What's Love Got to Do with It?

Over the last several years, I have formed a kind of mental repository for debunked pop cultural wisdom, John Lennon to John Hughes and beyond. I try to seal these emotional red herrings away, but they have always had a way of seeping out in the form of insidious and unrealistic expectations.

Good rules of thumb: though as a sophomore you may nurse a debilitating crush on a dreamy senior, it is unlikely that you will end up sitting cross-legged with him on a glass tabletop on either side of a birthday cake. Neither you, nor probably anyone, will ever be as cool as or pull off “Twist and Shout” quite like Ferris Bueller. No resolutions, confrontations, or massively coordinated dance numbers will happen at prom. A band nerd without glasses is likely a half-blind band nerd, not Taylor Swift. In reality, even if someone did try to chase you through an airport to confess everlasting love, TSA would probably tackle that someone before he or she cleared the first couple of gates. Getting the guy (or girl) is hard, yes, but being with him (or her) in real life, doing the work of an adult relationship, is much harder; happily ever after is never, ever guaranteed.

And, unfortunately, love is not all you need.

After my breakup, I experienced brief, passionate, and irrational bursts of anger at John Lennon for propagating such unconscionable tripe. I ignored in those moments that he was only participating in the grand tradition of “love conquers all,” because I found it much more convenient to have one Beatle upon whom to focus my wrath.

The unconscionable tripe, of course, is not the idea that love is all you need, but that love is all you need.

(Also, “unconscionable tripe” may be a bit strong, but it was a painful couple of weeks.)

It was an odd and wonderful experience to be, for the first time in my life, in a real relationship in the real world. I didn’t write him: he came fully formed, ready to screw up in ways I would never have planned and take my breath away in ways I would never have imagined. As a result, and also as a consequence of getting older and wiser (hopefully in equal measure), I began to think about our relationship less in terms of a movie and more in terms of our actual lives: two people in love, trying to make it work. I began to notice delineations in my head, marking out what I knew was fantasy from good, solid emotions, on which I could reasonably act.

The perfect example is my go-to theory about weddings vs. marriage. Yes, I want a wedding. I would like to wear an enormous white dress, attend a smashing party, and be the center of attention for a full calendar day. Shoot, I’d do that tomorrow if given the opportunity. However, I do not want to be married tomorrow. Not by a long shot. I am by no means prepared to join my life with another person’s until death do us part—the very thought makes me a little green around the gills. Which, I think, makes perfect sense: deciding to get married is a two person job. Deciding, on your own, that you would like to be married strikes me as missing the whole point. Marriage is a thoughtful, thorough agreement and promise between two people—at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

To recap:

Wedding: yes. Marriage: no (or, not for a good long while yet).

I never mentioned this theory to my ex, since I thought (accurately) that he might miss the subtleties of my differentiations as his pupils dilated and fight-or-flight kicked in at the mention of “wedding.” In the talk that may have been the beginning of the end of our relationship, he told me that he thought I was hearing wedding bells. I repressed the urge to kick him. I also repressed the urge to tell him that of course I was hearing wedding bells—but that was in no way related to my wanting to marry him any time in the foreseeable future, because I didn’t.

(Again with those pesky subtleties.)

He told me then that he wanted to think about our relationship six months into the future—no further. I was willing to agree to that, since it made sense for us at the time. However, as I started to think about graduate school and my own two year plan, I felt uncomfortably lopsided: I could plan everything else, but there was an enormous STOP sign right there in the path of my relationship. He had told me, in the same conversation in which he outlined the six month rule, that he didn’t want me to make any sacrifices for him. On the one hand, that’s fine, and I can appreciate that as someone whose mother has made many sacrifices for my father. On the other hand, I began to realize, just as I found the distance between wedding and marriage, there is a distance between sacrifice and compromise; between laying yourself down on some metaphorical (or not) altar, and realizing that in order to be together in the long run, sometimes you have to choose something that wouldn’t be your first choice if you were in it alone.

Increasingly I found myself on one side with my new set of subtleties, facing him on the other side with his hard and fast rules.

I find it ill-advised to marry for the sake of being married. I find it heart-breaking when the person you love refuses to budge on things he decided before you came along. And I find that in reality, love is not all you need. You need to be flexible. You need to be mindful of subtleties—of the distances between broad generalizations (that all women want to get married, that all men are commitment phobes, etc.) and the actual individual with whom you’re building something.

Even if it started like a movie, and for a long time was the most wonderful reality, you need to be able to see what something has become and will become.

And if it isn’t all you need—the love and all the rest—you need to be able to walk away.

