Los Angeles-based writer Melissa Broder just came out to the public as herself. For the last few years, she has been hiding behind the extremely popular Twitter handle @sosadtoday where she made dark jokes about her crippled self-esteem and heavy anxiety disorder.
"I think So Sad Today was a way to open the lid of a kettle that was boiling over," Broder says. "I felt that I couldn't be real about what was going on inside me, because we walk around and we're supposed to keep it together. Even in therapy I try to keep it together. I needed a place to let it rip."
Her nihilistic Twitter feed resonated with the public, but mostly with young girls who found her ability to joke about sexual rejection, lost love, depression, bad sex and pathetic masturbating could actually be therapeutic, or even funny. The willing vulnerability was refreshing. Broder, an acclaimed, published poet, finally revealed it was her behind the handle due to the release of her new book of essays, So Sad Today Personal Essays (Grand Central Publishing).
"[The book] is kind of like testing to see how much honesty I can get away with," Broder continues. "It's like, OK, if I reveal this shit and own it, then what I am saying to myself is: It isn't so bad. You aren't so bad. There's redemption in it. We're as sick as our secrets, and all that."
I sat down with Broder is pick her brain about the essays.
What made you want to write?
I started writing poetry in third grade. I was a spacey kid and not great at school, but my third grade teacher Mrs. Hovey told me I was good at this one thing so I kept doing it. I've always felt itchy about reality. The ability to be content with one's circumstances, the present moment, whatever life brings, eludes me. Writing has always been a way to divert that narrative – to have something that is mine. If time is a forward arrow then the act of writing is a reprieve in a way. It doesn't stop time, but it makes little pockets in the arrow so you can ride it differently.
Your anonymous Twitter, So Sad Today blew up for a reason: anxiety, nerves, and depression are ramped amongst millennials like an STD. You became a dark comedy, an anxiety populist. Looking back, how do you feel about your sudden popularity?
I've never been an “It Girl,” so getting popular was obviously really fun. I love the dopamine. What was maybe most fun was that I never intended for So Sad Today to be popular. I've tried to be cool in other arenas of life for sure. But So Sad Today was really a last-ditch effort to survive a dark time in my life, anonymously, in a dusty corner of the Internet. So I felt like damn, telling the truth is good. Now I just love having a place to go when I compare my insides to someone else's outsides. Like if I'm walking down the street and see a hot, young surfer couple and immediately feel like nothing compared to them – just obliterated by their effortless loveliness – I can tweet about it and get pieced back together by the roar of strangers. Both the dissolution and the validation are ephemeral, superficial even, but I guess it works to fight fleeting with fleeting.
One of my favorite essays was the one about your affair with the younger guy. Are you in an open-marriage and what is your perspective on maintaining a solid relationship?
[Laughs] You mean affairs with younger guys. I've had a few. I was in an open relationship and marriage for a long time. We weren't "poly." We weren't "swingers." We didn't speak on any panels, go on any cruises, wear any rubber bracelets or maintain any excel spreadsheets. Just two people who love each other, grappling in an honest way with the questions of longing, time, mortality and keeping things fresh. The whole story is in the book. We were monogz for five years, then non-monogz for five. Currently we are monogamous again! But that will be up for debate at our April state of the union. I don't profess to know very much except about longing and waiting for a text, and then I know a lot. Monogamy isn't easy. Open relationships aren't easy. Being single isn't easy.
Are you nervous to have these exes read essays about your sex lives together?
Nah, I gave them fake names and vetted the deeper pieces with them first.
You used social media as a way to publicly air out your anxiety without anyone knowing it was really you. Do you love or hate social media and how has it aided your existence?
If we're talking about Twitter, I think people tweet too many links and shit. Like, too much self-promotion and not enough delicious language. I like a clean fucking twitter. On my personal twitter I never tweet a promotional thing. Ever. On So Sad it's going to kill me to tweet links to the media coverage for the book, because I feel like it will disrupt the 'flow' or whatev. I'll be doing what I hate. Be the tweets you wish to see in the world. I love Twitter, I really do. I've been running my sister's Tinder profile for her like a pimp, scheduling dates, and I just set her up with some dude from the legal department. I was like, “If you guys get married, verify my shit, okay?” As for the others, eh. Facebook is a shithole. I don't do Instagram, because I don't need to see any more eyebrows that are better than mine. Tumblr is fun, because I like beautiful gifs and sensual, romantic hetero porn and alt gay porn and anything with the aesthetic of the 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet. But Twitter is where it's at for me. I'm a words person. At this point I forget that Twitter is even a website. It's just life.
You chose to start the book with an essay about never asking to be born. How bringing a child into the world seems unethical. So, I'm assuming you will never have children, or have you overcome these feelings?
I don't know if these feelings are something to overcome. I think they are more something to accept. I still struggle to accept how I feel. Is it okay that I don't want to have children, and have never wanted to have children, and as time passes feel no greater urge to do so? I struggle with trusting my own instincts, especially when they are counter to the biological majority. People say that I would be a good Mom, but just because I might be ok or even good at something doesn't mean I want to do it. And I think that's the hardest part for me to own: that I don't want to do it.
Your essay "Hello 911, I Can't Stop Time" weaves through the story of the first time you got Botox. I remember when I first met Joan Rivers, she said to me, "If it is going to make you feel better, run don't walk to the doctor." What do you feel about plastic surgery, especially living in the city the world associates with it?
OMG you met Joan? I love her. But I don't want my face to look like hers. I'm a super-addictive person, body dysmorphic and a Virgo perfectionist, so I am definitely the type who could get carried away with it. The overdoing it wouldn't start for me with the intention to have a frozen face. It would start with the fear of the last treatment wearing off, of "slipping back" into looking worse. So I'd start getting the treatments closer and closer together. I'd start finding more lines, more "flaws." There would never be enough botox in the world for me to be okay with myself. I would have to botox my psyche. I'd have to botox my self-esteem, my spirituality, adolescent trauma. It's an inside job. I think I'll always look outside myself to feel better, but annoyingly, the only real serenity is the quiet voice inside that you have to get really still to hear. I'll probably learn that lesson ten million more times before I die.
If you had a daughter, what would you warn her about life?
Right now, in this moment, I honestly feel like I know nothing.
