Category Archives: personal history

rumplestiltscass

My parents almost named me Georgia.

I’m convinced that if I had grown up a Georgia instead of a Dana, I would have been infinitely more glamorous. Instead being Dana, five foot two with a Buddha belly, wearing leggings and pink Converse high-tops and one of those T-shirt that might lead well-mannered straphangers to give up their seat for me, I would be Georgia, five foot ten and wearing one of those hats with a swoopy brim and high heels. (Yes, the simple fact of a different name would have overcome genetic science and the fact that I really, really hate wearing heels. “That which we call a rose,” my ass.)

As I remember the story, it was my four-year-old sister who liked “Dana” better, which is ridiculous, because if you had asked four-year-old me what I wanted to name my little sister, she would have been named “Vicky Pat Rice” and the swoopy-brimmed hat store wouldn’t have even looked at her. Anyway, I don’t have a little sister, which is probably for the best, and I’m Dana.

More specifically, I’m “Danacass.” One word, not two; sometimes with the inflection on third syllable alone and sometimes on all three equally. (“DanaCASS!” “DANACASS.”) Or I’m “Dacass,” which, yes, if you say it wrong, sounds like a weird reference to anal sex, but it’s really just a relic of when I went to Vassar and my email was dacass@vassar.edu. Kind of like how in the 40’s, the girls were all Bootsie and Betsy and Bitsy, it was trendy when I was at Vassar to call people by their email names, if you were lucky enough to have one that rolled easily off the tongue (first two letters of your first named followed by your last name, unless you were unlucky enough to have a last name like Wong or Smith, in which case you might have three or four letters appended to the front of your email and you’d never hear about all the trendy events happening that weekend in your dorm).

It makes me nervous to hear my own name. Nobody calls me plain vanilla “Dana” unless something grave and serious is about to happen, like if I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or I was supposed to send someone a PowerPoint but instead I drank three beers and fell asleep with my shoes on. I’m “Dana” when I’m about to be called on to do something I don’t want to do, like get a Pap smear or give a presentation that I’ve invariably forgotten to rehearse.

Nicknames mean that somebody cares enough about you to give you some special call sign that means that they like you more than your boss or your dentist does. When I was thirteen, my best friend found a new best friend and the surest sign was that they had given each other nicknames and I was still just Dana. My sister called me “Monster,” or “Dollface,” if I was being nice, and my dad called me “Buddy,” but my friends called me “Dana” and so I knew that something was wrong. I might as well have been in class, answering math problems, if they were going to call each other special friend names and I was still and always and only Dana.

It was a source of great pleasure for me when I went to college and I finally got a nickname. It felt like the first time that to a few people on the planet, I was more special than everyone else in the universe. My friends and I thrive on stories: our friendship, now that we don’t see one another that often, is built on a foundation of narrative that we are constantly hashing and rehashing. We’re always jumping to explain to an incurious audience why we use the names we do, and our favorite nicknames are the ones that require ten minutes of backstory to explain: “We call me ‘Shmiggs’ because of the time that I was in my room—oh, and I was always in my room, did I mention that? I was a terrible housemate, they’d have been better off with a plant, it would have been more social—but anyway, I was in my room and there was a cheesecake and…” and ten minutes later, no conclusion has been reached and we’ve gone down into that precious rabbit hole that is the time that we actually got to be friends in real life and not just in our memories and every so often at weddings.

We used to give our love interests nicknames, too. Code names, rather, the only way to gossip when you go to a college small enough that your ex-boyfriend’s roommate’s best friend is definitely sitting next to you at the dining hall talking about how you miss him, but you don’t really miss how his “chill and awesome” iTunes playlist that he always insisted on playing when you had sex. We would spend more time crafting up complex and layered code names like we were little kids playing spies and not almost-grown women who could have been in Sex and the City (minus the city and, except occasionally, the sex). And of course, it was college, so within a week’s time a code name might quickly become an expletive, but even that meant that you, Mister Chill and Awesome, had done something to cement yourself a place in my address book.

I work now at a company where everyone who was there in the first four years or so has a nickname. I missed that cutoff by a year or two and so at work I am Dana, and when I hear it, someone’s about to ask me to do something at six o’clock on a Friday night and it isn’t to join them at happy hour. I react like a golden retriever when I hear my name, and I almost wish that people would append it with some assurance that even though they’re calling me Dana and not “DANACASS” or “Shmiggs” or “Dane” or “Monster” or “Dollface” or “Dacass” or “Daney,” it’s not because they’re mad at me. Like how my high school dance teacher used to say “Can you see me after class? You’re not in trouble” so you wouldn’t spend the next hour and a half wondering if you were about to get expelled for going to Port of Subs during fourth period last week.

I still maintain that I would have been a different person if I had been a Georgia. Can you imagine, though? gecass@vassar.edu? That’s not the kind of call sign you can respond to with a disco pose, the way I liked to in college when someone called my name from across the room when I came into a party on a Friday night. I wonder if I would have pictured some spunky alterna-verse Dana, envied that girl across the aisle, cozy in leggings and high-tops and drinking cheap wine and staring at her computer with bug eyes, pounding at her keyboard, hopelessly unfashionable but at least she’s carved out some very small, Buddha-shaped place in the universe.

there and back again

When I think of anorexia, I think of Karen Carpenter. Like every normal teenage girl who came of age in the 1970’s, I idolize Karen Carpenter (I, unfortunately, grew up in the 2000s, which makes the “normal” qualifier irrelevant). But only insofar as I would give my right arm to feather my hair and belt out “Superstar” in front of a screaming crowd. It never occurred to me to want to be thin like Karen Carpenter. I knew that she died of anorexia, which as a little girl, I knew to be some terrible disease where you weren’t allowed to eat cereal or chicken fingers or any of the other beige foods starting with the letter “C” that I was willing to eat.

But her death, years before I was born, was irrelevant to me the way that Janis Joplin’s or Jim Morrison’s deaths are irrelevant to me: tragic, of course, and preventable in hindsight, but a fact of life, a thing that happens to people who aren’t me. It is only when I am 25 years old and staring at a piece of paper that says in clinical numbers—307.1, the diagnostic code for anorexia nervosa—that it occurs to me that I never got the feathered hair or the Asian tour, but I did get that freaky disease where you forget how to feed yourself.

I always assumed that if I were to contract an eating disorder, it would be something like pica, where you eat paint chips or whatever, things you see on “My Weird Addiction” (or read about in your favorite children’s book, the Childhood Medical Guide, if you were a friendless child with bizarre literary interests). Anorexia is awfully basic for a girl like me who prides herself on being original. Anorexia is for cheerleaders and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul contributors. I’m a writer—I’m supposed to be an alcoholic, or bipolar; something sophisticated and higher-brow. I’m too smart to starve myself.

But as ridiculous as it seems—that I, a girl who has always been best described as voluptuous whose favorite sin has long been a tie between sloth and gluttony, could be on the brink of death from self-induced starvation—the omnipresent pain in my chest tells me the truth.

“No, it’s not,” my then-boyfriend said when I mentioned that I thought my chest pain might be a consequence of my alarmingly low weight. I don’t know why—maybe he genuinely believed it, or maybe he was in denial, or maybe he was just sick of the fact that somehow the smart-mouthed, energetic little thing he’d fallen in love with had morphed into a moody, listless, half-cadaverous excuse for a human who would rather exercise than spend the morning in bed with him. I can hardly blame him. Nobody wants to date a sack of bones.

And a sack of bones I am. To clarify: I have always had great boobs. It’s awfully lowbrow of me to say that in such a public forum, but it’s true, and it’s important. They are perfect, and nobody in my family knows where they came from. They are big enough to be noticeable, but not so big that they’re, you know, slutty—because as any woman knows, large breasts are a visual indicator of one’s genetic predisposition not only to heterosexuality but also to wanting to sleep with any and all men, including that guy yelling at you from his car window—and they’ve always been one of the few parts of my body that I am comfortable with.

I looked down one day, though, and instead of my beautiful Raphaelite boobs I had a bra that I could have worn to smuggle drugs. Instead, I had a lucky rib.