Eat Two Pints, and Call Me in the Morning

About a year ago, my oldest sister was having a hard time. We don’t always get along; I think the trouble started when she left for college. That was—oh, give or take—eighteen years ago. Still, I love her enormously and fiercely. In a way, how crazy we drive each other is not in conflict with how much we love each other; it’s actually indicative of how much we love each other.

Nevertheless, JR and I have the unfortunate habit of hurting each other when we’re mostly trying to help. As a result, when I understood from our mother that her life was getting jostled around in a most distressing manner, I found myself a little stuck. On the one hand, I wanted to call her and tell her how much I loved her, and how sorry I was that things had taken a turn towards sucking. On the other, I also knew that we give and receive comfort in very, very different ways, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally set off a small nuclear disaster on top of everything else.

The solution came to me in a remarkable flash of insight.

Say it in butter.

My signature cookie was once known as the Witch’s Hat, before I started tinkering with it. Now it is commonly referred to as the Peanut Butter Orgasm. (With all due modesty, I think the name change indicates a certain level of success in my tinkering.) I tend to make these monstrosities for birthdays, breakups, and the occasional well-timed seduction. They're my go-to, but in this case, I wanted to make something a little less common, a little more historical. I settled on our grandmother’s Coconut Oatmeal cookies, which start with two sticks of butter and only improve from there. I shipped them off in a converted Kleenex box, held together with duct tape, with a short note telling my sister how much I loved her, how sorry I was that things were hard, and how these cookies were the best way I knew how to communicate both of those things.

A week or so later, she emailed me to thank me. She told me that when her daughter asked for one of the “special cookies” as a treat in her lunch box, my sister had to physically brace herself for the blast of narcotic coconut smell as she opened the ziplock, because if she didn’t, she would fall upon them with abandon and have to explain to her daughter why there were none left.

Which was, more or less, exactly what I had intended.

This particular mechanism came full circle about two weeks ago, when I effectively raised the red flag, via text, to my closest friends in Boston:

Woman down. Send reinforcements.

I had broken up with my boyfriend.

Their response was immediate, and along the lines of, “We’re on our way five minutes ago.”

They circled the wagons, and they brought supplies.

Stine, whose exceptional timing and intuition brought her to my door about two minutes after I had finished needing an hour alone, folded herself up next to me on the couch. Abbie, when I went down to let her into my apartment building, started pulling out pints of Ben and Jerry’s from her purse before I had even opened the atrium door. Back in my apartment, Stine found the spoons in short order.

A little while later, after I had singlehandedly demolished the Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, one of them asked me what I wanted for dinner. I was still thinking somewhat disjointedly, and said absently, “I have two chicken breasts thawing… I should cook them before they go bad…” After all, I may be injured from heartbreak, but wasting food is downright insulting.

Abbie turned on my computer, searched briefly, and proceeded directly to the kitchen: a woman on a mission. From my kitchen, the occasional hollers would issue forth as I nursed my second (or third, but who's counting?) Manhattan.

“Are you particularly attached to this pepper?”

“Do you have… oh here… wait—why do you have two canisters of seasoned salt?”

“I’m so glad you buy your cream of mushroom soup in four packs—do you mind if it’s expired?”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t mind at all.

What emerged from my kitchen a short while later was comfort in a casserole dish: a cheese-encrusted, chicken, pasta, and cream of mushroom miracle of love. We ate it while watching Aladdin, and when eventually (and with some misgivings) they left for the evening, they made sure I had enough hugs and Sun Chips to get me through until morning.

Never will it cease to amaze me how the combination of excellent friends and cream of mushroom soup can truly soothe the soul.

It is possible, when we whip up casseroles and ship off batches of cookies, that we are, at a very instinctive level, trying to stultify the emotions with excessive caloric intake. In The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, which is one of my favorite books of all time, there is chapter dedicated to this very notion, entitled: “What to Eat when Tragedy Strikes.” My friends and I did not originate the concept; we just honor it and perform it as needed.

There are plenty of times when I eat my emotions. My emotions last night manifested themselves in the impulsive purchase of a filet mignon—I find that I mourn better with red meat in my system. I would be the first to admit that my relationship with food is a little bit fraught, and I am working towards a place where I can combat distress without defaulting to a system of adding more steak or (more economically) adding more Goldfish crackers. However, when I shipped my sister cookies and when my friends brought forth ice cream and casserole, there was a bit more going on than the simple math of “if you consume more calories than you have emotions you might just feel better.”

The cookies I made my sister were our grandmother’s recipe. Our grandmother was, even for two people as different as her granddaughters, the ultimate source of safety and uncomplicated affection for both of us. I was sending her love the way Grandma used to express it, because I knew that kind of comfort would never get lost in translation.

