When It's Good To Give Up by Stephanie Georgopulos

I started smoking when I was 14. I used to say things like, “I’ll quit when I’m pregnant,” as though that was an actual plan, as though I could count on my addiction floundering just because there happened to be two of me growing instead of one. I made similar excuses over the course of my ten-year love affair with nicotine, none of which made logical sense but all of which allowed me to poison myself on an hourly basis without remorse. I wanted to poison myself.

But then, much to the shock of just about everyone who knows me, I quit. I didn’t chew gum or feed nicotine through my pores, I just abandoned the one constant in my life, the one companion I’d had for the past decade. The one-year anniversary of my quit date was this week. I don’t think I’ll go back.

It’s true that nicotine is addictive, it affects your mood, it changes the way you make decisions. It’s easy to point out that cigarettes are ‘the bad guy,’ the way they empty your wallet and yellow your fingertips. This is a negative habit that most people will commend you for giving up.

But we could stand to give up more often. Maybe there are no instructional pamphlets or illustrative posters to point out each and every one of the things we need to rid ourselves of, but there they are – lurking in the shadows of our subconscious. They are the people who make us feel like our lungs are in a vice whenever we see them. The humanization of our bad habits, walking and breathing and telling bad jokes.

Some people just make you feel bad. The way you can wake up smelling like some half-rate casino and think to yourself I don’t want to do this anymore, you can feel that way about people, and the worst part is that you can’t extinguish them, you can’t smother their head into an ashtray or make them someone else’s problem.

It’s in our nature to not want to give up, especially not on people; fragile, harmless people – we all just mean well, don’t we? Don’t we all just want to be happy? Don’t the things we do to achieve that happiness, the things that tear us apart from one another – aren’t those the things that make us similar? Aren’t people inherently good? Maybe. But what does it matter if that goodness is not reserved for you? What if all you extract from a person is negativity? How do we justify allowing ourselves to feel badly because someone may or may not be redeemable?

We don’t always recognize when someone is bad for us, but sometimes we do. Sometimes we become all-consumed by the disgust that’s bred from this idea that we allow hate to affect us so deeply. People create art because of it. It can drive us; it can turn us into something we’re not. And even though it’s ugly, it’s addictive. We become addicted to toxicity.

And in that case, it’s good to give up. It’s good to fight against the cancer growing inside of us by neglecting to feed it. We have to starve it into submission, forgo the efforts that help it grow. The brooding and the anguish, bury it. Extinguish whatever it is that’s making us feel badly and worry about ourselves. We need to quit allowing something that’s decidedly negative to drive our actions, our moods. We need to quit poisoning ourselves with vitriol.

The thing is, there are people who don’t make us feel terrible. There are people who listen to us and care for us and make us smile. They loosen the vice around our lungs and help us breathe. They are the fresh air. They alight us in ways a carcinogens never will. Whatever energy we devote to a toxic situation, we take away from the people who deserve it – the people whose goodness doesn’t have to be assumed; their goodness is just there, in plain sight. They are worth quitting for.

(When It's Good To Give Up by Stephanie Georgopulos)

Make Yourself Cry by Stephanie Georgopulos

Life is woven with these tiny disappointments that we toss aside in light of our responsibilities – we can’t take time away from work to nurse a letdown; careers are not concerned with whether or not we’ve been rejected by a person, place, or thing. We feel obligated to deal with our problems in a flippant manner to preserve our pride. We need to be strong, because, you know. What would other people think? We ignore the things that upset us because it happens that there’s not enough time in the day to properly address each setback individually.

Occasionally though, our resolve takes a much deeper hit; we find ourselves in a state less like disappointment and more like desperation. The things we’re carrying aren’t just heavy; they’re soggy – dense with invisible weight. What do you do when a burden becomes too much to bear? Well, you leave it where it lies. You tiptoe around it, you get back to the scripted version of your life. Where did we leave off, again? The scene where my emotions and expectations rest idly in a protective bubble, never to be contaminated by reality? I almost forgot my lines, what with all of that scenery crashing down around me. Let’s take it from the top.

But the baggage doesn’t go away. It multiplies. After all, it’s not a backpack that you can slip off and leave by the front door. It’s a tumor, metastasizing until it’s properly addressed. Friends will notice how you’re ballooning with grey-colored gloom, how you’ve got this mass of melancholy hanging off of you like a wet tuxedo. They’ll try making suggestions. Drink some tea. Have some sex. Quit drinking. Eat ten almonds a day. Do those things, do all of them. But most importantly, make yourself cry.

Make yourself cry. Listen to that song, the one you used to listen to when you lay between someone’s sticky arms. Listen to the song your mother used to sing in a whisper, before she left or moved or died. Listen to “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright or Brandi Carlisle or Leonard Cohen, whichever one cuts you the most. Listen to “The Only Living Boy in New York.” Listen to your favorite song. The idea that you could like something so much is enough to make you cry.

