by Cazzie David
“Walk? How stupid. Why would I care? I don’t care,” he said.
I relayed his answer back to my mother, who now decided she didn’t care if we didn’t care, we were going.
Walking is only one of the many reasons why a graduation ceremony is degrading. The amount of effort it takes to go in the first place is another major contributor. My family would have to book hotel rooms, fly from Los Angeles to Boston, wake up at six in the morning for the graduation, and then fly back later that day. My attendance alone would give the impression that walking was worth this huge effort from my family and me, which completely contradicts the “I don’t give a shit about anything” persona that has made me feel safest from shame, even though it’s clearly largely ineffective. Telling my mother all the ways in which going would be a nuisance for her was also largely ineffective.
It wasn’t until it was too late that I remembered the most embarrassing aspect of graduation of all: the costume. Costumes are inherently embarrassing, but there’s something about a cap and gown that’s worse. Maybe because the cap and gown disguise any true emotion you might actually feel and projects to the world that you feel only one emotion: excitement. Or because it represents accomplishment, so wearing it implies that you’re proud of yourself. But it’s probably most embarrassing because it’s emphatically heinous. The cap takes up your entire forehead, replacing it with the widow’s peak from hell. And the gown is basically anti-feminist, it’s so bad for a woman’s body, accentuating her breasts by clinging to them and then just protruding out from there in an attempt to erase the existence of the rest of her. Not even Billie Eilish would be caught in one.
At seven in the morning, I walked from my hotel to the ceremony in the big, black, boxy sheet that drew so much attention, it was as if my outfit were one big pair of sunglasses. Most people I passed on the street stared and whispered about me. Some, unfortunately, didn’t whisper, like the mother who pointed at me and said to her child, “Aw, look, honey! She’s graduating today!” Some even went as far as to talk to me. “What college are you graduating from?” “Congratulations! Big day!” “Ah, to be back in college . . .”
When I arrived at the gymnasium, hundreds of students were gathered and bursting with pride for the accomplishment of graduating from a liberal arts college. I didn’t feel accomplished about this. For one of my final projects, I’d turned in a video of my cat walking around my apartment with a depressed voiceover narration. I got an A. My discomfort grew as students hugged and took selfies together. I even heard one girl yell to her friends, “We did it!” and I audibly gasped. It was such a universal cliché that I never thought someone would actually say it at a graduation, the same way we’ve all collectively agreed to no longer take photos of avocado toast or kiss in the rain.
We got put into lines and I tried to talk to some of the students around me to cope. “Guys, how embarrassing is this?”
“How embarrassing is what?”
“Graduating . . .” I said, thinking it was obvious. They furrowed their eyebrows in confusion, proving themselves to be self-assured humans.
When my line walked into the auditorium, I was blinded by smiles. I wanted to cry, or hide, or throw up. The humiliation was excruciating. Families of students jumped up and waved enthusiastically to their graduates. I was so happy for all of them and so embarrassed for me. I put my hands over my face like I was a celebrity in a mob of fans. I didn’t want my family to see me and I did not want to see them or this. Covering my face backfired since it made it that much easier for my family to spot me, because who else would do something like that? I peeked through my fingers to see my mom waving both her hands in the air, my sister laughing at me, my boyfriend (who’d forced me to let him to attend) taking pictures of me to humiliate me even more later, and my dad (not looking at me) fake-conducting “Pomp and Circumstance.” It also didn’t help that both my dad and my boyfriend were famous; their presence garnered more attention for me than the kid who decorated their cap with a three-dimensional abstract art piece.
As students got their diplomas and walked across the stage, some actually did POSES for the jumbotron. One kid dabbed, one girl blew a kiss, someone did a peace sign. I wanted to give a middle finger, but I was afraid people would think I was trying to do a cool, badass pose instead of a serious Fuck everything about this. Friends and families clapped and shouted things like “Go, Hannah!” and I thought about how I would be too embarrassed ever to cheer and then wondered how it was possible that some people’s personalities allowed them to scream out of joy. I got sad for a moment, because I knew no one would ever yell like that for me. First, because I had no college friends, and second, because if I did, they would know how much their shouting “Go, Cazzie!” would humiliate me. Somehow, the second reason felt sadder.
