Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 5

One Man’s Trash

After we finished shooting the pilot, I was immediately put on a plane—“Oh, I’m in first class, thank you very much,” she said—to edit the Girls pilot. I was put up now in a minimalist oceanfront suite in Santa Monica.

For a month, I lived between the room, all art deco gloss and picture windows, and the edit bay, which smelled like Cup O’ Noodles and looked like a Staples headquarters. No sooner had I handed in the finished pilot—in hours, not days—I got the call that we had been picked up to series. I had spent four weeks editing it, working with a professional whose level of precision was new to me, and twenty-four hours after submitting it—ready for a holiday season full of “will-they, won’t-they” angst—I received a call from Mike Lombardo, president of programming at HBO. “We’re going to make it,” he said before we could even exchange pleasantries.

I didn’t hear anything after that, but immediately, Jenni and Judd called me together. “It’s never going to go this smoothly again,” Judd said, a perfectly timed quip I didn’t fully heed as a warning from the man whose back had notoriously failed him over the pain of his network battle over Freaks and Geeks, necessitating that he show-run in a prone position.

The plans moved quickly—to make our summer shoot dates, we would have to begin writing the rest of the episodes now. I had already completed four, but for the remaining six, we would assemble a writer’s room in Los Angeles (despite the fact that the show was set in New York, Jenni and Judd were adults with children, and I was a child myself, with a literal stuffed toy jammed in my suitcase).

I felt confident that every one of the girls would be thrilled at the chance to make the show. Adam, I was less sure about. The more I got to know him, the less I understood. He could not be pinned down; his behavior could not be analyzed for trends.

It became especially evident late one night, after we’d been drinking at Nancy Whiskey, that he liked it this way.

By this time, the show had been picked up, and I was home for a week or so, packing for my few months in Los Angeles for our writer’s room. He offered to walk me home, and somehow, I suggested that perhaps he might want to see the pilot we’d made.

On the computer in my mother’s studio—volume low; my parents were asleep upstairs—I fired it up. I had seen it dozens of times by now, so instead of watching, I watched him watch. I tried, as best I could, to discern a mood, a feeling, an inclination he was excited, amused, proud. But as the credits came up, he got up and left, slamming the door behind him.

A hot panic rose in my chest—he hated it. He was horrified to be involved. He thought that what we had made was an alarming piece of smut that deserved to be banned in all fifty states and the sixteen American territories, too. A good man, with good values, had been roped into this? Or maybe he just thought it was bad. A joke made by a joke. I didn’t know what he thought, because he didn’t answer any of my calls for the next three weeks.

After the pilot-viewing incident, I had done a little bit more digging, trying to understand this unknowable person who had compelled me to share so much about myself across banquettes around New York through the sheer power of his silence. He had a girlfriend of many years. She was blond and would have looked equally at home in the first-class cabins on the Titanic or at a modeling contest in the Winnetka Shopping Center.

So when the phone rang, at seven a.m. in Los Angeles, and I saw it was Adam, I answered—sure he was finally calling to beg to get out of his contract.

“Dunham,” he said casually, like we’d spoken yesterday. “Just thought I’d say hey.”

“Oh…I’m in California,” I whispered. “I’m in a man’s bed.”

“Do you like it there?” he asked.

“In California or in the man’s bed?”

“Both. Either.”

“I was worried I’d never hear from you again.”

“What? Why?”

“You left pretty quickly after the pilot, I—”

“Oh, that. I just don’t like watching myself. It fucks me up. Anyway, when’re you back?”

When Adam and I were alone, he spoke to me differently than he did when we were around other people. He told me what the work meant to him, and hinted at what I meant to him. That felt good. The occasional compliment about my body, always delivered with disarming speed as he was exiting after a long day, felt even better. Usually unable to keep my own secrets—spilling over with them like an excited expectant mother with a pregnancy test burning a hole in her pocket—I kept this one just for me. I wanted it all—at least the pretense of control and dignity, of seeming at the height of my artistic powers, and the basic pleasures of being wanted for my body over my mind. It seemed to me that even men who just fucked me did it because I was funny, because they knew I might come out with something interesting at a pivotal moment. It suited me just fine to imagine that, as I explained my vision to a crew, Adam might be ignoring my words in favor of my ass.