Abbie made me casserole because she knew that I consider casserole (especially with cream of [anything] soup in it) to be the best incarnation of home any Corningware could ever contain. Stine made sure I had plenty of Sun Chips because those were the staple junk food treat of my childhood.

Don’t get me wrong: the food was great, and my emotions were sufficiently blunted. I’m smart enough to know, though, that the most comforting thing that happened that weekend was not the procurement of grieving supplies. It was the circling of the wagons, the rallying to the wounded party, and the fact that I really do have the most wonderful friends in the world.

Point A to Point B, and Everything in Between

Last week, some coworkers and I grabbed sandwiches from the local deli and ate lunch at a picnic table outside our office. One of the women, about whom I normally have positive feelings, started to ask me about graduate school. As I felt my entire body go tense, I had to remind myself that, contrary to what I might believe sometimes, my anxiety is not immediately visible to everyone who might glance at me.

Leaning forward over the picnic table, as if she were anticipating a good answer, my coworker asked me what programs I was looking at.

I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Maybe art history. Maybe education. Not really sure.”

When I am desperately trying to keep panic at bay, for some reason I also drop the subjects of my sentences and speak in fragments.

She persisted. “Well, where do you want to live? Like, where would you like to end up?”

Again I shrugged. “Charleston. Tucson. Denver. Indianapolis. Don’t know.”

“Well have you looked at programs in those areas?”

In my mind, my composure started to squeak uncomfortably, like a guitar string wound too tightly.

“Hey, I just don’t know,” I said more firmly, smiled and changed the subject. For the rest of lunch, I tried to smother my flailing anxieties with the fresh mozzarella in my sandwich.

What I had been doing without realizing it was emitting the visual and vocal cues that I had adopted during my senior year and immediately after: the admission of uncertainty, followed by a polite request—usually indicated by tone or body language—that the subject be dropped.

Looking at it from a reasonable point of view (a.k.a. not mine), it’s not an unusual thing about which to be curious. My coworkers and extended family care about me or at least are interested in what my plans are for the future. Since my fear of those very plans and that very future is mostly internal, they wouldn’t necessarily realize they had hit on a sore subject. The issue I sometimes face with those people, who are interested in my plans but don’t know me well enough to read my signals, is that they care enough not to accept polite deflection.

They have the best intentions, and I have a profound appreciation for how fresh mozzarella can come in handy in defusing my mounting hysteria.

Late in my senior year, it wasn’t uncommon for certain words or phrases to be banned from polite conversation amongst classmates. Words like…resume. And what are you doing next year? And So’s your old man!—wait, that’s The Music Man… but still: they all spelled Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymed with “me,” and that stood for, “Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?”

And I don’t know never seemed to be a good enough answer.

We are a generation of over-achievers. It seems slightly arrogant and more than trite to say it, but qualifying many of my contemporaries as “rabidly ambitious” doesn’t hit too far from the mark. My best friend mused in an email recently that our generation will probably never stop asking "what’s next?" because we were brought up to believe we could do anything and have everything. As we get older, that all-encompassing Everything evolves into a much more specific Something: the goal, the life we decide we want for ourselves. Mathematics leads us to believe that the best way to get from ourselves as Point A to our goal as Point B is a straight line, and then all of our "what’s next?" questions line themselves up along that path. So it would seem like all you need to do is choose a Point B—a goal, the life you want—and start moving forward.

As usual, the practice of personal mathematics and physics leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m the person who stands for twenty minutes in front of the mascara display, paralyzed by the excess of options. And from this point I am supposed to make major life decisions?

Awesome.

I realize the flaw in my formula: that I am assuming there can only be one point B. In a way, that’s how I think because that’s how I was brought up. My parents followed a straight line, and they measured out the distance in their minds after which they would be There, at Point B, when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor and the contentedness of having achieved the goal. By their measurements, they should be There. They are of the right age, their children are grown, and they have worked so hard to get There. But, in the quintessential Modernist bait-and-switch, there is no There, there. Jobs are still frustrating, bills still need paying, and life still isn’t easy, or at least as easy as they would’ve hoped by now. From early on in my own life I’m watching my parents experience a kind of existential crisis in the middle of theirs. And I wonder if they are asking themselves and each other what’s next.

The logical alternative to a Point B is a host of other points, C through Z and beyond. In reality, though, you do have to choose to a certain extent: what job you want and what degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for that job. And which tests you’ll have to take to apply for the degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for the job.

And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.

It’s about this point in the conversation that I start hyperventilating and looking for an emergency stash of mozzarella.

