Of course, in many respects, I am never alone. People are goddamn everywhere. I live with two roommates in a tiny apartment, and though I fantasize each day about residing somewhere where I don’t have to listen to another person have sex, unless I sell all my earthly possessions or move to deep Staten Island, I will never be able to afford my own place. I reside in a city with over eight million people, and every single day I bump into at least three of them on the sidewalk because I refuse to look up from my phone while walking, lest I miss one of Cher’s tweets. Every day I am crushed between human bodies on the subway or kept awake by bodies breaking up outside my bedroom window or infected with the flu by a body sneezing near me at the coffee shop. I am never free of the reminder that there are billions of people out there, which only serves to heighten my awareness of my relative aloneness.
The funny thing about my erstwhile fear of being alone was that I never really feared being lonely. I just didn’t want everyone else to have fun without me. I didn’t want my friends to get boyfriends and husbands and babies and leave me behind. I didn’t want to miss out on what it would mean to share a life with someone else, to fall in love and make a family and grow old surrounded by loved ones like you were supposed to do.
I’m not sure that path is where I’m headed, or if it’s even where I want to go. I’m not sure it’s what I wanted back when I feared I wouldn’t get it, or if I just didn’t want to feel left out. But that fear got lost somewhere, along with the old friends whose lives no longer fit mine. Life happens all the time, even if you don’t get to post 10,000 Instagram photos each week reminding everyone you just got engaged.
* * *
I have mentioned my captivation with the concept of cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—in terms of how it played out with anxiety, but it also has practical applications. When my mind broke at nineteen, I liked its suggestion that nothing existed beyond the borders of your own brain because it let me avoid scary things like death, war, and my macroeconomics exam, because none of those things were real if the cogito held true. I also liked it because it let me be a bad and selfish person. I could stand up dates and talk shit about nice people and not recycle, because nothing mattered except me.
I still like the cogito, but not for the same reasons. I don’t think it means that no one outside my head exists or even matters, so much as it’s a reminder that the person you matter most to is yourself. That is not an excuse to stick straws up sea animals’ noses, but it is an excuse to stop fearing you’ll be the last one left without a partner in crime. No matter how many people flit in and out of your life, you’ll always be stuck with yourself.
It is always possible that I will meet someone, fall in love, make a baby, and raise it in a Park Slope brownstone purchased with our shared incomes. Anything can happen at any moment, as I am frequently reminded every time I have to tell my landlord the ceiling fell in. But it is also possible I won’t.
Maybe learning not to fear solitude will make it easier for me to give it up somewhere down the road. Maybe, when I’m older and wiser and past my prime, I’ll decide to let someone in because I want them, not because I’m afraid of missing out on something or being left behind. Maybe I won’t. Maybe all my friends will find love or move to Los Angeles or move uptown and forget about me. Maybe I will spend every day alone until the carpet beetles attack. It could be worse. I could have to listen to someone else snore.
How to Fail at Failing
I should probably start this off by admitting that I am spoiled as shit. Though I now panic over money at least twice an hour, I grew up in a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I spent my teen years complaining about having to save my babysitting dollars to buy one stupid overpriced jean jacket at J.Crew. At the time, I considered this to be a struggle. Which was, of course, deeply incorrect. But I was (and often still am) blind to real struggle, though never as blind as the year I matriculated at a fancy New York City private high school that was full of Very Rich People.
The Very Rich People took me by surprise. Before the Upper West Side, I lived in pre-Giuliani Midtown Manhattan, where public schools were allegedly “not good,” so it was decided I would attend private school. Real private school was very expensive, so instead, from nursery through eighth grade, I went to a then-unfancy Jewish day school. There were a few Very Rich People hiding out among my classmates, but the majority were the children of social workers, teachers, rabbis, and other folks in comfortable, but not lucrative, careers. It was a nice place to grow up, despite the fact that they taught us about the Holocaust alongside the primary colors.
New York City has some of the best private high schools in the country. Classes are intimate, teachers are dynamic, and the college guidance counselors have “special” relationships with admissions officers at the most coveted universities. By the time I was in eighth grade, I yearned for an experience beyond my forty-person-per-grade Jewish school, plus I was tired of pretending I’d never eaten shrimp. I applied to a bunch of those fancy schools, and when it came time to start ninth grade, I headed to a prestigious prep school in Riverdale, complete with ball fields (!!!), a swimming pool (!!!!!!!!!), multiple buildings for learning (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and a surprising number of students with personal drivers.
Annual tuition for these schools is now up to about $40,000 per year, and though my school cost much less than that when I entered in 2003, it was, I believe, still too expensive for my parents. My grandparents had the money, and so they paid for me (and later, for my sister) to attend this school. I both didn’t quite know this at the time and also did. But cost-prohibitive or not, it was important for me to go there if I wanted to go places. And if I didn’t go places, it wouldn’t just be me I’d be letting down. There was, after all, an entire tribe standing behind me, pushing me forward.