I received a sixty-thousand-dollar check for writing the pilot of Girls. I have a photo of myself holding it in front of my face and sobbing. It wasn’t just the money, which was life-changing and would allow me to not only start a life outside the family home but buy some incredibly whorish separates. It was the belief, for the first time in my life, that I would not always be reliant.

I had absorbed the feeling—familiar to anyone who has been labeled with anything from “special needs student” to “troubled” to “problem child”—that I might be dependent forever, unable to do the things other people did with such ease. Like my fictional counterpart Hannah, I had been diagnosed young with OCD. Starting when I was seven, the symptoms—once illusive phantoms at the back of my mind—began to move front and center, informing my every move.

Through middle and high school, my mental health had taken up more and more of the oxygen in our home. OCD is nothing if not a disease that envelops the family whole, as the sufferer ropes everyone they love into their obsessions and compulsions, checks and checks again, demands assurances no one can give. It seemed that my parents spent a good amount of their free time taking me to psychiatrists and behavioral specialists, doctors to manage the side effects of the medication, not to mention the gynecologist to deal with my heavy periods (which enveloped the home in the mushroom cloud of my black mood and profound physical discomfort), who prescribed medication that made me sleepy, hungry, and chubby and made my skin dry. Birth control helped my pain but rendered me so depressed and anxious that I could barely leave the sofa. I was afraid to have sleepovers. I was afraid to eat other people’s food. I was always confessing to strange sins that I hadn’t actually committed (“Forgive me, Father, for I have coveted another man’s wife—and I’m not even into girls!”).

When I was fifteen, I once overheard my mother talking to a friend in the living room on speakerphone. When it came to the topic of my mental health, my mother was always cheery and assured, uttering her favorite catchphrase, “This too shall pass.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” her friend said. “It’ll be a miracle if she can survive outside your home.”

To my mother’s credit, she didn’t take the bait: “I find her delightful,” she said, then offered casually, “and anyway, I’d have a real issue with how much sex your daughter is having.”

This is where my mother’s contrarian streak has really come in handy—in her dogged defense of even my strangest behaviors. (“The only time you ever alarmed me,” she said recently, “is when you wore those horrible knee socks to school, with pigtails and a mini backpack. I just thought, ‘Well, this is a fucking disaster.’ ”)

It seemed like my nuclear family would be the only place I was truly safe and understood, and then my parents would die and I’d be in my fifties, living among my mother’s dusty cut-price Manolo flats like it was a museum in her honor.

But no, I was going to make it after all—and the first thing I needed was an apartment.

At this point, Jemima and her young family were already living in Brooklyn Heights, the neighborhood we had gone to high school in, and announced it was perfect for me—after all, everyone was one hundred, so I wouldn’t feel pressured to dress up or party. “Plus, it’s sort of a surprising place to bring a one-night stand,” she explained. “It’s chic to be like, ‘Come back to my place, it’s all World War I vets.’ ”

She took on the job of finding me a home like it was an oath made to God. She surveyed Craigslist, called local realtors, and even circled listings in a good old-fashioned newspaper with a red Sharpie. She always loved a chance to allot someone else’s finances in a totally impractical way. We spent a March afternoon strolling with her bundled six-month-old past all our old high school haunts—the pet store, where I’d worked in exchange for rabbit food; the video store, where I’d been a stockist for exactly a month and Jemima came to help me shelve the porn; Monty Q’s pizza, where she would nap with her head in my lap at lunch—seeing what twelve hundred dollars a month could get you.

