Betty Gilpin - All the Women in My Brain

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For you, my secret favorite

This is a true story, though some names have been changed.

Dear reader,

Picture a mute feather woman. Shes essentially a bloodless meerkat recluse working as a night janitor for an apothecary. She does helpful things like apologize to the sun and lie facedown on census day so shes not on record for being alive. Now ask her to stand in the center of a farmers market and pop-belt reasons why she loves herself and should be elected mayor.

This is me writing a book.

To write you a letter listing reasons why you should be interested in my brain is to pour curdled milk on my personal bill of rights, which for years decreed that the shadows and unsent-idea emails were my mental Cheers bar.

But Im writing a book. Im writing a book, and the women in my brain are hyperventilating.

Some are in pilled sweaters meaning well, some are building forts or writing terrible poems, some have blood in their teeth and are throwing a cantaloupe through a store window. All of these brainwomen are different. Most of them are afraid. Many of them stand sentry at the door, warning the other women of the dangers of bravery and action. Lipstick for the bodega might send the poisonous message that you love yourselfsuggesting that your ideas are worthy is identity suicide. Its bagpipes at a library. Its a selfie at a funeral. It would kill us, plead the brainwomen. Leave the hand-raising to the women without cereal in their bra. Delete this paragraph.

Well, that was the first thirty years of my life. Then a strange combination of personal and world events gently then violently shifted my brainwomen, sedating some and birthing others. To my shock, some of the veterans announced their desire to phase out from twenty-four-hour megaphone duty and become a nap-prone member of the board. One woman stood up from leaning against a supply closet and out fell anotherbound, gagged, and kicking her pantyhosed legs at the women whod locked her away.

I feel a shift. There are things we do to protect ourselves as ladies that make sense when were twelve or twenty-five, but now with things like retinols and Donalds we no longer need those brainwomens help to feel shame. So Im baking some of those women an Ambien Bundt cake and writing this E. E. Cummings wedding toast of a book to you before they wake up.

Of course, I love those brainwomen, too. Every time they held me back from running at something, I saw a different color of the world. Something I would have missed if Id ignored them. While many of my braver friends seemed to run with a spear at the horizon, I sat with binoculars and a notebook. And now, before I suddenly throw my computer in an acid bath, Id like to present my field notes.

My name is Betty. Sorry, as an actor Ive been conditioned to exchange deepest fears and traumas before names. If the brain is a house, I like to get right to the terrifying attic and haunted second bathroom of truths and just bypass the vestibule of small talk and boundaries. Dont worry, this wont be an actor memoir. I dont have any delusions that the octogenarian auctioneers who have seen my Off-Broadway theatre canon are clamoring for my childhood timeline. Nor do I think the gentlemen who send me eight-by-ten printouts of my own breasts to sign are petitioning for my bookIm not aware that they know I can read. But now that theres been a small brain earthquake and Im coughing dramatically through the smoke, I see that all my experiences as a sometimes-working actor have been a perfect allegory for being a woman in this world. Having to cycle through identities to give whoever is in front of you the girl they want, feeling like you have to audition for the job you already have, having a quarter of the time that men do to achieve your dreams before your tits are in your shoes and the government deems you disgusting and banishes you to eat sleeves of tear-soaked saltines in bed until you die.

I have been doing actor weirdness professionally for fifteen years. Most of that has consisted of trying. Trying to make smaller my facial expressions, choices, and curvesall of which were too big to play sexy aunt with laundry or slutty neighbor with question. Trying not to listen to the business when it told me the things that were valuable about myself were not my imagination and darkness but my youth and cleavage. Trying not to feel shame for wanting things, and battling the anvil-anklets of depression and anxiety while walking through the world as an apologizing Barbie. Trying.

And then sometimes, in the dead of night, in a hamster-on-deathbed whisper, I do something illegal. Do you? Do you ever wonder if you could never mind. Its gross to type.

(TYPE IT, COWARD.)

Listen. I could write a dissertation on the blegh of my face and the suck of my ways. But also of course is that other thing, buried in all the no and sorry.

There is something inside you, and something different inside me, and in Al Roker and Elian Gonzalez and your dentist, that is insane and obscure and extraordinary. And yours. A tiny little pinprick of light. Its buried under lead bags of fear and oh well. Sometimes you think maybe it doesnt exist. Its externalization instructions are written in a dead language. Maybe one time you were given the chance to unearth it and let it float out, and nothing happened. You take that as proof it was all in your head, so you never try again. Maybe youre convinced that unless the world acknowledges your light as extraordinary, then it doesnt matter. It was never real.

Somewhere along the way I got too tired to hate myself all the time. And looked in the mirror and thought, you fuck, you have to try. I dont know what it looks like, but theres something in there that has to come out. Something, to use a horrible word, special.

*Have asked publisher to use puke-proof paper*

I am at the point where the caterpillar asks for a pretransformation cigarette break. She briefly wonders if she could turn into an eagle, or instead position herself to get pancaked by a Hyundai. We all have it at some point: the horrific adult realization that no one is going to hold you down, cut you open, and forcibly extract your centimeter-tall scroll of inner magnificence for the world to read. Its in your hands to decide your fate as magic or sweatpants. What once were personality quirks that made your emails more relatable are now sandbags against the door to potential. So many of us feel like we are designed for Greek circumstances but are given Ikea boxes to put them in. Emotionally, this book is an opportunity to sit together on the floor of Grand Central, turn our purses inside out, and simultaneously shit our pants. (I both know exactly what that means and have also lost the thread.)

Nowhat I mean is this. So many of us wait until the hallway or journal or car to open the compartment where we hide our ugly and our majesty. I want this book to scalpel out the darkness and ask if it looks like yours. Then I want to coax out the lice-sized brainwoman who believes we are meant for the moon and ask her to speak, too. I want to write about being afraid and grabbing the spear anyway, sobbing and peeing and sprinting at the horizon.