The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

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I remember seeing Yana again, at the Kickstarter house party in Melbourne. It had been over a week since our nudist park escapade, and she looked a little ragged. I’d seen her in the front row of my official theater concert the night before, her chest pressed against the lip of the stage, getting smooshed by a few hundred people behind her. The hostess of the house party was a drummer, and her grunge band was playing in the backyard while everybody ate picnic food and nursed hangovers from the show the night before. I bumped into Yana outside the bathroom. She’d flown all the way from Perth to come to the Melbourne concert and house party. She looked sad.

Yana! How are you doing? I asked.

It’s been a hard week. Symptoms of all sorts, she answered, in a voice that seemed like it didn’t want to elicit any pity.

Is it just physical? I asked. Body stuff? Or is there other stuff going on?

I’m fine, she said, shrugging. It’s been a brutal week, with all the travel. Just dealing with all sorts of shit.

I hugged her, then rejoined the party, talking to the guests, watching as people took turns sharing songs they’d written on guitars and ukuleles. My band came by with the tour van and flocked to the potluck food. I was about to play for the whole crowd in the garden and ducked back into the house to put on some makeup.

I made my way into the hostess’s bedroom, where I’d left my suitcase, and sat down in front of a cracked mirror. As I tossed my ukulele onto the bed, I saw a pile of clothes in the center of the room that seemed to be moving. I looked closer. The pile of clothes was Yana. She was lying on the floor, wrapped in a blanket.

Damn, girl. You doing all right down there? I asked. Don’t you want to lie on the bed instead of the floor?

No… I’m good, she said.

Really? I asked.

Yeah. Just need to rest.

I put my hand on her cheek and looked down at her. I knew those eyebrows so well. I still wished I hadn’t fucked them up so much in the painting.

Feel better, okay? I whispered. She shut her eyes and I pulled the blanket over her shoulders. Then I went back to the party.

I got to Berlin a few days ahead of the Kickstarter art party, and started noticing the same girl and guy everywhere I went in the city. They struck me as nice enough, albeit a little overenthusiastic, the first few times I ran into them. Which I did, seemingly coincidentally, in every spot where I happened to be eating or hanging out in Prenzlauer Berg, even though I was eating in pretty random neighborhoods and staying with different friends with no mention to Twitter of my specific whereabouts. Every time I ran into them, we’d say hello, and take another picture together. By the fourth time, I’d figured out that somehow they were following me, maybe even waiting for me at a distance to see where I was headed in a taxi. It was creepy. There was nothing threatening about this couple—they were sweet—but it seemed to me like they’d crossed a line.

The Berlin art party was held in a bunker-like pop-up gallery called Platoon, and the night had been electrifying from the start. The commissioned album art fit perfectly on the vast cement walls; the gallery staff were all thrilled and offered to kick in a bunch of free beer; there were some spontaneous last-minute guest performers, including a ragtag marching band I knew from the States called Extra Action, who happened to be playing a show a half a block away. I’d seen on Twitter that they were in town and invited them to come busk in the parking lot, and they made a perfectly ecstatic racket with their brass horns, banging on their beaten-up instruments, shouting into their megaphones. We passed the hat for them and everybody threw in a few euros.

The gallery fired up a barbecue. My German is still pretty fluent, and I danced between speaking German and English, running around in my kimono with my glass of wine, bringing requests to the DJ who was set up on a few milk crates, eating a vegan sausage as the sun set. Thrilled.

The band and I took our places in the middle of the gallery to play our acoustic set and a local string quartet accompanied us. At the end of the set, I took off my stage dress and invited the crowd to decorate me with marker. I wound up using a beautiful photograph of that moment for my TED talk, accompanied with a suggestion: that if you ever wanted to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers, I recommend this exercise—especially if the strangers in question were drunken Germans. The night, the venue, the bands, the fans—everything felt perfect in that moment.

A tipsy girl squeezed right up to me, saying something incomprehensible, painted a star on my nose and staggered away. People started markering one another’s faces and arms. One overbearing American was gently escorted away by the crowd because he was getting a little too racy with his marker. I laughed. It was like the street all over again: the crowd was taking care of me, an army of love police. Once I was thoroughly drawn on, which only took about two minutes, I volunteered to do something I hadn’t been planning on, but was happy to do given the mood: take pictures with people.