The most obvious fear is that I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision: get a degree that already stands a good chance at being economically useless (alas for the liberal arts) and then end up not liking the job I may or may not get. What I tell myself, when I’m pretending I’m a rational, mature human being, is that there is no law of physics that will make all graduate schools in the world instantly dissolve after I achieve that one degree I choose. (What can I say? Even when I’m pretending to be rational, I’m still sarcastic. The imagination only goes so far.) The point is that I can always change my mind and go back to school, seeking out another goal and another path towards it.

The less obvious fear, the bottom-dweller anxiety, is that I am afraid I won’t be brave enough to make the change: to go back to school and choose another life. I already know that change is hard and deeply scary, and I imagine it will only get harder and scarier as I get older. I’ve never been very brave by nature—I’m a lot of things, but courageous has never been one of them. So the panic I’m feeling now, closing off my airways and crocheting my intestines, is actually a manifestation of something I do know, not something I don’t: that if I choose wrong now, I may not be brave enough to undo and redo in the future.

The funny thing about Life (capital L) is that it is uncontrollable and inevitable. These are a few of my least favorite things.

So what do I do, other than curl up under my desk and eat my way towards lactose intolerance?

I think about my life so far, not as I’ve imagined it or planned it, but as I’ve actually experienced it: my actual, daily life (lower case l). I have experienced that if I have Cheez-Its in the house, I will eat them all in one sitting, so it is best not to keep Cheez-Its in the house. I have learned that my credit card spending has an ebb and flow throughout the cycle, so just because I’m having a slow week doesn’t mean I should buy that extremely desirable but ridiculously expensive dress. That relationships are hard: that there is not a foreseeable point at which I will experience complete romantic resolution and ride off into the sunset as the credits roll. Also, that my boyfriend is so much better than any romantic lead I could write for myself, because he’s real, and as an individual person over whom I have no control, he decided to love me. That only eating carbohydrates for breakfast will leave me ravenous by 10:30 am, and that those incredible, satisfying showdowns I imagine and script so carefully in the shower will never happen. That having good people in your life makes it better, whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. That happiness is not a constant state: you have a baseline of factors contributing to your general contentment, and an odd sprinkling of small elements in your day that can make you enjoy the whole shebang a little bit more. So for the love of God, pet that dog and shove your head in that lilac bush, because it will make you happy, and that is not a small thing.

Above all, though, I have experienced that there has not been anything yet that has killed me.

I have very wise friends. One, who knows exactly when to gently apply tough love, told me that thousands of people go through the graduate school application process every year and very few experience mental breakdowns. Another, while we were medicating our mutual bad day with blue-cheese burgers, told me that life is a collection of good days and bad days, and if you have more good days than bad, you’ve done okay.

I am responsible for who I am now, and who I’m becoming. However, I am not responsible for my Entire Future right here, right now. There is a place between taking no agency, blaming fate and old decisions, and assuming responsibility for my entire life as of this very moment. I seek that place, the middle-ground, because I imagine that the weather is very good there: an excellent climate for my chronic anxiety.

In the mean time, I’m going to smell lilacs and nudge my way into my future, buying a GRE book and perhaps a mozzarella sandwich and learning how to be okay with a scary answer to the scary question: “What’s next?”

I don’t know.

The Anecdotal Life

Two years ago, I was standing in a flower shop in my hometown waiting for a boutonniere when my phone rang. I had figured it was my best friend: we were T-minus twenty-four hours from her wedding, and as maid-of-honor, I was on-call and ready for action. I had flown home the previous day for the wedding, joyfully ditching in my new job for a long weekend, which I had negotiated when I took the position. I had a spike of anxiety when I saw that the number on my phone was a Boston area code.

I picked up and found one very urgent real estate agent on the other end.

“I need for you to be in Brighton right now,” Ashley said to me. After a few traumatizing Craigslist apartment visits, I had followed the advice of a friend and started working with Ashley, the agent who had helped my friend find his place. I had taken an immediate liking to Ashley when we had first met: she had frowned at several listings and said that she didn’t think they were what I was looking for. She was right: they weren’t. We got on well after that.

Now, three weeks later in a flower shop halfway across the country, my head spun with trying to remember who I was in that moment—somewhere between new Boston resident and maid-of-honor in Chicago.

“Ashley, I’m in Chicago for my best friend’s wedding. I don’t get back until Sunday night.”

There was a pause on the line, and I heard her take a deep breath. “Then you’re going to need to trust me.”

Everyone—and I mean everyone—in my family thought I had lost my mind when I signed the lease and faxed it in. The funny thing about my family, though, is that they will help you accomplish the task about which they are so dubious even while they’re voicing their doubts. My grandfather cut the check, which I was to pay back immediately, and dropped if off that night at the rental office in Brookline, probably about the same time that I was strolling down the aisle at the wedding rehearsal.

