Crying in the Bathroom

By Erika L. Sánchez

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because this is what it actually costs to build a life no one made room for.

In 2018, Erika L. Sánchez stood on a National Book Awards red carpet in a royal-blue mermaid gown. Her debut novel was a finalist. That same year, she was on her knees in her apartment screaming into a suicide hotline that did not answer. Same person. Same year. Crying in the Bathroom is not a recovery narrative — recovery narratives have the decency to keep the disaster and the triumph in separate chapters. This one refuses that arrangement. It is an accounting, moving across three decades, of what it costs to build a self from scratch when every institution that shaped you (the school, the church, the marriage) was engineered to make you smaller. The joy Sánchez arrives at by the end is not a gift she was lucky enough to receive. It is territory she seized. The seizure is the book.

When No Template Exists, You Steal One

At some point in her adolescence, Erika L. Sánchez started stealing books from the bookstore. Not out of thrill-seeking. The libraries in her Chicago neighborhood were actively unwelcoming to children, there was no internet to speak of, and her teachers rarely assigned anything by a writer of color. If literature was going to reach her, she was going to have to take it.

Sánchez needed art to confirm she existed, and she kept finding that art was being withheld. She grew up bookish, brown, poor, and "surly" (her word), the daughter of Mexican immigrants who worked factory night shifts and came home with cracked hands. She wanted to be a writer who traveled the world. The desire wasn't unusual. What was nearly impossible to find was anyone who looked like her doing it.

Then she found Sandra Cisneros: a Mexican girl from Chicago who had become a writer and traveled alone through Europe. The "alone through Europe" detail isn't decoration. That's the exact fantasy. The writing career, yes — but also the freedom: moving through the world unaccompanied, on your own terms, by choice. Cisneros was proof the life was possible. The best kind of proof: a specific Chicago girl who'd made it out.

But even Cisneros was hard to come by. She was often the only person she knew hunting for writers like these. They didn't surface without effort. No mentor pointed her there. No curriculum put them in her hands. She had to go looking, which meant, sometimes, taking.

That's the entry condition for becoming a writer when you're Erika Sánchez: you don't get handed the template. You manufacture the belief that a template could exist at all — and then you steal toward it.

The Damage You Can't Name Is the Damage That Lasts

The most durable harms are the ones you can't name. They don't stop once the event ends — they keep working, quietly, because without language there's no way to contain them.

At a Halloween party during her senior year, Sánchez gets blackout drunk at a friend's apartment and passes out in a bedroom. Her friend Martha — Goth, older, someone whose approval she has always wanted — steers a man named José to the room. The next morning Martha reports this cheerfully, as though she had done a favor. Sánchez doesn't have a word for what any of this is. The sexual education she grew up with ran one direction: no means no. Nobody had explained that consent requires ongoing agreement, or that a woman can harm another woman by offering her up while she's unconscious. The harm landed. Without a word for it, it stayed loose. Something felt wrong. She couldn't say why.

José drowns in Lake Michigan the following summer, likely intoxicated, which he usually was. Her last words to him had been "Fuck you." She attends his wake alone and sits in the back, unable to explain who she was to anyone in the room: the girl who kept pulling away, there to pay her respects. That unnamed thing never resolved. It got sealed instead.

What Sánchez builds in place of that missing vocabulary is the Rapey Scale: a rating system, developed with a friend, for threatening male encounters. The finance guy who methodically works to get her drunk while angling her toward his nearby apartment: seven. The boyfriend in her thirties who pressures her repeatedly into a sex act she had explicitly told him caused her pain: nine. She lists these with the flat precision of an actuary. About never having been raped, she writes that it feels like something worth celebrating, while knowing what a grim thing that is to have to celebrate. The joke acknowledges survival. The wound acknowledges what survival costs.

The Rapey Scale isn't dark humor for its own sake. It's what you build when the language doesn't reach. A number is more than nothing. Rating something is a way of asserting it had a shape, that it happened, that it can be measured. In the absence of words others had not yet supplied, Sánchez made her own.