But only for like one minute, you motherfuckers. I laughed above the din, as someone handed me another wheat beer. I’M NAKED!

The couple who had been stalking me around town was in attendance at the art party, and as a photographer friend jovially agreed to grab people’s cameras to take photos, they stepped up. They flanked either side of my naked body, and while we posed for the photo, the girl slid her hand behind me and thrust her fingers between my legs.

It was a sudden, startling violation. Caught up in the crazed moment of the photo frenzy and the blaring music and the laughter, I shifted my body, whacked her hand away, and grabbed the next person who’d been waiting.

I was so irritated. But, I told myself, I was fine.

Later that night, I didn’t feel fine. I felt very shaken up. I went to my bus-bunk and texted Neil.

I had a nasty run-in with a pervy fan tonight, post-markering. I think I need my husband for a second.

I lay there with the phone on my chest. Neil texted back.

Hello, brave wife. I’m sorry. Do you need to talk?

Yeah, actually I think I do.

Only when I called him did I let myself collapse a little. Talking to him made me feel better.

Shit’s going to happen, I said. Right? And it’s not like I haven’t done a million pieces of naked physical performance art and had lots of sex with lots of people. But man… what a skeezy thing to do. She ruined the perfect magical everything. Or… maybe she was an important part of it. Maybe I should actually be grateful.

I’m not sure I follow you, darling, Neil said, in a British way that suggests that he’s listening but is sometimes baffled by me.

I mean… she’s the extreme exception to the rule, right? I’ve been trusting people for years, and it’s all come to this moment, where I lay myself literally bare and then she sticks her hand in my vadge and breaks my heart. But maybe she has to, right? To drive the cosmic point home.

And what point would that be?

I trusted them, Neil, I said, feeling a lump growing in my throat. I guess the point is, there is no trust without risk. If it were EASY… I mean, if it was all a guaranteed walk in the park, if there wasn’t a real risk that someone would cross the line… then it wouldn’t be real trust. Now I know it’s real. She proved how much I could trust everybody else. Her stupid drunk move just reminds me how safe I am. Like, there’s a set of statistics I just need to accept and there’s a definite one percent probability that when you trust people like that, someone will fuck with you. Is that crazy? Am I stupid? I feel stupid.

You aren’t stupid. He sighed. And I don’t think you’re crazy. I think maybe you just trust and love people extremely easily, and that gets you into trouble sometimes.

It does. On the other hand, I said, it got me married to your ass.

That’s a very good point, he said.

I was recently in the Bay Area at a small back-garden hot tub where I’ve been going for years with a local friend. The property is private, but the backyard is a kind of gift from the owner to the community. He prunes the beautiful little Japanese garden, keeps the tub clean, and maintains a little shower and places for people to leave their clothes. Only women are allowed to attend alone; if a man goes, he must be accompanied by a woman. There’s a passcode-locked door, and if it starts to feel like the rules are being broken, the owner just changes the passcode and starts the trust cycle over again. Talking is not allowed. People do yoga on wood platforms under towering trees.

I was naked in the dimly lit changing shed, freshly showered and about to get in the tub, when a naked girl on her way to put her clothes back on caught my eye and recognized me. She took in a quick breath and remembered we weren’t supposed to speak, so she flailed her arms at me in a way that indicated, I KNOW YOU! I LOVE YOUR MUSIC. I flailed back and then opened my arms to her, asking for a hug.

She stepped towards me, and we embraced; two silent, naked strangers who didn’t feel like strangers at all.

Once I canceled my tour, and explained why, Anthony started getting fan mail. Girls in Denmark knitted him socks and mailed him chocolate. People in Russia sent him books. A collection of fans in Boston folded him a thousand origami cranes and framed them in a giant glass box. All over the world, people were sending him their love and well wishes. He was amazed. He started a Facebook page.

What did you do to them? he asked.

I loved them. And they love me. And I love you. So they love you.

