Buffering

  EPIGRAPH

  “There are no bad guys in this story.”

  —MOM

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Jenny Lawson

  Trigger Warning

  HEIRLOOM

  ORIGINAL KIN

  MY DRUNK KITCHEN

  HELLO, HARTO?

  THAT SUMMER FEELING

  FEAR AND ECSTASY

  CASUAL TRAVEL ASSHOLE

  KEEPSAKE

  SHADOWBOXER

  BODY LANGUAGE

  HOCUS FOCUS

  NO JUDGING

  FILM THIS MOMENT

  (UN)PACKING A PUNCH

  NEST

  FABLES

  EPILOGUE

  Read This Too

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Hannah Hart

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  When Hannah asked me to write the foreword to this book I was flattered and assumed she’d made a horrible mistake. Spell-check seemed equally baffled; changing “foreword” to “forward” over and over, as if even the application agreed it was an error. Obviously she meant to ask Jennifer Lawrence, I told myself. Or possibly J-Lo. We get each other’s mail all the time. But turns out that Hannah DID mean to ask me to write her foreword and I was like “HELL YES, I WILL” because I love her. And you probably do, too, if you are reading this. Who reads the foreword? Stalkers, mostly. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Hannah is amazing and also that I don’t know what goes into a foreword. It sounds like a mix of “foreplay” and “words,” and I think that equals “sexting,” I guess? Seems a bit weird, but I am a true friend, so here goes: 8, #amIright? (8 = sideways boobies. I think? This is my first time sexting. Sorry. It’s embarrassing for all of us.)

  Turns out I’m not good at phone sex or forewords. Hang on. Let me research what a foreword is so I have a better idea of what goes here.

  Okay. I’m back. According to the Internet, a foreword deals with “the purpose, limitations, and scope of the book and may include acknowledgments of indebtedness.” Got it. Ignore the boobies I gave you a minute ago. I’m taking back my boobies. Let’s start over.

  Ahem.

  When Hannah asked me to write this foreword, I said yes, but hesitantly, because I’ve been in a depression that’s been holding on to my life for the last few months. I’ve started writing it several times and always erased it because my broken head hates everything about me right now. But Hannah sees past that. She sees the truth and she sees things I need to be reminded of. Like the fact that depression lies. Or that I am worthy. Or that I’ll still be her friend even if I never finish writing this.

  Hannah has been through some things in her life, which she talks about in this book, that could have turned her bitter, but instead they gave her a capacity for kindness and strength, and a perspective that lets me see myself and the world with new eyes. It’s a gift she shares with others, and one that brings hysterical laughter or tears or both. She shares her truth with an honesty that is inspiring—one that makes me believe her when she says that it’s going to get better or that laughter is just around the corner or that you aren’t alone.

  And I’m not. Because I have Hannah and I have her stories of pain and joy and discovery. And hope. And after you read this book, you will, too.

  And that is a wonderful thing.

  —Jenny Lawson

  TRIGGER WARNING

  Hello!

  My name is Hannah Hart. Some of you may know me from my superglamorous life1 as an Internet demigod who is so unavoidably famous and successful that it borders on the obscene. We’re living in an era of such constant output via social media that all you need is a phone and a Wi-Fi connection to start creating a public persona. Got an opinion? Blog about it. Somebody said something rude? Blast ’em across all platforms. Took a cool picture of a snail? POST THAT SHIT.

  Others of you may not know me at all. Maybe you’ve never even heard of me. But somehow you ended up holding this book. (Isn’t the cover neat? What pulled you in? Was it the gold foil? As I said, SUPERGLAMOROUS life.) And that means you are about to get to know me really well. Almost too well.

  And while I am a proud social media titan operating in the age of the overshare, it’s only natural that I might need some privacy too. Which is why I’ve never shared anything quite like this before. But it’s not because I didn’t want to. It’s because I simply wasn’t ready. Some things just take time to process, and one must have healthy boundaries of time and space in place in order to do so. Simply put:

  BOUNDARIES + PROCESSING = BUFFERING

  Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it’s a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course. We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and some of life’s episodes take a long time to fully load.

  You’re probably wondering, “Hannah, what are these deep, dark, until now unshareable episodes you speak of?” Well, you’ll have to read on to find out, but they’re mostly things like:

  Schizophrenia

  Sexuality

  Questions of faith

  Questions of fame

  Psychedelic visions in the desert

  Self-harm

  Sex

  Spiders

  . . . and more!

  I called this introduction “Trigger Warning” because I wanted to give you guys a heads up that there won’t be any other trigger warnings in this book. I did this intentionally because I don’t think that there are many trigger warnings in real life. What’s important is to learn how to identify what triggers you, and to set up your systems to cope after the incident has occurred. So get a cup of tea, read near a friend, or do whatever it is you do to comfort yourself should the need arise.

  Now, without further ado, let’s go behind the scenes (screens?) of this life that I call mine. I think I’m ready to start. And thank you for reading. Selfishly, I wanted to write this to feel less alone. Selflessly, I hope it helps you feel less alone too.

