On the other hand, I was surrounded by people I loved and who loved me, who tended to make me dinner and let me fill up their DVR with reruns of The Nanny. It was a nice time, but it was also a weird time. I was lucky to have somewhere to crash while I waited for the insurance check to come through, but it was strange to abandon the life I’d worked so hard to make for myself so quickly. When I come home for short visits, I tend to turn into the person I was before I left for good, when I was seventeen and about to start college and become a new me. This time I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to leave again, or where I’d go. For the most part, the things I had amassed over my years of independence, the totems and proof that I’d once had a room and an address and a life of my own, were gone. Incidentally, the things I’d once feared losing—my dolls, my toys, my Wayside School storybook collection—were pretty much the only things I had left.
* * *
The thing about losing most of your stuff is that stuff is just stuff. Before toxic smoke penetrated everything I owned, I cared a lot about getting new things. I was never a shopper per se, but buying new things was a form of self-care. Capitalism had taught me that I would feel better if I had a new T-shirt, and sometimes it did make me feel better. Other times I just had one more T-shirt. But there was security in having the things. I liked that they were safe with me in my apartment. I liked that the things that belonged to me slept near me in a drawer. We insulated each other from the outside world, heightening the difference all domesticated creatures assert—that there in fact is a difference between in here and out there.
Everything I owned, up to the fire, marked a specific point in time. I had dozens of chiffon shirts I’d gotten for free when I worked at a clothing store that I refused to throw out, just in case. I had hundreds of dollars’ worth of nail polish that I bought during a particularly dark phase when I was on Weight Watchers and would go to Duane Reade to avoid drunk-eating. I had a hard drive full of photos from college, concert flyers I’d stolen from bars in Europe, a painting my grandmother made for me. All my books were gone. I loved all those things because they were mine, and now they were in a sanitation lot in Brooklyn. But it was just stuff.
I also lost a place. Though I still had somewhere to live, getting ejected from my little Greenpoint haven was like being thrown into a river. I missed my blue kitchen and my yoga studio and my Polish grocery store. I missed my commute. I missed being a person with her own address. I didn’t miss paying rent, and my short reprieve at my childhood home meant I could stress less about having to replace all my belongings (the insurance check eventually did arrive, taking the edge off even more). Still, my little life in my little neighborhood had ended.
There’s a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth, which researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun define as a “positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity and other challenges in order to rise to a higher level of functioning.” Basically, when something bad happens to you and you stare it down, you develop more confidence and the sense that you can face adversity, should it come your way again. I read about posttraumatic growth years after the fire when Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico, and though my small plight was far, far cushier than the unmitigated destruction and governmental abandonment of an entire island, something very odd did happen to me after I lost my things and my home. I knew I could survive a bad thing, and if that was the case, I could probably survive many more bad things, maybe even worse things, but certainly things that were decidedly less bad.
Back in my paranoid youth, disasters like fire, death, and monkey bar accidents were out of my control. That fear of not being in control extended into adulthood, even if I wasn’t gripped with terror each night over potential catastrophe. Instead, I feared constantly that a boy I liked would drop me, or that I’d be trapped on a subway train overnight, or that I’d be fired and lose my income and my entire sense of self. But you can’t really protect your parents from dying in a car crash, just as you can’t stop electrical wiring in your illegally zoned Greenpoint apartment building from sparking in the middle of the night. You can’t stop someone you care about from deciding not to care about you. Sometimes you lose your job. Sometimes you lose your home.
* * *
Of course, though I’d like to say the fire turned me into a minimalist, I now own fourteen pairs of jeans. Papers and sweaters and dust and errant hair ties and memories of bad decisions have piled up in every corner of my room in Brooklyn, which is now three years old but was new when I escaped into it several months after the fire. I shed my old shit just to get new shit, and though my new shit fits me better, I’m still weighed down by it all the time. Experiences change you in small ways, but you’re never really fixed.
And in some ways, you’re even more broken. Once, in my new apartment, the smoke detector went off in the middle of the night. I made my roommates march out of the apartment and stand across the street while we called the fire department. They cleared us to go back in, and I spent the rest of the night seeing phantom clouds dance across the room. It was nice to be safe, I suppose. But then again, the insurance money was nice, too.
Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder Except When the Teens Think You’re a Hideous Beast
The internet is great for a lot of things, like googling photos of young Harrison Ford or looking up specific character traits for some of the rarer Muppets. There are times, though, in which the collective voice of the internet turns against you, transforming the World Wide Web from an encyclopedia ripe for near-anonymous browsing into a big pitchfork that angry Twitter townspeople can use to rip out your intestines. And few mob’s tines are sharper than the ones wielded by Taylor Swift fans.
I was an OG Taylor Swift fan—which is to say, I myself loved her as an actual teen. I remember Taylor when her hair was curly, her voice twangy, and her songs imagined ballads about truck-driving boyfriends intent on proposing to her before she graduated from high school. A friend introduced me to Taylor Swift during my freshman year of college not long after she’d released her debut album, and though I wore a lot of scarves during that period, I fucking loved Taylor Swift. My sophomore year, “Forever & Always” came out right around the time a boy I occasionally made out with decided he didn’t like me anymore, and I listened to it on repeat while I waited for him to text me back, which he never did. “‘Was I OUT OF LINE?’” I’d scream along with Taylor in my room. “‘Did I say something WAY TOO HONEST, made you RUN AND HIDE? / LIKE A SCARED LITTLE BOY?’ HUH, SAM? DID I?” The rage didn’t make him like me, but it was cathartic nonetheless.