He’d been writing up some memoirs about his childhood and daily emotional struggles, and I needled him to self-publish them. A few of his friends who were also writers stepped in to help, and he put out a book called Lunatic Heroes and set up shop online. It actually sold really well.

The best marketing plan in the world, he said dryly. A terminally ill author.

I kept darting out of Boston for occasional out-of-town appearances and batches of house parties—trying never to be away for longer than a week at a time. People started asking about Anthony everywhere I went, bringing me little gifts to pass on to him. I’d carry them home.

Staying in the Harvard Square rental house with Neil, while the world seemed to keep turning without me, was hard. I didn’t have the things that usually made me happy and strong. The crowds. The constant love from uncomplicated strangers. The signings. I missed it. It made me feel selfish.

My band waited patiently and found other work.

Everybody waited to see which way the fifty-fifty was going to fall.

We were safe in bed, and I thought up a game.

I’m going to ask, I said, and you answer.

Okay, said Neil.

What are you afraid of? Like really, truly afraid of?

Getting old.

Okay. What else are you afraid of? Be specific.

Getting old and losing my memory, he said, and added, and not being able to write anymore.

Okay. What else are you afraid of?

You leaving me alone, he said.

I hugged him.

Okay. What else are you afraid of?

Not being able to have sex anymore.

I shuddered. Okay. What else are you afraid of?

Being ugly. Not being attractive enough to hold your attention.

This game went on for a while.

Then we traded.

What else are you afraid of? he asked.

Turning into an actual drunk someday, I said.

Okay. What else are you afraid of?

Losing control at some point and going off the deep end and hurting someone beyond repair.

Okay. What else are you afraid of?

Everybody hating me, I said.

What else are you afraid of? he said. Be honest.

People thinking I just married you for your fame or money.

Okay. What else are you afraid of?

My friends thinking that everything the critics say is true but nobody having the balls to tell me. People actually thinking I’m a cheap bitch who doesn’t think about anybody but herself.

Oof, dear. Okay. Anything else?

I swallowed. People thinking I don’t work hard enough. People thinking I’m a shitty musician who just tweets all the time. People thinking I’m an ugly, flaming narcissist. People thinking I’m a fake.

He drew me close into his chest.

Oh, darling. You’re really very worried about what people think, aren’t you?

I buried my face in his armpit.

Ya think?

The next time I saw Yana was a long while after the Melbourne house party, when I returned to Australia to work on this book. I’d taken a ten-day residency at the Sydney Festival, playing a show each night in their wooden, stained-glass, merry-go-round-esque Spiegeltent, and was trying to make progress on the book during the daytime. The publisher’s deadline had become suddenly breakneck, but the shows had been booked months in advance, so I juggled a monastic schedule: wake, yoga, coffee, write, play show, sign, sleep, repeat. Yana, along with a small group of hardcore Australian fans from different cities, had tickets for the entire run of ten shows, and they’d bonded over the Internet and became a clan of friends. Yana dropped me an email just as I arrived, asking if I’d have time for a cup of coffee. I told her that I was antisocially buried in the book, but not to take it personally. I said I’d see her soon, at the shows, and looked forward to giving her a hug.

On my way to soundcheck one day, I saw Yana and a group of five or six fans by the fountain near the tent, and I went over to say hello. Yana seemed out of sorts; she wasn’t acting like her warm, friendly self. I couldn’t tell if she was angry at me, or just in a globally dark mood, and though I didn’t address it at that moment, I felt bad. Maybe I’d screwed up my priorities. Maybe I was a jerk for saying no to the coffee.

I brag endlessly about my real friendship with my fans, I thought, but maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’m just a fair-weather friend who takes what she wants when she needs it and scampers away.

My inner Fraud Police bristled.

A few nights later, after the show and signing, I was sitting in my underwear behind my computer, answering the last of the day’s tweets and emails and about to retire according to my book-marathon bedtime of one a.m., when I saw some troubling tweets in Yana’s Twitter feed. I read back through her recent Twitter history, and it was clear that something was wrong—she was posting dark, vague, and despairing sentences. I emailed her to ask if she was okay. She sent back a single word:

suicide.

