Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine‘s series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. We feature original poems, short stories, and essays. Just real voices writing right now. If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
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You’d wander around West Elm, smelling candles, feeling the fabrics of duvets, and testing the comfort level of chairs you’d never buy because your finances couldn’t be further outside the universe of someone who could afford them. But that was never the point. West Elm, in all its top-dollar, earth-toned snootiness, felt alienating to you, and when you’re depressed, there can be a sick comfort in that.
Because feeling out of place in a room that never really wanted you feels normal, while feeling out of place somewhere you once felt like you belonged feels like the ground opening up beneath your feet, like stepping into quicksand right after you’ve managed to dodge a bathtub with a toaster in it.
You no longer belonged in your own life, so you sought out places where not belonging made sense. You pull in the anxiety and carry it in your chest as you handle some seventy-dollar tchotchkes you’ll never buy, letting the familiar weight of your own inadequacy settle over you. And eventually, you let it swallow you whole, because somewhere along the way you ceased to belong.
Luckily, there’s a Whole Foods next to the West Elm, where you can drag your dead-eyed self, with all your balls and chains, up and down the aisles where you can continue to feel like a circus freak. Whole Foods is a massive, bustling cavern of well-packaged corporate sludge, and if you play it right, you can wander throughout this organic fuck hole for hours on end. Just be careful: if you stare into the artisanal olive bar for too long, the olives will eventually stare back.
The staff will eventually notice you and the empty shopping basket you’ve been hauling around like a prop. Let it dangle in the crook of your arm as you eye the hot bar up and down, occasionally stirring the guts of the chicken tikka masala with the serving spoon. Yes, they will notice you—but you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just being weird, because depression makes you fucking weird. Lean into it as you drag your feet—and let them all wonder, let them all talk.
Three years before your sad boy bougie tour, your five-year relationship with a modeling agent was slowly imploding, and you were yet again the interloper at a fashion event that made you want to dry-swallow a Xanax, sitting there in some bottom-shelf designer outfit that you’d gotten on sale at the end of the season.
As someone passed you a vial of cocaine from under the table, you remember thinking that it felt as if the Nashville skyline had dissolved into the pool of soy sauce you were frantically dipping your rainbow roll in. Then you remembered that, to stomach living in Manhattan, you’d always envisioned the buildings as massive, concrete weeping willows to take shelter under because it was the only way to trick your brain into feeling safe.
Living in New York felt more like a concrete ambush. A steel and stone war zone. An endless and pretentious art installation. A theme park where you’ve never been tall enough to ride anything. And then your mind was suddenly intercepted by a memory of you and the witches—how the three of you used to break onto the rooftop you shared in Harlem, how you’d light orange candles and ask the Goddess to fill the caves inside you with light.
And it had been three days since your five-year relationship had completely dissolved, which had resulted in a one-way ticket out of LaGuardia with a shitty airline, and you were lugging all of your shit behind you in cheap suitcases, and you didn’t remember much else in between then and now, but where you were was a twenty-four-hour Kroger that was somewhere in between Brentwood and Nashville, and you were staring into space at a pile of Lean Cuisine through the glass door of the freezer, and there was this church dad on Grindr who wanted you to come over so that he could blow you in his garage while wearing his wife’s clothes, and it was one of those super Krogers, so nobody really noticed you, and your heart was broken, and you were listening to Avril Lavigne’s version of “Breakaway” on repeat, and you were walking around feeling like you were on the brink of tears all day long, which was kind of like carrying around the same electricity that’s in the air when it was about to start snowing.
You’d tan your way through this tragedy, frying like bacon and funnel cake, because a tan is something nobody can take away from you. You’d sob in your best friend’s giant wood-paneled kitchen, lost in your own thoughts, burning your hand on the handle of a cast-iron pan, only to wind up on the kitchen floor with a newly homed stray kitten curled against your bare chest, cradling your new friend while the pain in your hand throbbed against your heartbeat.