Having a Female Body Has Always Been a Security Risk

Clara was eleven when the stalking began. Her father had been murdered two years earlier, leaving her family exposed on their farm in rural Mexico. One of his former friends, a widower, started coming around. He wanted her for his wife. She was the same age as his own daughter. When he threatened to take her by force, Clara and her younger brother climbed to the roof with her father's carbine, a rifle that overwhelmed her small frame, and made a plan: aim, fire, figure out what to do with the body and the horse. When the man rode toward them, she fired. The shot knocked her off her feet. She'd taken his hat clean off. He fled and never returned.

The story reminds Sánchez of Daphne, the woman so relentlessly pursued by Apollo that she begged her father to transform her into a laurel tree just to escape him. Apollo tore off her branches and wore them as a trophy anyway. Turned into a tree, and the god still wouldn't leave her alone.

The line runs straight from a Mexican farm in the early twentieth century to a Chicago sidewalk in the 1990s. Catcalling in Sánchez's neighborhood was so constant that running an errand required route-planning. During her junior year of high school, she shaved her head and wore falling-apart thrift clothes, not as self-expression but as camouflage. "I was afraid of femininity," she writes. "I thought it would make me soft." Resting bitch face is a tool, she explains, not a curse: a face carved from years of unwanted attention, designed for deterrence. The preparation changes. The math doesn't.

The Mala Vida Was Never the Problem — It Was the Cure

What if the thorniest path wasn't a symptom of depression but the only path available to someone built like Sánchez? Her mother had a name for it: como te gusta la mala vida — how you love the bad life, the complicated life, the one full of difficulty when a smoother road was right there. Sánchez owned it. She became a poet, which her mother correctly identified as choosing poverty, obscurity, and unnecessary strife on purpose. The real question is whether any of those choices were really choices — or whether someone who, in her telling, felt the world with flayed skin and had her first psychiatric hospitalization at fifteen was ever going to find the smooth road anything but unbearable.

The Buddhist conversion is where this becomes clearest. Jackson, a Black trans writer, practiced Nichiren Buddhism and carried herself with a settled certainty that Sánchez could watch but not replicate — a self-possession that seemed almost incomprehensible to Sánchez, given everything Jackson was carrying. Meetings were held at a temple in Cicero, a working-class Mexican neighborhood, in a building that had been an art store and, before that, a speakeasy. Sánchez went. She also sat through the chanting thinking about bacon-fried beans. When Jackson eventually moved away, a friend named Andy kept pulling her back to meetings. She described it later as someone repeatedly handing her an antidote for her life while she kept smacking it out of their hands.

What finally landed was kintsugi — the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold-laced lacquer, so the fracture line becomes visible and beautiful rather than hidden. One afternoon while chanting, staring at a stone a friend had carved with the word "clarity," Sánchez understood she had never been loved the way she needed to be loved, and that this was not entirely someone else's failure. If she never believed in her own worth, no one else was going to supply it. The marriage ended. The depression didn't — not fully. But the framework shifted: the brokenness was not the obstacle to be cleared before a real life could begin. It was the material the person got built from.

That's the reversal her mother's phrase contains, once you turn it over. La mala vida — the hard life, the supposedly wrong life — was never the deviation from an easier self that might have existed. It was how someone becomes capable of surviving at all.

She Was Nominated for a National Book Award While Trying to Stay Alive

Manhattan, fall 2017. Sánchez is on the red carpet outside the National Book Awards ceremony, grinning for cameras. Her debut novel had landed on the New York Times bestseller list before publication and was a National Book Award finalist; her poetry collection was out the same season. She had been selected from several hundred applicants for a Princeton Arts Fellowship, one of three chosen. Now it had all arrived at once.

Weeks later, a new psychiatrist took her off Prozac, the only medication that had ever worked, and diagnosed her with Bipolar II. Sánchez accepted without challenge. The replacement, Abilify, was an antipsychotic. She didn't know yet that it was contraindicated in pregnancy. She didn't know yet that she was pregnant.