For a moment, all my compassion fled, and I was just pissed. There was no way I could go to bed now. And then I was instantly ashamed of my reaction. I wrote back, and stayed up emailing with Yana and texting with another fan-who’d-become-a-friend, Carolyn, who knew her and who had also seen the tweets. She offered to go check in on Yana at her youth hostel.

I’ve had fans threaten suicide at me. In 2004, back when my personal email was still posted on the band website, there was a girl who sent me a few emails in quick succession threatening to kill herself if I didn’t write back. It was my first foray into that kind of darkness with a fan over the Internet, and I wrote her long, life-affirming emails for several days. Wrong move. That just encouraged her to send me weirder, more intricate threats. I finally figured out that the best thing to do was to send her the phone number for the Samaritans and otherwise ignore her. She kept sending me suicide threats, several a week, for an entire year. I blocked her email.

But Yana was different. I knew her. I’d spent real time with her. We emailed that night about her mom and dad and brother, about life, about death, about needing to be seen. I told her we could grab a quick walk together after the show the next night. I tried not to feel manipulated. Life happens. I finally went to bed at around three in the morning, after getting a text from Carolyn that Yana had come down off the figurative ledge and was also heading to bed.

The next night, after the show and signing, Yana and I left the festival grounds and took a walk to a park. I’d spent time with her, true, but I’d never walked around with her in public, where people stared. I noticed the way people looked at her and her four-foot-six stature as she moved through the world. I wondered what it must feel like to have the gaze of the world fixated on you because of the shape of your body. Inescapable. I remember how I’d been impressed by Yana the first few times I met her. She seemed so absolutely fearless, so embodied, so totally comfortable with herself. I sat and listened while she poured out the stories of the past few months. She’d told me she’d been suicidal since after getting into a scuffle with the management of the hospital where she was working, doing patient intake administration. They’d tried to force her out of her position, but they wouldn’t level with her about the reason why.

They wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, she said, blinking back tears. I was great at my position. I was really good at my job, Amanda. Everybody in the ward loved me. And they refused to tell me what was wrong.

And that’s what made you suicidal? I asked, wiping her teary cheek with my sleeve. There’s got to be more. I know that losing a job is super-stressful. But it sounds to me like it was about something more than that. Why did it hurt so much?

Yana didn’t say anything, but it suddenly occurred to me exactly why something like that would hurt Yana so much. It was the story of her life—and I’d just witnessed it as we walked from the tent to the park, through the festival of people who stared at her body and then quickly glanced away. Who gawked at her, but never said anything. She’d lived her whole life having to cope with people looking at her the wrong way, but never addressing it.

They wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.

They were looking at her. But they weren’t seeing her.

We left the park and started walking along the waterfront, and as Yana spilled out more of the background of her story, we wound up on the topic of government assistance. She’d been eligible for disability benefits for ages but had refused to take them. Her parents encouraged her not to.

Why? I asked.

Because I don’t really have a “real” disability. I’m just short. I can do things that everybody else can do. I can work, I can drive, I’m educated. My parents insisted, when I was growing up, that I was absolutely like everybody else. Short, for sure, but not different. And the way they see it, if I take disability from the government, it’s like admitting failure. Like defeat. It’s like saying, “Yes! You’re right! I’m a cripple!”

Her comment from the park echoed in my head. I thought about all the shit this girl had had to go through in her life, the ten operations, the stretched bones, the medications, the people staring in the park, the bosses and co-workers who wouldn’t tell her what was wrong.

You and I have one giant thing in common, Yana, and I just noticed it, I said. Have I ever told you about my marriage problems? And how I refused to take any money from Neil until Anthony got sick and I had to cancel this year’s tour?

No.

You’re in for a lovely treat. Want to walk me home?

It had been over thirteen weeks of chemo, and they couldn’t tell us yet what the outcome was going to be. There was talk of a bone marrow transplant. And if they did that, an even smaller chance of survival. We all got used to living in the cloud of unknowing.

One day Neil and I were sitting in the hospital on either side of Anthony, who had just fallen asleep because the chemicals had hit him.

