8 Continents: Part 3
Europe, or, You’re Never Too Depressed
I’m sharing one chapter per week of my new memoirette, 8 Continents: A Love Story. Can’t wait to find out what happens next? It’s available as a paperback or ebook on Amazon!
europe, or, you’re never too depressed
2007
The next summer, I taught English at summer camps in two small towns in Eastern Europe. But in the end, as the ol’ cliché goes, I learned more than I taught…
… like how all your best, most innocent intentions can lead to you standing in public in a bikini getting pelted by water balloons by your 10-year-old male students calling you a bitch. True story!
This story doesn’t start there. It starts with a flimsy suicide attempt. Halfway through my senior year of college, I was overwhelmed by feelings of alienation, unresolved grief, failure, and a healthy dose of fear of the future. So I stole a box cutter, snuck off to my room, scrawled a quick note, and went to work on my left wrist. Was it a genuine suicide attempt, or one of those oft-maligned “cries for help”? It’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the years. I think I wanted to die, but I wasn’t sure what death was. I thought it would be gradual and peaceful, like the light slowly fading from the evening sky, or water running down the drain. It wasn’t like that at all. It was irritating. Turns out your body hates pain and wants to be alive. I had to psych myself up every time I slashed, and every time my body would stop me. Like, Hey, that hurts, quit it. I looked down at my note and all the blood on my comforter and the ragged flesh of my left wrist, and felt nauseous but no closer to death. Defeated, I went to sleep on sheets soaked with blood.
The next morning, my psychiatrist put me in a mental hospital for three days. There, among people who talked to themselves and wrote long missives in languages of their own invention, I realized two things:
I wasn’t broken. I was just sprained.
I wasn’t brave enough to kill myself. And since all the women in my family live for-friggin-ever, it was gonna be a long, shitty 70 years if I felt like this the whole time.
Once I got out, my life was an experiment in finding things that made me happy. One day, I came upon a volunteer group making sandwiches for the homeless, so I skipped class and made sandwiches instead. By the end, I felt light in a way I hadn’t in a long time. “Volunteering gives my actions meaning,” I realized.
So I applied to every volunteer program I could, including one called Learning Enterprises where you stay with a host family in a poor(er) country and teach English. I’d probably make fun of it now — voluntourism for college students — but at the time it seemed perfect.
I stayed with a host family in Slovakia who spoke almost no English. My host mother was a gorgeous woman with a perfect figure who cooked rich food and ate it in tiny bites spaced hours apart because she was perpetually clad in a bikini. Her husband was a doughy goof who made wine that tasted like vinegar and asked if I wanted to do cocaine. When he saw the scar on my wrist, he pointed to it and asked, “Problem?” Their daughter, the coolest girl in school, wanted to know if I lived in New York City and which celebrities I was friends with. I felt bad because I couldn’t meet those expectations. I was, of course, the girl who wore the same hoodie every day for three years and didn’t know how to blow-dry my hair. To try to compensate, I taught her some English curse words that promptly spread to the rest of the students in school.
The town, Alistál, was on a lake. Big fat ladies lounged beside it in bikinis, like they’d never considered that they might be ashamed of their bodies. Inspired, I bought my first two-piece.
At 11 a.m. before class, I was at a student’s parents’ house and they offered me a brimming shot of pálinka, the traditional whiskey of the region.
“But it’s 11 a.m.”
“Drink!”
“I have to teach your children!”
“Drink!”
And then I took my water balloons to class. It was going to be a fun day, I thought! We could learn about basic verbs like “throw” and “splash” using water balloons. And I was smart and wore my new bathing suit!
That night, I went to my room at 6 p.m. and cried facedown on my bed. I hated Slovakia. I wanted to go home. I wrote a poem and used a candle to singe the edges of the paper. My host father, perhaps smelling something burning, poked his head in the door.
“Beer?” he asked.
We hopped on bikes and rode to the local pub, where we ran into a ruggedly handsome dude who turned out to have a decent command of English. We eagerly asked all the questions we couldn’t articulate to each other. I asked why Slovakian women wear bikinis all the time, and the mom asked why Americans wear hoodies all the time. Turns out we’re both just weird.
Near the end of my time there, we rode our bikes maybe 100 kilometers to a folk festival. It was flat and warm, and trees like a painting in a museum lined the road. I watched a Slovakian band cover “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and I was pretty sure they had learned the lyrics phonetically. I played a game I invented called Freeform Tic-Tac-Toe with a 10-year-old boy; he won when he drew a giant T-Rex eating the board. A wild-haired Romani guy named Rudy pulled down his pants to show everyone his underwear, which featured cartoon livestock humping each other and saying GROINK. He proudly proclaimed, “Brooke will share my tent tonight!”
I looked up at the embers of a bonfire swirling up past the reaching arms of trees and toward the stars overhead and thought how lucky I was that I wasn’t brave enough to die.