“Rib” is probably not the anatomically correct term. I never pretended to be good at science, but to the point, I had a lucky rib—a little nub that protruded from my sternum that I could feel when I poked around at my chest, which I did often when I wanted to make sure that I was still a good and disciplined and virtuous person and not a greedy-sloppy-sluggish pig.

My lucky rib was more fascinating to me even than the base of my spine, which I discovered for the first time some eighteen months ago when the protective layer of fat that coats my bones first began to melt away. It became my talisman. I rubbed it like an underfed Buddha.

I could count, then, every bone from my collar to my waist.

It becomes harder to concentrate. I quit reading books. When I was a kid, I used to get a stack of books from the library, read them all in three days, and beg my mom to take me back. At 25, I am no longer able to read books because they are too much for my shriveling brain.

My hair grows brittle and falls out in clumps. The more I exercise—and oh, boy, do I exercise; even my spin instructors admire my dedication to the classes that I attend every day without fail—the grayer my skin grows. My veins pop out of my arms and legs. My heart pounds out of my chest. Sometimes, when I lose control and eat too much, I stick my finger down my throat and vomit. This is by far the least glamorous part and I try to save it for when I really need it, like when I eat ice cream.

“If you continue like this, you will DIE,” C_______ writes to me in an email.

“I had two heart attacks,” says K__. “You will have a heart attack.”

I dislike these opinions, so I ignore them. I stay home, mostly, or I go to the gym, where people ask me what I do and what I eat and eye me enviously. The gym is a safe place. Restaurants and bars are not safe, so I stop going to them. I go to bed early. C_______ and K__ want me to be healthy, they say, and happy, but it’s unclear to me how I can be happy if I’m not skinny and being skinny is incompatible with going to restaurants and bars and staying out too late to get up and exercise. Plus, I get cranky when I’m hungry, and I’m always hungry because I only eat when I’m ready to chew off my own arm and I stop when I stop shaking and that doesn’t really mean I’m less cranky, just that I’m less faint.

I’m not very much fun to be around. My boyfriend dumps me, eventually, and then I am alone, except for my lucky rib. Like a country song about a lovelorn vegetarian at a barbecue.

I am a sack of bones dangling from a coat hanger.

I used to be a wild animal. I used to go out dancing, take four shots and sweat it out in a pile of bodies and then go pile into a booth at the diner and order chicken fingers or buy a bag of tacos from Del Taco and down them in the back of the car.

Have you ever asked a sack of bones to go out dancing with you?

Nobody loves a sack of bones.

I watch a video of Karen Carpenter a few months before she died, after she had been force-fed 30 pounds’ worth of food in a hospital. She is haggard. She could pass for sixty—and I’m not just saying that because she has the same haircut that my grandma did before she died, which I don’t think you can really blame on anorexia—and her skin is gray like mine. I want to drink away my heartbreak, but I can’t, because alcohol has calories, and I want to read away my heartbreak, but I can’t, because I can’t read, and I want to run away my calories and so I do until my heart is practically popping out of my chest and I hear again—“I had two heart attacks. You will have a heart attack”—and with no love and no wine and not even a book to keep me company, I know that I have lost.

This is rock bottom, I suppose. Sometimes, now, twenty pounds later—and counting, God help me, I’ve already replaced my pants twice and I’m about ready to join a nudist colony—I look at pictures of myself from those months between when my boyfriend dumped me and when I finally called the treatment center and I am abjectly horrified. I want to make inappropriate jokes about the Holocaust and the Bataan Death March because I don’t know how else to explain away the complete irrationality of starving yourself.

Rock bottom is the night at work that we need to pull an all-nighter, and I can’t bring myself to eat so eventually I lose it and start screaming at my coworkers and solidify a reputation for myself as the psycho girl who can’t hack it during an all-nighter. Rock bottom is leaving my best friend’s bachelorette party early because I want to get up early and run the next day. Rock bottom is doing that again at her wedding.

But I felt so glamorous. This is what they don’t tell you about anorexia: you feel like a movie star. “You look great,” I hear, often, from coworkers and strangers and relatives and friends. “What do you do?” I am unused to this attention and this is what is so hard to give up: the idea that I’m finally doing something well. I’m not good at very much: I wasn’t very good at ballet, and I wasn’t very good at being a girlfriend, but for a time, I was good at being skinny and that felt really, really good.

I am smart enough to understand that being good at something that will eventually kill you—“The only good anorexic is a dead anorexic,” C_______ says to me, and I suppose logically, that’s true—is not actually a talent you want. I go to therapy and the dietitian and I learn that I’m slowly killing myself and that my body is eating away at my brain and that if I don’t start feeding myself again, and soon, I’m going to lose my job and then I will have nothing, absolutely nothing, left to live for.

What I also learn is that I have a choice: I can be a glamorous movie star in a tiny dress with jutting elbows and cheekbones and ribs that I can count in a dressing room mirror, or I can be a human being, with a life and friends and love and hobbies.

My therapist gives me a list of the things that happen to you when you starve yourself: not just the hair, or the being cold, but things I never guessed, things that explain why my life has become so intolerably lonely. It turns out that starving yourself is a good way to become an antisocial hermit, only minus the part where you read the works of James Joyce and write your version of Walden, because as I’ve mentioned several times, malnutrition is really bad for being a functional human.

I am given instructions to feed myself. This is ironic: I’m 25 years old, I was the valedictorian of my high school class, I have a degree from an almost-top-10 liberal arts college and I have to pay $160 an hour for a woman to tell me how to eat properly. (Maybe if I’d gotten Phi Beta Kappa, I’d still be able to eat sandwiches without feeling like I’m trying to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Prove? What do you even do with a theorem? See above re: not being good at things.) It’s demoralizing.

I cry a lot. I cry about the bachelorette party that I missed. I cry about the fact that I went an entire year without eating sushi because it has rice in it. I cry about my relationship, both because my eating disorder destroyed it and because I think that maybe letting myself stay with someone who was so cruel to me was, in a way, tacit permission to let me be cruel to myself. It seems to me that I have lost an entire year of my life to what looks to other people not like a disease but a weakness, and I cry over every night that I could have spent dancing and drinking and eating bags of tacos from the Del Taco drive through but instead I spent on the couch reading a single page of some women’s magazine over and over until I finally digested whatever bullshit they were feeding me about how I should hate my body.

Eating disorder therapy is not all tears and confessing that your high school dance teacher made you keep a food journal (side note: in retrospect, that was really fucked up). It’s kind of fun, trying to regain 20 pounds. It’s fun to say that going out and drinking beer and eating pizza is your therapy. It’s fun to down a whole plate of enchiladas like you’re a fifteen-year-old boy and feel the warm sensation of fullness spreading through your veins in a way that you haven’t felt in months.

It’s not fun to feel yourself seized by a wave of panic induced by a plate of enchiladas. In fact, it’s downright embarrassing to be 25 years old, gainfully employed, ostensibly an independent adult, and to be brought to your knees by a plate of enchiladas. It’s not fun to buy a new pair of jeans every month because you’re blowing up like a hot air balloon. I could probably buy stock in the Gap right now. I would happily join a nudist colony right now if it meant that I never had to put on another pair of jeans and feel the button crushing into my fat belly every minute of every day, reminding me that I am no longer thin and glamorous.

I’ll be 26 in three months. I’ve remembered mostly how to eat on my own again. I am reading voraciously, catching up on all the books I missed while I was underwater. I have a new boyfriend who puts his hand on my belly sometimes like it’s something precious. He looks at me like a girl in a Renaissance painting and I forget for a moment that I’m covered in fat, that my lucky rib is buried again, that I’m not virtuous or special. I go out dancing and I eat pizza and I drink beer, and when I do, I look at everyone in their sweaty, imperfect bodies, girls with mascara running down their cheeks in cheap faux-silk tops from Express and boys who are finally outgrowing their teenage metabolisms and I feel—well, not lucky, yet, but at the very least, at home in the world again. Alive, again, at last.

elf on the shelf

“Cutie!!!”

I brace myself. She is coming.

She comes every day at lunchtime, diving on me like a jackal on a rabbit. I hear her battle cry and know that it’s only a matter of seconds until her arms close around me, lifting my defenseless body into the air and breathing her Lunchable breath into my ears.

