The Dangers of Furniture and Alumni

During the spring of my freshman year in college, I accidentally gave myself one of the nastiest bruises I have ever sustained. In a spectacular miscalculation of speed and distance, I basically impaled my right upper leg on the corner of a low table. The bruise itself was smashingly colorful and shaped like a flower; I remember, because—morbidly intrigued—I drew an outline of it in ballpoint pen and took a picture to prove it had the rough silhouette of a daisy.

The bruise plagued me for most of that spring, because I kept running into it over and over again: the first dazzling display of poor coordination was followed by many random acts of clumsiness. The unfortunate splotch on my leg remained purple and painful for about six weeks, and I got into the habit of dodging potential threats to my leg for most of that summer. My phobia of menacing, sharply cornered furniture had mostly faded by the fall.

On a night several years later, I was walking into an ice cream shop to celebrate a friend’s birthday when I came face to face with another bruising force: another alumna from my high school.

To be fair, she herself was not bruising. She was probably one of the nicest people in school: bubbly, sweet, self-deprecating, and totally beloved. Since at that time I was angsty, miserable, and awkward—and had yet to form a sense of humor about those qualities—interacting with this girl made my teeth ache with jealousy. Facing her now, a full seven years later, I realized with some detachment that outwardly I probably looked like a deer in headlights. Inwardly, I was reflexively hunching over a very old bruise.

In the time since high school, I’ve developed remarkably quick defense mechanisms, which (mostly) allow me to gloss over rattling encounters with barely a pause. The problem is that, when I see people from that time in my life, I find myself launched back into a time before I developed those defenses. Really, it is directly because of that time that I developed them in the first place.

What had happened was that my family had moved from a suburb of Chicago to a suburb of San Francisco when I was fourteen, and it had been a protracted, painful excision. It wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a clean cut: I knew we were leaving but not when, and my mother and I spent six months being kicked out of the house at a moment’s notice for real estate showings, while my dad commuted between California and Illinois weekly. When we finally got to California, during the loneliest summer I ever had, I tried to wrap my head around the fact that my life as I had planned it—and had every reason to plan in that way—was now an impossibility. There was no immediate support structure to speak of: my best friend was still in Chicago and we were limited by long distance charges; my sisters were both college graduates with their own lives; and my parents were by turns clueless and helpless, unsure how to deal with my massive grief, which evolved into a thick, ugly anger. It wasn’t actually Doom (capital D), but to a very scared fourteen-year-old, it sure seemed that way.

I felt like I had been evicted from my own life. I think to a certain extent that most teenagers believe that they are the only person who can suffer from the special kind of solitary confinement within their own minds. I don’t think I was any more or less right than the rest, but I came to rebuild who I was around the loneliness.

The first defense mechanism I developed freshman year, in order to protect a very bruised core, was kind of like a tool from the Iron Age: completely inelegant and bluntly effective. It involved a persistent scowl and way too much black eyeliner. I fairly oozed hostility, but of course, secretly, I still wanted everybody to like me. What came of that attitude were a few rather odd and disjointed friendships and a reputation as an Angry Girl.

In the few years that followed, I managed to smooth off some of the roughest edges, but what I ended up doing was honing one blunt tool into a sharper one, exchanging Iron Age hostility for a kind of Bronze Age sarcasm. Either way, I was never exactly what you might call friendly. In a funny and rather telling development, many of the minds of my male peers seemed to do a very basic arithmetic with me: angry girl plus smart girl equals Feminist. That I did (and still do) have feminist leanings was sort of beside the point for them: they had figured out why I was the puzzling combination of angry and smart. It was because of the Feminist. Problem solved, reputation established.

Of the many layers I built up in high school, many eventually felt false. I was more than my anger and my hurt, but in that context, I had no idea how to be a person who wasn’t built around those things. I always thought that once I got to college, the old scabs would fall away. Then I would be secure enough, knowing that I was where I was supposed to be, that I would end up being whoever the hell I wanted, not who a scared fourteen year old had needed to become.

I wonder sometimes how I might think about this differently if we hadn’t moved back.

Which is exactly what we did: almost four years to the day after we moved from Chicago, we unexpectedly moved back. I’ve always known that I’ve taken the easy way out on sorting through those four years of my life; after all, they were book ended so neatly by two very jarring moves. My years in California were the hurt years, the bad ones. I went home when I moved back to Illinois and started being happy again.

Problem solved, emotional alibi established.

But of course, nothing is every that easy.

I don’t spend a whole lot of time in my day to day life dwelling on high school (no really!); college replaced that Big Bad with its Saving Grace. (Sometimes my emotional building blocks are almost laughably rudimentary—I’m working on it.) The issue is that those paralyzing memories are always there, and that for some very unsettling reason, Cambridge is positively crawling with alumni of my high school. It’s almost as though the maniacal pursuit of Harvard is still subconsciously present, even after college. I would be lying if I said it were consistently awful: I had a very joyful reunion with my Latin partner of four years, and I was nothing short of flattered when a freshman I had known as a senior tackled me in the middle of a bookstore.

Nevertheless, as in my recent encounter at the ice cream shop, my general reaction to running into a fellow alum is freezing dismay. The hurt I remember threatens the person I became, and I feel like I’m having a forcible out of body experience: the person I was, defense mechanisms blazing, shoves out the person I am, who’s managed to practice a little more finesse in the subsequent years.

And a slightly exasperated voice asks from within, “Really? Are we still experiencing this?”

When has it been too long? There is a kind of conventional wisdom that implies that there is some sort of shelf-life for emotional stressors or traumas; that after a certain point, you have to “let things go” or you’re willfully and immaturely holding onto them for your own twisted purposes. I always hated that phrase—let it go—as if I would suddenly get a light bulb over my head and think, “Oh! I’m over it.” When I throw a baseball, I let it go: my fingers obey my neurons and release a spherical object with no small amount of force, and it speeds along a trajectory away from my person.

My memories and my experiences? Not so obedient to neural impulses. Believe me, I’ve been trying to launch these emotions on an outward trajectory for years.

I don’t want these bruises anymore. It’s been seven years since I graduated from high school, and I am honestly humiliated that they are still there. I like to think I have become a real live whole person, and the stress of being blitz-attacked by a broken fourteen-year-old’s emotions is very tedious. I wonder if I’m as whole as I think I am, still dodging memories like sharp furniture, and I wonder where the line is: between forgiving myself for an old protective instinct, and reaching some point of enlightenment to be able to just let it go.

I think “letting it go” may be a bit of a fallacy for me. First of all, it implies a very zen, beatific approach to pain, a quality which I have never possessed. Second, all of the things that have happened have made me who I am—I can’t take out those four years any more than I can take the flour out of a cookie after it’s come out of the oven. How nice it would be: to be able to pummel myself down into all of my elemental attributes. Then I could sweep the nasty ones aside and collect the ones I liked into a pleasant little pile. But as Jimmy Buffet has pointed out, I’m already out of the oven—and I am flawed individually.

Maybe eventually I’ll let go of letting go; maybe I’ll just be content with incorporating and be able to remain consistently in my whole rather than trying to sidestep one of the parts of my sum.

After all, I didn’t really notice in my conscious mind when I finally stopped avoiding table corners, so maybe there’s hope. Someday, I might run into someone from high school and notice with some surprise that I’m not flinching, because both the bruise—and the instinct to protect it—are gone.