I moved in two years ago Sunday. Best leap of faith ever.

One of the trappings of adulthood to which I treat myself is a subscription to the New Yorker, sent weekly to my darling little apartment. One of the things I began to do almost immediately when the magazine started arriving was to cut out my favorite cartoons. (Let’s be honest: the only thing Playboy and the New Yorker have in common is that nobody reads them strictly for the articles—the images therein are a major draw.) It started out casually enough: I would see something about cupcake frosting or Lady Gaga and cut out the cartoon to send it to the friend of whom it reminded me. The snarky corporate images—“Sir, he left a suicide deck”—appealed to my sometimes fleeting, black humor about my job at the time. Some of them were just plain funny, like the penguin who is flummoxed to find he has his tuxedo on inside-out. And still others were almost embarrassingly insightful into how I think about my life: over coffee, one cartoon woman confides blithely to her two companions, “I don’t mind emotional trauma if I can turn it into a really funny anecdote.”

Yikes.

In reality, the day on which I signed my apartment lease sight unseen and attended my best friend’s wedding rehearsal was incredibly stressful. In the end, however, it made a great story, because everything worked out—the wedding was fantastic and so is my apartment. Likewise, one of the best stories I have was born from the longest thirty-six hours of my life, during which I travelled from Praiano (where the bus was full), to Sorrento (where the bus left without me), to Naples (where I barely caught the last train) to Rome (where I found out Orbitz had lost my reservation) to Newark (where my flight to Chicago had been cancelled), and finally to Chicago, after having caught the last flight home through the grace of one very kind gate agent. I arrived more or less in one piece, but as soon as I sat down on the flight to Chicago, I burst into uncontrollable laughter and thought they might have to subdue me.

Again: horrifying at the time, but hilarious in retrospect.

Even the stories that don’t end so well can be made into excellent cocktail conversation fodder: my standard line about my disastrous year on match.com is that I was secretly conducting anthropological research for a David Sedaris-style book of short stories. After I realized how the system did and didn’t work, I would almost pray for a truly catastrophic date. It was unlikely I was going to meet my match (no matter what their commercials might say—I always have to resist the urge to chuck a shoe at my TV when they come on), but nothing about a boring date was particularly funny. And dang it, if I had paid this much money not to meet my future mate, I’d better damn well get some good stories out of it.

It’s times like that when I worry that my twenties are turning into the pursuit of the perfect anecdote.

We often think about our lives as a continuous timeline: one age gives way to another, grouped under certain sub-headings (high school, college, first job) and punctuated by memorable events. This is, I guess, more or less accurate, since all of us are bound to a certain straight, chronological line; but really, how many of us think that linearly about the lives we lead?

When I think about my life, I think about a collection of stories. When I was little, my grandmother created an oral family tree for me, and I can trace my family back several generations through the stories I know about them (the one about great-grandpa George, the Tin Lizzy, and the rhododendron bush is especially memorable). At some point, between history class timelines and Grandma’s stories, my young mind decided that the stories are infinitely more fun, so that was how I began building my own history.

At some point, of course, in my overly analytical, literarily inclined brain, I started to anthologize (pause to flinch at unbearable pretention). If I am made up of the stories I’ve lived and the stories I tell, what do they mean as—for lack of a better work—a collection, and how could they indicate what comes next? I want so much to make sense of what my history has meant, as if I might be able to uncover clues about where the heck I’m going. It’s kind of like my own form of augury; it’s an inexact science either way, deciphering the flight of birds or common experiential threads.

In the last several years of my life, there has been quite a lot of uncertainty and general flailing. I’m not a big fan of uncertainty, so when I start to think about my most recent batch of stories, I cast them in a humorous light. I make sense of my twenties by making them funny, because if these years aren’t funny, they’re scary and uncertain, and I have a hard time knowing what to do with that. Yes, my adventures in weddings, real estate, international travel, scary bosses, and internet dating have been frequently hilarious. But sometimes they weren’t—sometimes they just sucked. I am a person who always wants to be funny and always wants to have a good story, but someday I would also like to be a person who is confident enough that even if my life is scary and uncertain, most of it will make sense eventually.

I have several different editions of The Great Gatsby sitting on my shelf at home, and each of them has a fresh, insightful introduction, which tackles the meaning of the book in a new light or under new assumptions. But really? I never read the intros. I just love the book itself. So maybe I should just stop anthologizing and keep writing.

It is, after all, a little early in my life for any definitive, editorial conclusions.

