In this one the madwoman locks herself up: Anna Marie Tendler is searching for her purpose (and I can relate)

I started reading Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy expecting to find a navel-gazing sob story, focusing too much on the men in her life and how they have wronged her.

I was wrong.

Men Have Called Her Crazy is a feminist take on the hysterical woman, an often-represented concept in pop culture and the literary canon. The woman, often claimed to be crazy by men, gets this label from the most trivial reasons, such as showing the slightest hint of emotion, particularly anger. By using this statement in the title of her memoir, Tendler claims ownership of her own craziness. 

We’ve seen the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, and witnessed the Girl, Interrupted, both locked up and stashed away to protect others from their crazy against their own will. This is the crazy woman with no power, autonomy or authority in her own life. But Tendler is a different kind of crazy woman. No one locks her in the attic or forcibly commits her to a psychiatric hospital – she drives herself there, and walks through the door of her own free will.

From the first page, this book echoes Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. The memoir begins with Tendler describing her entry into a week-long psychiatric evaluation on the recommendation of her therapist, detailing how her belongings are taken away from her and inspected. Immediately, I am reminded of Kayser’s portrayal of her own entrance into a psychiatric hospital. While the two women have vastly different experiences in entering a psychiatric facility: the latter agreeing to her sentence kicking and screaming while the former goes calmly at her own behest, there is a striking similarity in tone. 

I’ve been following Anna Marie Tendler for years, and proudly “took her side” in the whole John Mulaney divorce spectacle. I knew this book would be coming out the moment she announced it on her Instagram (which I too have been following for years).

Yet, I wasn’t moved to actually read the book until I listened to Celebrity Memoir Book Cub’s podcast episode on it. And, as much as I love CMBC and enjoy their takes on various celebrity memoirs, I’m not sure I agree with this one. And of course, listening to their podcast before reading the material myself affected my perspective going into this book. In other words: your girl was biased. I was ready to go into this book rolling my eyes at her so-called problems.

Again, I was wrong.

I think CMBC are unnecessarily harsh on Anna Marie Tendler. They talk a lot about how she puts too much focus on the men that have been present throughout her life, and while I agree to an extent, I also believe that the experiences we have shape us and stay with us for a very long time.

I will agree that maybe it was too soon for this memoir to be written. Maybe some time, some extra space between having lived through the events of entering a psychiatric hospital and presenting them in this memoir would have been good. Possibly, Tendler was too close to the actual events to lay them out in a memoir. 

At the same time, maybe doing it in this way fulfilled the purpose Tendler intended the memoir to do. Maybe it was part of the healing journey.

Tendler’s memoir could have at times been mistaken for my own diary.

I started making notes for this essay when I was roughly halfway through the memoir. While reading, I was constantly underlining passages and paragraphs, and reading without a pen in my hand felt impossible. At the time, I made this observation in my Notes app:

“While I will finish reading the memoir before completing this essay, at this moment I have to say: somehow, by sharing her experiences in mental health struggles, Anna Marie Tendler has punctured something deep within me. I see much of myself in what she is writing. And as heartbreaking as it is, this book has given me a sense of comfort. I am not alone in feeling this way.”

How can someone who is a complete stranger to me beautifully lay out precisely how I feel and have felt at many times in my life regarding loneliness, my own capabilities (or lack thereof), and fear of failure and mediocrity?

At times, sentences shook me to my core because they took me so deeply by surprise: Tendler’s memoir could at times have been mistaken for my own diary.

As Tendler, I too begin and then promptly abandon different projects. Maybe this stems from my gifted child syndrome (I swear, if you too were a gifted child, can we start a support group or something?). Or maybe I just lack follow-through.

There is a yearning in Tendler that I deeply relate to. She’s passionately searching for her purpose in life, as am I. When she details her explorations into different fields, roles, and personas to find purpose; that one thing that will ignite the spark, is something that I as a very lost 20-something can relate to. I too am fervently searching for my purpose.

Anna, let me know if you find the purpose, I’ll give you a finder’s fee.

Everything I know about running away in an attempt to find myself: reflections on Dolly Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love” by a 20-something vagabond

I read Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton and had an epiphany about my own ability to stand still. Let me explain.

