Now Is Not a Good Time for a Breakdown
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Two things for you to know before you go: 1. God cursed Adam with working the ground and women with their desire to be their husbands, and though I’m Eve’s daughter, I’m cursed with both. 2. When I can’t handle how bored I am at work, when I feel like I might light my brain on fire for something to do, I go into the single bathroom stall with my phone and my AirPods and dance my heart out. I’d try to tell you more if I thought you’d believe me, but we’re not there yet. Some people say to leap with both feet, but you and I know that you do a test of the ground first. The thing is that it hasn’t always been this way. It couldn’t have always been this way because there weren’t jobs like this before. People haven’t always worked. But sometimes I wonder if it has always been this way. If it has always been this way but now there are jobs to point to. And if people point to jobs now, what did they point to before? Malnutrition seems like a good culprit, or surprise death but then I wonder, if there is always something to point to. Was there ever a point where there was nothing? No thing to point to? Maybe back in the garden, back before the curse, maybe then it wasn’t like this. July 13, 2019 The summer sun is warm and golden, like honey tumbling down into a steaming mug of tea. I’m enjoying the light glittering through the window, my oversized coffee mug’s weightiness in my hand and the relative silence of the morning when I hear a crash above me. The invasion is to be expected. I sigh and look away from the tiny window above my kitchen sink to my laptop. I could go outside, enjoy more of this day, find my way to the park where the sounds of the city will be muffled. But my laptop, and all the joy it has to bring me, is sitting right there, just one ungraceful stretch away from me. And, anyway, it’s hard to gauge what the weather will do on a day like this and I’ve had quite the week at work. I need to go easy on myself, that’s what everyone on Instagram is always saying. I’m a part of a generation of people who expect too much out of themselves. Be kind. Be gentle. I will kindly allot at least one hour to indulge in the series I recently started: Game of Thrones. Everyone in the office is also watching it so it will be good to watch it because then I’ll have something to talk to them about. It’s important to always have topics on hand to discuss, I learned this from The Fine Art of Small Talk or maybe I only read it on the back of the book, or maybe I heard it somewhere else. Either way, I believe it in my bones that it’s a good idea to have relevant topics prepared in case of an awkward lull in conversation. I’m preparing to tuck into the series when I hear my roommate moving around in her room. Honestly, I forgot she was here, as I always try to forget she’s here. I’m beginning to believe that the nervous knot of anxiety that exists as a constant state in the pit of my stomach is, in fact, due to her ominous presence. She’s my best friend of nearly seven years but everyone should be the master of their domain and with her and I sharing an apartment, I can’t be. It’s not that I don’t like her, Emma, of course I like her. She’s my best friend, like I said. The thing is that I can never truly be myself with her here, never truly at home. It’s like that part in House of Leaves when the guy is explaining that uncanny means out of home—if you don’t live alone, you’re always out of home. That’s actually where I stopped reading in House of Leaves because that passage got too confusing to follow, so I tried to look it up online, and then I discovered that the book makes people lose their minds. I don’t have any history of mental illness in my family, or anything like that but, truth be told, I feel a bit paranoid that my life is a constant tight rope I’m walking on resting between sanity and… well, something else. Really, the main reason you can never be at home unless you live alone is that you don’t have your own bathroom. If you can’t come and go out of the most sacred domain that exists within a residence, how could you ever call it home?
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About the Book
A refreshing and boldly human story of one woman’s personal reckoning and subsequent self-discovery—from a debut novelist to watch. Jess has everything she thought she wanted: a thriving career, a packed social calendar, and a New York City apartment with her best friend. On paper, she’s thriving; in reality, she’s unraveling—stuck between the life she imagined and the one she’s living. When her best friend falls in love, Jess’s sense of stability begins to slip as the cracks in her seemingly perfect life begin to show. Torn between stability and desire, Jess finds herself caught between two men: Greg, a picture-perfect architect, whose version of adulthood promises comfort and security, and Taylor, a magnetic bartender, who awakens the opportunity for exhilaration and escape. Th en the world shuts down… As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads to New York City, the fragile vices holding Jess’s life together collapse leaving her alone with questions she’s been avoiding. Cue a breakdown, as Jess takes stock of her life beyond its successful exterior: excess, avoidant ambition, situationships, and insincerity; and, instead of unraveling, considers the terrifying freedom of starting over. Darkly funny and emotionally raw, Now is Not a Good Time for a Breakdown is an empowering coming-of-age novel examining what it means to come into your own when visible markers of success aren’t enough to stifl e the feeling of quietly falling apart.
About the Author
Mel West is an American writer whose job and network of friends and family means she, invariably, lives in between, though she tries to spend as much time as possible with her husband in their Zürich apartment. Previously, she lived full-time in New York City, including the entirety of the pandemic, thank you very much.