He’s out cold, I said.

Yep, said Neil.

I don’t want him to die, I said.

I know, said Neil. Neither do I.

I don’t want you to die either, I said.

I’m not going to die for a while, darling.

Good, I said.

You know, I’m quite proud of you and me. We’ve managed to learn how to take care of each other, Neil said, even if our marriage is a bit of a mess at times.

Yeah.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, looking at Anthony’s chest rising and falling, his head propped up on the white hospital pillow.

You really love him, don’t you? said Neil.

Yeah, I answered. I really do. He taught me everything.

The liquid dripping into his arm from the metal rack above was crystal clear, and I had a hard time looking at it without remembering that each bag, according to the doctor, cost $10,000. It always made me think about my friends without health insurance, and how hard I’d fought my parents when, just getting out of college and broke, I hadn’t wanted to pay for my own. The battle had lasted months. They wound up offering to pay for half of it. I resented it but paid for the other half. God, I was so cavalier when I was twenty-two, so asleep and so ungrateful. I looked at Neil.

I really love you, too, I said. I actually, truly do. You know that, right?

Yes. I think I do.

It’s funny, I said. Anthony taught me that.

What’s funny? Taught you what?

The love stuff. You. Taking your help, so we could be here. The whole deal.

Neil looked at sleeping, snoring Anthony. Then he looked back at me.

And then he smiled. He taught you how to love. You taught me how to love, and how to be loved. I suppose it’s all a bit of a circle, isn’t it?

I reached over and squeezed Neil’s hand.

We’re turning out good, darling, I told him. We’re getting it.

I called Anthony from the road. I was in someone’s backyard, in Canada, away from home for a few days to deliver a few house parties. He was getting more and more tired. The chemo was wearing him down. And he wasn’t always answering my texts. Sometimes it took a few days to get him on the phone. I worried.

Remember the sin-eater? he asked.

Yeah.

Cancer, same thing. I’m growing on the inside. There’s more room. It’s all coming at me. The only way it works is if you act like a sieve, he said.

A sieve? A kitchen sieve? Like a spaghetti colander?

Yes, clown. And I’m having to do the same thing with the cancer. More room, bigger space. It’s all the same.

I’m not following you.

Everybody keeps talking about “fighting” the cancer, he said, everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and blah blah blah blah.

Okay… and?

I’m not fighting, he said. It’s already inside me… and I’m not going to fight. I’m going to be a good host, let it pass through me… resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.

I get you. But it’s all a metaphor anyway. Be careful about saying that… you might piss people off. So many people are so proud of their cancer fight. That’s just their way of thinking about it.

The fight doesn’t work, beauty, he said. It’s like the haters and the Internet shit you deal with. Let them in, love them, let them go. No fight. Like I said. Sieve. Befriend every dragon. You get it.

Yeah. I get it.

I’m gettin’ off the phone now. Can’t keep talking. Too tired. Gotta take this cancer-ridden body to slumberland. Say the magic words, my girl.

I love you.

As time wore on, the hardest thing was the relentlessness of the fifty-fifty. We hung on every word from the lips of every doctor trying to figure out if Anthony was going to escape the death sentence. I didn’t want to plan anything I couldn’t cancel, so I just stopped thinking about the future altogether. It was late winter in Boston, and the cold and the paralysis of the schedule seemed to be sucking the life force out of everything. I tried to write music, but I failed. I felt empty and lazy and uninspired.

I was invited to talk at TED, and that gave me something nice and distracting to freak out about.

There was also a tired smear of hurt left in my heart from the volunteer musician controversy. The worst of it had dialed down, but the wounds were slow to heal, and I found myself occasionally stumbling across Internet lists of how I was one of the Ten Worst People Ever. I took comfort in preparing my TED talk, sitting in Anthony’s study, reading him my talk drafts on his chemo-recovery days and pacing around the basement of our rental house, flailing my hands around to an imaginary TED audience consisting of dirty paint cans and boxes of books.

After a few months, the fog started to lift, ever so slowly.

The chemo was working, they said.

My friend wasn’t dead… yet. He might be okay.