The first place we saw was a studio in a luxury building with a doorman but no kitchen, just a little shelf for a coffee maker and one glum window looking out onto an airshaft, like an Edward Hopper painting—all gray light and hard angles around the solitary bed. The next place we went, the couple who lived there was still asleep in the nook off the living room at four p.m. and, on the asphalt roof beyond their window, some of their friends were smoking joints and eating cheese, despite the forty-degree temperature. I wondered what kind of life I really wanted, and choosing the right apartment seemed to be the key to living it.

On our third try, we hoofed it up three flights to a one-bedroom at the back of a long carpeted hallway that smelled distinctly of cat piss. The ceilings were higher than the rooms were wide. There was a small, oddly shaped living room with a broken fireplace. The bedroom off the back had a hissing radiator under a plywood windowsill. The kitchen was just a moldy fridge jammed haphazardly next to an ancient oven, leading to a bathroom with a broken shower head (but a claw-foot tub!). Despite the alarming proportions, abysmal fixtures, and tragic smell, the place had a sort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s glamour, as if the saddest party girl you knew lived there with just a rack of clothes and a feral cat. And there was the view—of all the best gardens, tidy and lined up as far as the eye could see. Across the yards, I had intimate visual access to grand living rooms with chandeliers and crown molding. I knew that if my mother saw this place, she would try and have me committed in an effort to stop my signing a lease, so we ran to the landlord’s office and presented a Hasidic man who refused to share his name with a handwritten check, which he inspected as he inspected me.

“Come back tomorrow when it clears, and you can have the keys.” We celebrated our big win by stopping in a matronly shop on Montague Street and buying ourselves earmuffs.

I refused to let my parents see the apartment, much less help me decorate. Never mind that I’d never used a measuring tape in my life, or that they have a gift for interiors and a storage unit full of useful pieces (my brother was smart enough to tap into this wealth, and as a result, his first homes were charmingly shoddy facsimiles of our childhood living room transposed to Providence, Rhode Island, and then east LA).

But without their help, I was useless. I bought a bunch of furniture from Ikea that didn’t fit the rooms because it hadn’t occurred to me to measure. It would take me months to move in fully, but most afternoons I would leave my parents’ apartment and go there to make phone calls while lying on the hardwood floor among my boxes.

When I finally moved, I reveled in the lonely, displaced feeling. At night, it felt a little like sleeping in an unfamiliar flea market that appeared to be selling all of my stuff. But in the morning, waking to the sun shining on those gardens—or even the rain, leaking through the shoddy windows and pooling on the makeshift windowsill—I had the feeling that my life could go anywhere, that it already was going, so fast that I was nostalgic for a time when this apartment would be a story I told.

Downstairs was a saxophonist, the culprit of the cat-litter smell. Upstairs was a man who danced all night playing “Runaround Sue” and made so much noise that I had to resort to banging on the ceiling with a broom like I was Jack Lemmon or something. One night, when even that failed to silence him, I went up there wearing boxer shorts and a sports bra and asked him to stop. His door was ajar, and he was tied to a chair in his boxers, laughing girlishly. Dancing around him, a young Australian girl with a lustrous mane of ombré hair was menacing him with a belt while he laughed and she growled, “Norrr, don’t loffff.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, seemingly genuinely contrite. “Are we being very noisy?”

Some indie film trivia for you: The last scene of Frances Ha was shot in my apartment in this building. Unlike in my life, it’s the place her character lands after all of her midtwenties wandering, not before. She places her name in the little window in the mailbox, and it doesn’t quite fit, condensing it from Frances Halladay to the titular Frances Ha. But less notably, there’s a brief but lovely moment where she places her things on my little white desk and looks out the window at the very gardens that made me feel I had to live there. It captures exactly how it felt that winter, that spring, and half of that summer, when I was the girl with the perfectly terrible apartment, unsure where I was going, but too guileless to think it was anywhere but up.