Truth be told, I’d been terrified to graduate, and not just because of how embarrassing the ceremony would be. I was scared of how embarrassing my life would be following it. I’m too embarrassed to follow my dreams but not as embarrassed as I am to have written the phrase follow my dreams. I secretly want to be a stand-up comedian, but I can’t do it. And it’s obvious that I can’t because it took me closing my eyes to be able to type that sentence. My true dream is for someone to come up to me on the street, put a gun to my head, and say, Cazzie, that’s it! I’m forcing you to do comedy, leaving me with no choice. Because without life-or-death motivation, I can’t do it—mentally, physically, and emotionally cannot. You know how they say that all comedians hate themselves or they wouldn’t be able to be comedians? Well, it’s a lie. Well, maybe it’s not a lie, but they’re certainly not as self-conscious and humiliated as they say they are, because if they were, they wouldn’t be able to get onstage and talk about how self-conscious and humiliated they are. So, in conclusion, I am more self-conscious than every self-conscious comedian because I refuse to do it, even though I figure I would be amazing at it, considering all it seems to entail these days is discussing how mentally ill you are.
Stand-up is one of the most embarrassing professions that exist. You’re essentially begging the audience to think you’re as funny as you clearly think you are or you wouldn’t be doing it. Comedians might as well go up on stage with a cardboard sign that says NEED LAUGHS AND ATTENTION (comedy rim-shot sound effect). That terrible joke is why, instead of doing stand-up, I write. That way I won’t ever have to know in real time how unfunny you think I am. I’m not one who is capable of continuing on with life after a moment where no one laughed when I wanted them to.
Writing is still embarrassing, though. When people ask me what I do, I can barely get the words out, like I’m a guy with commitment issues saying “I love you” for the first time.
“And what do you do?”
“I’m a . . . I’m . . . I’m a . . . wr—a wriiii . . . ter. Ter. I’m trying to be a wri . . . you know what, let’s just not talk about it.”
Writing is grossly self-involved and narcissistic, and I hate people who are self-involved and narcissistic. Nevertheless, I was told from a very young age that writing is one of the most helpful tools for processing emotions, which in my case would be how embarrassed I am about everything in life. It’s not like I can talk to my therapist about it; I’ve avoided her for two years and now I’m too embarrassed about it to reach out. Plus, there’s too much to talk about—two years of embarrassing moments for me is two lifetimes for others. It is rather unfortunate, though, that instead of writing helping to alleviate my perpetual shame, it’s just added to the list of things I’m embarrassed by—like having written this essay in the first place. And how truly embarrassing it is to think anyone would want to read twelve pages about how embarrassed I am.
* * *
Love You to Death
I moved back into my dad’s house right after graduating college, like a lot of people do. Although most kids move back home for different reasons—not having a place to live yet or not having the money to get their own place. That wasn’t my thinki
ng. I was moving in with my dad because I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible before he died.
Yep. He’s dying. No, he is not sick, nor has he been diagnosed with anything. Not yet, anyway. But someday he will die, because everyone dies. So every moment with my father must be cherished. He’s in great health at the moment and will hopefully be one hundred and twenty when he passes, but it doesn’t matter. He will go someday. And now that I have reached adulthood, it is officially sooner rather than later.
Since the age of five, I have been obsessed with death—not enamored of it or seduced by it, the way a love interest in a Wes Anderson film might be, but immobilized by it. When I learned what death was, it was my death. The second I was informed of it, I was no longer alive but instead “going to die.” And if I was going to die, my dad was really going to die. The present is a myth. There’s only the future and the past. If time could stand still maybe there would be a present moment, but every second that goes by becomes the past and every second that hasn’t happened is the future and the future is my dad is either dead or almost dead.
