We present “In Debt” by Marcia Wall, which took second place in Writing It Real’s Spring 2007 Personal Essay contest. Sheila’s comments about how and why the essay succeeds are printed following the essay.

In Debt
by Marcia Wall

The woman sitting in front of me turned around to face me. Her uncombed hair, (an unattractive shade of dirty blonde) and her yellow teeth made her look ten years older than she probably was. Above the noise of the clanking streetcar she pleaded for train fare. She must have read the puzzled look upon my face because she shook her head and said “Not for the streetcar, for Amtrak.”

Apart from the fact that I did not make a habit of giving away money upon demand, I seriously doubted that an Amtrak ticket was what she was really looking for. I didn’t have any change on me anyway. “I don’t have any change.” I told her. I thought that settled the matter.

Then her voice came at me above the chatter of the other passengers and the traffic outside our window. “That’s ok. I need more than change anyway.”

Sadly, that’s true, I thought to myself as we rolled by the Antebellum mansions of St. Charles Ave. Still, I was not inclined to hand over the $10 bill in my wallet. “I’m sorry. I don’t have cash either.” I lied, a perfectly acceptable course of action I thought, considering the circumstances. I held up my empty hands as if to show that I truly did not have any cash on me.

“Well that’s alright,” the woman coughed, sounding like someone who had smoked far too many cigarettes. “You can use your credit card.” Her cloudy, gray eyes, probably once a pale blue, pleaded with me.

“What?” I asked, more stunned than anything else. The buzz of the rails and the clatter of the windows seemed to fade into the background as I met this woman’s gaze. Suddenly, I felt like we were the only two people on board. Who was she? Her skin was weathered, almost paper-thin. She wore a stained, extra large T-shirt that was frayed at the collar. She smelled like old sweat, and the oversized tee could not hide that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She could have been anyone, anyone who had encountered a bit of bad luck in life. She could have been me.

One sleepy afternoon on a foggy beach, everything changed. I had traveled there to put an end to the relentless, nameless pain that gnawed on me like a tiger on fresh flesh. Only 26 years of age, I swallowed 72 button-sized sleeping pills, planning to close my eyes and fade away like a sunset.

 Fate had other plans. As the pills entered my system, an adrenaline-induced fear of death stopped me in my tracks. I stuck my finger down my throat and vomited all that was bad inside me. I was alone, teary-eyed, and covered in puke. I realized I could no longer run away from the truth: I was mentally ill.

“You can use your credit card.” The woman continued talking to me, undaunted. Come with me to the Amtrak station and buy me a ticket.” The proposition seemed entirely reasonable to her.

“I don’t have a credit card.” I explained, starting to feel exasperated. I did have a credit card on me, but that was beside the point: I wasn’t going to let her use it.

For another moment or two, she stared at me like a blank piece of paper, then quietly turned around, defeated.

Not wanting to look at her, I turned my head to look out the window. The well-groomed streets of the Garden District stood as monuments to the ruling class of the Old South. Not far beyond were the crumbling shotgun cottages of the working class, nothing but chipped paint and cracked foundations. Poverty lay just on the other side of privilege.

Mental illness runs in both sides of my family. As a teen, I suffered from classic manic-depressive symptoms (suicidal thoughts, perfectionist thinking, excessive crying), but I refused to believe I was sick. I could feel that something was wrong with me, but at that time, I was still able to function with a semblance of normalcy, go to school, catch a movie, maintain friendships; so it was easy to convince myself that I wasn’t ill.

As I grew older, it became harder and harder to believe my own lie. At twenty-six years of age, I had been out of college for four years. I had never had a steady job or a steady relationship. I was broke and living on a friend’s couch. I felt completely unemployable. In my mind, there was no future for me, so I planned to end my life rather than suffer through it.

A pang of guilt hit me as I thought of the downtrodden woman sitting in front of me. Soon, guilt gave way to anger. Why should I feel guilty for refusing to give a total stranger access to my credit card? I only used it in case of emergencies and almost always paid my bill in full each month.

As we passed the shops and streets of the Central Business District, I wondered to myself, what had this woman expected? No one with half an ounce of sense would have accepted her proposal. Most likely, she was just hungry and homeless; what good could an Amtrak ticket do her? Besides, what if she had criminal intentions or was high on drugs? In this instance, a concern for my own safety far outweighed any feelings of charity.

What really had me troubled though was what this woman didn’t say. Somehow, she believed I could afford to go into debt on her behalf. She probably thought I had a high-paying job and a healthy savings account. At the very least, she assumed that I had more money than she did and that was all the reason she needed to ask me for help. Her message to me was: “You can carry the weight of my misfortune.”

Is that what every homeless person thinks, I wondered. Do the multitudes of men and women living on the streets hope beyond hope that the rest of society can save them? Can we?

I prayed for years that my parents would see what was wrong with me. My temper was mercurial. I was often angry for no apparent reason and cried too easily. I believed that getting the right job would make everything ok and consequently quit every job I had. I even left graduate school a semester early because I was certain that, despite all evidence to the contrary, becoming a college English instructor would be a huge mistake. At my worst, I didn’t get out of bed for weeks at a time, and for a while, I even ceased to eat.

Even when I wasn’t sure that something was wrong, I wondered how my parents could not. My mother is a counselor, and my dad is no dummy. Was my suffering that invisible to them? Would they have been able to help me even if they knew?