The night before we started filming the first season of Girls, I lay in bed in my new apartment, the walls now shoddily painted and papered by a busker who had recently knocked up Jemima’s sister, and I tried to imagine what was coming for me. Throughout prep, I had been as cocksure as the guy on cocaine at the party, the one who seems utterly positive that all his ideas have merit. But suddenly, I imagined a new raft of possible calamities: Forgetting my lines. Forgetting my shot list. Forgetting to be pretty, funny, smart, or good.

I then began to wonder if I’d ever fall asleep—a fear that, in childhood, had been a theme, so much so that my mother made up a scientific fact to calm me: “Closing your eyes gives you the exact same amount of rest that sleep does.” Only now, twenty years after she first said it, did it occur to me that this was total bullshit and made no sense. If I closed my eyes, I still wouldn’t be sleeping. Sleep is the bedrock of mental health. And what would the next day, much less the next four months, look like on zero sleep?

And suddenly I remembered the pills, untouched in my medicine bag—Klonopin, prescribed in high school when OCD rendered me frozen, then again in college, shortly after I’d been raped at a party and returned home inconsolable and unusually quiet. It was to be used for occasions of extreme anxiety. I took it rarely, if ever—at that point, drugs were only done to impress someone else—but if ever there was a time, this seemed like it. A small battalion of people were relying on me to show up with vigor and verve. And so I swallowed one and lay back on my Urban Outfitters quilt. I let an hour pass. Still nothing—somehow sleep seemed even further away. And so, I swallowed another.

The next thing I remember was lying belly down in my rusty tub, in three inches of lukewarm water. I pictured myself as a manatee in a tank, happy and fat and smiling at tourists. I was that manatee. That manatee was me. After some time—it could have been five minutes or five hours—I somehow made my way to bed, and I woke up a few short hours later to my alarm, still moist in my towel on top of the covers. I dressed in darkness, an outfit I’d selected the night before, gathered my things, and slipped into the teamster van.

The first scene we were shooting was on a park bench—Jessa, Hannah, and Shoshanna talking about what it means to be a lady. “We’re the ladies,” Shoshanna concludes, to violent rejection from Jessa, who does NOT want to be one of the ladies. The scene was set in front of Thompson Street Playground, the park I had gone to as a kid on the rare days I agreed to go to any park at all. I was still hungover; the world felt sticky and hard to reach. I was catapulted back into endless loops of memory: the time a woman on a park bench coaxed me over and offered me a toy vanity mirror, still in the box, like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” offering candy, and my father called me back forcefully. The time I fell off the swing and said “Jesus Christ” and my Irish nanny threatened to wash my mouth out with soap. The time we came to the pool to swim outdoors in the summer but I was too scared to get in line for the shallow end with all the big kids. I was there and I was here, I was then and I was now, and I ate too much of the prop Tasti D-Lite and made myself throw up in the bathroom of my trailer, the chemical sweetness coating my pointer finger.

We finished the scene, and it seemed to me that I had gotten away with it. Jemima and Zosia were so funny that even a mild Klonopin hangover in the lead actor could be cut away from with ease.

But the next day, Jenni took me aside during our lunch break. “Everyone in LA saw the camera test,” she said. “They said you look too pretty—your costumes are tidy, you have hair extensions in. You’re wearing Spanx.”

“All right,” I conceded. “I don’t need the extra hair. I don’t care about the Spanx. If I take them off, the outfits will look way…messier, sillier.”

She paused. “I think the issue is that you’re too thin. And the thing is, it’s not funny if you’re too thin, it’s just Sex and the City all over again. What made your movie special was that you weren’t that. If we lose it, we don’t have a clear voice.”