As someone who sees a bit too much of herself in both Anti-Hero and The Bolter by Taylor Swift, relating to Dolly Alderton’s exploration of female friendship and gut-wrenching reality checks about oneself was maybe a given. But nothing could have prepared me for how deeply this book would seep into my veins and reveal painful truths about myself and my constant need to stay in motion.

I think Alderton touches upon something really interesting as her namesake in the book is shown to be someone who is willing to move countries at the drop of a hat. As someone who identifies outer factors as the source of her unhappiness rather than herself and who sees the solution to this problem clearly: if I am unhappy in London, the problem must be London, not me. This, paired with a want and need to explore many places can create quite a restless soul. 

I feel as though the more I see of the world, the more paths and possible futures I see and the less I know what I actually want to do. And I have encountered a new problem, one I am sure is not unique to me. There is simply too much I want to do. Too many different lives I want to live, and too many hypothetical futures I see myself in. How’s a girl to choose?

‘This need to see and do as much as possible has rendered me in a constant state of restlessness. I think my soul has restless legs syndrome. I am almost incapable of actually staying still for more than a year. Even if I stay in the same city, something has to change: I have to move apartments, or get a new internship, or embark on some sort of new adventure.

Some people don’t like change. I love change. I thrive in change. Throw me into an uncertain situation and force me to find my footing and I will do absolutely amazing. But leave me in that situation once the boat has stopped rocking and that’s when I get uncomfortable. When everything is seemingly stable, and I have a social network, a steady job, as well as an apartment where I’m expected to stay for a year, that’s when the alarm starts going off in my head, saying “GET OUT!”. Except I’m not running from creepy white people who want to auction me off, I’m running from myself.

Let me explain. As long as I’m in a state of semi-urgent panic, when things need to be sorted out, I can focus on that. I can focus on finding a job, or finding an apartment, or going to a bunch of meet-ups to make new friends and create a social circle. I get to keep busy, and I’m good at keeping busy.

But when the dust settles, and I should feel happy and comfortable, because everything around me is in order, that’s when the chaos inside me awakens. That is when I get to the most uncomfortable thing of all: having time to actually be with myself.

I think my soul has restless legs syndrome.

Or, as Alderton puts it: “A week into my big New York adventure, I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.” This line hit me like a ton of bricks. See, there’s this thing I do whenever I get too complacent in life: I run away in one way or another. Hence my reference to The Bolter by our dearest blondie in the beginning.

I always thought my incessant need to constantly experience something new and have an ever-changing environment was because I was unhappy with something around me. And, of course, there have been times where this has been true. But now I’m starting to realise that very often, there isn’t anything wrong with where I am at that given moment, and that it’s just my dissatisfaction with myself that comes to light when the noise around me quiets down and I have to actually settle down for a bit.

I used to think, and often still do, that I will find true happiness once I accomplish a certain thing. At first it was going to university. Then it was changing my major for my master’s degree. Then it was travelling as much as possible. Then it was living abroad. And one by one, I have ticked off every single one of these, I have done things that my 15-year-old self sitting in her bedroom in a small seaside town in Finland never could have even dreamed of. And guess what? None of those things made me find happiness. And none of them made me find the version of myself I keep looking for.

And I always told myself that I was on this never-ending mission to find myself: that I was one of those people who needed to travel and live many different places and do many different things to find myself. And that once I found myself I would also magically find happiness.

And as much as there’s nothing wrong with that, and it may very well be the right lifestyle for someone else, I’m starting to realize maybe constantly exploring isn’t just a way to find yourself: it can very much be a way to set yourself aside.

The last thing I want to do is discredit the role these experiences have played and how they have shaped me, because of course they have! They’ve taught me all kinds of things about myself, and most importantly showed me that I can manage to do almost anything I set my mind to. So yes, of course they have helped me “find myself” in some way. 

But what Dolly Alderton helped me realize is that with constantly moving to new cities and onto new opportunities, I’m not necessarily running away from my surroundings; I’m running away from myself. And I’d like to stop doing that.

And to my mother: I know you already knew this about me.