I run through my options. I know how this works: if I scream, or I kick her in the shins, she’ll claim that she was just being “nice” and somehow I’ll be the one who loses her gold star for the day even though I wasn’t the one running around assaulting my classmates. She is one of those pretty Mormon girls that all the teachers loved, and I am the freaky little kid who I suspect the teachers view as most likely to blow up the school one day, and in short, that means that I will definitely get blamed for it somehow. (You know the Sunday school scene in A Prayer for Own Meany? It’s like that. Minus the nuns.)

So I tense up my entire body and prepare for the assault. She grabs me, spins me around, shrieks in my ears, and drops me. Some days, she pinches my nose or my cheeks, as if she were my grandmother (who at four foot nine would never do me such a grave indignity). “Cutie,” she says over and over again. I am never able to discern her motivation for carrying out this ritual day in and day out. I understand that height-wise, I’m the closest thing our second-grade class has to an infant, and maybe she’s just practicing in case one of her fifteen Mormon babies turns out ugly and she has to force herself to call it cute. (Meanwhile, I’m here wishing I could just eat my peanut butter crackers alone in the corner in peace like I do every other lunch day. Don’t other weird kids get to be home-schooled?)

I am small. I have almost always been small. I combed through my medical records a few years ago and read with mild interest as I fell further and further down the percentile charts that track childhood growth. Nobody has ever been particularly concerned about how small I am—my mother, after all, is all of five feet and for a Wilson girl to surpass that is an achievement—but people often feel compelled to comment on it. More specifically, dudes like to comment on it. Women understand how I can, in fact, be both five foot two and a fully functional human, while men seem to be trying to vet that I’m not lying about being over eighteen.

Sometimes, these comments are a clear and harmless expression of surprise that evolution hasn’t done away with my kind yet. Other times, I get the sense that I’m being politely warned that I am likely to be murdered posthaste.

  • The one who told me that I was “beautiful… like a porcelain doll”: Murderer. Wanted to stuff my body and add it to his Madame Alexander collection.
  • The one who nicknamed me “little girl”: Murderer, inspired by some combination of the Brothers Grimm and Hannibal Lecter. I suspect that upon his death, his journals will reveal detailed plans to chop me up and store me in a mini-fridge.
  • The ones who poke and prod at various parts of my body—my calves, my waist, even my ears—and say, “You’re so tiny”: Not murderers. Just genuinely fascinated with the idea that natural selection hasn’t done away with a nose as small as mine. (“Can you even smell?”)

I can’t say I’m totally averse to this line of conversation. As a former ballet dancer, it’s refreshing to be called small or tiny, considering that I had one teacher who used to come up to us at the barre, poke us in the belly, and ask if we had eaten a watermelon for breakfast. (There’s nothing like the trauma of thirteen years in ballet to make a girl seek self-actualization with questionable life partners!)

Really, for the most part, I like being small. Airplane seats are almost comfortable. I can tunnel through a crowd without making awkward eye contact with any of the people that I bodily shove out of the way. I can always fold myself into that three-quarters of a seat next to the dude on the Metro who is airing out his balls.

But there are myriad indignities associated with being small. I often thank the universe that I was born before they started telling parents to keep their kid in a carseat until they were like four foot eight, because the eighth grade was embarrassing enough as it is. At the airport a few years ago, the guy running the backscatter machine asked me if I was old enough to go through. “How old is old enough?” I asked. “Twelve,” he said.

Like my second-grade classmate, men also like to pick me up. As in, when I run into a dude that I haven’t seen in a while and he greets me with a hug, maybe two times out of ten, he will pick me up. I understand that this is out of both love and a desire to demonstrate your masculinity, but 1) I am a human, not a kettlebell and 2) I weigh like a hundred and ten pounds. Call me back when you can bench-press The Rock.

Clothiers seem to be under the impression that I should have four more inches of skin between my shoulders and my boobs. Consequently, every shirt I buy that isn’t designed explicitly for petite women is inappropriately low-cut. I live in constant fear of nip slips. More specifically, I live in constant fear of realizing halfway through a conversation with one of my many male coworkers that my shirt has slipped far enough that my bra is exposed and of course it’s the leopard-print one.

At the ATM or to punch in a code to get into a garage, I can’t just stick my arm out the window like a normal person. Rather, I have to wrest my body halfway out the window and if even then I can’t reach the keypad, I have to open the door and sort of drape myself across the window while the line backs up behind me and all the normal people wonder why they gave a pygmy a driver’s license. I am waiting for this to appear in a Final Destination plotline where some poor sap has their skin burned off in a tanning accident only to be chopped in half by a rogue power window trying to get cash out at her local Wells Fargo.

I came across my second-grade tormenter recently on Facebook. She has a kid now. I imagine if that thing’s internal organs haven’t been squeezed out of its eyeballs yet, it’s probably dressed up in a lot of ruffles and getting posed next to a chalkboard every morning detailing how many hours old it is. Best of luck, kid. May you make it to five foot three unscathed.

gunner

I signed up for a French class a couple weeks ago. It’s the first time I’ve set foot in a classroom since I graduated from college some three and a half (!) years ago. It’s entirely for fun—not for work, not even for a grade—and yet every time I enter the classroom, I feel myself transmogrify into a vicious hand-raiser of the Hermione Granger variety. Long-buried instincts from my school days gurgle up from some corner of my belly into my throat and before I know it, I’m practically jumping out of my seat to demonstrate to the class that not only do I know that the French word for “hotel” is, uh, “hotel,” but I knew it BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE.

Ladies and gentlemen, I must confess: I am what they call a gunner.

I learned this term from my many friends who have attended law school. They tell me that there’s one particularly obnoxious breed of law student defined best as “that asshole who shows up having read not just ALL the required reading but the supplemental reading and also some additional research by a scholar that has influenced the professor’s career, which they knew to be true because they read all the professor’s books, too.”

The gunner accrues this knowledge not to further their education, but to demonstrate at every turn that they are smarter than you and to ensure that when you answer the professor’s questions incorrectly, they can chime in with the right answer and probably some supplemental trivia about habeas corpus or torts or whatever it is you law school people learn.

Here’s the thing: in an academic setting, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been utterly incapable of conducting myself like anything but the nerd equivalent of a WWE wrestler. I get that what you’re supposed to do is sit quietly, absorb information, and provide input when called upon. What I don’t get is how anybody manages to do that.

I’m utterly incapable of silence to the point that even now, in my current position in business development at a software company with a lot of smart people who have more useful skills than I do like writing JavaScript and blowing their noses effectively, I have to bring notepads to meetings so I can write down all the things that it would be inappropriate or obnoxious for me to say out loud. “You just… like to be heard,” my manager said to me once during a performance review. It was a more tactful phrasing than I deserved of the appropriate suggestion that I can it every once in a while.

This need to be heard—this need to prove that I have something to contribute and that I’m totally worthy of being wherever I am, whether it’s in a classroom or a business meeting or on Earth in general—is something that’s plagued me for as long as I can remember.

I have referenced previously on this blog that I was, shall we say, unpopular as a child. I like to explain this away by saying that nobody liked me because I was smart and bad at sports, but I’ve neglected a central truth of my childhood personality: I was… a little obnoxious. Actually, if we’re being perfectly honest, I was kind of an asshole.

To clarify, this wasn’t a permanent condition. I was often quite pleasant, especially when I was tucked into some corner engrossed in a book or otherwise occupied. Really, when I wasn’t trying to engage with other humans, I was a pretty great kid. I drew stacks of pictures and wrote stories and poems and built houses out of Popsicle sticks and lived fairly quietly on a diet of dry cereal and Cran-Apple juice. Stick me in a classroom setting, though, surrounded by a bunch of jerks who came out of the womb knowing how to kick a soccer ball in a straight line, and my inner gunner flew free like a butterfly. Or, more accurately, like a cicada. A really, really persistent cicada.

This is what I was like as a baby gunner: I devoured books at the same rate that I devoured dry cereal and consequently had a killer vocabulary for an eight-year-old. The year we competed to see who could recite their times tables the fastest, I spent the preceding week stalking back and forth down the halls of my house, furiously whispering “ONETIMESONEISONE-ONETIMESTWOISTWO-ONETIMESTHREEISTHREE” until I could do it without taking more than a couple breaths. Then every day at school, when the other kids tripped over words they didn’t recognize as we read aloud Round Robin-style, I corrected them. (No. Seriously. I was an asshole.) I Hermione Granger’ed my way into answering every question the teacher asked: hand up, waving frenetically, frantic to demonstrate to everybody else that even if they knew it too I knew it first and therefore better. When the teacher didn’t call on me, I would purse my lips and shift my weight petulantly onto one arm in my desk, staring pointedly at whatever sucker got to answer the question instead of me.