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.

There and (Regrettably) Back Again

Around this time of year, I start sleeping with my windows open. As far as I’m concerned, there are few pleasures in life that rival sleeping in a warm cocoon of blankets in a cold room. On weekdays, however, the pleasures of a blanket cocoon are slightly compromised when one has to depart from said cocoon into a very chilly apartment in the morning. When my alarm clock goes off, I tend to hit snooze and glare for a few baleful moments at the general surroundings of Wednesday, or worse yet, Monday.

I was describing this phenomenon to a friend in an email when I added as an afterthought that an Apartment Gremlin would be the perfect solution to this problem. (I should note here that I choose the word gremlin more for the pleasure of its pronunciation in conjunction with the word apartment. As a deep fantasy nerd, I realize there are other creatures that would be much more appropriate: brownie, fairy, sprite, etc. Again, the nerdhood runs deep.) An Apartment Gremlin, in my mind, would wake up around 3 or 4 am and make the rounds in my apartment, closing windows. Consequently, I would be able to fall asleep in a chilled apartment and wake up in a blissfully warm one.

My mind grabbed the idea and ran with it.

I’ve always had a fascination with things small and magical. I can trace this inclination to the books my grandmother read to me as a child: all of the E. Nesbit stories, The Borrowers and its sequels, and anything by Elizabeth Goudge. These books were inhabited by fairies, helpful bees, elder relations of suspiciously magical character, and other invisible goings on, and all of them had the ability to make it seem as though magic, and its presence and dealings in everyday life, was the most normal thing in the world. It went even further than that in many cases: often the magical creatures were characterized by very human foibles, from general prejudices to outright fussiness. It’s entirely possible that the reason these books are mainly written for a younger audience is that children can accept more readily the idea that mixing magic and Mondays isn’t so outlandish. Harry Potter wasn’t the first British child to discover a world of magic coexistent with his own; he is only one of the most recent and, I might add, he seemed more surprised to find it than most of his literary predecessors. Most other young, British protagonists in fantasy books simply took magic as a matter of course. I think especially of Lucy, emerging from the wardrobe into Narnia and promptly taking tea with Mr. Tumnus.

The distance now separating me from The Five Children and It and all the other stories is a bit wider than the breadth of the Atlantic. When I fantasize anymore, I don’t often dream myself into Maria Merryweather’s perfect tower room or Arrietty’s sub-floorboard living room. I dream about mystical, perfect grad school scholarships and an herb garden outside of a grey house in Maine. In a way, these are the adult incarnations of pots of gold and fairy tale castles. We just ground them, hauling them into our world and putting coffee cups down on top of them so they won’t blow away.

Sometimes I wonder about the point at which we stop importing ourselves into worlds of fantasy and start bringing fantasies into our own realities; when the trappings of dreams must become more real to be more acceptable to the adult mind. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other, but the difference is certainly startling. The change, though, isn’t necessarily permanent, and sometimes the wonder does come bubbling up.

As soon as I formed the idea—Apartment Gremlin—a remarkably detailed image came to mind and rapidly wrote itself into something like a story:

It is just before dawn in my apartment. The light is subdued, and the air is cold. There is a small cottage underneath my bed, which is conveniently set upon risers. The structure is mock-Tudor, fashioned from cardboard, plaster, whiteout, thatching, and scraps of cloth; particular attention has been paid to the windows, which are adorned with curtains within and shutters without. There are sturdy window boxes, which boast an assortment of Corsican mint and sweet violets.

From the tidy cottage a small figure emerges, stretching its arms over its head to work out the night’s kinks. It has a broad face, decorated with a beaky nose and determined eyebrows. It wears its sugar-floss hair in different colors, depending on its mood, and today has chosen a wealthy tuft of pale green. On its spindly body it wears indifferent brown trousers and a bottle green vest, which is decorated with a silver watch chain of which it is very proud. One may note that there is no watch upon the watch chain; gremlins take very little note of the institutionalized measure of time per se, but are quite fond of the lovely adornments humans give to the measure of time: arms of clocks, chains of old fashioned watches, and the brief and entirely insistent music the keepers make at an especially appointed hour. This gremlin’s personal watch chain was cleverly adapted from an old silver necklace chain, polished to enviable brightness.

Fully awake, the gremlin surveys the expanse of hardwood floor and mountainous furniture with quick, business-like approval, and clambers nimbly upwards towards the windows. At its polite request, the windows lower themselves silently, only making an apologetic, muted whump as they seal. It taps the radiator on its way to the kitchen, to politely remind it of its duties, and before the gremlin has had its tea, warmth has begun to creep back into the apartment.