Think about the things you can’t change, the things that are beyond your control. Remember the last words you said to someone who isn’t alive anymore. Apologize to your body for the things you’ve ruined it with. Think about the lies you took for truths, and get angry with yourself for being so stupid. Know that your mistakes have matured you but resent making them anyway. Cry about it.

Watch something that makes you cry every time you see it. Watch the last ten minutes of Donnie Darko. The last ten minutes of American Beauty. Titanic (maybe that’s just me). An episode of True Life that hits a little too close to home. Anything is fair game, really.

Cry the way you cry when you’re sick and pathetic, the way you cry when you can barely move a limb. Curl up in the corner of your bed and cry the way you did when you were five. Eight. Thirteen. Sixteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-five. Cry like you did after a fight with your parents, after a breakup. Mourn the death of something important. Cry the way you cry when you realize you’re alone, or the way you cry when you realize you’re not.

Think of your eye secretions like they’re every word you’ve held back, every sliver of disappointment you’ve devoured without complaining. Each one of them, spilling out into a mess of tears and snot and makeup on your pillowcase. Dispel of it all, because if you hold on to it, every minor and major disappointment will become a mass of misery so unmovable and opaque that it’ll become a part of you indefinitely, a mutated body part for which modern medicine has no answers.

Eventually, you’ll have to pull it together. Put things in perspective. Understand that there are situations you can’t manipulate anymore but that you’re ultimately the… captain of your own ship, or whatever. Other people’s decisions will affect you, but they don’t have the power to crush you the way your own frame of mind does. Tomorrow can be the start of a new chapter, c’est la vie, all that jazz. But right now, before you succumb to rational thinking, make yourself cry. There’s nothing like it.

(Make Yourself Cry by Stephanie Georgopulos)

What It’s Really Like To Have An Abortion by Alexis Singer

No amount of sex education prepares you for that trapped feeling. That constant cloud of concern over your head as you get further and further away from when your period should have come.  You can deny it for a while—“Maybe it’s just late, I’ve always been irregular, it’ll come soon.” And then when it doesn’t, you panic.

You buy a pregnancy test. You buy two, just to be certain, because zany feel-good comedies tell you those things fail all the time. You smile sheepishly at the drugstore clerk who double-bags your purchase, telling you “That’s the best I can do.” You try not to feel the sting of her pity. You’ve been there before.  Every month since you started having sex you have rejoiced the monthly inconvenience of your period and watched TV shows about teenagers getting pregnant, thinking to yourself “at least it’s not me.” It’s you now.

Taking the test is like preparing for a funeral. Everyone always tells you that sex changes things, that it’s the death of your innocence and you can never take it back. Sitting there staring at that pee-soaked stick, you know they were lying to you. This is the loss of that innocence. You feel damaged, dirty, nauseated. Nothing will ever be the same after those lines appear. Two, of course, and not one.

The first test, of course, turns out ambiguous. Is that a second line? Is it just the shadow of one? You aren’t quite sure. You down a bottle of Coke, you watch a movie that ends far too quickly, you take the second test. It is not ambiguous. That second line is staring you down, decisive and willfully triumphant.

The walls of the already-tiny college apartment start to close in. You feel like you are being squeezed into the space between those two lines. How ironic, that those two lines represent the two solid options you have before you. Option A and Option B. For a moment, you have to chuckle masochistically at how perfectly fitting those letters are.

The person sitting beside you—your significant other—is already crying. They are religious. They think this is a baby. You are exhausted before the conversation you must have even starts.

The next morning you make the call you know you have to make. You cry a lot.  You don’t go to class for three days and you stare blankly at The Food Network and sleep. You empty your bank account. You wake up in the middle of the night the night before and find your significant other in the next room, lying on the floor, talking to his mother on the phone, trying to find solace in her promise that they aren’t going to Hell. You wish someone were there to make you that promise.

You sit at seven thirty the next morning in a waiting room that makes no attempt to be cheerful or reassuring. You are numb and exhausted because you cannot sleep enough right now. Everything feels white.

Your significant other will turn to you, while you are sick and shaking and scared as hell in that waiting room, and they will say to you, “Let’s just keep it.” And you feel the most mournful weight you have ever felt because you have to look at them and tell them that you can’t, you just can’t.

No one tells you how it feels. How the waiting feels, like endless time. No one tells you that you will lie there, totally open, totally lost, and that it will hurt. It will hurt like you are having your intestines sucked out with a garden hose and you will cry, at first in pain, and then in relief. You will erase all of those thoughts you had for the past week. All of the fear, and the thoughts of an alternate path that no longer sits, unmoving, in front of you. You no longer have to worry about screwing up a whole bunch of people’s lives, especially that of some innocent being that came about in the most unintentional and resented way possible. You will cry, momentarily, for that second option. And then you will cry because everything can go back to normal.

Nothing goes back to normal. Your significant other will grow distant afterward, they won’t touch you. You will wonder, and you will be relieved, and you will not regret.  And you wonder if you should. You regret not regretting, because you should, shouldn’t you?

(What It’s Really Like To Have An Abortion by Alexis Singer)