You’d fuck an ER nurse from Knoxville with terrible tattoos because sometimes you needed someone else’s hands on your body to remember that it was still yours.
You’d keep yourself busy by remembering how to live: at old-school East Nashville ragers in backyards with nerdy weirdos, moshing at metal shows like a teenager, looking deep into a drag queen’s eyes while she performed “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” crying about boys on porches with your girlfriends while y’all drank tequila straight from the bottle, dancing in the living room until 5 a.m. to gay eighties bangers during Pride, posing semi-nude for a friend’s budding body-positive boudoir photography company, and nursing your hangovers in above-ground pools while you stared at the sky.
You’d break up fights, throw back shots, make out in bathrooms, and microdose mushrooms in the bathroom of the bar on goth night.
It was all good. You’d always said your soul was a dive bar, and that after you died, you’d know you’d made it to heaven when you could see the peanut shells all over the floor. But even with all that living, there were things you couldn’t dance or fuck or drink your way out of.
Eventually, you’d turn to nature like Joni Mitchell after fame hit her sideways, letting the city bitch inside you fall away as you wandered muddy trails, stripped naked by streams, and cried for every part of your body and everything it had been through. Something in the woods remembered who you were, and all it wanted was for you to heal.
You’d wind up back in South Nashville off Nolensville Road, where the taco trucks and the porn stores and the fortune tellers had always felt like home, where a knot inside you loosened. You’d feast on biryani, ceviche, pupusas, pho, chicken tikka masala, tortas, curry, vermicelli, tacos, kimchi, gyros, hot chicken, and mee krob. You’d always been better at being a mess in your thirties than in your twenties, and you were just as entitled to losing your way as you were to finding it.
Somehow, throughout those first few years back in Nashville, you managed to keep depression at bay, something you’d dealt with your entire life and something that always felt like a sword hanging over your head (you even wrote an entire book on the subject, a scrappy little memoir that’s as ballsy as you hope to be someday).
But when a bout of depression inevitably clawed its way up through the floor (the ugly kind that used to look out at you from underneath the supermarket waffles you’d eat when you were a kid; the kind that was angular with a wide skeleton and long fingernails; the kind that liked to dig its spurred heels into your soul), you knew what to do.
You didn’t let it win. You dug it out from under your nails, screamed into your shirt, and were rude to people on 12 South when they asked you to take their picture in front of one of those tacky murals. You read that Ariel Sylvia Plath poetry shit that you love, naked on your floor at 4 a.m. while listening to Barbra Streisand’s version of “Life on Mars” on repeat. You rolled your eyes when the tools the fancy Upper West Side therapist taught you actually worked, even if they cost you an arm and a leg an hour.
You stood up to your bullies and watched them crumble. You didn’t turn around, bend over, and touch the floor, and three weeks later you watched it float away into the sky. You watched as it clawed at the air, its bloodshot eyes filled with rage, knowing that it didn’t have anything to grab onto. You told no one it had shown up. You figured it out on your own, and you felt proud you’d found a way to stay strong in the absence of a rescue party.
Maybe the rumblings of a depression residency planting its flag in your mind (you know, like Britney in Vegas) began with renting a room from a friend—a former bodybuilder, still caught in the drain of body dysmorphia, who you would eventually cut all ties with.
When you moved in, they told you to make yourself at home and that you were welcome to anything in the pantry, even though all they had was a monolith of different kinds of protein powder, arranged like books in clear, rectangular containers. It devolved into a year of roommate hell that you didn’t need to dwell on (even though, evidently, commenting on your body was on the roster).
And even though they cut you a deal and you walked away with a savings account, you left a little smaller. The lack of kindness wasn’t worth it, but this was your first great loss after returning to Tennessee, and loss was the essence of depression—the hand-placed, decorative emerald-stone backsplash in depression’s kitchen.