It enjoys a meal of precisely one Cheez-It and a small cup of Constant Comment tea. I came to understand very early on that gremlins are not appreciative of thimbles as drinking receptacles and reserve special disdain for all things pink. As a result, I was obliged to find a doll’s tea cup, which was not difficult, that most especially had no pink decoration of any sort, which was surprisingly difficult. When I obtained a light blue china cup, the gremlin was exceedingly pleased.

Its first meal of the day is also its last, since gremlins have very short days: they do not favor brightness (and so avoid morning and afternoon), cannot abide darkness (and so avoid night), and their disfavor of pink predisposes them to avoid sunset entirely. They seem only to enjoy the few silver hours between true night and glaring dawn and in an adaptation, which may only be described as peculiarly British, they take particular delight in gloomy days with soaking rain. As a result, I often wonder about the gremlin population of Seattle and whether or not it is, in fact, an untapped resource.

After its meal, the gremlin casually retrieves a vicious looking shrimp fork from behind the toaster and descends competently to the floor. In the remaining time before true dawn, it stalks a now domesticated population of dust bunnies in their usual haunts. It feels no compunction in their slaughter, because (as it pointed out in our one conversation on the matter) there will always be more. I had experienced some surprise at its pursuit of the dust bunnies, their extinction not being a feature of the gremlin’s original contract, but (again, in our one conversation on the matter) it noted to me that the bunnies had themselves gone quite feral and that it enjoyed the hunt. It had also taken the difficult procurement of the blue cup to be a gesture of good will, and had been pleased to return the favor.

With the dust carcasses skewered on the bristles of a well-placed hand broom, the gremlin yawns (which, in gremlins, is primarily a function of stretching its feet luxuriously) and walks back across the floor to its cottage. The warmth of the obedient radiator has made it sleepy, and it takes a final cursory glance around the room before it enters its home and closes the door behind it.

I come back to my awareness at my desk, shaking off the curiosity about whether or not the gremlin has a mailbox. I feel predictably silly and surprisingly sad, and I realize that I miss the combination of wonder and everyday acceptance of the possibility of magic. It is simultaneously necessary and terrible that we grow out of it, perhaps only satisfied as the eccentric aunt or uncle who still secretly believes and provides a suitable and supportive backdrop for another child’s story.

I also realize regretfully that tomorrow morning, I will wake up with no cottage under my bed, the windows open, the room cold, and a rampant population of feral dust bunnies.

Dead Poets and Career Choices (an ode to Karen Wallace)

In my family, the story goes that at one point in the early stages of my aunt’s adult life, an older relative informed her that she should never let a man see her sleep before they got married, since she snored. She should also never beat a man at checkers, apparently. I got my own dose of advice, from a different relative but along similar lines, while I was demolishing an unfortunate crustacean at a family crab-feed: that I should probably have something on paper with my beloved before I let him see me eat shellfish.

On the one hand, all of the aforementioned advice positively reeks of chauvinism and values of antiquated femininity, in neither of which I place much value. On the other hand, I am well aware that I (perhaps only surpassed in reputation by my mother) am the creature with which mommy crabs threaten their baby crabs to make them behave. Eating crab and lobster combines for me three of my most favorite things in the world: eating in general, butter in particular, and competition above all. I take just as much joy in picking every last ounce of meat from the crab as I do in enjoying the spoils. I’m not kidding myself about how such a sight might affect a potential suitor: I’m intimidating enough as it is. Perhaps it’s best to wait a while before we go out for lobster.

Self-awareness is a funny thing. While it primarily involves honesty, it also involves some other components. It’s kind of like the gin to a martini: essential, but incomplete without supporting ingredients. One of those ingredients—in the martini metaphor, this might be the exquisite, gorgonzola-stuffed olive—is external perspective: someone to reach in from outside and point out something that is obvious from a distance but less so from within the confines of your head (an extraordinary best friend is perfect for this; a therapist also helps). The trickiest ingredient is the ability to gauge how hard on yourself you should be; the vermouth of the equation: too much and you run the risk of a wimpy martini, too little and you can barely kid yourself that you’re enjoying drinking this jet fuel.

Many of my exercises in self-awareness are harmless and sometimes accompanied by the warm, fuzzy feeling of figuring out that some of my quirks aren’t faults. For instance: yes, consumption of shellfish should wait until the preliminary stages of a relationship have passed. Another realization has saved me a lot of money: an item of clothing may be simultaneous desirable and totally unrealistic. Sure, I may like it, but I’ll definitely never wear it, so put the credit card away, stupid. There are some movies that will make me cry—as in, bawl my eyes out with loud, messy hiccups—and so should be watched alone. Among these are: Armageddon, Toy Story 3 (a recent addition), Moulin Rouge, and Dead Poets Society.