I did the TED talk, and people liked it. My life was starting to grow back, people on the Internet seemed to be tired of hating me and had moved on to being outraged about Miley Cyrus’s decision to twerk. Spring was coming.

Neil and I flew home from our week at TED, back to Anthony’s side, and I started feeling better for the first time in months.

The feeling didn’t last long.

I was sitting in the café of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, mundanely answering some emails over a coffee and some Vietnamese soft rolls, when several people suddenly twittered at me to say that there had been unexplained explosions at the Boston Marathon, at the finish line, which was only about eight blocks from the Cloud Club.

It’s bad—it’s real—bomb went off. Here at marathon.

Within minutes, just how bad became clear. More tweets came in. People had lost limbs.

I drove home, sat down at my computer, and didn’t get out of the chair. I was glued to my Twitter feed, sharing every piece of relevant information coming from the news, every update from my virtual community on the ground, and every outpouring of concern and love from the rest of the world. People who were at the marathon site shared their shock and fear and sadness, and told us what they were seeing. Everybody wanted to help one another.

I twittered over five hundred times that day.

Neil was out of town.

I called Anthony. Laura had been near the finish line, cheering on a friend. She was safe. He was tired.

As evening closed in and I was still in the chair, a painfully graphic photo of one of the victims was uploaded, and I shared it, with a warning. There was a collective outpouring of grief and anger and confusion—people commenting in real time about how it made them feel.

At that moment, I found myself thinking that I wanted to be in a space where people were physically all together, communing, stilling themselves and feeling the massive disruption in our city and the impact of all the blood, debris, and senseless loss of life. I felt alone. Sitting at home alone on the Internet just wasn’t doing it for me. People sent tweets asking if I could get everybody together at a park, or in a square, but there was a police mandate against any public gatherings, because the bombers were at large.

I typed a message to Twitter:

We can’t gather. Illegal. But how about a few moments of silence. I need it. Does anyone want to join me?

My feed exploded with a rousing “YES, please.” It was 8:55 p.m., so I set the minute of silence for nine o’clock exactly, and asked people to find a good spot, and do whatever they needed to do to get ready. I lit a few candles, counted down with the Twitter feed, set my iPhone timer, and at nine on the dot, closed my eyes.

Seconds later, Neil’s visiting cousin Judith came through the back kitchen door, looking as emotionally exhausted as I felt. We hugged. I gestured at the laptop on the kitchen table and said:

Hey… it may sound a little weird but… I’m holding a moment of silence on the Internet.

Judith knew me. She got it. I closed my eyes again and sat in silence, with Judith—and with my online community—until the timer went off.

Everybody sent love and peace back and forth. I sent the people around me in Boston a wish for a safe, unafraid night’s sleep.

The next days were filled with a steady onslaught of unsettling images and news. The manhunt for the alleged bombers—two young brothers. The city lockdown, during which planes were grounded, trains were canceled. I was supposed to play a show in New York; getting there seemed unlikely. I found myself obsessed by the horror of imagining what makes a person do something so terrible, and imagining the pain of the victims, suddenly legless. I heard about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged bomber, a nineteen-year-old they finally found hiding at the bottom of a boat, and who—I found out through the news on NPR—had been a friend of my friend’s high-school-aged kid. I heard the story about how they hijacked a car and tried to make their way to New York. It was all close to home.

A few days later, after a yoga class, I went back to the same café I’d been sitting in when the news of the bombing hit, and blogged a stream-of-consciousness mishmash of thoughts about my life, the lives of my friends, and about the teenager at the bottom of the boat, in the form of a free-verse poem.

There were thirty-five such lines. I didn’t think it was a great poem. It was just a collection of my own feelings and impressions. The coincidences. The blender. The dots.

I called the blog “A Poem for Dzhokhar.” The fans read it, and within a few moments sent back tweets and comments of understanding; a lot of them had been online with me the night of the bombing. But three hours later, the blog post had gotten over a thousand comments, and the poem was being linked to on right-wing news sites as an example of liberal evil. Some critics of the poem (who weren’t all strangers, by the way; some were within the fanbase) asked:

How could you be so insensitive? How dare you shamelessly promote yourself by writing a poem about this?

