life. If I got ugly it would be my own fault. Dont drop the ball. Dont fuck it up. I was definitely going to fuck it up.

Next they probably put me in a room with, like, twenty other babies. Immediately, Im sure I compared myself to all of them and lost. The other babies probably seemed pretty chill about being on earth. They shit their diapers like no big deal. They just sort of effortlessly knew how to do existence. I, on the other hand, was definitely a wreck about being alive. Why was I here? What did it all mean? Things werent looking good.

My first day on earth and I know I was already thinking about death. A lot. I was probably thinking about death enough to negate every future accomplishment, relationship, and thing that I might come to love with thoughts like whats the point? and why bother? At the same time, I still cant come to terms with the fact that I am actually, definitely going to die one day, as this might lead to the realization that I might as well enjoy my one brief life, and who wants that.

The situation only got worse when my mother announced that she couldnt breastfeed. More precisely, she told me later, I was killing her. Killing your mother as an infant is proof of ones too-muchness. In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldnt be here.

I was killing my mother, because I was sucking too hard. Less than twenty-four hours on the planet and I was already trying to fill my many insatiable internal holes with external stuff. I was trying to sate the existential fear of what the fuck is going on here with milk. I was sucking and sucking, but there wasnt enough milk. There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle.

As a result of all my sucking, I ended up in a higher weight percentile than my height percentile. This was problematic, because my mother had obese parents. She needed an object upon which to project her own anxieties. I was perfect for that! The religion of the household quickly became food: me not being allowed to have it and me sneaking it.

One of my favorite foods to sneak was me. In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my fingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between my teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

What I loved most, though, was to pick my nose and eat it. During story hour at school I created a shield with my left hand to cover my nose, so I could enjoy some private refreshment. Then Id really get in there with the right hand. Some of my happiest childhood days were spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisfied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didnt care. The bliss was too profound.

Unfortunately, the bliss was not going to last forever. Lets be honest, the bliss was going to last four minutes or until my nose ran out of snot. But parents, if your kid is eating herself, you have to let her. Let your child devour herself whole. Even if she disappears completely, encourage her to vanish. Let your child eat the shit out of herself and then shit herself out. Let her eat that.