I wasn’t good at much when I was a kid, and so I decided that being smart would be my domain. The girls in my classes were always athletic and pretty and confident and I was uncoordinated and geeky and constantly uncomfortable. I wanted desperately to prove that I, too, was good at something even though it wasn’t soccer or dodgeball or the kind of code-word-and-inside-joke-laden interaction that is so common among eight-year-old girls. It’s unsurprising that the other kids responded by concluding that I was annoying. Frankly, I’m surprised I never got trash canned. I probably deserved it.

Thankfully, it didn’t take me long to connect the fact that I had no friends with my behavior in class. After a couple of years of tortured journal entries—“Everyone thinks I’m annoying and I know I’m annoying, but I don’t know how to stop being annoying”—it occurred to me that it would probably behoove me to stop constantly insinuating that I thought everyone around me was an idiot.

It was around this time that the other baby gunners started to come out of the nerd woodwork. We were finally released from the torture that was playing foursquare during recess and instead, we passed the time comparing scores on math tests and vocabulary quizzes and competing for the high score on the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. (Does anyone else remember this game? I liked it at least as much as the Oregon Trail. Better, maybe, because you never died of cholera. Or while fording the river.)

I passed several years blissfully competing with my fellow nerds for the top prize at the spelling bee and a speaking slot at graduation. We spent classes trying halfheartedly to outgun one another, growing more comfortable with ourselves. Basking in the knowledge that there was still an unwashed mass of Prettier and Better at Ballet/Soccer/Tuba/Mime but Not Nearly As Smart suffering beneath in some English class not designated as Advanced Placement, we began to understand the joy in learning for the sake of learning.

Then I went to college and the bottom dropped out. I was now not only less pretty and less good at ballet than everyone else, but they were also smarter than me, and some of them had even written “theses” in high school, and also a lot of them were not virgins. I had nothing to flaunt because I didn’t even understand half the words they were throwing around in class—dichotomy? Heteronormative? Semiotics?—let alone know how to use them in a sentence. One time, I made the mistake of using the term “symbolism” in a 200-level American literature class and the professor gave me such a dirty look that you’d think I was dropping racial epithets in an Africana Studies class. I shut up after that.

After a while, I picked up enough of the vocabulary to understand that nobody knew what they were talking about and to string together enough bullshit literary theory terms to sound as pretentious as the Mason jar-toting, keffiyah-sporting hipster on either side of me. By that point, though, I had come to terms with the fact that I would never be Phi Beta Kappa. Being smart at Vassar wasn’t my domain, and I lost interest in “gunning.” I felt like a much more tolerable human being: quieter, if you didn’t count every second that I wasn’t in class; more social; more in tune with… okay, yes, I drank a lot of cheap wine and sang a cappella. “Tolerable” might be a stretch.

But by all accounts, I was—am—less obnoxious than I was when I was eight. I recognize that I am never the smartest person in the room, and even if I’ve read the most books or can spout off the most state capitals, there’s probably someone else there who should be saved from the coming apocalypse before me. My gunner instincts lie dormant except for those occasions in business meetings where I feel the need to prove that even though I look like I’m twelve, I’m still totally competent and know many words with lots of syllables and would own many leather-bound books if Anne Tyler would only release a special series of her collected works bound in leather. (People tolerate this because I’m still less obnoxious than people who say things like “close the loop” and “synergize.” You can get away with a lot of behavior in a business setting as long as you never say the word “synergize.”)

I try my best to stay away from trivia leagues, where I fear that my inner gunner would flow free and wild and I would be shunned by the rest of the mid-twentysomethings and forced to live out the rest of my days eating peanut butter and jelly in the toilet stall without even a half-price Yuengling to keep me company. I keep my hands down and my thoughts on social media where the universe can choose to listen to me or not, unlike the elementary school classroom, where “Dana Cass never shuts up and if I spend another hour in class listening to her screech her times tables I’m going to off myself” was not an acceptable excuse for an absence.

But this French class? This French class might out me. If you see a bunch of yuppies chasing one of their own down Embassy Row, hurling workbooks at her as she seeks asylum with the Kazakhs, you’ll know what happened: I just had to prove that I could count to “quarante-quatre” the fastest.

baby’s first breakup

prologue

It begins with a breakup that takes all night.

Is this normal? I’m not sure. This is my first breakup, because this was my first relationship (sorry, high school boyfriends, but you don’t count. I still treasure the poems I wrote about missing looking at your dirty Converse sneakers under the table during biology class), and I was under the impression that it would be a lot cleaner than this.

But it’s not, and we’re in a hotel room in Palo Alto, and it’s midnight and there is nowhere I can possibly go and nothing I can possibly do but stay here and listen to my sandcastle of a long-distance romance—with a man nine years my senior and polar opposite from me in every way including, it’s becoming apparent, those that mattered (the literary merits of Haruki Murakami, bacon as a food group, the frequency with which one should sharpen one’s knives)—crumble.

i. the tracks of my tears

The sun rises the next morning. There is nothing to do but shower and venture back into the world of the living, and so I do, fumbling as I wedge my contact lenses in between my swollen eyelids and painting my dark circles over with a heavy coat of foundation.

I am not one to wallow in my bed. I got that out of my system years ago, during my third, wasted semester of college, and now come hell or high water or surprise all-night breakup session I will participate in the world, puffy eyes be damned.

And so this morning, when the sun rises and I confirm that this was not a dream, I get out of bed and I shower and I grit my teeth and I embark on what I have come to think of as “the North American crying tour.” I must make it through one day at the office and one overnight flight from San Francisco to Atlanta and just to hammer one last nail in the coffin housing my dignity, a commuter flight from Atlanta to D.C. at 7 A.M. It occurs to me that someday I am going to find this funny. It might even be funny already.

I make it through a solid three hours, a testament to the power of business email to dull anyone’s senses to the point that they can no longer experience normal human feelings. At 11:30 A.M., I run out of email, and I cry in the basement of my software company’s hip Palo Alto headquarters, face first in a synthetic leather IKEA couch next to a foosball table. I pray that none of the engineers decide that they need an 11:30 A.M. foosball tournament to get their creative juices flowing. I’m not sure they understand crying. (This is a generalization, I know. Engineers have feelings too. You’ve seen the iPhone 6 lines.)

At 5:30, I go to SoulCycle. At 6:07 or so, I begin to cry in SoulCycle. I continue to cry in SoulCycle, in part because I’m sad and the instructor keeps shouting inspirational things about how I’m a warrior and a rockstar but really I’m just a leaky faucet, and in part because I am now one of those assholes who writes essays for SoulCycle’s Twitter feed about how SoulCycle transformed them from a leaky faucet into a functional human.

I leave SoulCycle with an endorphin high that propels me through one last tortured farewell with him in an airless hotel room and to the airport and through the boarding process and into a seat and through the air until we get somewhere over the mountains, when it occurs to me that I haven’t slept in a day and a half and that the relationship I spent the past year of my life cultivating has crumbled like a sandcastle and also that the music on my iPod is all from high school and not only is it depressing, but it’s also kind of embarrassingly bad. I take another Xanax and turn up the Dashboard Confessional because I’m on an airplane and there’s really nothing else I can do about my life at this point.

I land in Atlanta and stagger toward the gate where I will board a commuter jet to my final destination. The boarding area is full of fat white men in business suits who look like they are off to D.C. to lobby for the NRA. I look haggard. Red-eye flights are cruel. Red-eye flights are crueler when you’ve spent most of the previous day wallowing in your own angst. I feel like the Michelin Man.