* * *
New York City private school is not quite as crazy as it looks on Gossip Girl—there are fewer murder plot lines and I don’t recall ever attending a catered brunch or someone’s wedding to a prince. But there were big drunken parties. Skinny attendees of all-girls schools whom all the hot boys wanted to fuck hung around those parties. Kids probably did coke in the school bathrooms, not that anyone invited me. People knew what Fabergé eggs were, because their parents owned them. I’m sure at least one person lived in a hotel.
I was startled by the drivers and the four-floor penthouses and the bathroom coke I heard about but never saw. All of this was new to me. The other thing that was new was the academic pressure. I was here to excel—that was the point, after all, of pouring money into private school tuition. In theory, I had worked hard to get into this school; my parents had worked hard to help me work hard to get into it, and my grandparents had worked hard to pay for it.
Hard work here would get me to into a good college; hard work there would get me into a good graduate school, and hard work in grad school would get me a job to pay for the next generation’s private education. This was how it worked. This is what was necessary to succeed. Armed with this knowledge, I started my new school.
* * *
At my teeny day school it was easy for me to be somewhere near the top of my class, but at this behemoth, excelling was a challenge. I am not as smart as I think I am, and I don’t like to work hard at things that don’t come easy. At my old school, there was an entire science unit that focused on determining which methods of cow slaughter were kosher. Here we had biology. The textbooks had real science words, like cytokinesis and petri dish. It took some adjusting.
In ninth grade I did all the reading and raised my hand in class and generally enjoyed getting As and nice comments on all my essays, just as I did at my old school. But in tenth grade, I somehow ended up in three advanced courses, two of which were Algebra II and Chemistry. Numbers have long been my nemeses. On the SATs, I added 8 and 6 and got 4. But my academic adviser (fancy school!) told me college admissions officers preferred students who got lower grades in a hard class than high
ones in a mediocre one, even if the former triggered regular night sweats. I had my little heart set on Brown, the only university in the United States of America, so I decided to stick out the scary numbers.
On my first advanced chemistry test, I got a C. On the second one, I got a C−. On the third, I did so poorly I had to retake the test, and I did so poorly on the retake that I had to have a meeting with the teacher, who tried very patiently to explain covalent bonds (fancy school!). In Algebra II, my worksheets and exams came back with bold 68s circled at the top. I continued to try to understand the numbers and symbols, but they swam together and twisted and jumbled in front of me on the page. Even when I studied for more hours than I currently spend bingeing on all eleven seasons of Cheers, my tests came back tattooed in red ink.
“I think this class is too hard for you,” one of my teachers told me gently. “You’re failing.” It was strange to hear. I had never failed anything before.
* * *
What they don’t tell you when you’re young and afraid of failing is that it is very freeing to fail. It is even more freeing when you fail in full than when you fail in part. It’s easier to scrap something entirely than to fix something that’s broken, which is why couples break up after their first fight and no one ever eats half a burger. If you can’t be the best, you might as well be the worst. The resignation is liberating.
When I started to fail math and chemistry, I stopped paying attention in class and doing my homework. I didn’t study for tests. The damage had been done, and it didn’t matter anymore. I was no longer the smartest, so I was no longer smart. No amount of hard work or focus or hours spent reading my textbook was going to make me understand quadratic equations. Now I had more time to watch TV.
It was so nice not working hard at math and science that I did the same for my other classes, which were much easier for me but still required me to put in some effort. There are no walls to cling to in a free fall. I stopped doing the reading for my English lit class. I stopped studying for history tests. I lost my Spanish book. I faked sick during first period and hung out in the nurse’s office. I faked sick in the morning before the bus came and stayed home on my couch. Teachers in even my strong subjects started picking up on my lack of preparation, perhaps because I called Walden a “very good book.” My grades tanked, and I went from a mostly effortless A student to someone who had to have parents sign her tests. Such is the maturity of a fifteen-year-old tasked with making good on a very adult financial investment: I fucking loved it.
* * *
Also pertinent: the summer before tenth grade, I discovered the Doors. One day my father played “Light My Fire” on the stereo, and all was lost. I thought Jim Morrison was the hottest cat on the block, assuming the block had transported back through time, since he’d been dead for over three decades when I heard of him.
I listened to a song he recorded while tripping on acid, and one he recorded while getting a blow job. He sang about eating out women and anal sex and getting “higher,” all of which were things I didn’t quite understand but knew I would soon. I read about how he spent the summer of 1965 living on a friend’s rooftop in Venice Beach and stealing oranges from neighbors’ trees. He was bohemian and free, a blend of SEX and DRUGS and LOVE and LIVING, even though he was not actually living, and so to me he offered the promise of the wild life just out of reach.
That fall I got drunk for the first time. Two weeks later, I tried pot in the backyard of one of my classmates’ fancy apartments, the kind with columns at the entrance and multiple floors outfitted with built-in bookshelves. Somewhere in this period, I also developed a crush on a classmate named Jake. He also loved Jim Morrison. He’d had sex already and smoked a lot of weed, and did terribly in school, and sometimes during our free periods we’d share clove cigarettes in a park near campus. He had no interest in me, or maybe he was just interested enough in having a girl like him that he kept me on the hook, I’m not sure.
