Of all of the classical mythology I’ve had to absorb over the years, courtesy of a liberal arts education, the birth of Athena stuck with me most vividly. When I learned, however many years ago, that the goddess of wisdom sprang fully formed from her father’s head, I suddenly imagined Zeus’s skull opening as if on a hinge. Athena, necessarily in miniature but still formidable, steps out: fully armed and ready to go.
Sometimes I wonder who all would step out of my head, were a hinge to be installed.
There are, of course, the various incarnations of self, whom I tend to name by their age. Eight arrives, skinny and tan, with a neat bowl cut. Thirteen has greasy bangs, small eyebrows, and is holding a book of Robert Frost’s collected poetry. Fifteen has platinum skunk stripes in her hair and black liner completely encircling each eye, about an eighth of an inch deep. Nineteen’s hair is long, of natural shading, and she seems to have relaxed, if only a little, sitting astride our Trek mountain bike. Each of these imagined incarnations tends to have something to contribute to my emotional processes, to such a degree that my internal monologue becomes more of a chorus, and not a terribly harmonious one at that.
But my various selves are not the only ones in there.
In the new territory of an adult, romantic relationship, I have come to some remarkable conclusions, which have applications in other realms. For instance, I indulged an anxiety recently, and my brain immediately wove an enormous fight out of a single worry; an imaginary fight in which I filled in all of my sweetheart’s lines to the point of our seemingly inevitable break up. Then I stopped short. I had to think about it carefully, because the most obvious conclusions for me tend to be the most slippery: I wasn’t actually having an argument with him. I was having an argument with myself. His imagined voice was my voice. I couldn’t predict how we were going to grow together or apart, and it was patently unfair of me to suppose I could predict how he would react and respond. I love him because he is very much not me. All I could do was take things a day at a time, love thoroughly, and be thoughtful.
As I told her this, my therapist seemed very close to bursting into applause. Progress!
Twenty-seven, whom I have yet to become, has managed to take up ghostly residence in my mind as well. I can think of no one else to credit for the surprisingly mature thoughts that occasionally formulate from practically nothing. I have no idea what she looks like, but she’s very patient and encouraging. She’s the one who nudges me to apply my newly gained insight to other, murkier areas.
Like my sister.
If Athena stepped fully armed from her father’s head, I feel as though my oldest sister steps out of my head armed only with a certain facial expression she has. It’s enough, though, to send me screaming—towards her with a metaphorical battle axe, away from her towards any convenient cliff, or towards the nearest wall against which I can beat my head.
Her expression is one of intense rationality. It drives me absolutely insane.
The specter of my sister, the one I carry around in my head, isn’t actually my sister. It’s a composite version of her: her eighteen year old arrogance, her twenty-two year old cruelty, and her twenty-seven year old judgment. I have internalized her voice as my inner judge: she archly questions my motives and doesn’t ever seem to think that I’m good enough as I am, as if she’s waiting me out until I become more like her. For many years she did make me feel like that, but I have to wonder where the emotional trauma stops and the echoes just keep going out of habit. I don’t believe that the entirety of my self-doubt can be traced back to her voice; it’s just that her composite is the easiest and sometimes most historically accurate name to put on it.
The problem with a composite is that it lacks any and all subtleties. I remember one particular instance, when my sister and I were fighting bitterly on a ski vacation. It was the worst kind of fight: one born of misunderstanding, old wounds, and things said with poor choice of words at the wrong time. When our mother got mad at us for fighting, we turned on her in unison: bound together by our right to hate each other in peace. It may be deeply screwed up, but it’s one of those subtleties that I miss when my sister simply fills the role of “villain” in my mind.
It’s a funny thing to realize: that two people’s similarities can cause them almost as much damage as their differences. The combination of problematic similarities and differences, especially among family, I have observed to be uniquely cataclysmic. After a particularly severe blowout about eighteen months ago, our relationship has been hobbling back to health. We check in maybe quarterly: I tell her a synopsis of my goings on, and she tells me what she’s teaching and non-food items her dog has been eating. She is not the person who lives in my head. She is the person who lives in Michigan and who can do her own part—which I can’t predict—to mend our relationship.