  Love,

  P.S. Follow your @harto.

  The names and identifying characteristics of several individuals featured in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

  1 Glamorous life = drinking Merlot and making fancy frittatas in front of a camera in my kitchen.

  HEIRLOOM

  My mom, Annette, as a young woman.

  I guess we should start from the beginning.

  I was born on November 2, 1986. I grew up in Burlingame, California, a city nestled into the Bay Area just south of San Francisco that smelled like roses and chocolate, divided between the affluent hills and the low-income part of town where we lived. It’s called the “flat-part.” Our house was by the railroad tracks and a sound wall that led to the freeway. We faced a car repair shop and could hear the almost constant noise of things being taken apart and put back together.

  On Christmas Eve 1987, when I was a year old, the cops knocked on the door and took my mother, Annette, to the hospital for fourteen days because she’d had a “nervous breakdown.” Some told me it was because she had called the cops saying my dad was attacking her with a knife. Others told me it was because she had attempted suicide. From that day forward the world seemed to paint my mother as an unreliable source. A liar even. Because no one could tell if what she was saying was true or not.

  The truth was that she was never a liar. My mother is one of the most honest people I’ve ever known. My mother is so honest, in fact, that she’ll tell you about the things that no one else can see or hear. She calls this her “vivid imagination,” and it’s what enabl
es her to be such a talented artist. Once, as a kid, I asked her to draw me a bath. She put pen to paper, and without ever lifting the tip from the page she drew and shaded a claw-foot bathtub. I thought she was magnificent.

  Between 1987 and 2003, there were fourteen incident reports filed by Child Protective Services (CPS) that led to to my younger sister and me being removed from the house.1 In 2003, just after I turned seventeen, I was emancipated and my six-year-old half sister, Maggie, was placed into the foster system. The next year, I got into UC Berkeley, took out student loans, and was awarded some need-based scholarships so that I could attend. My life had been a case study in charity and gratitude.

  However, despite all of these court cases and incidents with the authorities, nobody could tell us what was going on. Naomi and I had a theory that our mother was suffering from a disease called schizophrenia, which a quick Google search defines as “a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.” Without treatment, schizophrenia spreads like a parasite through the mind devouring reality completely and leaving behind the wake of a world perforated by invisible nightmares.

  But we didn’t know all that yet. We just knew that Mom was “unstable” and “irrational” and just getting “weirder and weirder.”

  In the spring of 2007, I came home from a semester abroad in Japan to discover that my stepfather, David, had left my mother and that she was being evicted. They’d been married for eleven years. Maggie was their child, and after she’d been removed from the house four years earlier, David had tried to help Annette2 get the medical care she needed, but she wasn’t interested. She had other things on her mind. (“There is nothing wrong with me. What we should be worried about are the urban pimps that live in the phone lines!”) There was nothing that David or any of us could do to get her into treatment. In the state of California it’s nearly impossible to get a loved one psychiatric treatment without their consent. And since her illness separated her reality from ours, she couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about.

  Annette’s disability meant she hadn’t worked in more than ten years. David left her with enough money in savings to pay her rent for four months. I was twenty years old and working to keep myself in school. My older sister, Naomi, was twenty-four and working to live while paying off her own student loans. Neither of us could afford to keep Annette in the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Again, our mother’s concerns were elsewhere. A minor housing issue was nothing compared to disabling the transmitter that the Catholic Church had implanted in a van that parked on her street, or getting back the $1.3 trillion that the government had stolen from her, money that was her birthright as designated by her English heritage.

  This meant that it was up to Naomi and me to move her out of the house. We found a residential hotel where she could stay for $640 a month. The room she had there was . . . well, it was literally a room, with a shared bathroom down the hall. It was essentially a halfway house, or rather a halfway hotel. It was decided that I would find an additional job3 and that Naomi and I would split the rent.4 However, you could not fit forty-eight years of memories into a single room. There was simply nowhere for everything to go. There was barely anywhere for my mom to go.

  I should take a moment to tell you something: I really love my mom. When I was growing up, she was quirky and silly and fun and passionate. She loved history and mystery and art and magic and, oddly enough, miniature food-shaped erasers. Her illness has made her almost unrecognizable, but every now and then, she’ll tell me that she’s proud of me, and for a second I think I can see the old her behind her glassy, reddened eyes.

  During her last days in that house we put everything into trash bags. Naomi and her boyfriend, Michael, pulled out photo albums and other objects that they wanted to save. My mother had a passion for rock collecting, garage sailing, archaeology, and antiquing. To her credit, she had accumulated some cool stuff. There was just . . . a lot of it.

  I was twenty years old and twenty years bitter and desperate to pretend that none of that mattered to me, so I didn’t save anything. Plus, I only had a single room back at school and the budding adult in me was not eager to carry around the vestiges of my childhood. My memories of cleaning out the house are a blur, and it’s only now that I’ve begun to regret not taking anything for myself.

  But I did write some things down.

