I either send you my little newsletters after writing them in one go, or I don’t. There are many almost finished pieces in my draft box, where I wrote and wrote and then could not seem to find an end to it. Its the archetypical experience of writing. However, this substack is a low-stakes experiment for me and I re-read this draft and think it has enough potential to be entertaining to you. Many strange things are happening here and I am thinking of ways to share them with you: a man tried to rob the guy I was kissing on the corner of my street last night. Clara has bought me a barbie dress. I was served stolen goats’ milk labneh for breakfast whilst the french classical music radio played in the background. My heart aches for Diana whose voice sounded so so fragile in the voice note she sent me. Until then: i present you a piece I wrote in Amsterdam, in december last year, when I was reading maniacally. It’s Holly Golightly July y’all.
“You know the days when you get the mean reds?
The mean reds. You mean like the blues?
“No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”
I.
Last night I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time ever. The above quote is part of a conversation between the male protagonist and Holly Golightly. I read it and part of me thought “this is the best thing I’ve read all year” but also I have to substract points for blatant racism and other nasty comments. The story so carefully crafted, Holly so funny, so fast, so fatally scarred. I know Truman Capote, the author of this and many a short story, struggled with substance abuse. Both alcohol and tranquilizers served as temporary represants of anxieties caused by childhood trauma. A growing dependance on these substances of course causing anxieties on their own.
After I finished the book, around 11 pm, I blew out my candles and lay awake until 4. It was insomnia caused by the mean reds. Naturally, I had a lot of time to think about the nature of my sleeplessness and I realized that whereas in the past I often lay awake due to a mental racing of the thoughts, I was now awake due to a physical racing of the heartbeat. I could feel it in my throat, had been feeling it there all day, and as much as I tried breathing to my belly, I was not able to make it disappear.
II.
As I type this, my sister sits in front of me, typing away her own words that build towards an academic paper. She made us a poké bowl and I just cleaned the kitchen. As I sprayed the stove with a bottle containing rebranded soap, decorated with a label of printed pine trees, I found myself thinking about Elena.
Elena, during a period that lasted around a year, was my roommate on C/ Bertrellans 5-1, the house I referred to as “next to decathlon” and if that wouldn’t ring a bell with the audience: “a minute from pl. Cat” and if that didn’t work: “next to the rambla”. (All the above is, in fact, true). Elena and I, we shared the house with a couple, the girl being a good friend of mine I had met in Barcelona, and the boy a somewhat good friend of Elena’s from her hometown in Italy. It was a weird household. Elena and I bonded over aperitivo hours in our living room whilst our other roommates hid in their bed, silently, for days on end. I truly believe both of them used to be fun people, but they’d had unrealistic expectations of a move to spain and instead of trying to make a nice life for themselves, they just cooked in their dissapointment with the actuality they found themselves in. All the while, their icy, resentful energy covered the apartment and caused me much distress. Bowls of patatas chips and cans of estrella limon provided a shield of warmth against the sad bitterness radiating out of that closed room. We tried our best to laugh about it, but it was never really funny.
Elena was - next to a lover of the aperitivo, a self-employed illustrator, a grand cook and a sweet friend - a girl with a nervous spirit. For a long time I did not understand what ‘ansiedad’ meant, but she didn’t as much explain it to me as embodied it. In addition to celebrative cocktails and prescription drugs, she found a cure in cleaning. This is how despite the fact that the frozen couple never as much touched a broom, and the fact that I myself was a teenager who’d never been taught how to clean a bathroom, our house was always impeccably clean. Grand was my surprise when I’d find Elena in the living room with our vaccuum machine in her hand and our huge purple carpet folded over the sofa’s end, again, when I felt that she had taken the dust away underneath the carpet twice that week already.
III.