It’s a tense process. I have to conquer a vintage, desperate need to have her like me, to make her laugh, and she probably has to think carefully about the things she says so that she doesn’t accidentally tread on an old wound she may or may not have given me.
It’s also very difficult to recast her in my head, so to speak. Can I have a relatively successful relationship with who she is now, if who she was then still plays the villain in my mind? Somehow I doubt it. When it comes down to it, though, maybe that’s the best we can do: to have a relationship with each other as we are now, mindful of the past but not dwelling in it. Another observation I made in plaintive tones, which made my therapist laugh, is painfully obvious: Adult relationships are hard.
But who knows? Maybe my Twenty-seven and her Thirty-seven will get it right even more than we do now. We'll have to ask them when we get there.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Chicka-Cherry-Cola Culture (or, Confessions of a Teenage Mutant Awkward Turtle)
Before rolling up my jeans and stepping into the bathtub, I put on a definitive mix in the bathroom. We’re talking Spice Girls, Will Smith, Savage Garden, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Sublime: the works. My best friend was kneeling on the floor, arched at a seemingly impossible angle to get her head over the rim of the tub. Her hair was nearly down to her butt, and I wondered if there was enough brown goop in the bottle to cover it all. As we both wailed along with perfect inflection to “Say You’ll Be There,” I stepped into the tub and began slathering her head with hair dye.
It could’ve been ten years ago. But it wasn’t. It was five weeks ago.
My best friend and I have been dyeing each others’ hair for most of the eleven years of our friendship. In one particular instance, I, being of less than sound mind and stubbornly brown hair, decided to go blond. Halfway into the box-recommended time, my better half peeked under my shower cap and gulped, “I think we should rinse. It’s looking more orange than not.” Between the two of us and over the course of our adolescence, we covered more than half of the color wheel on our respective heads, with varying forms of red, orange, purple, and a batch of neon yellow stripes. We’ve also endured varying pierces, fake tattoos, real tattoos, terrible haircuts, braces, glasses, episodes of severe eyeliner, and one botched leg-waxing attempt.
And that’s just in the beauty department.
It isn’t any wonder that her husband has a hard time keeping up with us when we’re together. After all, as I pointed out in my toast at their wedding, she and I have been together longer than they have. (I’m not that much of a jerk—I also added that he and I now had something very important in common: loving her for the rest of our lives, in very different capacities.) She and I speak in a kind of shorthand, collapsing eleven years of shared cultural, historical, and personal experience into a language with a fluent population of two. I must admit he is a very good sport, and I can’t blame him when he eventually backs away slowly, hands aloft in surrender. Good man, that.
My best friend and I are a matched set. I, for one, feel remarkably lopsided when I haven’t talked to her for a few days, like a nestled peppershaker without its salt: just a weird little figurine hugging nothing. We shared the travails of a deeply awkward adolescence and came out the other side similarly scarred, mutually stronger, and bonded for life. Sometimes I wonder if my proclivity for people of similar teenage awkwardness traces its origins to her: I look for people with similar scars, because we’ll probably have a lot more in common than people who don’t.
It’s an honest truth that I am just more comfortable with people who were uncompromisingly awkward in their teenage years: we of the early-onset acne, the bad bangs, who said we liked Tool, actually liked Cake, and secretly loved Billy Joel. We who watched Star Trek: TNG and had enormous crushes on Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, or both. We who appeared voluntarily in public wearing the comically outsized but mysteriously desirable “raver pants.” We, for whom the “Men in Black” dance was the equivalent of the “Thriller” dance. We who wanted desperately to be Full House’s DJ Tanner.
We, who were about to die from embarrassment for many teenage years, salute you.