Honestly, that year and some of the time that followed was a little bit of everything. It was a dollar menu on a leaky air mattress, waiting for the guy you thought you were falling for to come back into the room after finishing in your mouth. It was mic-drop thirst traps and being a totally out-of-line Nasty Piece of Work (but it still got you tons of fist bumps at your favorite dive bar). It was a string of painful disappointments, right up until the last second of the year, but you kept yourself busy.
You talked miles of shit with new friends over wet burritos after getting your nails done. You lip-synced your way through the mess like a mad dog drag queen on the stage of a smoky small-town gay bar and kept the ghosts of all the boys who had no fucking idea how to love you at a manageable distance.
It wasn’t always pretty, and sometimes you came pretty close to losing your mind, but you found ways to get through it. You drew lines in the sand, showed people the door, and kept moving. It was a hard year, but you were still standing. You hadn’t fallen into depression. You were figuring things out, one questionable decision at a time.
Somewhere along the way, as life kept moving and work kept you busy, so much happened that you barely had time to take stock, and you started looking outside yourself in damaging ways. You didn’t recognize it as depression. You were too busy living, or trying to, to notice that something was shifting beneath the surface.
Mostly, you turned to sexual encounters that weren’t about pleasure so much as distraction, something to hold your attention long enough to forget that depression was slowly becoming the filter overlaying your entire lived experience.
The worst part was the feeling that your essence—that unequivocal part of your being that made you feel like you weren’t just a copy of a copy of a copy, that made you believe there was space for you between the pieces in the migration of birds across the sky—was trying to leave you behind, stranded on the ground in a place without the means to survive.
So you downloaded the black-and-yellow app and spent hours scrounging through its grid, hunting for flesh and bone to keep your gaze off the feeling that you were becoming less human. You reached for a different set of feelings, hoping they’d do what the others couldn’t. The snake ate its own tail, and you yanked it from its mouth to hold on, but it tried to break free, dragging your feet across the ground as it went.
Someone would emerge from the shadows of the app, someone you would want to keep around. An adorable, kind-hearted weirdo with myriad unignorable red flags stitched into the fabric of your emerging situationship (all of which you actively chose to ignore). He played your triggers like a piano, which, through the distortions of your trauma bond, made you want to keep him safe.
He was funny, delightfully candid about being raised in a Christian cult, and unwaveringly kind. Quiet, complicated, and gentle. Part of you wanted to try and prevent anything bad from ever happening to him again. You asked him once, in humor, if, when he was in the cult, he ever had to lay hands and pray for someone—which, of course, he had. You thought it’d be hilarious to ask him to pray for you, too, and even though he’d left the church years ago, he put his hands over your heart and asked Jesus to give you a break.
You’d hold on to moments like that. But over time, as time often does, the rift between you would reveal itself, and certain truths that you won’t chronicle here would come out. Things would get complicated in ways you couldn’t easily explain, and it would feel like a four-wheeler had run you over, knocking the wind out of you and making you forget how to breathe.
When it ended for the last time, he’d send you a biblical text chronicling your shortcomings, how you’d failed him, how he’d wished he’d never met you, and how you’re a few years shy of forty and still don’t really have any decent savings.
And there were other things, too, things that would send you breathlessly barreling into Planned Parenthood to recount your sexual activity to a hard-nosed lesbian nurse practitioner, who would inject you with a thick-needled antibiotic in the fat of your ass cheek that would send you limping across the linoleum.
Still, there’s a fold in the universe out there somewhere where you two wind up together, a place where you both manage to walk the trauma-bond tightrope and make it to the other side of everything that came between you. He’d pull your hands up to his face, kiss your fists, smile over your fingers, and tell you it would all be okay, because isn’t that what he always told you?
Didn’t he tell you that, baby?