The last of these movies (no, I’d never call Armageddon a film) was on the other night, and I stood paralyzed in front of the TV, watching the last scene even as my tea kettle was shrieking to be unplugged in the kitchen. As soon as Ethan Hawke starts up from his chair, stuttering about how he knows it wasn’t Robin Williams’ fault, the floodgates opened. By the time the boys are standing on their desks, I was a blithering heap.

I myself was lucky enough to have an O Captain, My Captain, in the form of the inestimable Dr. Karen Wallace. I hated her at first: she had a very low tolerance for bullshit, and as an arrogant high school freshman, I had a surplus. It eventually became a joke between us that at first, all I could hear was her saying to me that I didn’t know everything. When I stopped blustering and started listening, I could hear the other half of her wisdom: that no, I didn’t know everything, but ignorance is not lack of knowledge. Ignorance is refusing to gain more knowledge because you think you already have it all. Basically, once I realized she didn’t think I was a moron (which, in many ways, I was) and that she was in fact trying to help me, we became very close. I would come into her office when writing a paper (for any class, not just hers) and soliloquize at length on a completely disorganized heap of ideas, which were swirling around in my head.

She would listen patiently, and when I had worn myself out, she would ask, “What are you trying to say?”

Surprised out of my stream-of-consciousness, I would reply in the form of a thesis statement.

She would smile beatifically and say, “Good. Write that down.”

Throughout high school and college, I always began essays and papers by typing her words on the top of my brainstorming page:

What are you trying to say?

Good. Write that down.

Two things I know about myself are that I love the English language in its various literary incarnations, and that I love to teach. Karen used to let me take over small parts of the weekly grammar lessons, and when my enthusiasm at the chalkboard translated into someone’s understanding how an indirect objected works, I experienced a satisfaction that has proven to be difficult to match. Several years later, I gave a gallery talk in conjunction with an intern show I had curated at my college museum. I got the same rush as in freshman English: watching my explanation of a topic change the way people understood it.

One could logically deduce from all of this that I should be pursuing a career teaching English or art history. And believe me, I’m thinking about it. I think to myself that if I could just be one person’s Karen Wallace, if I could spark one student’s lifelong love for Fitzgerald or McCullers the way Karen did mine, that would be a career well-spent.

It is at this point in my thinking that my punctilious self-awareness clears its throat to get my attention. It may be fun to fantasize about a fulfilling, rosy life of teaching attentive, passionate students, but at a time when I need to be making real decisions about graduate school and how to afford such opposing forces as higher education and sustenance, I need to be honest with myself:

I would love to be someone’s Karen. But, truthfully, would that be enough?

The truth is that teaching is hard. At a dinner party I attended recently, a friend of mine commented dryly that she did not pass a day in her first several months of teaching without at some point bursting into tears. And she’s a lot more even-keeled than I am. I am someone who thrives on positive reinforcement, and I am abundantly aware that in most cases, teaching is a thankless job. Aside from ungrateful students, you also face hefty school politics, a tiny, fiercely competitive job market, and insane workloads. Thinking about all of these things, the rosy glow of teaching pales somewhat, and I find myself wondering if this is really something I want to pursue.

And so I face the vermouth issue. On the one hand, it’s possible that I’m not giving myself enough credit. Maybe I am tough enough to teach. Maybe letting myself give up just because something looks difficult is cowardly. On the other hand, I’ve learned the hard way that idealism is something very easily crushed, and that thankless jobs have indeed left me on the floor of my apartment in helpless, defeated tears.

It’s times like these that I find myself not so much “yawping” as “wembling.”

One of the things I have learned in (mostly) becoming an adult is that one often has to assign value to slippery, complicated things if one is to make any decisions. When I was choosing an apartment, I literally had to put a price on my preference for privacy. When I left my old job for my new one, I decided that losing sixteen months of hard work and walking away from valuable recommendations was worth less to me than working in the field I had originally set out to pursue. At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to decide how brave I really think I am, and how much realistic value I can place on the idea of being one person’s Karen, and many other people’s Just Another Lame Teacher.

One of the things I loved most about Karen was the combined power of her incapacity for bullshit and her immense capacity for kindness—kindness that inspired almost unreasonable patience with a pretentious student like me. I like to think she believed I contained multitudes.

What I have to do now is take my self-awareness and decide exactly of what those multitudes are capable.

(For fantastic coverage of English grammar from a real-live teacher, who has also faced the Dead Poets conundrum, please see Missed Periods and Other Grammatical Scares.)