But I know I started living and breathing him, so much so that I posted entries composed entirely of Doors lyrics on my (very public) online journal to exemplify my love. “‘Can you picture what we’ll be,’” I typed to the music. “‘So limitless and free. . . . This is the end.’” This was, again, all public. I know you would have hated me in high school. Don’t worry, I hated me, too.
When I started failing, I felt like a rebel, the way Jake was, the way Jim Morrison must have been, considering the number of times he got arrested for indecent exposure. I felt like Not Me, like a braver, wilder, more adult person. I was barreling through an “elite” prep school, where phrases like Ivy League and permanent record felt like they hung on the walls, and up to this point, I had been made to believe that anything bad I did would resurface to damage my future. No college wants a student who isn’t perfect. No job wants a graduate from a shitty school. No man wants a woman with a worthless job. No woman wants to go through life without a man. More than math and science, I was learning these lessons in school.
But when I started to fail, those things began to lose their weight. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of that or needed it to survive. I reveled in my new identity as someone who didn’t care or try. After all, I was too wild for a real college and a real job and a good man to take care of me. I was never going to be as pretty or polished as the girls in my class were, with their duplex apartments in Jerry Seinfeld’s building and highlights their mothers paid for. I was never going to be as smart as the kids whose brains could reason out matrices and polynomials. But maybe that was fine. I didn’t need to be perfect if I was a rebel. Cool people lived by their own rules. I could live off acid and stolen fruits in Los Angeles, like my beloved Jim. Maybe the cycle of good schools and good jobs and good, dutiful offspring was something I was meant to break.
* * *
The thing about these fancy private schools is that they won’t let you fail, no matter how hard you try. This, I suspect, has more to do with preserving their U.S. News & World Report rankings and steady stream of alumni donations than any real concern for their students, but it is what it is. Teachers at my school oversaw a small number of students in advisory groups, which meant there was someone paying attention to me when I went from a good student to a poor one.
My adviser, a former investment banker who now taught economics and history, wasn’t actually all that attentive, and appeared to assume my silly girl brain had always been slow. But he did have a meeting with my parents to go over my report card, and since the two of them had believed for so long that their baby girl was a certified genius, they were quite surprised by the comments on my quarterly report suggesting I was not.
“What’s going on with you?” my mother asked, after reading a note from my American history teacher suggesting I had not once opened the textbook. “Are you on drugs?”
“I’m not on drugs!” I insisted, though to my mother, smoking pot twice was the equivalent of running a cartel.
They did not understand what was wrong. But they knew something was, and their incredible disappointment radiated outward every time they looked at me. It turns out no matter how hard you try to be a new person, the old version of you refuses to go away, and the part of me that wanted my parents to love me for being good sent out panic signals. By attending this school, by letting other people shovel money into an education that was supposed to push me forward, I had been handed an opportunity. I was wasting it. I was ungrateful. I had strayed from the path, and now it was time to come back.
Several months of fucking around had rendered me academically rusty, and it appeared that if I wanted to pass tenth grade, I would have to give up the Jim Morrison videos and clove-smoking sessions and maybe read a book. When I started studying again, I got As in my good subjects. And with some diligence, I managed to get my math grade all the way up to a C+, a mark my college guidance counselor would later circle at each of our meetings when it came time to apply to my beloved Brown.
Tragically, I am not a genius. I did not g
et into Brown or any Ivy League institution, but I did just fine, even with my small dip in grades. In the world of the Manhattan rich, there is no such thing as failing, no matter how hard you try. Last I heard, Jake’s parents bought him an apartment.
* * *
This was not the only time I let myself sink. In college, there were semesters in which I gave up, because life was more rewarding when I was out making a mess of it than when I was impressing TAs by memorizing The Winter’s Tale (which I also did). There’ve been periods in adulthood—short periods, but they’ve existed—in which I’ve swapped out hard work and diligence for binge-drinking and reckless sexual encounters. I have spent money on cigarettes that I needed for my gas bill. I have done shots at eleven p.m. and called out sick at nine a.m. There have been mornings in which I look in the mirror, see my sunken eyes and yellowing skin, and know I am pickling myself from the inside.
But the rebellion never sticks. No matter how much I flirt with the idea of letting things turn to shit, of breaking with who I am supposed to be, I always seem to pull myself out of free fall before I’m rendered bloodied and splayed out on the sidewalk.
Sometimes I am tired of being me. I am tired of the cycle. Even if I live my life on a parallel track—even if I technically didn’t get a good moneymaking job or make good babies who will go to good schools to later make their own good money and babies—I am still on a track, and I am going to stay on it. Sometimes I want to know what it would be like if I weren’t, if I didn’t live up to expectations, if there were none to live up to at all. I wonder if I’d have any drive, or, as I suspect in dark moments, if left to my own devices, I would fail for real.
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 11