As someone who was intensely self-conscious and deeply insecure, I spent a lot of middle school and high school trying to triangulate what I should like, what I shouldn’t like, and what I secretly did like. I tried to formulate who I was against other people: if I wasn’t a popular, beautiful person, then I wouldn’t like what they liked; I had to like something different. All of this is to say that my anxiety tended to get in the way of acknowledging the things that made me happy. I have a remarkable capability of getting in my own way sometimes.
It was so strange to get to college and suddenly, inexplicably, be able to own all of my likes and dislikes; to find that the things that I thought made me a mutant, whom only a best friend could love, actually made me kind of interesting. More miraculous still, some of my perceived “mutant” qualities weren’t even unique: I found people who had somehow reconciled a love of classic Paul Simon with a love of the Spice Girls at their peak. I found people who loved Star Wars and the Muppets, danced like maniacs, told fantastic bad jokes, and used big words with joy and without pretention.
It was like the promise land for a weary nerd like me.
To this day I take sincere comfort in finding something of a late ‘90s vintage in common with a peer. Popular music tends to be a good jumping off point: say “chicka-cherry-cola” to just about anybody of my generation and odds are that person will know exactly what you’re talking about. It is no longer shameful to like things that were popular and things that weren’t, all at once. I came into my own in college, and every time I freely admit to something that would’ve made me die of embarrassment years before—yup, I own a Star Wars shirt, and I bought it XXXL at Baby Gap—I feel like I’m redeeming an episode of angst gone by.
It’s an amazingly freeing feeling to simply like the things I like and be fine with who I was, even if only in retrospect. I always do remember, though, that at least one person always liked me in the depths of my awkwardness.
She’s a woman who recognized my toenail polish color, which I applied more than ten years after we met as tragic teenagers. She knew that the color was an homage to a polish from years before, one that I stole from my sister when we were fourteen. She even remembered the unlikely name of the color (“Daisy the Pig”) and commented on it as we were getting her into her wedding dress.
I may not have been sure of much, but I was always sure—at fourteen, twenty-four, and beyond—that since she is the half that makes me whole, I couldn’t ever really be any more than half bad, and therefore never a total loss.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Fathers, Daughters, and our Alma Maters
Two summers ago, I emailed my dad asking for directions to our mutual alma mater. I didn’t need the detail Google maps would provide; I just wanted the numbers and directions of the highways. He wrote back fairly quickly with the appropriate highways—all pointing north—concluding his directions with the final instruction, “And straight on ’til morning.”
There’s a lot going on in those five words.
Yes, we all get the reference. My oldest sister’s critical outlook has had such an impact on me throughout my life that I seem to have internalized it to a certain extent, and I hear her snort derisively on occasion in my head. She might posit that our father’s reference is a fitting indicator that in some ways he never did grow up and that our college (which, I might add, she also attended) is a kind of persistent, boy-child fantasy. I might posit, in return, that she should shove it. (You can imagine how crowded and noisy it gets in my head.)
The sad part, which the more cynically-minded might ignore, is that, with the exception of Peter, all of the children eventually left Neverland and could never go back. Admittedly, I still head back every now and then to see friends or ski, but it’s not the same place I left. It belongs to a new group of students, and rightfully so. We all have to leave college and grow up. I myself did it with remarkably little composure on the drive home after graduation, sobbing my way across all of Vermont and most of central New York. But I did it.
In the months following graduation, I was nothing short of a damn mess. Truth be told, I had never really had a solid plan for my post-college years. It generally involved working in some museum in a ridiculously well-appointed office and looking like a million bucks. How exactly I would get to that office was a bit nebulous. As I applied for jobs, day after day, I came to reserve a particular well of hatred in my heart for the “well-meaning adult.” This adult loves to offer unsolicited advice based on his or her own long-passed trials and tribulations, and the only thing you take away from those one-sided conversations is that the process is a crapshoot and success depends in no small part on luck. In my more sullen moments, I even developed a theory about “new adult smell”: how new college grads have it, and established adults can’t resist it.