It wasn’t what she was saying that scared me—although nobody wants to hear that their averageness is the comic thesis of their work, no matter how much they may know it in some compartment of their mind. It was how she was saying it. Up until this moment, Jenni had been playful, teasing, but always with the defensiveness of the ideal television big sister—she’d mock you, but only because you belonged to her. And if anyone else tried, there’d be hell to pay. Now there was a bitterness to her tone, a hysteria in her voice that indicated I was doing more than compromising the show. I was compromising her—she had a job to execute, and she was going to say and do whatever she needed to in order to get it done. If it could be cozy, great—but she was telling me that we could play nice or play mean, depending on how I wanted to proceed. It was the first time she had switched roles, from cozy bestie with whom I bandied about ideas to the role she was initially pitched for: “supervisor.” Only the idea of a supervisor took on a more sinister note: Big Sister is watching you.

I told her it was hard to get food down these days. “I’ve been anxious,” I said—a half truth. Yes, I’d been struggling with anxiety, moving a mile a minute. But I had also shown up in Hollywood and quickly understood the attitude of the place, what it required of its best citizens. And it’s not like she walked the talk—I had once awoken at her house in LA to find it empty, only to check my texts and see she’d written: “walked down the hill to get some smoothies, to deal with my obesity.” Jenni wasn’t obese—she wore skinny jeans, perky blouses with fluttering hemlines. She was, to me, positively coltish. Sometimes all she ate for days was tinned salmon from an Ayurvedic meal delivery company.

“It’s not that hard,” she hissed. “Just put food in your mouth.”

This didn’t sound like concern to me. It sounded like a threat. For the rest of the day, when I tried to catch her eye, she seemed to turn toward someone else. I could hear her laughing, but it was far away and not with me. I was already heavy and panicked, unsure of how to operate now that this wasn’t a seven-day experiment, but a day in and day out reality. How did a boss speak? Act? I had assumed she would be by my side, modeling it. All I knew is I never wanted to make anyone feel like this. Something told me if confusing personal situations arose—sensitive situations, house mother situations, twenty-four-year-old girl situations—she’d be tasked with them anyway. That scared me, too.

My eyes filled with tears every time we started to talk—I wanted to continue a conversation that, to her, was over—but she didn’t wait around to watch them fall.

It wasn’t until later—as I bit into the first of two massive slices of pizza from John’s, the same pizza place my father used to take me on summer afternoons—that she met my eyes: “Good girl.”

It took me years—until I was in my late thirties, working with women in their early twenties—to think about how I’d approach someone who was showing signs of disordered eating. It would never occur to me to do anything but ask if I could help, express my concern about their health, their inner life, which resources they had and which they needed. The discussion of what we were getting on camera would be the least of it. It also occurred to me—looking at these younger women—how absurd it would seem to link myself to them in ways beyond the playful support system an on-set adult provides, the intergenerational creative collaboration that can be amusing and fruitful. But to make them the rocket that was going to deliver me to the next stratosphere? You couldn’t pay me enough to demand that of someone so young, so unformed.

Except maybe she saw right into me, saw just what I’d respond to, just what would make me work my hardest and my best. Maybe she knew that I was never going to get this show made if I didn’t think I had everything I needed—a best friend, a mother, a mentor all rolled into one and sitting in a director’s chair beside me. And I believe that she liked me—even loved me. She especially loved me when I was on my game.

For the rest of that summer, I ate like my job depended on it. Cupcakes. Cheeseburgers. Bagels, peanut butter and bananas, dozens of oatmeal cookies in my bed. I must have gained fifteen pounds in a month, and none of my new jeans, the ones bought with my new paychecks, zipped for years after that.

It seems to me now that the answer to nearly every real-life crisis that arose as the series progressed, over the next seven years, was some version of: “It’s not that hard, just put food in your mouth.”

And what that meant was: We didn’t give you access to the highest echelons of what show business has to offer to deal with your shit. We paid a lot for you, but we’ll return you if you break.

In July, as we were shooting the final episode of the first season, I disassociated. It had happened to me before, for fifteen minutes or an hour, but this time it lasted for days.