One news website said it was “the worst poem ever written in the English language.” A television news commentator that night called it, “Amanda Palmer’s love poem to a terrorist.”

There was nothing about loving terrorists in the poem.

The onslaught continued over the next few days. There were two thousand comments on the blog, almost all of them hate-filled and outraged. Strangers started posting limericks, suggesting with or without humor that I should have my own legs blown off. Blog comments included sarcastic haikus and limericks, some of which were competent parodies of my own poem, and some were more along the lines of:

And in response, my own readers posted their own poems about empathy and non-violence. Then someone told me it was national poetry month. Timing is everything.

My Twitter feed was filling up with angry comments so fast I couldn’t even keep up with it. And I stopped wanting to—it hurt too much. People were calling me a monster.

In the aftermath of the bombing, one journalist and mother of a son said on the radio that her initial reaction had been motherly worry for the bomber. And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far.

Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far?

To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.

To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness.

Here is one successful recipe I have used to deal with haters, trolling, bullying, and other manifestations of critical voices. We all have them.

Take the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

Hold it in your mind.

Now imagine the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment being aimed at the Dalai Lama.

Now imagine the Dalai Lama is reading or hearing the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

If it helps, you can get specific here and think up something like: HEY DALAI LAMA! UR DUMB AS SHIT & UGLY & BALD & WHO DO U THINK U R TRYING TO FREE PEOPLE?? FUCK U

Or, if that isn’t working for you, a subtler approach:

Dear Dalai Lama. With all respect, I find your approach to peace highly problematic. If you would stop narcissistically meditating and pretending to “help” people, perhaps you would actually be a force of good in the world. Sincerely, a former fan.

Now imagine the Dalai Lama’s reaction. He may smile, frown, or laugh—but he will undoubtedly feel compassion for the author of the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

You can substitute the compassionate/holy/serene being of your choice. It may work to use Jesus, Joan Baez, Yoda, or your kind-eyed but strong-as-an-ox great-aunt Maggie.

Rinse and repeat as needed.

About a week after I wrote the poem, I turned thirty-seven. I was in Seattle to deliver a handful of Kickstarter parties. It was hard to leave Anthony, but I was happy to leave Boston for a few days. Neil came with me for the start of the trip, so we could celebrate my birthday together.

I was miserable, visibly drained, and verging on a shade of depression that I hadn’t felt since my blackest college years. I was tired of feeling hated. Tired of explaining myself. Tired of thinking about it. Tired of Anthony being sick and not knowing whether he would live or die. I didn’t even want a birthday. It seemed pointless and unnecessary.

We hadn’t made any plans for the day in Seattle except to not do any work—and to stay away from the Internet, which was still roiling with hateful comments and bomb limericks. Things had gotten bad. Someone had just suggested on Twitter that I should have a bomb shoved up my cunt.

When we woke up on the morning of my birthday, it was freezing cold, dark, and slashing down rain.

So what do you want to do today, birthday girl? Neil asked lovingly.

I dunno, I said. Stay in bed. Vanish. Die.

Well if you’re going to die, let’s eat first. I’m hungry. Would you like some lunch?

No.

We found a quiet little Japanese restaurant, where I sat with my sunglasses on, feeling sorry for myself, and staring into my miso soup.

Darling, Neil said. It’s going to blow over. Trust me. I’ve never seen you this unhappy.

Sorry.

Is there nothing we can do? Let’s do something nice, okay? We could try to find a place to get you a birthday massage. Want a massage?

I looked up from my soup. Neil. He was trying so hard. He was so kind.

I’d taken a few flights that week, and my back hurt. And my neck hurt. And my head hurt.

Yes. I’d love a massage. That’d be wonderful.

I left to go to the bathroom, and Neil started typing into his phone. When I came back, he said, I found a massage place right near here and booked online, using a little form! Isn’t the Internet amazing?

Uh-huh.

Two hours later we showed up at an antique office building, slightly early for our appointment, and rapped lightly on the propped-open door before entering. I dried my eyes and tried to look like not too much of a mess.