The airplane to D.C. is smaller than I like and freezing. I grab a blanket that some previous passenger has abandoned on a seat, probably after contaminating it with Ebola, and wrap myself in it. I curl into my window seat. I thank Airplane Jesus for granting me this window seat. I begin to cry silently into my neck pillow. It occurs to me that this may be my nadir: wrapped like a burrito in a stolen blanket that is probably contaminated with, at the very least, the common cold, on a commuter flight to D.C. surrounded by fat white men in business suits, sobbing like the world has ended with my face molded involuntarily into my best “I Love Lucy” crying face.

The woman next to me orders a bottle of wine and drinks the whole thing between 7:20 and 8:00 A.M. I want to hug her. I don’t, but I want to.

My girlfriends, who are the greatest girlfriends in the history of the universe (more on this later), pick me up at the airport with a handmade sign. I cry at the airport. I walk into my apartment and I drop my suitcase and I make a Family Circus-esque beeline through the 600 square feet, scouring every inch for signs of him and cramming them into the bottom of my storage chest.

I haven’t slept in two days but the thought of sleeping is daunting. Instead, I make an appointment with the eye doctor. I send my closest coworker an email to tell her that I’m not functional today and that I’ll be back in the office tomorrow. I put on my bikini and I climb eight floors to the roof of my high-rise building and I bake in the sun until my eyes feel dry again.

ii. a little help from my friends

My friend J____ takes the bus down from New York City to spend the weekend with me. (See “the greatest girlfriends in the history of the universe,” above.) We drink, and drink some more, and we go to a pizza restaurant with my sister and her husband and the four of us order a quattro carne pizza to celebrate the fact that I am no longer dating a vegetarian.

“Do not talk to him,” says K____, after I confess that he is still contacting me, asking after my well-being. I waffle and mumble about how I feel like I have to, because I’m worried about him, and this and that and every excuse I can think of to cling to the last grains of sand before they wash into the ocean.

She is right, of course. She always is. Several days later, I text her in a panic because it’s worse than it would have been if I had just quit talking to him. She talks me down from the precipice and doesn’t even say “I told you so.” I make a vow to myself to always listen to K____ because she is always right and if I take her advice, I will be more okay than I would be otherwise.

“Time and distance,” she says, again and again. I write it in my journal. I repeat it to myself. Time and distance. Time and distance.

“I don’t know how many more breakups I have in me,” says A____ ruefully. We are discussing how very sad breakups are, and how surprised I was by this fact. I think back on how much of an uncaring asshole I must have been to my friends when they were going through breakups in the past. I expect that the next time someone gets dumped, I will show up on their doorstep with chocolates and insist on petting them and pouring wine down their throats until they politely ask me to leave.

iii. the sound of silence

What happens next is this: the pit of panic that sits like a walnut in my chest, knocking occasionally to say “hello” and to remind me that it exists, is knocked loose. It rockets around my insides like a pinball, rendering me helpless in the face of the crazy that I’m usually capable of tamping down enough to function. I’m not sure what this says about what I was doing with my feelings while I was building the sandcastle that was my relationship.

I do an excellent job at acting like a functional human being. I feel slightly bitter that my coworkers don’t know how hard I’m working at being functional. I consider mailing them physical copies of documents covered with the stains of my tears, but this seems excessive. When I’m not hiding in the corner of my office crying, I am aggressively cheerful. People ask how I’m doing and I shriek “FINE!”, which seems like a fairly obvious signal to them that either I’m not fine or I’ve discovered meth (which is probably a distinct subcategory of “not fine,” now that I think about it, but fortunately for everyone involved, I’m not cool enough to know where to get meth).

My officemate is on vacation for the week. This is both a blessing and a curse. A curse, mostly, because she’s a comforting presence and without another human in the office, I’m free to listen to Taylor Swift without headphones, which is healthy for no one. A blessing, though, because there’s something kind of delicious about shutting the office door, curling up in a ball in the corner, and crying into my chest. It’s kind of like when I say I’m working from home and I’m actually on the roof deck checking my email on my phone. Only soggier.

I begin to feel aggressively lonely. I feel lonely in a way that is unfamiliar to me, a sworn and avowed curmudgeon who typically prefers a book for company. I spend a Saturday afternoon at brunch with friends and go home to my empty apartment and sit in the dark with my panic. It’s bewildering, because two weeks ago when I was in a long-distance relationship and I never saw him anyway, I was perfectly content to spend a Saturday night with no plans taking myself on a date to the movies or devouring a novel at the Barnes & Noble down the street.

I log onto Facebook and watch a video of my high school classmate proposing to his girlfriend at Disneyland.

I fear that when the world spots me alone, now, they’ll know that I failed at sustaining a relationship, that I’ve failed at sustaining many relationships, that I am not actively choosing to be alone the way I used to but rather I have been left alone. This is the walnut of crazy zinging its way into my brain. When the rational part of my brain resurfaces, I am able to remind myself that the relationship failed because we were not the right people for one another.

The rational part of my brain seems to surface more and more infrequently. I feel like I am scuba diving without the appropriate gear.

I need to be constantly entertained. I fly to Washington to visit my parents for a fortuitously timed vacation and spend ten days trotting after my mother to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the nursing home to visit Grandma and and Pilates and the hairdresser, anything to give me something to do with my brain other than think about how aggressively sad and lonely I am right now. (I’m not sure that my poor mother knew she’d need to expend as much energy taking care of me on this visit as she had to when I was three. Next time I visit, I expect to find that she’s hired me a babysitter. In my defense, I no longer need my diaper changed, and I am capable of making my own breakfast that doesn’t involve eating poisonous mushrooms off of the lawn, to name some of my primary failings as a three-year-old.)

I watch the clock tick down to my inevitable return to D.C. and I think about sitting alone in my apartment and I begin to panic again. When I resurface, I remember how much I like to spend time alone and that I spend plenty of time in the company of others and that it’s absurd to expect that life is always going to be easy and that sometimes I am going to be underwater without the appropriate scuba equipment and that this is not a permanent condition. Time and distance. Time and distance. Time and distance.

iv. love is a battlefield

I begin to think in really, really bad metaphors. Worse than the scuba diving metaphor.

I feel like a jellyfish.

I feel like a leaky faucet.

I feel like a used Kleenex. No, that one’s kind of gross. I feel like a wrung-out washcloth.

I feel like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, cut a six-inch valley in the middle of my soul. Wait, that one’s kind of good. Oh, that’s because Springsteen wrote it. Dammit.

I feel like a wrung-out washcloth.

v. don’t think twice, it’s alright

I begin to think about the exciting things I can do when I’m over him. I calculate that this will be true after two things happen: 1) My criteria for new boyfriends does not consist of “a curmudgeonly vegetarian in his mid-thirties who likes German philosophy and runs marathons and likes to play Leonard Cohen songs on his guitar” and 2) my criteria for new boyfriends also does not consist of “a barely legal ginger who subsists entirely on beef jerky and listens to Nickelback.”

I count myself lucky that I don’t believe in the notion that there’s only one person out there for me. Like, it sucks to get dumped, but it must suck A LOT WORSE when you think you found #TheOne and then they move on without you. Also, it must suck A LOT to break up with someone who you’ve been dating for longer than a year. And divorce must just literally be the worst thing in the universe. Except for getting widowed. Oh my God, everything is more terrible than this and I will probably be over it after my next case of the hiccups.

In the grand scheme of breakups, this one is not actually that bad. The panic walnut is bad, but the breakup itself is not bad. I envision us having a civil conversation several months from now. I recognize that it is probably for the best that our relationship ended when it did not only because it wasn’t, like, #MeantToBe and also because I was apparently incredibly emotionally constipated and I need to spend a lot of quality time navel-gazing and figuring out why I’m such a nutcase, and then maybe I need to become a missionary and do some things that don’t involve thinking about myself and crying into my pillowcase.

