This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(36)

Then again, maybe I do.

Now that the other woman had left, there was no other black person in that pool. Some of the people in there were smoking. Men and women were making out with one another. There was a weird vibe, like the pool activities could have easily progressed further. For a moment, I felt like an extra on the set of some Entourage episode; these were the kinds of behaviors that I only saw in decadent HBO series, or read about in personal essays written by white women. To me, such hedonism was a luxury afforded to the white and privileged, and when I was in that world I could observe but never participate. At the most I could afford a glass or two of the weakest wine, but I could never indulge. White, privileged people are always considered clean no matter what they do, while I as a black woman have to constantly scrub at the filth that society smears onto my body.

I feared that if I got into the pool half naked, with my breasts spilling out of a bikini top, my body would alter the atmosphere. I would be stared at, and men might even hit on me, asking me where I was from and if I was having a good time before offering me drugs. If I got in and didn’t participate with everyone else, I would be seen as uncool and immature. If I did, someone I knew professionally could see me, suspect that I was up to no good, and then my boss could find out that his most recent hire was fucking up.

When I discussed this deep sense of unease with my mentor, who is also black and more than ten years my senior, he told me that I made the right decision by not swimming. He eased my worry that I was overthinking an otherwise fun situation. In fact, he argued that there is no limit to overthinking when you are a young black woman in an overwhelmingly white space.

But a part of me wanted to fuck up. I wanted to see what it was like to be so carefree, so white. I fantasized about getting in that pool, taking off my bikini top, catching the eye of some older and more powerful editor, and having sex in a bathroom with the door slightly cracked. I thought about what it would be like to do a line of cocaine, even though I’ve never wanted to. (I have a strong aversion to taking even regular, over-the-counter drugs.) But these fantasies were the only luxury in which I could indulge. Only in my imagination could I do any of these things and remain unscathed both professionally and socially.



I crept back into my hotel room that night so that I would not disturb my roommate. I couldn’t fall asleep, so I decided to read and propped open Melissa Broder’s essay collection, So Sad Today. Broder is the creator of the depressing, anxiety-ridden, and self-deprecating Twitter account @SoSadToday, which has over 370,000 followers (including Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus the last time I checked). Plenty of my friends retweet her posts. I don’t, but I do read them whenever they appear on my timeline, usually half smiling at their relatability before diverting my attention to something else that won’t pull me into such a dark place. For years, Melissa’s identity as the mind behind @SoSadToday was hidden. She published poetry under her real name in many renowned magazines and journals, like Guernica and the Missouri Review. When I googled an image of her, I saw a blonde-haired woman with smoldering eyes, simultaneously inaccessible and vulnerable. Reading her biography, I assumed that she was a woman who had her shit together. She was so accomplished.

Generally, I devour personal essay collections written by women in a matter of days. I’m a nosy and voyeuristic person, maybe because I have four older sisters and I know what it feels like to be banished from their conversations. I listened from the outside and vicariously lived through them. Or maybe I’m naturally curious. Whatever the reason, I love reading about women’s inner lives, traveling through the pages like a boat buoyed by a mild yet noticeable current. But reading So Sad Today was like trudging through a stalactite cave. It felt dangerous, as if I were violating Broder in some way by reading the secrets that she shared and gave permission to publish. She spent pages upon pages writing about how much she destroyed her body in her early twenties with whiskey, benzodiazepines, opiates, Ecstasy, laxatives, amphetamines, psychedelics. I sank into her accounts of blacking out all over San Francisco, waking up to blood on the walls and strange men next to her in bed who told her how much of a mess she was, going into yoga class with the alcohol oozing out of her pores, the whole time feeling more and more guilty for enjoying these darkest moments of her life. All the while I thought, How the hell is this woman still alive? Even more, How is she still alive and so successful after all that?

Then again, I already knew how her story would end: she would not only still be alive; she would be writing and producing and traveling and talking and gaining visibility. She would rise from the ashes of the fire she’d started, like the phoenix of Greek mythology. Soon, it became clear to me why I chose not to swim in the pool that night: because as a black woman, I was never taught that I possessed that kind of regenerative power.



Our culture loves young, beautiful, and drug-addicted white women. In the mid-1990s, heroin chic was all the craze in the fashion world. Characterized by the dark circles around their eyes, gaunt bodies, pale skin, and either drained or apathetic expressions, supermodels like Kate Moss and Jaime King rose to prominence. Of course, this trend was criticized by anti-drug groups and even former president Bill Clinton, but its timing was not an accident. Because of the scars from the 1980s crack epidemic and the fear of AIDS, heroin was seen as a “healthier” alternative due to its relative purity, and its use was glamorized not only in fashion but also in the music world. Aside from the reality that the fashion industry (like most industries) is overwhelmingly white, I am not surprised that white models popularized “heroin chic.” Growing up black, I was imbued with extreme hatred for Ronald Reagan and his administration; I knew nothing else of his impact on America besides the crack epidemic. Little black girls were traded by their parents for twenty-dollar rock; prostitution skyrocketed; an entire generation of low-weight “crack babies” was born to addicted mothers. Because of Reagan’s War on Drugs, by the end of 1999 over half a million black men and women were sitting in state and federal prisons, broadening the disparities in incarceration rates between blacks and whites.3