I followed Taylor through college and into my early postgrad years. I have fond memories of making my sales associates listen to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” while closing out the clothing store I floor-managed my first year out of school. When 1989 came out I wanted to hate it—I was twenty-five and too old and cool for Taylor Swift by then, you see—but I listened to “Blank Space” every single day on my walk to the train in Bushwick and thought about my own long list of ex-lovers who were probably telling people I was insane.
Taylor Swift’s star started to decline with my people when pop music, like everything else in the universe, became politicized by the 2016 election. By the time Reputation came out in 2017, she had become almost synonymous with mediocre white women who let the country fall to Trump. (I was a mediocre white woman who voted for Hillary, thank you very much.) Still, I accepted that Taylor Swift was my problematic fave. So you understand why it was a bit of a shock when the Taylor Swift fans came for me.
The Swifties Incident, as I like to call it, was a snowball. I was a recent entrant into the freelance workforce, and I’d picked up a couple blogging shifts with a very popular women’s website. I was a fan of the site and very excited to work for them when someone asked me to cover their night shift. The catch was that I already had a day shift for a different site in the morning, and another one the next morning, so I was going to have to work nine a
.m. to three p.m., then six p.m. to one a.m., then again from nine a.m. to three p.m. That’s a lot of writing, especially considering that night shift would have me running a website I didn’t know that well without anyone else online to catch my errors. But I was hungry for work and worried about being hungry in general, and you don’t turn down jobs when you’re new to the freelance grind, so I took it on.
The hardest thing about blogging for a website that’s new to you is finding what to write about. When I worked at my local blog, we had a Google doc of story ideas, plus I knew the site so well I could find something appropriate in under ten minutes if I needed to. In New York, subway perverts abound in a pinch, after all. But with this beat, I still wasn’t totally sure what would qualify as a story, and I was scared I’d screw up and endanger our budding relationship. (It turns out this fear was unfounded, as I once published a blog post titled “Reese Witherspoon Cleaned Her Own Hollywood Star, But Will She Come Clean My Room?” and continued to work. But that is neither here nor there.)
Long story short, in need of a story, I noticed Taylor Swift had said something stupid online, and I was good at writing about Taylor Swift. So I made a blog.
The blog, titled “Shut Up Taylor Swift, Everybody Hated 2017,” called Swift out on a comment she made on her Instagram about having “the best year.” For review, 2017 was a total fucking trash fire in which literal Nazis held rallies. Swift hadn’t denounced the white nationalists who celebrated her for being an Aryan pop star, and was now saying the year that blessed us with these monsters was “the best.” The blog was dumb, I wrote it in fifteen minutes, and I sent it out onto the internet. The backlash came quickly.
It’s a specific kind of torture when a teen who hates you gets ahold of your Instagram. I learned this the hard way, when the following day I started getting photo comments and messages from handles like @taylorswiftfan1989 and @reputaytionforqueen excoriating me for daring to come for their girl. “I’m sorry but by writing this article you just showed that your belonged to those sad journalists/bloggers who do nothing but acting,” one person posted. “Blogger aka someone with barely 500 followers ready to tear down successful artists just because her own year wasn’t good,” another wrote.
I have 550 Instagram followers, thank you very much, so I brushed it off. But when I woke up the next morning, the angry Swifty Instagram comments and mean tweets had multiplied. Most of them were about how much I sucked, how cruel I was for attacking a millionaire celebrity who would never hear of me, how I’d surely torn out sweet Taylor’s heart by implying she should have had a bad year just because I did.
A bunch of celebrity stans calling me stupid and cruel didn’t really faze me, as I am not stupid and I know for a fact that I am cruel. Still, as I recall from my own time as a teen, teens always know just the right place to stick the dagger, and some of the enraged Swifties were quick to find my soft spot. The most recent photo on my ’gram at the time of the Swiftening was a makeup-less selfie I took while bored—one I figured maybe fifteen people would see and/or care about, and maybe a guy I liked would think was cute—and the Swifties were quick to inform me that I was nowhere near as beautiful as their queen. In fact, they pointed out, I was ugly.
“The most ugly person I have ever seen, body and soul,” one poster wrote. Another: “If I had a face like yours I’d have a bad year too, why don’t you put on some makeup or some shit.” One dug a little deeper into my Instagram feed, posting “ugly” on photos of me at a wedding, holding a winter squash, hugging my friends. On a photo of a friend’s cat, they even posted “ugly cat.”
Trolls love to call women ugly online. In a world in which appearance is still paramount for the once-deemed fairer sex, being ugly is a curse, a surefire sign that you’re an Undesirable destined for a lonely future and a silent death at the paws of your many unkempt felines. Some women are able to brush off an attack on their physical appearances, having moved on, postpuberty, from the terror of discovering one of their eyes is slightly smaller than the other. Other women don’t even have to contend with a slight against their looks, either because they’re confident enough not to care or because they’re so fucking hot no one would dare call them ugly in the first place.