And so here I am today, three weeks out, bobbing like an under-equipped scuba diver in the toxic and beautiful ocean that is love and relationships and friendship and heartbreak and really bad metaphors. I feel like a real adult now: like I can go write a terrible first novel featuring a thinly veiled version of him in a supporting role and throw it out, like in a while I can go meet someone new and we can laugh about the time that I got dumped in a hotel room in Palo Alto and I had to wrap myself like a burrito in a stolen blanket and cry into my neck pillow and all the fat white businessmen on the plane must have thought that I was a tragic, raving lunatic. And I was a tragic, raving lunatic, and I think that for a few more weeks—maybe even a few more months—I might still be a tragic, raving lunatic, but that’s okay because we are all tragic, raving lunatics bobbing in the bad metaphor ocean and I don’t really think there’s much we can do about that.

idiot box

I was five before anyone noticed that I couldn’t see past my own feet. In hindsight, much of my peculiar behavior up to that point could be chalked up to my near-blindness: the way I stared at the ground when I walked and held books inches from my face to read them and how I called pennies “drops of money.” (At the same time, no near-disability could explain away my decision to rename myself “Vicki Pat Rice” or the solid year I spent refusing to wear any article of clothing that wasn’t a bathing suit. I was both blind and weird, characteristics that have persisted into adulthood.)

More than anything, though, my childhood blindness explained my aversion to movies. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would voluntarily spend hours in a darkened room staring at blobs on a screen. (The glaring exception here was “101 Dalmatians,” which I begged my parents to borrow from the library every week. I guess I could handle movies whose primary tropes involved 101 characters that all looked alike.) I fell in love with books instead—probably because I could hold them inches from my face without anyone looking at me sideways—and left movies and, by extension, television, to the more sighted masses.

Two decades later, while I catch the occasional movie, I still haven’t developed an interest in television. Unfortunately, this is much more detrimental to my participation in the world at large than it was when I was a blind four-year-old. It was one thing when I was fourteen and I didn’t watch “One Tree Hill,” but with the advent of Netflix, DVR, and binge watching, the world cannot conceive of a pop culture-literate twentysomething who, God forbid, has never sat down for eight hours to watch an entire season of “House of Cards.”

I consume television the way I consume, say, classical music. I might leave it on in the background, and there are a a few gems that I treasure, but I don’t actively seek it out. I wouldn’t pay for a concert ticket… although I should confess here that I pay the extra $30 or so for cable television on top of my Internet for the sole purpose of leaving Food Network on at an indecipherably low volume because the dulcet tones of Guy Fieri are an excellent substitute for a roommate, one that doesn’t forget to change the dish towel. Regardless, I know about as much about “Mad Men” as I do about Wagner, and I have about as much desire to watch every episode of it as I do to listen to the entire Ring cycle. (Sorry, Jon.)

I frequently engage in some variation of the following conversation. Someone asks, “Do you watch ‘Orange is the New Black?’” And I say, “No, I actually don’t watch a lot of TV.” And they hear, apparently, “No, I actually don’t have Netflix.” And then they ask, “Did you see the ‘Breaking Bad’ finale? Will I spoil it if I talk about it?” And I say, “No, I actually don’t watch a lot of TV.” And they think something like, “Oh, it’s too gory for her.” (I watched four episodes, actually, and it was. Also, I got depressed. It sort of reminded me of a grown-up version of something that might happen in a Sammy Keyes mystery novel, and that was depressing, and then I got distracted by the fact that I don’t have any Wendelin Van Draanen books on my shelf and high-tailed it to Amazon to see if she’s written anything for adults that I might be able to read in public without losing my dignity.)

The conversation doesn’t end there, though. You can explain away my aversion to most popular TV shows: “Game of Thrones” is too bloody or too fantastical, “House of Cards” and “Scandal” too political, “Mad Men” too misogynistic. But where I finally have to confess that I’m a cultural illiterate who lives under a rock is when someone drops the trump card: “Downton Abbey.” I have no excuse not to watch “Downton Abbey.” I’m a liberal who thinks that PBS is an appropriate way for the government to allocate Mitt Romney’s tax dollars. I understand and appreciate British humor. I can make educated comments about how classism is alive and well in modern society, and I read long books of my own volition, and also, I like castles. When I tell people that I don’t watch “Downton Abbey,” they think that I’m referring to the last episode, or that I misheard them. “You don’t watch ‘Downton?’” they ask, bewildered. “But… you’re…” And all I can do is nod sadly. I was born to watch “Downton Abbey.” But I don’t.

It’s not because I think television is lowbrow. It’s because I think it’s boring. It’s because of what drew me to books as a half-blind four-year-old. There’s no way to put this in words that aren’t painfully hokey, but it’s because books offer me an outlet for my imagination that television and movies can never provide. When I read, I am engrossed in the prose and in conjuring the images that the author has put forth for me to engage with. Conversely, when I watch television, I feel like a passive consumer of images that I have no agency to interpret, and so I’m not as engaged. I’m aware of my surroundings the way I never am with a book that’s even remotely engrossing.

I get this sensation with books as lowbrow as mass market young adult fiction and as highbrow as 500-page novels by Hungarian nihilists with an aversion to traditional punctuation. I spent a good portion of last summer stretched out on a lounge chair by the pool on my apartment building’s rooftop deck reading Anna Karenina, because what better way to escape the D.C. swamp than to pretend you’re throwing yourself on the train tracks in a frigid Moscow winter? (One could argue that one could more effectively escape the D.C. swamp by spending a few quality hours in a dark air-conditioned room. Like the ones where they show movies. Whatever.)

Maybe it’s because I was half-blind when I was little and I missed out on developing some kind of visual entertainment appreciation function. Maybe it’s because television is actually boring and I’m the only person in the universe who is enlightened enough to realize otherwise. (You know that episode of “How I Met Your Mother” where the gang makes fart noises every time Ted talks because he’s a pretentious asshole? 1) Good pop culture reference, self. See? I’m not totally inept. 2) This would be an appropriate time to employ that device.) The reason is unimportant, but the fact remains: one of the many insurmountable obstacles that prevent me from ever achieving normalcy is that the only thing I do with my television is fantasize about marrying Alex Trebek.

whenever this world is cruel to me

When I was thirteen, my best friend found a new best friend. After five blissful years connected at the hip—it was a rare weekend that didn’t start at one of our houses and end at the other’s—it had become clear that we were no longer appendages of the same person. It was painful, to be sure, but it was also a relief to withdraw, for the first time, into myself. I began to discover the pleasure of spending weekends alone.

I haven’t had a best friend since. I refer to a rotating cast of people in my life as my best friends—I’ve got my best friend who goes to law school, my best friend who lives in Mississippi, my best friend who is training to become a midwife, my best friend the singer-songwriter—but none of them would rank me their first call in prison or their number one on speed dial.

And God forbid I ever become one of those people who calls their mom their best friend. I love my mom. She’s an excellent mom and one of the two people I ever speak to on the telephone (the other is my dad, who is similarly excellent and also not my best friend). But I think that the fact that at various times in the past, she’s grounded me, forced me to pay her money for complaining, and given me a piece of packaged American cheese that I was to eat before I would be allowed to play with my dolls, would preclude her from being my best friend. (Also, I’m just saying, a best friend would never ground me for something silly like getting caught drinking underage at a roller disco-themed party in someone’s backyard.)

On that note, don’t even get me started on people who call their significant others their best friends. My feelings on coupling haven’t changed since I entered into a relationship. I still go to restaurants alone and I still go to 6 A.M. spin class alone and my boyfriend is NOT my best friend because Christ, having someone all up on you while you’re trying to sleep is enough of an intrusion on your personal space without having to classify them as your number one brunch date, too.

Generally, I’m okay with this, but as a particularly self-conscious member of the Facebook generation, being a loner can start to feel like being a loser. “I still get irrationally angry and hurt whenever a close friend calls someone her best friend,” a friend of mine admitted recently. “Because then I am not the best friend. And then I want to crawl away in defeat.” She and I are engaged in a similar mental battle: I don’t want to be someone’s best friend, but to acknowledge that I’m not and never will be the best is… well, it’s not my style.

The problem is that I’m not the “best friend” type. It’s not a role I, as a loner and a fairly selfish person, play comfortably. Much of what the Internet tells me I should do for a best friend—or that a best friend should do for me—are tasks that frankly, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of on my own. (Moreover, some of this is downright unhygienic. The day I let anyone else use my toothbrush is a cold day in hell indeed.) Contemporary best friendship is characterized as a competition: who does the most of your bidding? Who listens to the most of your whining? Personally, I prefer to share the wealth of what I’m unable to shoulder on my own among all the people who have some modicum of willingness to aid me in my incompetence.

