But that’s how I felt in high school, sure that my people were from elsewhere, and going elsewhere, and that they would recognise me when they saw me. They would like me enough that it wouldn’t matter if I liked myself. They would see the good in me so that I could, too.
Why spend $200 once a week on therapy when you can spend $150 once a year on a psychic?
I was reminded again that there are so many things we need that can also hurt us: cars, knives, grown-ups.
After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type.
This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.
I’ve never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has bee simultaneously hostile and rapt.
It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.
A friend once told me that when you’ve been in AA, drinking is never fun again. And that’s how I feel about having seen a nutritionist – I will never again approach food in an unbridled, guilt-free way.
Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.
Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen.
This is our hobby, appropriating meaningful artifacts and displaying them as evidence of who we will never be.
If you have a bad feeling about someone, don’t worry about offending them. Just run. Being polite is how you get your purse stolen or your “purse stolen.
It’s a little too cold to be outside and we wear our sunglasses, shrinking down into our hoodies. I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s okay to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself. I don’t have to watch him cry.
No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.
I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.
But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child – feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.
There are two types of women in particular who inspire my envy. The first is an ebullient one, happily engaged from morning until night, able to enjoy things like group lunches, spontaneous vacations to Cartagena with gangs of girlfriends, and planning other people’s baby showers. The bigger existential questions don’t seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What’s the point? It just gets dirty again anyway and then we die. Why don’t I just stick my head...
But I am not one of those young people. I’ve been obsessed with death since I was born.
I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts.
Upon graduation I had felt a heavy sense of doom, a sense that nothing would ever be simple again. But look, look what we had found! We were making it work, with our cash and our bad wrapping jobs, with our fried overdyed hair and our fried overprocessed foods. Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke.