“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IN PEANUT BUTTER,” the man shouted into a megaphone. “THIS IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH, BITCH.” Nearby, people bought potatoes.
Every Sunday, I go to the farmers market in Dupont Circle in D.C. The longest-running market in the city, it’s also the largest: sprawling over three city blocks, it has nearly 75 vendors, from flower stalls to a stand that sells pickled okra and not much else. There’s a guy who plays miniature steel drums (sometimes), and a man who fingerpicks a Mexican guitar. There are dogs in children’s strollers, dogs in backpacks. Generators hum and people crush against each other, impatient but desperate, for a bagel sandwich.
On that particular Sunday—September 4, 2022—this newcomer set up shop next to a farm stand. I heard him before I saw him at the end of the street. At first, I thought he was a performance artist. Some other people seemed to think so as well: a small crowd gathered around him in a semicircle, anticipating.
“ALL YOU GOTTA DO IS SAY GOD BLESS YOU AND I’LL STICKIN MOVE. I DIDN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP, YOU CAN READ IT FOR YOURSELVES.” (I can quote him directly because I did my best to write down everything he said.)
I got a better view of the speaker. He was a tall Black man, dressed in a yellow Oxford shirt and blue slacks—and they were slacks; they would have made sense in an office, or a Men’s Warehouse ad. His cadence reminded me of a street preacher, but also a poet: the dramatic pause (Poet Voice is an affliction I hope never to have), the internal rhymes that knot together. All you gotta do/is say God bless you.
“GOD BLESS YOU SARAH. HER PRONOUNS ARE SHE / HER.” Was he psychic? Was this payback for something? Had I bought the wrong potatoes, and he was judging me? I should have gone for the red fingerlings, I know now. Should have could have would have: a lamentation for the way life has to happen, on roads that erase their exits as we move on.
That kind of thinking is personalization: I blame myself for what happens, because I think I am somehow responsible. While one interpretation of personalization would accuse the thinker of egocentrism (You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you), it’s more commonly, and kindly, considered one of many examples of cognitive distortions: forms of thought that usually involve negative feelings for the thinker.
In some cases, personalization stems from extended relational trauma; the thinker in question was in a relationship and/or social environment where the conditions were such that they were made to feel responsible for everything that happened, including and especially things that were not, nor should have been, in their control.
This man, of course, did not know me; and because of where I was standing, he couldn’t even see me. The obvious answer is that he knows somebody named Sarah. In 2021, according to BabyCenter, Sarah was the 98th most common girl’s name in the United States; in 1995, the year I was born, it was the fifth.
(And as I write this, I wonder if his use of “Sarah” with “She / her” are actually brilliant inversions of a few letters: S, h, r, with the e substituted for the a. After all, a name invites interpretation: how will this person, with all their as-yet-unknown, evolving specificity, live into this word?)
“I GOT MY OWN MOTHERFUCKIN EARPHONES IN MY EAR, SO I CAN’T HEAR YOU BITCH.” That was fair. I would give him that one. Once, as I was getting on the train, a man called me a white bitch, which: yes! Well spotted.
“BITCH STANDS FOR,” he added, “BELIEVE IT TRULY CAN HAPPEN. BITCH BITCH BITCH.”
BITCH: Believe It Truly Can Happen. If that isn’t a gauntlet thrown. I can imagine a personal trainer—he seems like a Malcolm; he is a Malcolm—Malcolm, a gleeful misogynist whose only clients are a cadre of women who believe in the power of positivity. Malcolm posts on 4chan, eats chicken breasts and plays drums in a Nirvana cover band.
What is it? It can be anything; he didn’t specify what he was insisting BITCH pointed towards as an end goal. Again, I interpret what he said as something about me—or rather, for me, capturing the fragile wishbone that is recovery. Believe it truly can happen: better really is out there, and it wants to meet you.
According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, recovery is a word with a fairly coherent sense of self—broadly, it means a sense of improvement—that crops up in various rooms; it’s a party guest equally likely to be found in your bedroom closet or outside, smoking at the moon.
Two of its appearances capture the tension inherent to recovery: recovery (from something) and recovery (of something). There’s a reason Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is one of my favorite short stories: its title is a question I have always longed to ask people, in part so I could find my own answer in theirs.
When I explain the distinction between PTSD and complex PTSD (what I have been diagnosed with), I rely on a crude metaphor. PTSD is a car crash, a specific event or set of events whose impact I can point to; the trauma can be known, named. Complex PTSD, on the other hand, is somebody gently hitting my car for years, and I’m parked between two other cars, so I can’t get out—but I don’t notice that until my car breaks into pieces, and not necessarily even then.
Recovery from and of something. But how can you retrieve what you’ve forgotten you had? In Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” the speaker insists that she seeks “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”
It’s not that the story is unimportant, or meaningless; it’s that the stories can mislead us, with narrators whose charisma, whose urgency, compels distraction. Recovery requires exertion. Recovery drains your muscles and tells you to do it again, suck it up, suck up the dry air and breathe into what hurts, which is everything. Everywhere.
In an interview, Leslie Jamison explained how she embraced clichés in her recovery from alcoholism—while resisting them in the process of writing The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath.
Even when a cliché resonates for people in totally different ways, it’s still this point of connection—a kind of touchstone that both people can grasp onto from very separate life situations. I came to appreciate that, even if it didn’t change the way I approach my work.
And that’s why BITCH: BELIEVE IT TRULY CAN HAPPEN nearly made me cry, when I was home by myself: l wouldn’t write that phrase (it makes me think of “dripping with sentimentality,” how a professor in college described the Never Let Me Go soundtrack), but I need it. On my wallet, I’ve taped a Post-It note that asks me, “for everything: Does this help me recover?” So I guess I should say: I would write that phrase, I’ve just been trained to resist what it represents: the obvious.
But the thing itself—recovery—is not the myth. It is boring and trite, and in no way unique; the myth, by contrast, is all-knowing, decadent, royal with fury. The myth says you’ve always been this way, a fuck-up who fucks up. The thing itself says fuck no, bitch. And the sea where you dove wonders, What kind of fuckery is this? And I respond, Fuck off! I don’t know how to swim!
The rest of what I got from the market, incidentally:
WALK ON BYEEEEEE BUH BUH HUH HUH
YOU BETTER CHECK YOUR INGREDIENTS BEFORE YOU OVERDOSE
MY COLOR IS JEE-SUS
FUCK THESE WHITE PEOPLE
BLACK MAN, DAHNANANANANANA BLACK MAN
WHAT COLOR IS JESUS
DEEZ NUTS ARE CRAZY KOOKOOKOO
I GOT THAT COCOCO YOU KNOW A MIRACLE
I SAW IT HAPPEN AND THERE WAS NO TEMPO
THERE IN HEAVEN
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
Gidget is an equal opportunist carbohydrate devotee, but with discernment: she only likes injera as it’s traditionally made in Ethiopia (with just teff flour) rather than the Americanized version (a combination of teff and wheat flours)—making her, as my favorite barista Ayat said, “a real D.C. kitty.”
Yesterday, I made pain de campagne from Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast. Gidge staked her claim to a slice by sitting on the Boos block, where fresh loaves go.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
Malcolm was a sight to behold. Thank you for juxtaposing a beautiful metaphor for cPTSD with the only picture of Bruce Hooper ever worth posting. Thank you Kyle Schwarber.
And hi Gidget.