I don’t imagine I was very easy to live with in those months, since I pretty much hated everyone who had graduated college before 2007. Everyone, that is, except my dad.
I would call him about the job search, sloshing back and forth between depression and outright rage, and he would listen. It was not the sort of listening that implies exaggerated patience with a hysterical child, nor was it the sort of listening that patronizes, because the child is taking his or her woes entirely too seriously. He was listening because he knew what it was like. A few times in his professional life, corporate restructuring had ended up putting him on the job hunt too. So when I would spill out my insides, which were full of anxiety, self-loathing, and resentment, he would say, “I know.” And the really incredible part, the part that miraculously made my misery a little better, was that he really did know.
It was usually at that point in my conversations with him when I really would break down and confess one of the marrow-deep, truest causes of my unhappiness: I missed college. I missed excelling in classes and knowing exactly where I fit in the world in which I lived. I missed having the majority of my closest friends within a ten minute walk. I missed the breathtaking beauty of the place itself, and the innumerable quiet places I had found where I felt a skin-expanding contentment.
My dad knew, he understood. He missed it too.
It was a vast relief for me to know that I was not the only one in my family who had ached, and in some way still did ache, for school. I had been ashamed that I missed it so much, as if it were in some way juvenile; that missing Neverland in some way meant that I had never left it and truly grown up.
I’ve come to realize that nothing is that simple, not even my hard-ass oldest sister.
Was I perfectly, incandescently happy for every minute of the four years I was in college? Of course not. Was I, on average, happier in those four years than I was in the two that followed? God yes. Do I believe my greatest happiness is behind me? No, and recognizing that fact is important.
I took for granted as a child that people in the same family have the same set of values. As we grew up, the necessities of personality and experience divided us to a surprising degree. It is not a whole lot of fun to feel judged for your values, especially for something you ostensibly shared, and the defensiveness that results causes a positive feedback loop that can set relationships back by years. College seems an odd point of contention, but believe me, it’s not the only one. It’s just one of the most obvious. My sister and I come slowly to understanding, but we’re trying. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to experience the effortlessness of a shared core, from which the most complete and comforting empathy emerges.
I went back to school for homecoming with a few friends this year, and while we were in the car, one of my best friends asked me if I thought other people felt the same way about their colleges, if this weird, intense bond is unique to alumni of our school. I told her I didn’t know. I absolutely believe other people can love their schools in a way that outsiders can’t possibly understand, but I also think that this one, particular strain of love and loyalty is distinctly ours. In a weird way, it’s a gift my dad gave me, one that I found for myself, and something we share and understand about one another. We understand that our school didn’t just give us four good years; it also gave us pack mates for life. My dad’s best friends from his fraternity stood up at his wedding thirty-seven years ago. They were also in the pews at my sister’s wedding six months ago. Whenever and wherever my friends and I gather, it’s like coming home: boxed wine, ‘80s music, and all.
College isn’t the only thing we share, and it won’t be the only thing that holds us together, but I’m grateful for what started it all. I’m also grateful I know exactly where to find it:
Three highways to the north, and straight on ’til morning.
There’s a lot going on in those five words.
Yes, we all get the reference. My oldest sister’s critical outlook has had such an impact on me throughout my life that I seem to have internalized it to a certain extent, and I hear her snort derisively on occasion in my head. She might posit that our father’s reference is a fitting indicator that in some ways he never did grow up and that our college (which, I might add, she also attended) is a kind of persistent, boy-child fantasy. I might posit, in return, that she should shove it. (You can imagine how crowded and noisy it gets in my head.)
The sad part, which the more cynically-minded might ignore, is that, with the exception of Peter, all of the children eventually left Neverland and could never go back. Admittedly, I still head back every now and then to see friends or ski, but it’s not the same place I left. It belongs to a new group of students, and rightfully so. We all have to leave college and grow up. I myself did it with remarkably little composure on the drive home after graduation, sobbing my way across all of Vermont and most of central New York. But I did it.