Most of the time, though, I prefer to take care of myself. Case in point: the only time I ever had to take Plan B, I happened to be in Las Vegas without my car, and it was the height of summer and I had to walk to not one but TWO drugstores in the hundred-degree sunshine to ultimately locate it at a pharmacy in the middle of a retirement community, where the unfairly attractive pharmacist felt the need to repeat my request audibly in front of a lot of obviously judgmental old biddies. That was a character-building experience that I wouldn’t have undergone had I subjected myself to the indignities of best friendship as delineated by Thought Catalog. I also assemble a lot of furniture on my own because I’m not willing to call anyone else to help me. (This has the unfortunate consequence of my apartment being somewhat of a structural hazard. I should probably rethink this particular commitment to independence.)

Much more than best friendship, I value meaningful social interaction with whoever is in my life at a given moment. Little pleases me more than conversation over a languorous meal with someone who lives an interesting life, whether that’s my boyfriend or one of my rotating cast of best friends or someone I haven’t seen in months or years. To me, friendship is about sharing the human experience, not about competing to be somebody’s one and only by—by what, precisely? By letting them call you at four in the morning because they can’t handle their own shit? When I’m a mess, I prostrate myself on the floor and cry. The floor is my best friend. The floor doesn’t let me down and I don’t have to hold the floor’s hair back when it drinks too much or help the floor select matches on Tinder.

I am lucky to have a rich and wide social life that spans multiple states and even continents. I have friends who provide me with invaluable social and emotional support and a boyfriend who fixes my poorly built furniture and a mother who had the good sense to ground me when I got caught drinking underage at a roller disco-themed party in a stranger’s backyard. But I am too selfish to commit myself to being anyone’s best friend. Does this make me inferior to the kind of people who are selfless and kind and willing to pick up the phone at four in the morning to lend balm to someone in need? Maybe, but I like the way I live and I like the way I interact with people. I’ve been accused of holding people at arm’s length and perhaps that’s true, but if you ask me, arm’s length is a perfectly comfortable and fulfilling distance.

hoarders

I am desperately afraid of losing my memory. Sometime last year, I read neuroscientist Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice, about a woman’s descent into Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t the finest piece of literature I’ve ever read, but I read it in a single sitting and sobbed for HOURS. To lose your memory seems, to me, akin to losing your sense of self, your purpose, the ability to comprehend and interpret the world that you’ve painstakingly refined since birth.

My friends and I spend a good deal of time reminiscing. I mean, I know everyone does this, but I’m not sure that anyone is as hardcore about it as we are. We can pass hours reconstructing the events of a single night in gory detail, prompted by the memory of an object or a moment–it goes something like this:

“I would really kill for one of R.M.’s brownies right now.”

“Do you remember the last time we had them? It was the night we crashed the end of a cast party for a show we weren’t in–”

“OMG, I fucking HATED that show. J.W. was the director–you remember J.W.? She was psycho–”

“Wait, but wasn’t that the show where B.P. was shirtless?”

“When was B.P. NOT shirtless? Whatever. But remember, we were at the cast party, and we had run into J.F. in the College Center on the way–”

Here J.F. himself interrupts. “I still can’t believe you didn’t make me come with you! I was in the midst of making a VERY BAD life decision!”

“Um, YEAH, you were. But seriously, J.F., when were you not in the midst of making a very bad life decision?”

He sighs.

“Anyway, it was like, March, and it was still super cold, and we weren’t even drunk but we decided to go to this party anyway because R.M. always made really delicious food for parties, and we ran into J.F. on his way to make a really bad life decision, and B.P. had been shirtless, and then we ate brownies. Wait, but what else had we done that night? Why weren’t we with A.S. and M.K.?”

We have memories like elephants. We are a herd of memory-hoarding elephants. It’s silly how much we love to do this, and perhaps a sign that we should be doing more constructive activities as a group, but we’re memory-hoarding elephantine storytellers and maybe we’re writing the sequel to “How I Met Your Mother” and it’s what we like to do. We like to hoard our memories, use them to build stories, marvel at the absurdity of life. 

I hoard memories, for certain. In my living room, I have an ottoman that opens to reveal boxes of journals, photographs, show reviews clipped from newspapers, notes, letters, cards. That’s a lot of paper with a lot of memories that I don’t need to hold in my brain.* And perhaps in decades when I’m in the throes of dementia, I’ll sit for hours digging through my vast stores of paper, unfolding the notes that the cute boy in freshman geometry used to write me back in 2003, tracing my tenuous path to adulthood through a pile of spiral notebooks, aching for the details–details that I could never capture in words or photos or origami or Crayola marker song lyric collages.

There are no words that can capture the most precious feelings. I don’t know how to write a book that will explain to an elderly, confused version of myself how strangely warm it feels to see someone cry because you’re leaving them or how cold it feels when someone leaves you. All the photographs and programs and ticket stubs can’t encapsulate the ecstasy of being onstage. I can’t write a poem about the spins. 

I cling to the most visceral elements of my memories. What will I do when I can no longer remember the feeling of your hands on my back? When I can’t remember how cold I was that night in October, how I had to put on a bathrobe over my sweatshirt to keep out the chill? When I can’t hear the applause of 1300 people giving a standing ovation in the middle of a high school theatre performance? When I can’t relive the feeling of my stomach dropping as the cops burst into the backyard at our Memorial Day roller disco in 2007? When I can’t see the green paper that I used to write my goodbye letter to our house on Brook Bay eleven years ago?

*Guys, what if I started referring to my brain as my personal virtualized storage solution? I AM THE CLOUD. Only I’m not a particularly non-repudiating solution. I can’t vouch for the integrity of my data.

haterween

I hate Halloween.

Yes, world, I went there. I hate Halloween. I’ve hated Halloween since I was sixteen and my parents and I got food poisoning celebrating my mother’s birthday the night before (never get the chocolate fudge cake at the Cheesecake Factory. Why did we get anything that wasn’t cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory? Why were we at the Cheesecake Factory in the first place? It was probably karmic food poisoning for having poor taste. But I digress) and we spent the whole day, plus a couple days after that, puking our guts out. My first college quasi-relationship–we didn’t have relationships at Vassar; only quasi-relationships and marriages–fell apart during Halloween my freshman year. I spent Halloween evening in my bed in four layers of clothes, shaking. I get cold when things fall apart.

When I was a little girl, Halloween meant my mom making me beautiful costumes that were, in retrospect, totally culturally inappropriate (I was a geisha one year. Give me a break; it was the 90s and we lived in Nevada). It meant tromping the neighborhood with my best friends from down the street, and eating candy for days until I had finished my own bag, then starting in on my sister’s. It was a glorious time and I relish every cavity I’ve had filled since.

I don’t need to wax poetic on college Halloween or postgrad Halloween because I think we’re all well-acquainted with the traditions. You dress in some costume based on your position on the scale of intellectualism (somewhere between “unironic ‘Jersey Shore’ viewer” and “person who drops the number of times they’ve read Infinite Jest in conversation, including ‘one'”). You go to a party with your friends and you cling to your friends the entire time and so does everyone else and nobody makes new friends and you drink themed drinks and someone gets sick and you wake up the next morning with a raging hangover that is ENTIRELY not worth the spectacularly mediocre evening you had.

I hate Halloween now for the same reason that I hate Founder’s Day at Vassar and any other event characterized by crushing peer pressure to HAVE FUN and GO CRAZY otherwise you’re SUPER LAME and KIND OF TRAGIC. It’s no great secret that I’ve downed my fair share of too many tequila shots and that I have a whole slew of embarrassing and potentially incriminating stories from my wild youth. But FACT: not one of those crazy stories is from Halloween or New Year’s or St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras or any other those other holidays where if you aren’t wearing pasties and, like, doing body shots, you’re a loser and you’re never gonna be in any cool Facebook albums. They are all from cast parties. Almost exclusively. (Except for that one time with the Australians, but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so I can’t elaborate.)

I like parties where I know everybody, or have at least identified them as Cute Sound Guy and called them the bullseye on my emotional dartboard. I really hate parties where the sole purpose is to drink until you puke in a houseplant. I like parties where the purpose is to drink while you play word games. I like parties that turn into everyone having intense drunk conversations in various corners. I like parties where you make new friends that aren’t trying to have a CRAZY NIGHT. I find that on holidays where fun is preordained, everyone is trying to have a CRAZY NIGHT, and they’re annoying and too drunk and someone is probably going to pass out and you’ll have to poke them every twenty minutes to make sure they don’t aspirate. Nobody wants to make new friends on CRAZY NIGHTS; they are too busy posing for Facebook photos and drinking the appropriate drinks and fixing their costumes.