I consider myself lucky to have lived a life without much interference of the mean reds. For over twenty years I was blissfully unaware of the feeling called anxiety, but when the meanies did arrive, they weren’t subtle. I understood I had a problem to deal with when I found myself in the salon of my flatshare, crying, tying the shoe strings of a pair of decathlon running shoes I had bought in an act of sheer desperation that day because don’t people say running alleviates stress? I ran up and down passeig sant joan, beneath arc de triomf, and afterwards suffered from a pain in my hip for three weeks straight.
On 16.10.19 I describe my first experiences of anxiety as follows:
“I have been feeling restless as of late. I have sudden panick (sic) attacks, during which my heartbeat goes up, I feel panicky, I can’t focus well on other things than the physical sensations that are molesting me. At night, before bed, negative trains of thought carry me away”
And what is the first step any 21-year-old-girl-in-distress undertakes towards solving a problem? She writes a list. A long list of possible causes of my anxiety, “which, if true, assure me of the fact that I am not going crazy.”
I was bored, I was alone more often than I wanted to be. The city was going through major political uproar that had to do with nationality, origin, a people, locality, and I remained - however well integrated - an expatriate. I could join the marches but I’d never dissolve in the catalan masses, I was a designated observer, simply other.
I had also, two months prior to writing, undergone an abortion. Whilst I still have zero doubts about my decision, and was not sad about anything related to a potential child, in retrospect I think I suppressed a lot of anger about the day itself. Based off the experience of a close friend of mine, who had undergone the same procedure half a year prior, I was expecting no pain and a lot of being taken care off. And that didn’t really happen. Up unto this day my voice trembles when I describe a girl in her black calvin klein nightgown -i take any occassion to dress up nicely!- , sick with narcotics and bowed over in pain, being kindly requested to leave the bed she’s in because the clinic is closing for the day. She puts on dungarees and exits into a broad summer’s daylight and stands out on the street, where instead of leaning against her lover she leans against a fence for support. He arrived, eventually, sprinting.
“Abortion. makes me feel bad sometimes. May have fucked up my hormones.”
IV.
Since I read Olivia Laing’s “a trip to echo station” (a book on writers, alcohol abuse, and writers suffering from alcohol abuse) I always get an extra fright when the mean reds hit me. Objectively, by any standards, I drink too much, and alcohol is a depressant and a nerve-wrecker if there ever was one.
Over Christmas lunch my uncle asks me, kindly, “so natural wine gives less of a headache, do you notice that?” and I cannot help but reply “well alcohol is poison”
Laing explains that alchohol has two effects: positive reinforcement (ingestion activates the pleasure-reward pathways in your brain) and negative reinforcement (ingestion sedates excitation). It makes you happy and reduces tension. Alcoholism is driven by both, but in the long term, it is the negative reinforcement that tends to take the larger role. It’s stress management. For a while. Because after a larger time of regular ingestion, the brain starts to compensate. It creates more excitatory neurotransmitters, more stress, and then of course, you need more alcohol to sedate it.
Laing’s book tells the tales of Tennessee Williams, Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carver, and Hemingway. Men who consider themselves drinking intermittently, as there are days where they avoid gin! Those days they drink twenty bottles of beer, but that doesn’t count.
I know I’m far removed from that level, yet when I’m in bed with the meanies I can’t help but think of think of Cheever’s trembling hands and pledge abstinence.
V.
Holly’s mean reds may have been caused by all of the above: drinking up until the early hours, abandoned children, a lack of cleaning her house. Such a shame she remains one of the most fabulous character to ever grace the pages of a book. Personally, I know that tranquility is like the tides to me, and my way of dealing with the frights is just a firm believe in that they’ll pass again, and return, and pass. Last night I rejected a fluitje, thought of Elena and how cleaning is a more sustainable way of suppressing anxiety than alcohol, whilst Holly echoes in my head:
“the hell with him, he’ll get tired, he’ll go to sleep, my God he should, eight martinis before dinner and enough wine to wash an elephant”
Yes. Spill every last crumb from that draftbox please. ✨
More plz