In the months following graduation, I was nothing short of a damn mess. Truth be told, I had never really had a solid plan for my post-college years. It generally involved working in some museum in a ridiculously well-appointed office and looking like a million bucks. How exactly I would get to that office was a bit nebulous. As I applied for jobs, day after day, I came to reserve a particular well of hatred in my heart for the “well-meaning adult.” This adult loves to offer unsolicited advice based on his or her own long-passed trials and tribulations, and the only thing you take away from those one-sided conversations is that the process is a crapshoot and success depends in no small part on luck. In my more sullen moments, I even developed a theory about “new adult smell”: how new college grads have it, and established adults can’t resist it.
I don’t imagine I was very easy to live with in those months, since I pretty much hated everyone who had graduated college before 2007. Everyone, that is, except my dad.
I would call him about the job search, sloshing back and forth between depression and outright rage, and he would listen. It was not the sort of listening that implies exaggerated patience with a hysterical child, nor was it the sort of listening that patronizes, because the child is taking his or her woes entirely too seriously. He was listening because he knew what it was like. A few times in his professional life, corporate restructuring had ended up putting him on the job hunt too. So when I would spill out my insides, which were full of anxiety, self-loathing, and resentment, he would say, “I know.” And the really incredible part, the part that miraculously made my misery a little better, was that he really did know.
It was usually at that point in my conversations with him when I really would break down and confess one of the marrow-deep, truest causes of my unhappiness: I missed college. I missed excelling in classes and knowing exactly where I fit in the world in which I lived. I missed having the majority of my closest friends within a ten minute walk. I missed the breathtaking beauty of the place itself, and the innumerable quiet places I had found where I felt a skin-expanding contentment.
My dad knew, he understood. He missed it too.
It was a vast relief for me to know that I was not the only one in my family who had ached, and in some way still did ache, for school. I had been ashamed that I missed it so much, as if it were in some way juvenile; that missing Neverland in some way meant that I had never left it and truly grown up.
I’ve come to realize that nothing is that simple, not even my hard-ass oldest sister.
Was I perfectly, incandescently happy for every minute of the four years I was in college? Of course not. Was I, on average, happier in those four years than I was in the two that followed? God yes. Do I believe my greatest happiness is behind me? No, and recognizing that fact is important.
I took for granted as a child that people in the same family have the same set of values. As we grew up, the necessities of personality and experience divided us to a surprising degree. It is not a whole lot of fun to feel judged for your values, especially for something you ostensibly shared, and the defensiveness that results causes a positive feedback loop that can set relationships back by years. College seems an odd point of contention, but believe me, it’s not the only one. It’s just one of the most obvious. My sister and I come slowly to understanding, but we’re trying. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to experience the effortlessness of a shared core, from which the most complete and comforting empathy emerges.
I went back to school for homecoming with a few friends this year, and while we were in the car, one of my best friends asked me if I thought other people felt the same way about their colleges, if this weird, intense bond is unique to alumni of our school. I told her I didn’t know. I absolutely believe other people can love their schools in a way that outsiders can’t possibly understand, but I also think that this one, particular strain of love and loyalty is distinctly ours. In a weird way, it’s a gift my dad gave me, one that I found for myself, and something we share and understand about one another. We understand that our school didn’t just give us four good years; it also gave us pack mates for life. My dad’s best friends from his fraternity stood up at his wedding thirty-seven years ago. They were also in the pews at my sister’s wedding six months ago. Whenever and wherever my friends and I gather, it’s like coming home: boxed wine, ‘80s music, and all.
College isn’t the only thing we share, and it won’t be the only thing that holds us together, but I’m grateful for what started it all. I’m also grateful I know exactly where to find it:
Three highways to the north, and straight on ’til morning.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)