By the time I was twelve, my dad had me read every Edgar Cayce and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross book on death, promising me with each one that I could stop agonizing, that there is proof of life after death, and if either one of us died, the first thing the other would do was go to a medium and wait for the deceased one to say the code word we’d agreed upon. (We have to change it once a year because we always forget what it is, but it’ll be fine.)
Well-intentioned people say, “You don’t need to worry about that until it happens!” As if that’s comforting, or even makes sense. I won’t be able to worry about my dad’s death once it happens because he’ll be dead—duh. If I don’t worry about it until it happens, I’ll just be left feeling like an idiot, wondering why I wasn’t worried that entire time. Therefore, I like to mentally prepare myself for the worst and the definite. Every day, preparing. How can you not when you know it’s coming? People prepare for interviews and pregnancies and marathons and battle; why not death?
If everyone truly internalized the fact that the people they love are going to pass, I feel they’d behave more like I do: spending every possible moment they can with that person and panicking about their upcoming passage to the other side. My dad spends almost every night sitting on the couch watching a movie from the forties. I find old movies to be boring in that they require the same kind of tedious attention it takes to read an esoteric novel, but I’ll sit with him despite my lack of interest. He has so little time left; I must take note of everything. Even the way his hand holds the remote, how his long fingers wrap around it and his concave pinkie veers freakishly to the left, like a runaway train. When I noticed that, I had to ask what happened to his hand. After all, one day I won’t be able to. He told me it was from a basketball incident. The ball hit his pinkie. Fascinating. Thank God I found out before it was too late.
As often as people tell you not to worry, they tell you to cherish the people around you because you never know when they’ll be gone. Is this what they had in mind? Forever acting like my dad has a terminal illness and is going to die in one year? How do you even cherish someone to the fullest extent? Just by thinking about how much you love them while they’re alive? All that does is make me unable to look at him without thinking about him dying. I don’t know anymore if there’s much of a difference between me picturing him dead every moment he’s alive and him actually being dead.
“Why don’t you go hang out with your friends? Go do something,” he said one weekend a year after I had moved in.
I told him I could do that whenever, but how many more times would I be able to sit next to my dad as he watches Cary Grant and yells, “This is dialogue! Now, this is what dialogue is!”
“What are you talking about? We do this every night,” he said.
And I thought: Yeah, every night . . . until you die!
Every time he gives me advice or says something funny or smart, I jot it down, like I’m writing the biography of a man who’s on his deathbed. Literally, though, exactly like that.
A few examples:
When we were outside sitting in the shade in Martha’s Vineyard: “The way plants are drawn to light, I am drawn to shade.”
After someone bragged to him about their child: “The way people talk about their kids is sickening. Sickening! I would never talk about you unless I’m asked. I hope you don’t mind.”
When I was crying about something stupid: “Nothing is more disgusting than self-pity.”
After I showed him a video of someone I hated trying to be funny: “You can’t try and be funny! If you can’t be funny, don’t try. Either be funny or don’t try!”
When he caught me smoking weed: “The fact that you can smoke weed is the only thing that proves to me that you’re not crazier than I am—otherwise, you have me beat. So nice try ever pretending you’re crazier than me again!”
And: “Everything you eat is either giving you a disease or helping your body fight disease.” (He didn’t come up with this one himself, but he says it all the time.)
Loving my dad so much is debilitating. Sometimes I wish he were a less great dad and person. It would just be easier if he weren’t so wholly good; at least I’d feel less sad when I looked at him. I don’t know how it’s possible for a person to be so kind and compassionate while still being so overtly aware of the stupidity of humanity. I don’t know how he can have no ego at all when he has one of the greatest comedic minds of all time IMO, IMHO! He says, “One cannot be funny and also arrogant, it is mathematically impossible. If you’re arrogant, then there’s no way you’re funny.”