Disassociation is hard to explain to someone who has never felt it. A PTSD or anxiety symptom, it’s often described as a feeling of unreality, as if the lived moment is happening but not to you. I would describe it as a permanent sense of déjà vu, that headshaker of a feeling that jolts you out of the moment, for a moment, now making up all the moments. It makes me laugh now thinking how much trouble I must have cooked up in my twenties by being radically myself, when in reality, I was universes away from my own body. It’s easy to set fires in a life that seems like a simulation.

I couldn’t really understand the trigger for this episode. The summer had been so rich with pleasure: improvising with Andrew Rannells for the first time (his first day was the now ubiquitous, “It was nice to see you. Your dad is gay”); night shoots with Allison and Jemima and Zosia, huddled and shivering in the UGGs we were provided between takes; driving home with Adam at dawn and drinking coffee on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, talking about our childhoods and our deepest fears, and the way he would look at me, shake his head, and say something laden with meaning or potentially meaningless like “You’re really something else.” I remember the boundless creativity that television seemed to allow, not to mention the wonder: If you wrote an abstract painting or a Bundt cake or a sports car into an episode, it would appear, like everything Harold drew with his magical purple crayon.

And yet I was also learning, quickly, about the politics of an adult workplace. Someone was always combusting over something. Ilene was always hoofing toward some trailer or department to diffuse a situation, often re-fusing it in the process. All of this had seemed somehow both above and below my pay grade, but now there was a tug-of-war between Jody—who considered us allies in our indie aesthetic, defenders of subtlety, artists who refused to do things as basic as traditional close-up shots, overlit interiors, or trite comedy beats—and Jenni and Judd, who were trying to help me bridge the gap between my very specific aesthetic and the medium of television, which, even in its most elevated form, still needs to feel accessible and, on some level, populist. I loved Jody—as a friend, yes, but also as an artist. I felt I owed him my entire cinematic instinct, the way I saw the world a direct reflection of the way he lensed it. I also loved Jenni and Judd, and I owed them the very fact that I was here, on this set, at all.

It’s hard to remember the specific misunderstandings and suspicions that got us there, but by the final episode of the season, Jody could barely look at me. If you think you can do this on your own, he seemed to be saying, then do it. He made himself scarce, leaving me to communicate my needs to the intimidating array of technicians on my own. At one point, unable to find him, I was informed that he was napping on the hammock they hung off the back of the electrical trailer.

And so I woke up one morning feeling odd, softened, like all sound was being filtered through an egg carton, with the strong sense that I wasn’t inside my body. It was like my face wasn’t mine—familiar enough, perhaps belonging to a cousin I looked vaguely like but had vastly different life experiences from. I remember lying in bed when my phone rang. It was my parents, calling from the airport, on their way to Paris, wanting to check in. As I sobbed hysterically, unable to begin to explain why, they asked if I needed them to stay—but I wasn’t sure they meant it, or maybe I didn’t know what would help anymore, and so I cried some more as I said goodbye, but the tears rolled down someone else’s cheek, and I felt someone else’s hand wipe them away.

At work, I found it was hard to act or direct when I wasn’t, in fact, a person. I wondered if everyone on set could tell that an alien had replaced me. I wondered if my scene partners could feel how barely human I was. I remember doing a fight scene with Adam and how scary it was to meet someone so totally present with such absence. Late one night, as we practiced lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer—until finally, Adam screamed, “FUCKING SAY SOMETHING” and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. “WAKE THE FUCK UP,” he told me. “I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.”

I’m one of those lucky people who grew up in a house without hitting. It took me years to understand that as a gift and not a given. It was the ’90s—that strange time between corporal punishment being discouraged as a parenting strategy and the occasional spanking still being overlooked by sympathetic parents at the park—but nonetheless, my folks did little more than grab me by the shoulders a few times, and I can honestly say I had it coming. I remember once—after days and days of refusing to go to bed, keeping them up until one, two, and three a.m. —my mother threatened to spank me: “I’m really going to do it,” she cried, deranged with exhaustion, before raising her hand and breaking into hysterical laughter before she could even lower it.