The massage therapist, who was pretty and tattooed, was eating a salad out of a takeout container. We had barely said hello when she took a deep breath, looked me deep in the eye, and said, I have to talk to you.

Okay… I said, taken aback. With Neil? Without Neil?

He can wait out here. It’ll just take a second. She pointed to a chair in the hallway outside her office and Neil sat down to wait.

She led me past her massage table into her back office, where a small recording-studio setup—complete with a digital piano and a microphone—took up one corner of the room.

Oh my god, I thought. She’s going to play music for me. Oh NO… wait… maybe she’s going to ask me to record backing vocals in exchange for my massage? I don’t know if I can handle this right now.

We sat down.

So… hi, she said. How are you?

I was still trying to hold back tears. I took off my sunglasses.

Honestly? I’m pretty raw, I said. I’m sorry. It’s… my birthday. And it’s been a really rough week.

She handed me a tissue.

Happy birthday, she said. Listen, I couldn’t work on you without talking to you first; it felt unethical. I know who you are. I know who Neil is. And when I got his email a few hours ago saying that it was your birthday and you two wanted to come in for massages, I thought my friends were playing a practical joke on me.

She wasn’t smiling. She took a deep breath.

I’m a songwriter, and I was following that whole thing with your volunteer musicians. And I have to tell you… I’ve written some… really, really horrible fucking things about you on the Internet. Like really horrible. Whole long blogs about what a bitch you are and how much I despise you and everything you do. They were so horrible that a few weeks after I posted them, I deleted them because I felt so bad. And if you could read what I’d written, you’d just be… I don’t know.

I sat there, stunned. This was not a good birthday.

I’m not proud of what I did, or what I wrote, she said. I’m really not. But I couldn’t have you just come in and lie on my table, without you knowing. And if you want to go ahead and cancel, I totally, totally understand.

I looked at her.

I looked up at the ceiling, thinking:

Is the universe shitting me?

I said:

I’m really, really glad you told me. Honestly… I don’t want anything more in this world than to get on your table.

Okay, she said. Let’s do this.

So there I lay, for an hour, letting the tears leak out of my eyes and onto her massage table, while she wordlessly ran her hands gently all over my body. She rubbed my arms, my hands, my back, my feet, my face in a ritual of total forgiveness, at least in my imagination. And I wasn’t even sure who was forgiving whom.

I felt her elbows dig into my hips. I felt her knuckles separating my ribs. I breathed deeper. I felt her fingers dig into my neck, trying to release all the stuck, metallic tension.

I closed my eyes.

Every tweet telling me I was fucking worthless, every blog comment telling me to shove my vain head up my own ass, every piece of blog criticism I’d read that labeled me as a self-serving, greedy, superficial attention whore danced in my mind as her hands swept over my body, slowly and reassuringly. Almost lovingly.

She was like a saint, this woman, come to absolve me. Forgive me. Forgive herself. Forgive everybody. I didn’t know what she’d written about me. I’m sure it was horrible. I didn’t care. I’d read enough. I’d had enough.

Not a single word passed between us for the entire session. I didn’t care that she could see me silently crying, soaking the towel under my head.

After an hour, she leaned over and said quietly,

We’re finished.

Then she opened her hand, laid it on my heart, and whispered into my ear,

Happy birthday.

Then she left the room.

I got up and blew my nose. I felt exhausted. But light, like something substantial had been lifted out of my insides. I put my underwear on. Then my shirt. Then my pants. She came back into the room, said nothing, and handed me a cup of water.

I drank it, and we stood there, looking at each other for a minute.

She broke the silence.

You’re really good, she said, looking me right in the eye, at receiving.

And I looked back into her eyes, deeply, for the first time, and saw a lot of sadness in there.

She looked tired. Hurt.

And you, I said, are really good at giving.

That broke her.

She grimaced and her eyes filled with tears.

We stood there, just looking at each other.

So… I said, you’re a musician? I saw the piano.

Yeah, I’m a singer-songwriter. Can I give you my CD? Consider it a birthday gift.

I took the gift.