  IMPORTANT THINGS

  * the green desk

  * the rocking chair

  * the swan box

  * the globe

  12:38: Loses it over the dolly . . . probably my mistake.5

  “At least I’m not a piece of human garbage!”

  “Alone in this house without my children, without my husband . . .”

  My fingers fall on a moldy robe, and she sees me move quickly to throw it away. I’m allergic to mold. She’s not happy.

  “How can you ask me to throw this away? It’s good! It’s clean! We have pictures of you wearing these! We were happy.” She’s sobbing.

  “Look at this photo—Maggie is wearing the love bug robe. David is wearing his old navy medals . . . There is a lot of hope, Hannah.”

  It gives me no comfort to think that my irrational belief in things working out for the best in all likelihood may stem from my mother’s tenuous grip on reality.

  Regarding the appearance of the house alone, the level of filth, one would think that five people were living here, but the feeling of stillness, the dust, the stagnance of inactivity were inescapable markers of the truth.

  I feel guilty, like I’m blowing up a museum. It’s no wonder Mom can’t throw any of these things away. Of course she can’t. It feels like disposing of a body or packing up after a funeral. Aside from the damp breaths of mold or the soft smell of rot associated with the clothes, there are a thousand memories attached to each item: the weight and feel of Maggie as a baby, her Lion King underpants, her bonnet, her tiny socks, my tiny socks, Naomi’s first job at Chickn-Chickn, can’t believe Mom kept the apron, Weasley is my King T-shirt, I thought I lost this, the stains, the tears in fabric, the overuse of everything . . . overused but lasting. At a time when we had so little these clothes gave us so much. Until now. Until this moment when I throw it all into this big black bag. The reward for their tenure.

  It’s a silent job and there’s nothing that can be said. I don’t know where Naomi and Mike are. Mom’s footsteps pacing/stomping above me. Her babbling is sometimes enraged, sometimes nonsensical, she’s talking to no one. I picture her standing in the middle of the room, her brain reaching a wall in logic before turning around and starting to circle again.

  I’m holding a black sweater with candy stuck to it. I start to pull it off to see if the candy is good to eat. I’m repulsed by my own instincts. You have other food, Hannah. Just throw the clothes in the bag.

  Mom is coming downstairs as I pick up Naomi’s 1920s flapper dress. This was our first store-bought Halloween costume. She looked beautiful. She fit in seamlessly at school. We were all her. We were all proud.

  “Oh, leave it out so Naomi can say goodbye.” She’s going upstairs. I think she’s talking to Naomi.

  I find another garbage bag on the ground with about five items in it. She must have tried to start the process on her own and stopped. I have to stop myself from picturing her down here alone, trying to throw away her lifetime, only unable to do so. Some might say that’s a good instinct. Maybe she’s been saving all this stuff for so long because she was waiting for her life to start back up again. Is that hope?

  Naomi and Michael are coming down to whisper.

  “We got the photo albums and important books. We put them in the car. You should stop, okay? I don’t even want to touch this stuff. I don’t want you to touch this stuff.”—Naomi

  “If we’re
going to screw somebody, we want it to be the landlord of this house. Not your mom.”—Michael 6

  “My vote is we chloroform her. Wakes up? House is empty. Bam.”—Naomi is trying to make things funny.

  “Hope is not a strategy, Hannah.”—Michael

  They are going upstairs. I hate that they aren’t helping me clean. I don’t know why they want to keep anything.

  I find a pink princess hat. We went to Disneyland once when I was five. I got a blue princess hat. I remember breaking off the elastic because I wanted to play with it.

  Mom is coming downstairs reeking of BO. She hasn’t been bathing despite the shampoo and soap we brought her. She’s hugging me. “You’re not throwing away anything that has sentimental value, right?” She’s walking away. “You know I love your stepdad.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Are you writing out your feelings?”

  “Of course.”

  She’s nodding. “That’s what I do when I can’t talk to someone I love.”

  She goes upstairs.

  I’m stopping. I can’t keep going.

  Because somehow, despite everything . . .I manage to find a used condom wrapper on the ground.

  Condoms make great water balloons.

  I didn’t grow up with a lot of toys, so as a kid I would play with anything I could get my hands on. Condoms were something I found hilarious and entertaining until the day I learned what they were really for. Then I was mildly grossed out and lost interest in them. I doubt it had anything to do with the lesbian status of my id, but who knows. Condoms weren’t the only unorthodox toys Naomi and I played with as children. Since there was never adult supervision, anything we could find in the house was fair game.

  One night, when I was five years old, I made a “potion” out of aspirin. I think the top of the bottle must have been broken, but when my mom told the story she always said that I could read by age five and simply read the instructions on how to open it. She believed that each of her children was a prodigy in some regard. We were all special, and brilliant. She never let us forget it. Our family was royalty, and our bloodlines could be traced back to English kings. But we also had Jewish roots. And maybe even some extraterrestrial in us, too. Did we know that we were each born lucky and each had our own superpower?