(As a little kid, every time my father would raise his voice, I’d mewl, “Please, Papa—don’t hit me!” This was something I’d probably seen in a movie, and it was incredibly effective at getting us to leave boring museums, and fast.)

That’s why the first time I was punched—square in the chest while high on Oxys at Lip’s house in Flatbush (by this time, my friends had started calling him “Anal”; nicknames just happen)—when the fist hit my clavicle, I’m pretty sure I laughed. It seemed like such an absurd gesture—his arm reared back, face contorted with effort into a pathetic grimace, his cock slipping out of me from the awkwardness of it all.

“Shut the fuck up,” he whispered. “You think this is fucking funny?”

By the time I felt pain—emotional or physical—I was already halfway home.

I wish I could say that after he hit me, I never spoke to him again. You already know that isn’t true, that I continued to appear whenever and wherever he asked me to for a very long time. Even into the first season, I sometimes called him on my way home. One night, he stopped by—still in his uniform from work—and simply pulled up a chair and watched me as I closed my eyes and pretended to rest, unsure of what he’d do if I actually fell asleep.

And so I returned. “Slap me,” I’d coo. “Choke me. Punch me. Show me I’m nothing.” Confirm what I’ve always understood, but no one would say.

I’ve always been fascinated by the breaking of boundaries, and this one was too wild not to follow until its last breath. I didn’t sense danger in the room, or for years afterward. After all, when I was a kid, when the doctor hit my knee with that little hammer, they often had trouble getting a response. Slow reflexes.

Which is why, when Adam threw the chair, I didn’t have any further questions. I didn’t tell anyone. But I said my lines correctly after that.

On the fifth day of not existing, I decided to call my psychopharmacologist. She went immediately into compassionate crisis mode. “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice warm but clinical. “This happens. It’s a form of extreme anxiety. It will pass.” She couldn’t say how or when, but she prescribed Klonopin—just as she had during previous episodes of unrelenting anxiety—and told me to use it every four to six hours as needed “through this critical period.” I went home to my parents’ house (they were still away on their romantic trip), lay across their bed, and waited for the drugs to work. Before I could grow human, I grew sleepy. I watched a comedy on TV and congratulated myself for smiling at Will Ferrell like any red-blooded human would.

On the way to work the next day, I swallowed another pill with my green tea, and I made a map of how I would behave—whom I’d speak to and in what order. I wrote it all down on a napkin just in case I forgot. Then I lay on my back, listening to Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” and watching the power lines pass. It was in an instant—after one electrical pole and before another—that I felt it: my self, the self I identify as Lena, snapping back into place, like a dislocated joint returned to its socket.

I worked until four a.m. , and it was then—when I was standing out on a Bushwick street, directing actors in and out of an ambulance in a benzo haze, trying to talk to Adam like he hadn’t thrown a chair and Jody like he wasn’t giving me the silent treatment—that I noticed him: small as an elf, with muscly tanned shoulders and an earring in his cartilage, on the top of a ladder that leaned against a lighting truck.

I blinked up at him, dumbfounded, as if he were a horny Keebler Elf hallucination brought on by the drugs.

“Who are you?” he asked. He was visiting a friend who worked on the crew. He knew who I was, but he smirked at me as I hunted for an answer.

Before Klonopin ever became a regular habit in my life, it seemed to me that any problem—from a family fight to a work conflict to an episode of complete psychic collapse—could be cured by entering someone’s bed and allowing them to do exactly what they wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t participate—I got all the participation trophies, offering myself up fully as an object for fantasy and play, advertising myself as a girl who would try anything twice—but the real thrill wasn’t any kind of physical pleasure. I didn’t experience these encounters as erotic in a typical way. I experienced them as a vacation from being, an obliteration of the already brittle self who couldn’t figure out how she had ended up here: in this body, in this job, in this life.

But in this bed? Now that I could wrap my head around.