I get bored at these kinds of parties. I don’t think it’s very interesting to sit around and watch other people do crazy things, and I’m not really the kind of person to do crazy things myself. Sometimes, when I get sad that I didn’t go to wild parties in high school, I remember that I don’t actually like wild parties. I like drinking too much with people that you can have a great conversation with, especially when you’ve collectively drunk away the fact that you’re all a little socially awkward and inhibited. My favorite nights from the months since I’ve graduated: the night Lauren, Julie, and I killed two pitchers of sangria at Firefly and sang Adele in Julie’s backseat until we were sober enough to drive. The night before the Fourth of July at book collective, talking about everything from philosophy to the company mission to God knows what after the fourth bottle of wine until four in the morning. 3 AM the night before my cohort parted ways after our new hire training in California, sprawled out across beanbags in the office rec room, listening to my coworkers–my new friends–swap stories about life in Afghanistan. Sitting around the coffee table at Jon and Jeannine’s apartment in Sunnyside having meta-conversations about the same conversations we had in college, which were usually deconstructing the nights we couldn’t remember, which were never Halloween.

I like those kinds of nights. They’re still impractical and a respite from the stresses of the real world, but unlike the CRAZY holidays, they’re actually fun. And memorable. Minus the blackouts.

So this year, I bought two bags of Halloween candy at Target to hand out on Halloween. Tonight, while everyone else is at Halloween parties HAVING FUN and GOING CRAZY, I am binging on orange Kit Kats and watching reruns of “How I Met Your Mother” and thinking about how happy I am that I don’t have to clean someone else’s puke off the carpet at a party full of biddies dressed as Sexy Mustard. Also how happy I am that nobody is bleeding all over my kitchen floor because they bit it while drunk-biking across campus in their Sexy Giraffe costume (unrelated: apparently gay men have their own rules for Slutoween).

May I spend all Halloweens in my future like this one; may my weekends be filled with pretentious conversation and nobody puking in a houseplant.

boys don’t make passes…

I believe that the wearing of glasses should be exclusive to nerds. Let me tell you what sparked this audacious statement:

Of late, I have seen many a photo of my elementary and middle school classmates doing their creepy sorority cult poses* and noticed that many of these obnoxiously pretty girls are wearing GLASSES.

When I see Facebook photos of those long-haired, long-legged, perfectly proportionate beauties accessorizing their Herbal Essences commercial-grade locks with a big pair of plastic frames, I am filled with INORDINATE RAGE. If I were to speak my feelings aloud, it would be in a sort of guttural, Exorcist-style grunt: “YOU CAN’T WEAR THOSE.”

They have undergone none of my struggles! They were never caught picking their collective nose in front Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, never to live it down! Nobody ever accused them of reading the dictionary! They were never dubbed “Dorky Dana” during the unfortunate first-day-of-school icebreaker game when you’re supposed to think of an adjective with the same first letter as your first name, only that doesn’t always work because there are no good adjectives that start with D, and someone will inevitably think of an insulting one before you’re even called on to speak! They have never been unceremoniously dumped via text message, nor puked in a parking lot! (I can tell, because they have perfect hair.)

When I was a kid, I was convinced that all of my struggles could be blamed on my glasses. I wished on stars and eyelashes and birthday candles and yellow lights that I would wake up the next morning with perfect vision. I was painfully different from most of my classmates and it drove me insane; I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like them. Sometimes I read my old diaries from elementary school and that, for years, was the underlying theme of my existence: why, but why, am I not like everyone else? Why is my brain so noisy? Why don’t I like the same TV shows and games and magazines as everyone else? I could not relate and in my mind, it was because I wore glasses. They were the physical symbol of my geekdom, my nerdiness, my dweebery, and I was convinced that if I could only cast them aside, I would understand what was so fun about running around and shrieking on the playground, and “Rocko’s Modern Life,” and maybe I would be good at soccer, and everyone would like me and nobody would tell the class that I picked my nose.

I, and my fellow geek-nerd-dweebs, are uniquely qualified to enjoy the fashion benefits of glasses because we suffered the angst of wearing them when they were decidedly uncool.

I am 23 years old and it has been fourteen years since I, um, hypothetically could have been caught picking my nose in front of Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, but actually I just had this really atrocious itch somewhere on my sinus and maybe found some gold along the way, and I’m gonna quit while I’m behind, but suffice to say that I have not grown up to the point where I’m over my childhood. I’m still socially awkward; I still don’t find social interaction as comfortable as most people seem to; my brain is still so noisy that it regularly keeps me awake at night.

(I’m lucky here in Silicon Valley to be surrounded by many, many like-minded people. We are, generally, the meek inheriting the earth, and it feels great, especially since I don’t have to trip all over myself wearing heels and business casual. It’s oxymoronic, but here I feel I can be unabashedly socially awkward because everyone else is too. People here, like me, are earnest and curious and unconcerned with looking uncool. It’s a comfortable place to live.)

And so I still feel a residual bitterness towards people who seem to have always had it “easier” than I do. Their lives are hardly anything I desire; I have never wanted to be in a sorority and don’t have the energy to maintain Herbal Essences hair and I don’t want to work in fashion or PR or go to med school or do anything besides what I already do. Not to mention that my life is actually embarrassingly easy nowadays. I don’t even have to do my own laundry (thanks, Silicon Valley perks!). I can easily afford my rent and my car insurance and my cable and a couple new pairs of shoes every so often, and I have health insurance and voting rights and freedoms and privileges that many people lack. Frankly, nowadays, I only complain because it’s something to do.

But I remember being a little girl and wishing madly that I could spend a day in the body of one of the “popular” girls. They were pretty and easy and happy and sunny and I was bespectacled and moody and lonely and sensitive and nothing was easy. (I was unaware of the concept of “white privilege” at the time. Don’t worry, dear reader, I now know that everything is easy except trying to keep my uterus out of the hands of dastardly Republicans.) None of that is particularly true any longer; I work hard to be happy, and also I wear contact lenses, and I have a lot of really fantastic friends all over, and people generally like me.

But it’s hard to shake the nighttime thoughts that kept you awake when you were a little girl, especially if you thought them as hard and as often as I did, and for me, it’s still those damn glasses that kept me down, kept me from being happy and normal like the popular girls.

Perhaps these girls were once as geeky and shunned as I once was by classmates who watched Nickelodeon while they read Newsweek (RIP, print edition) in the corner. Perhaps they are actually nearsighted and need glasses, which is probably the most likely case, and I should maybe shut up and get over myself. But I maintain that the wearing of glasses should be a privilege held exclusively for the nerds of the world – for those who have suffered the shame of being outed as a non-consumer of Pokemon, of consistently missing the ball during four-square at recess, of knowing the capitals of every nation in the world but not the basic premise of “The Angry Beavers.” For if my Coke-bottle rims are suddenly going to give me an edge on everyone else, to set me apart in a way that makes me look special and glamorous instead of mousy and pitiable… I think that I deserve that one, don’t I?

I bought a new pair of glasses recently and when I wear them, I feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Analyze that, Freudette.

 

*I would like to take this moment to note that sometimes I can’t tell when my friends are posing facetiously. I have many friends from pre-college who are in, like, Delta Gamma Theta Phi or whatever, where you do the little broken wrist with the fingertips against the forehead with the jutting hip, and I guess it’s universal because I also have a bunch of Vassar friends who often pose like that as a joke. And the only way I can tell if they’re serious is if I look closely and see if they’re all wearing matching T-shirts that say something like “DELTA BETA KAPPA EPSILON BOYS VERSUS GIRLS FIJI ALPHA WET T-SHIRT FUNDRAISER PARTY.”

Also, we used to take pictures in dance company poses ALL THE TIME, so I probably shouldn’t make fun of sorority girls for doing it, but obviously we were pursuing the high art of Irish step dance/contemporary ballet/”walk eight counts and touch yourself” and can deservedly consider ourselves superior.