You still managed to keep your shit together throughout this mess, eventually becoming a freelance journalist after finally getting a pitch greenlit by a local magazine (a dream come true if there ever was one), and, contrary to the advice of nearly everyone you’ve ever met in your life, you became a manager at your bar gig, which is essentially a roach-infested dive bar shack on the side of the road that’s covered in a pile of Costco Christmas lights (fight me). But it was one of the last of its kind in Nashville, a true haven for people like you—the dented cans in the back row in black graphic tees just trying to get by.
It all ended (or started) with a MAGA dad in cargo shorts who didn’t know how to tap his fucking card. You were fried, burning the candle at both ends, your ass still sore from the antibiotic shot, and there was an All-American Rejects concert down the street that had brought in one of the worst crowds you’d ever dealt with.
You rage-quit your job through gritted teeth as every nerve in your body short-circuited and fried, sending smoke billowing out of every electrical outlet of your brain, repeatedly screaming at MAGA dad to go fuck himself. It was public. It was ugly. It was devastating.
And of all the things, everything you’ve managed to recover from, this is what will do it. This is the experience that will throw your mental health, a stability that you fought and clawed for, into the chute that led back to the bottom. And how were you to know, all along—because it was just a stupid fucking job—that you were unknowingly sitting there making sandcastles with your back to the tsunami.
Cargo shorts and shitty 2000s pop punk are what did it—what made it impossible to ignore. It was no longer a question—this is now your brain on depression.
You’d even manage to get your job back in some capacity, as just a bartender, which is what you wanted in the first place. So stand there and make drinks like an asshole, with the ragged pieces of your broken heart filling up your non-slip shoes.
You’ll go into hiding. And nobody will really notice. You’ll throw up your shifts like confetti, wander around the woods looking for peace, and feel your emotions differently, in a way that feels more menacing.
When you first left New York, your emotions moved through you like a child’s—naturally, coming up when needed, even when they were at their strongest. They were heavy, but they flowed like rain, letting you process what was happening to you. Now they were moving through you like cement, making you give up on hikes before you even started and eventually pinning you to the mattress.
You’d work one or two nights a week, each shift feeling like you were resurrecting the fucking Titanic, and you’d start putting your rent, your entire life, for that matter, on a credit card, tanking your credit score.
The one thing you refused to give up, though, was writing, and you still turned out bangers for local magazines that made you look amazing on paper. The writing was good; everyone noticed that, and not a single soul seemed to notice that you were drowning the entire goddamn time.
The people in your life, for whatever reason, all of whom know, in some capacity, that you’ve been gutted, watch you shuffle around your hometown dragging your insides behind you. You pick up the slack as you go, unwrapping yourself from the bottoms of barstools and coffee tables, leaving behind a thick, sticky trail of yourself as you walk across town, your shoes sticking to the ground like you’re crossing a freshly painted porch that hasn’t dried yet.
And everyone you know will sit in the mezzanine of life and watch you drown while they eat Swedish Fish. They couldn’t get enough. You wouldn’t be surprised if they sat up there touching themselves—them and their little coked-out, sadomasochistic circle jerk, watching you thrash around below them.
There was always Virginia, wasn’t there? The iconoclastic, blue-haired-poser Richmond dream—the blindingly cool, low-key city with the weirdos and the porches and the food and the music. You’d carried it around in your head for over a decade, but could never seem to pull it off.
You got close once, ten years ago, after your dad died, because RVA seemed like a solid dead-dad city. But you’d sold your car a few months earlier in New Orleans and caught a train back to New York instead, because only you would wind up living in Manhattan, surrounded by sociopathic supermodels, when what you really wanted was Richmond. Always the wallflower at the orgy.
You didn’t necessarily intend to move there when you blew out of Tennessee; you were just looking for some breathing room. You had family in one of the microscopic suburbs outside the city, a picturesque town with a history it would rather not discuss, like so many small Southern towns. A place where all the evangelicals voted for Trump and celebrated by rocking back and forth, in and out of each other on their clandestine basement sex swings. Christians always have the most secrets.