I am not one of those women. My phone is full of selfies I have taken, not to marvel at my appearance, but to find each teeny flaw. I am very familiar with the awkward way my nose hooks over my nostrils, and the little extra flap of skin under my chin where stitches melted, thanks to an unfortunate seesaw incident. My teeth are crooked. My eyes are small. One of my eyebrows does not have as much hair as the other eyebrow. I am a monster.
I am not actually a monster. Most people are not actually ugly, just as most people are not actually beautiful. Some people have qualities that make them attractive to some people and not to others. Imperfections are interesting. Taylor Swift’s eyes are also small. But the flood of strangers calling me ugly stuck right into the section of my brain that screams every time I go shopping for jeans, or maybe so much interaction with Taylor fans was regressing me to the Taylor-loving, self-hating teen I’d once been. I texted everyone I knew. “Am I ugly?” I begged them. “You would tell me if I were ugly, right?” (Certainly they would not.)
In the twenty-four hours following the Taylor Swift Attack, I devolved into madness. I looked through all my Facebook and Instagram photos at least twice. I took more selfies. I texted more friends. I journaled. I googled, “How do you know you are ugly?” and read a number of Reddit posts that varied in usefulness.
The belief that you are ugly embeds itself early. When I was six or seven, my aunt told me that if I picked my nose it would grow to be bulbous and big. “Like mine,” she said, pointing to the monster gourd that sat atop her face. She scared me—not enough to stop me from digging up there, of course, as I am only human, but enough so I spent the next twenty years obsessing over the size and shape of my own increasingly protrusive organ. Indeed, I ended up with my aunt’s nose, not because of the nose-picking, but because we share genes. BUT STILL.
At one point in my youth, my mother told me short women live difficult lives. “It’s easier to be over five-two,” she said, and so I spent my formative years regarding with pity the teachers, mothers, and other adults who didn’t quite hit that target. I waited for the moment in which I would shoot up and stand above them on the pedestal reserved exclusively for the beautiful and tall, for when I would be willowy and beloved like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, whom I assumed, for some reason, that I’d resemble, even though I was blond and curly-haired and she was a literal drawing. But my growth spurt never came, and soon the classmates who’d stood in front of me when we lined up for school photos moved behind. When I was in fifth grade, my Snoopy-tie-clad pediatrician told me I was probably done growing. “You’ll always be small,” he said, writing 4′11 in his notes, and I screamed and kicked the examining table with my dumb little stubby legs that would never be long enough. I would never be five-two. I had failed. As punishment, my life would always be hard.
The summer before I started sixth grade, I spent my first summer at sleepaway camp. I was short, chubby, and newly pubescent and harbored an obsession with Michael J. Fox that was rather outdated in 2000. One night we had a “social” with the boys’ camp across the way. I dressed up in case someone resembled my beloved MJF, donning a tank top that showed off my arm fat and my friend’s horseshit-caked riding boots that I thought were sexy. The girls looked me up and down. “Is that what you’re wearing?” one asked. It was. “Have you looked at your hair?” I had not. They laughed at me. None of the boys at the social talked to me. I started to understand.
When I was sixteen, I found out a friend of mine was calling me ugly behind my back, and I never got over it. When I was in college, someone posted in my university’s anonymous student message board that I was “ugly and bowlegged.” I have still not gotten over it. (I may also be bowlegged? /shrug.) No matter how many men have told me I am beautiful in order to t
rick me into having sex with them, I do not believe it. When they dump me, I know it’s because they noticed that my nose looks like a potato in the right light. If I dump them, it’s because you can’t trust someone who likes an ugly girl, and also maybe because they laughed weird.
It did not escape me, when the Swifties came for me, that the person I wanted to look like, back when I was young and dreamed of growing up beautiful, was Taylor Swift. Not specifically her, of course, but the paragon of womanly Westernized beauty—tall, thin, long-legged, with bouncy smooth hair and big red lips, just like Taylor. This perception of beauty is starting to shift. Models, actors, and singers do not need to be white-skinned and thin-nosed and European-esque to be considered beautiful. But the shift hadn’t quite made it to me as a child in the 1990s, and it hasn’t pervaded society enough at this point that people don’t think someone that looks like Taylor Swift exemplifies True Beauty, a fact made clear to me by the Swifties.
“I would hate Taylor Swift too, if I looked like Rebecca Fishbein,” one fan tweeted at me, and maybe he’s right. Maybe I tried to cut down a celebrity because I wish I looked like her and owned her house and drove her car. Maybe it was just my job to make a blog, and it was ten p.m., and I was very tired. Either way, I had questioned the human paragon of beauty. Therefore I was “ugly,” because who was I, with my big Jew nose and wild hair and slightly unfilled left eyebrow, to fight the rules governing good looks? Beautiful women are untouchable. If you are not one of them, if you question them, armies of people will literally rise up to tell you why you’re too hideous to speak their name.
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 6