I would welcome the opportunity to compensate for the misfortune and unhappiness that plague homeless and other marginalized people. I try to combat this problem in my own feeble but sincere ways. Sometimes I do empty my pockets for those who ask if I have anything to spare. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, I frequently take the time to volunteer at missions and shelters. I almost always give my leftovers from a night of fine dining to seemingly hungry folk on the street. In my career, I have served needy and at-risk youth, steering them away from impoverished lives.

Despite my best efforts and those of countless others, people in this country go to bed hungry every night, and untold numbers call the street home. I would be hard pressed to find even one individual who believed that we could entirely eradicate this problem and perhaps even harder pressed to find one individual who did not wish that we could.

I wanted to help that woman I met on the streetcar. Whether or not she was trying to scam me, she definitely needed help. What twist of fate, divorce or mental illness perhaps, had driven her to a life of desperation? What inopportune event or run of bad luck had put her on the losing end of life’s game? I could see it in the lines on her face. Something horrible, something beyond words perhaps, had scarred that woman. That old saying “there but for the grace of God go I” quietly entered my thoughts.

After I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my late 20s, my life finally began to make sense. I wasn’t a failure. I wasn’t a loser. I was just mentally ill, and my family and I could deal with that. I dutifully took my meds, attended therapy, and slowly began to recover. I took a part-time job at a summer camp counselor and enjoyed it. I finished my last semester of grad school. Eventually, I fulfilled my dream of becoming a college-level English instructor and even bought a house.

My parents stood steadfastly by my side, never judging me, always loving me. I lived with them for two years until I was able to live on my own. When I wasn’t sure the meds would work, they reassured me that the doctors would find the right combination, eventually. They cheered me on when I got my first “real job” and had faith that I would succeed even when I was sure that I would not. Years later, they traveled 2,000 miles to my adopted hometown of New Orleans to care for me when I had my first relapse. They stayed until I got well again.

If it were not for the love and dedication of my family I might have been dead by now. At best, I might have become a lonely, weather-beaten woman who looked to strangers for salvation.

What I wanted to offer this woman was my strength, my faith, my fortitude, the things I had received from my family over the years. I wanted to take her hand, walk with her off of the streetcar, and show her a better way of life. I wished that I could pay her way until she could afford to take care of herself.

When I stepped off the streetcar at the end of the line, the homeless woman was nowhere to be found. She’d simply disappeared. Up and down Canal St, well-heeled men and women checked their watches and clutched their purses. They talked loudly on their cell phones, ignorant of those around them. They walked liked frenzied penguins, anxious to get to their next appointments.

I crossed the street into the French Quarter and began to stroll towards home. My credit card remained safe, tucked away in my wallet. I shook my head. I had never felt more impoverished than I did at that moment.

****

Personal essays are inquiries into experience and reflections on what our experience means to us. Writing essays forces us to find shape in our experience. Feeling the contours of that shape, we find new shape in ourselves and grow as individuals. We admit to failings, to mistakes, to being human. Acknowledging our life situations, we recommit to our truths. Having reached for the lessons in our experience, we accept who we are. We say what we didn’t think we knew how to say. With the shape of experience, insight and acknowledgement on the page, the experience resides in a vessel (the essay) outside of ourselves and no longer swirls amorphously around and around inside.

We use the craft of essay writing to draw the connections we need to draw to feel whole. Some essays do this work in a straightforward manner, moving along through time toward an ending that captures our inner experience. Others braid present triggering situations with past experience to dig deeper into knowing and acknowledging.

Because Marcia uses the event on the streetcar to delve into her uneasy feelings, she creates meaning from this chance encounter. By alternating her narration about the conversation with the homeless woman on the streetcar with her narration of her own experience with mental illness, the speaker makes readers acutely aware of the seriousness of untreated mental illness. The saying “there but for the grace of God go I” hovers over the essay, as we relate to the speaker’s inability to help the homeless woman and begin to understand what it is like living with mental illness. Most of us would not have taken the homeless women to the Amtrak station or used our credit card to buy her a ticket. Most of us feel relieved not to have what the speaker has in common with the homeless woman. We are at once informed about the personal experience of coming to accept mental illness and about the experience of how much support and help mean. Our sympathies for both the homeless woman and the speaker grow until at the end of the essay, we, too, feel the speaker’s inner resonance with the homeless woman, even as she decides, as we would, not to buy the train ticket.

With the disappearance of the woman at the essay’s end, we are left wondering. Would she really have gone to get that ticket had the speaker decided to use her credit card to get her one? The woman might have disappeared anyway or changed her mind about wanting a train ticket. We can only imagine. However, the speaker is the one we identify with at the end–with her gratitude for being able to function well in her life now and for the overwhelming support and love she received from her family and friends. Try as she does working with at-risk youth and with personal giving, “compensating for the misfortune and unhappiness that plague homeless and other marginalized people” is an impossible task. Her sadness at not being able to accomplish this task drives her to inform us, though, about living on the “side of town” that borders the “mansions” of good mental health. This is a way of “compensating” the homeless woman and others, because writing means readers will become informed, will think and act differently in their lives because of a new understanding of the homeless woman and because of the speaker’s sadness at her inability to help her. The speaker’s gratitude for a debt she can never repay brings out the kindness in us, urges us to be committed to those we love and to those we can help through both our work and our understanding.

Writing at this level of honesty in essays is difficult. We may fear putting the truth of our experience on the page. We may think others will not be interested. However, when the experience we write is genuine and well drawn, when it connects with activities and events in the world, readers are engaged and moved. When we send our words out into the world in a sea-worthy vessel we have crafted, the world we send them out into changes a little, becomes more willing to accept, to honor and to love. And ultimately, that is what the personal essay is for.