“How’d I get so lucky to have you as a dad?” I wondered out loud to him one day.
“I think the same thing about you.”
“No, Dad, I suck. No one likes me.”
“Well, their loss!” he yelled back, smiling.
SEE WHAT I MEAN? It’s so unfair. Just call me a disappointment, I’m begging you!
Every time I walk into my dad’s closet, I can’t help but picture the day I walk in there after he dies. Running my hand through the hanging line of identical sports coats and sweaters, burying my face in his shirts that all smell of sunscreen, dragging my feet around in his Simple sneakers.
I think about the day of his funeral: Who will be there, what it will look like, whether I’ll be in a fight with my sister and why—perhaps because he left her all of his money and me only his notebooks of illegible unfinished show premises. I imagine sitting there, vacantly staring, wishing to be more dead than I already was.
It’s a completely different experience imagining future scenarios that you know are going to happen (rather than ones that just might happen) because you know that one day, you’ll be living that nightmare. That funeral will come and it will be how I pictured it. The day I see a medium will come, and I’ll break down no matter what word she says. I will one day feel exactly how I imagine feeling: inconsolable and incapable of believing that I will ever be able to get up off the floor.
All I knew when I moved back home was that I would never again leave that fucking house. Well, if he died, I would leave. I would leave only in the circumstance of his death. But not until then. I didn’t care if I was a nuisance whenever he wanted to bring a date home or do anything that would actually bring him joy. I didn’t care that I would live forty minutes away from all of my friends and probably never keep a boyfriend because my best friend and roommate was my dad. He definitely would care that all of the water glasses would wind up in my room and that I’d wake him up with the smell of toast in the middle of the night. But it didn’t matter if we were both miserable until he died as long as I could be in his presence as much as possible for his final twenty, twenty-five, thirty (if we’re lucky), or ten (if we’re not) years.
* * *
Insecurity When You’re the New Girlfriend
Cazzie’s distress and dysphoria are considerable and at a level that would
justify medication consultation with a child psychiatrist.
—Excerpt from neuropsychological evaluation of Cazzie David, 2007
There’s nothing like the high of a new relationship. You’re in love but, more important, your partner is in love. Let me rephrase: There is nothing like the high of someone being in love with you. It’s like someone taking a fire extinguisher to every negative thought you’ve ever had about yourself. Someone thinks you and your mind are beautiful and you think that person is beautiful; could it be? Could this person actually really love . . . me? you marvel to yourself. They must! Or they wouldn’t want you to be their girlfriend.
Falling in love is amazingly stupid. All of a sudden, you feel like you have a purpose in society, like you’re a part of something bigger, even though in actuality you have less of a purpose than ever before because all your thoughts have turned into a stream of Me, me, me, you, you, you, me, you, you, me. You now find it totally acceptable to go to the beach in the late afternoon just so the two of you can kiss and stroke each other’s hair while you watch the sunset. You don’t cringe when you hear yourselves talk to each other in a way that could be mistaken for dialogue from a terrible YA romance novel. You’ve lost all self-awareness; you feel no shame at the fact that you speak the same language as lustful vampires. You’re touching and staring at each other all day, every hour, adding new mannerisms to the collection of things you’re in love with. You miss the other when they go to the bathroom and during the hours you’re asleep even though your faces are still touching. Your screen-time average plummets. At first that’s because you don’t want them to know you’re on your phone an unattractive amount, but then it becomes natural. You don’t need to go on your phone anymore, you’re getting all the attention you need.
Then the dreaded day comes where their declarations of love aren’t as YA-novel-sounding as you need them to be. Doubt settles in; old memories of past relationships haunt you. Being told they love you is not enough, or maybe it’s just less in their eyes. The first thing you want to say to them in the morning is no longer “I love you” but “Do you still love me?” But you can’t say that, so instead you look at them with wide, desperate eyes and whine, “PROMISE?!” And they’re like, “Promise what?”