The pregnancy revealed a relationship she'd been papering over with optimism. Marcus, her partner, responded to the news by reminding her she should have taken a morning-after pill; he later accused her of trying to trap him. She wanted the child — named her Clara, placed both ultrasound photos on her altar. But she was also on the wrong medication, spiraling, suicidal. The decision to end the pregnancy came not from ambivalence about the child but from a straightforward calculation: she wasn't sure she could survive long enough to have one.

The clinic was nothing like its name (Princeton Women's Services) suggested. The doctor had stains on his shirt and was seen dozing in a chair between appointments. No sedation was offered. She drove herself there, went through the procedure fully conscious, and afterward saw the glass container of remains left uncovered in her line of sight. Then she drove to a fast-food restaurant and ate a burger alone. Then she taught her fiction class.

Professional success and psychiatric collapse look like opposites: one a sign you've arrived, the other a sign something went wrong. Sánchez's 2017 demolished that assumption. They arrived together, through the same convergence: a medication switch that destabilized her brain chemistry, a relationship that offered no ground to stand on, a body carrying a pregnancy she loved and couldn't continue. None of it bent to insight.

What did fix it was electricity. Six rounds of electroconvulsive therapy under general anesthesia, every other day, at two hospitals. Painless, she reports, and disorienting. The ECT changed her brain chemistry so completely that her Prozac prescription was suddenly too high — she had spent most of her life believing something in her brain was deficient, and the treatment left her with excessive serotonin. She told her brother, who sat with this and said: Yeah, I thought it was weird you were laughing at all my jokes.

That's how she got through. Not by working through her grief; she burned both ultrasound photos and couldn't discuss the abortion in group therapy for months. Not through willpower or insight. Through a procedure that, to an earlier century, would have looked like a controlled application of lightning to the skull. Sometimes the fix is that literal.

Pleasure Was Never the Reward — It Was Always the Point

Pleasure was the entire project — not the epilogue to surviving, but the reason to survive at all.

After her divorce, Sánchez books a solo trip to Portugal on impulse, first installment of her novel advance barely in hand, in debt, barely held together. In Porto, with twenty-four hours left on her itinerary, she spots a handsome bartender in a porkpie hat and simply asks him if he has plans that evening. His name is Filipe. He gives her a tour of the city, kisses her at a crosswalk while traffic blows past, tells her she is special, promises to visit Chicago in the fall. She comes home wanting things again — the opposite of everything her marriage had made her feel. Two weeks later, he informs her he spent the weekend sleeping with his girlfriend. When she demands an explanation, he produces one: I like to enjoy. He means it as a shrug. She hears something else. A friend's response ("you just have an internationally renowned pussy") converts the humiliation into comedy and the comedy into philosophy. A cheating bartender's excuse for infidelity becomes, through the simple act of refusing to collapse under it, what Sánchez had spent her whole life trying to earn the right to hold.

That's what the book's end actually looks like. A daughter named Sojourner Inés: Sojourner Truth, a woman who named herself and whose name alone says I dare you; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the colonial Mexican nun forced to renounce her studies who kept writing secretly until her death, because that was her rebellion. The last name hyphenated, because she made the baby in her body and wouldn't be erased by tradition. And then a list, the thesis delivered not as an argument but as a catalog of wants: eating too much and ordering dessert anyway, losing a shoe at a party, painting trees with her daughter, scaring white people with her laughter, swimming in the ocean at dusk, making bad art no one ever sees. Not aspirations. Not rewards she had earned. The point: the thing she had been building toward, and fighting toward, and in her worst years barely staying alive long enough to reach.

Women Who Refused to Disappear

The list at the end looks like nothing. Small pleasures, the kind you apologize for wanting. But you have to hold them against everything that came before: the grandmother who picked up a rifle at eleven rather than become someone's child bride, the nun who lost her pen for daring to think, the mother who worked factory nights so her daughter could want things she herself never got to name. That's not a family history. It's a set of refusals — each one saying the same thing: I will not disappear. The book is the latest one. Not testimony, not a reckoning. Just another woman picking up what she was told she couldn't have and refusing to put it down.