You imagine all the neighbors down there in the dark, on their knees, leather masks covering their eyes, surrounded by a dildo menagerie, switching out the toys as the holes get bigger and bigger, using ranch dressing as lube.
Far-fetched, you know. But you know good and goddamn well that somewhere beyond one of those white picket fences, someone who forgot their safe word is chained to a radiator with a lightbulb up their ass, quietly wondering whether he’s ever going to come back for them.
Still, your ironically liberal family took you in after you eventually got fired from your bar job for being depressed (and does anyone really know the truth behind why you got fired?). You filed for unemployment and retreated to the countryside, where cornfields stretched to the horizon and the days moved at a pace you could almost tolerate. You climbed out onto the roof despite being told not to and stared at the river running behind the house. You watched the water move, going nowhere in particular, and for a little while, you let it.
You came out feet-first, kicking your legs in delirious confusion, trying to claw your way out of an upside-down grave. And when the hole finally spat you out, you probably landed in a chair at Edo’s Squid, eating braised fennel and gorgonzola with an entrepreneur and a muralist. When you got up to take a piss, you felt like you were interrupting a symphony halfway through a concerto, but the food was so good it hardly mattered that you’d nearly been trampled to death. It was a rookie mistake anyway.
The entrepreneur, a family friend with a penchant for taking in strays, offered you the chance to live in a gut-renovated, top-floor duplex in Jackson Ward. Towering front windows. Sky-high ceilings. A place that felt a little like Brooklyn, a little like San Francisco, a little like New Orleans, and somehow nothing like Nashville. It had collected the best pieces of every place you’d ever lived and left out the one that had most recently broken your heart.
One of the windows shuddered open, and you could sit on the sill with your feet dangling over the tin roof, staring at the streetlights through the branches of the trees. You’d work at a bar. You’d write for the local magazines. The dream you’d been dragging around for years would finally have somewhere to live, and this city would give it the fuel to catch fire.
The sinkhole to Richmond had given you a second chance. Everything came together so quickly you barely had time to overthink it, talk yourself out of it, or find some new and inventive way to ruin your life.
Thank God.
But that doesn’t mean depression was snuffed out, not entirely. It has always lived and breathed alongside your experience of being alive, a sprawling symphony of emotional sound with an eager conductor. You can try to numb your way out of it, but that’s like sitting in the concert hall with earplugs jammed in your ears. You can’t technically hear what the symphony is doing to you, but the vibrations still find you, traveling up through your feet and permeating your entire body.
And it will find you, because you carry it in your heart alongside everything else. Sometimes you’ll wander around Jackson Ward, which has quickly become your favorite neighborhood in the world, one hand cradling your stomach, the other pressed against your chest, trying to move through whatever is happening inside you. You’re old enough now to know that feelings need to be felt. You know how to find your way through the pain.
On a particularly difficult day (but still much better than any day you had in Tennessee), you’ll sit in the grass of Forest Hill Park in October on one of the last warm days of the season, reading Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. A gaggle of small children, first-graders at the oldest, will be playing underneath the trees behind you.
And there will be a small, rambunctious hellion named Cameron who’s constantly being reprimanded by the teacher—you’ll hear his name (your name) being shouted over your shoulder repeatedly, mostly because he wants to climb one of the trees and isn’t permitted to do so, but it won’t stop him from repeatedly trying, persistently indignant and unwaveringly rebellious.
At one point, you’ll hear him fall with a soft thud and start to cry, and you assume he eventually broke free and managed to climb a foot or two behind his teacher’s back, only to wind up feeling what it’s like to have the ground rise to meet him.
And then, and may God strike me dead if this shit isn’t true, you’ll hear the teacher say, “Cameron, if you’re going to constantly misbehave and fall down, you need to learn to get back up on your own.”
And you’ll cover your face with your book as your eyes swell with tears, there in the sunshine in a new place where nobody knows who you are.
And Cameron will stand back up behind you.
Photo Andrej Lisakov
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