In Search Of A Permanent Peace Of Mind

It is 5pm in Los Angeles when Melissa Broder leaves the house. "I've been feeling kind of weird today for some reason," she says. Today is one of those days "when I'm just like 'Oh, everything's shit, it's all over, it's all done for me, I suck'".

She is talking to The Music about her collection of essays, So Sad Today, named for the formerly anonymous Twitter account she started in July 2012. The collection, endorsed by Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, traverses Broder's struggle with alcoholism, drug abuse, anxiety and depression, her open marriage, fetishes, romantic fantasies, and her difficulty with her body and gradual, erring self-acceptance and connection with others. It is a collection that is as wry and funny as it is raw and honest, Broder capturing existential angst, lust and obsession, and all of our attempts to simply be okay with ourselves.

"I write because I have to," Broder says. "It's the thing that kind of keeps me alive. With my prose it is a way, when I feel like I am powerless over the world, when I feel specifically powerless over my mind, writing the prose is a way to have at least an illusion of control over the narrative.

"[I write] to survive stuff. To survive life. And to maybe have a chance to feel okay within myself. I think I write as a way to kind of survive myself and my abundance of constructive or destructive energy."

"When I hear the word self-care I think it's like 'Buy yourself some flowers or some shit,' and I'm just like 'No, that's not going to fucking work. I can't fool myself by buying myself flowers.'"

Broder describes anxiety and depression as her "wiring": "I would love it if something would give me that permanent okayness in the world, I want that; that's all I've ever wanted in my life is to be guaranteed to feel okay, that permanent peace of mind. But I kind of learned over time through trying like a gazillion different things that nothing outside me will really give that to me."

And Broder has tried a gazillion things to find that okayness, from New Age spiritualism, to drugs, to alcohol, to romantic obsessions with other people. Those romantic entanglements into which she threw herself - some conducted partially or entirely online - are a rich place from which to write, illuminating the blurred lines between the real and unreal, between lust and love. "For me, it's not always the person so much as the fantasy that really was in some ways saving my life. We feel we need it. We create these fantasies for a reason, I think, and that's because some element of reality was too difficult for us. These fantasies are really these coping mechanisms and they can be really beautiful and really real for us, and really sustaining, and they can be even more real than the person I think."

When a fantasy becomes "unsafe": "no longer a beautiful, warm place for me to go inside my head", it becomes necessary to withdraw. To "surrender" these fantasies, Broder says, "The pain [of maintaining the fantasy] has to be worse on some level, or more final, than the intoxication of that potential.

"The point though is to mourn," Broder advises, by crying, by not denigrating the other person, by cutting off contact, and then "turn[ing] it into art because that gives me a renewed meaning": "If this can't exist anymore, at least I can create something from it, y'know, so that it's not just gone. "

So then, if not escaping in substances or other people, what is a healthy way to practice self-compassion?

"I take a lot of actions to kind of stay afloat: I go to therapy, I have a psychiatrist, I check in with a mentor, I create, I run, I take psych meds, [there's] other things as well that I do and they're all really important, so I guess I do a lot of self-care. But seriously when I hear the word self-care I think it's like 'Buy yourself some flowers or some shit,' and I'm just like 'No, that's not going to fucking work. I can't fool myself by buying myself flowers.'

"For me it's more I kind of put up these - when children go bowling, they'll put these mats in the gutter so that the ball doesn't go into the gutter, so the ball like weaves back and forth as its going down the lane, it weaves left and right but it can't fall in the gutter. And I think like if I have any forms of self-care, that's what it is. It's like that I put these pillows in the gutter for myself so that I can't - I'm always weaving all over the road, but it makes it hard to fall into a ditch, or it makes it hard to fall into the gutter, because I've kind of set up these sort of protections, in the form of people I care about and trust and just the work I've done on myself and continue to do on myself."