• • •
A major element of my codependence is that it’s incredibly hard to say no to things or cancel if I find myself overcommitted. As soon as I made a plan, I’d immediately be overcome with dread and regret and spend most of the time between making it and the event itself trying to figure out a way to get out of it, sometimes praying I’d get injured or have a baby so I’d have an excuse. At the time I didn’t realize how arrogant it is to fear saying no to an invite. This is something that cracks me up about my codependence—that I’m very insecure, yet still think if I say no to an invite, the person inviting me is going to have an emotional meltdown if I don’t attend. When we fear canceling plans, essentially the thought process is “If I don’t say yes, this person will implode with sadness and have no reason to live!” I didn’t understand that no one’s life is shattered because I declined an invitation. As Vera once said, “Codependents obsess over what other people think about us until we realize they’re not.” Trust me, at parties nobody is in a fetal position, sobbing over the fact that I didn’t make it; they’re preoccupied with taking selfies and picking a flattering filter for their aforementioned selfies.
Maybe this isn’t always true. Let’s say someone does freak out when you honor yourself and say no because you’re too tired, or simply don’t want to do whatever thing they ask. If that’s the case, there’s something going on with that person that’s way bigger than you (self-absorption, immaturity, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, addiction, or just general punk-ass-ness), or they may be possessed by their own codependent demons, like I was, leading them to believe that friendships are about attendance sheets. If this type of person is in your life making you feel guilty for taking care of yourself, try control alt delete—that is, take control, make an alt choice, and delete their contact in your phone.
It took me a long time to understand that friendships shouldn’t feel like work, and the ones that do eventually corrode because you grow resentful of them. But sometimes when relationships feel draining, it’s because we’re not being direct and honest about what we need; then when we don’t get it, we’re annoyed. I used to exhibit what’s called “magical thinking,” in which I expected people to just know what I wanted, since I was too afraid to tell them outright. I expected them to know that when I said “Sure, I’ll go,” what I really meant was “I would rather have hot-sauce-covered sea urchins on my eyeball than do that.” I was angry at people for not knowing mysterious things about me, like that I didn’t really want to go to an art walk or whatever probably very fun thing people do these days that gives me crippling anxiety.
Once I got a handle on my codependence, I faced my fear of saying no and canceling on people. It never occurred to me that I was allowed to say, “Thanks for asking, but I’m gonna pass.” I realized that it’s okay to not want to do things. For example, I really don’t vibe on karaoke. It’s just not my thing. I know I come off as the type of person who would love to get up there and belt out bad ironic nineties songs, maybe even the actual nineties song “Ironic,” since Alanis Morissette and I seem to have a shockingly similar approach to relationships. But no, the truth is I do not like karaoke. There, I said it. I hate karaoke! Goddamn, that feels good to say. I hate karaoke! Okay, I’m done. I can see why it’s fun for people, but for me, bad singing is something I enjoy doing in the privacy of my own home, not for strangers and Snapchat. I yell into a microphone and embarrass myself for a living, so I don’t feel I need to do it in my free time as well. Also, my singing is shockingly bad. I promise I’m not being self-deprecating here. My singing voice is truly horrendous, and not even, like, funny horrendous. It, like, makes people sad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forced myself to do karaoke with people. I’m terrible at singing and the thought of being bad at something in front of a crowd is probably my least favorite of every worst-case scenario, so I’d pretend to have fun when the truth was I was consumed by anxiety as I forced laughs and woo-hoos. After the third or fourth night of waiting for three hours just to get up and yell “Wild Thing” with three drunk girls I barely know, I finally hit rock bottom. I had to find the courage to start saying no to things I didn’t want to do because once you turn thirty, pretending starts taking a toll on your immune system. I had to learn how to say no to others and yes to myself, and today I no longer feel ashamed for not being “fun” and being down for every draining activity I’m asked to do. I’m no longer terrified I’ll be judged, abandoned, rejected, or left out. And if I am, good. Turns out it’s kind of my dream to be left out of doing things I don’t want to do. What this means is that unless your invite involves cheese, Netflix, Mexican wrestling, Moscow mules, or actual mules, chances are, in the words of Randy Jackson, “That’s gonna be a no for me, dog.”
I’ve also learned that I am allowed to change my mind after I have already made a plan to do something. This was previously anathema to my codependent brain, because when I was a kid, I learned to always give in to guilt, no matter how uncomfortable the situation made me. I now know that I’m allowed to RSVP yes to a seventies theme party, but then the next day, once I realize I have to go to a vintage clothing store and wear musty-ass high-waisted bell-bottoms that give me a camel toe, I can rethink the plan and politely bow out. Instead, I can do what I really want to do, which is stay home and stare at photos of my dogs even though they’re sitting right next to me.
Now I find it amusing to think how scared I used to be to cancel on people. When people cancel on me, I’m never upset. In fact, I’m usually downright thrilled. When someone texts, “Not feeling great tonight, rain check?” I almost pull a muscle doing a victory dance. I love my friends, I love spending time with them, but when one of them flakes on dinner plans, I feel even more love for them. If you truly want to be nice to someone, cancel if that’s what you really want. Showing up to a plan feeling tired, sick, resentful, or rushed isn’t nice or fair to you or the person you have the plan with. I realize now that when I cancel, I’m probably giving someone the greatest gift of all: the opportunity to stay home, throw on some Crest Whitestrips, and not have to hold in their farts for a night.
• • •
Before I rewired my brain, even my house reflected my codependent belief system. I had a closet in my office reserved for gifts I collected throughout the years. Whenever I saw something online or in a store that I thought a person I know might like, I’d get it and throw it in the ole Make People Like Me Gift Closet. Or if someone gave me a gift, I’d put it in the closet to give to someone else down the line. I know that may seem pragmatic or just downright frugal, but I even did this with gifts I actually wanted to keep for myself. I just felt compelled to give everything away—from my energy to my time and even to my gifts. This was also a closet I needed, a closet I could have used for much more useful things like to store bully sticks, since I very recently discovered that they’re dried cow dicks that smell like dried dicks covered in dried balls and should be buried deep in faraway closets. I could have used the unnecessary gift closet for all the miscellaneous crap in my garage that I bump my car on every time I pull in. My point is, if you got a gift from me in my twenties, I want you to know that I did not buy it for you, you don’t deserve it, and please give it back.
I even decorated my home with the comfort of my guests in mind instead of my own. I had chairs that only guests could sit on, while I sat on a wobbly, too-tall barstool at my kitchen counter, which caused me to sit like I was either throwing pottery or puking outside a nightclub. It never occurred to me that I could enjoy sitting on the cozy couch or leaning on the fancy pillows—my cozy couch and my fancy pillows that I had bought on sale at Anthropologie. Nope, those were reserved for guests. I also never used my own dinnerware. I had nice glasses that I never used because I didn’t want to soil them in case someone came by who needed to be dazzled with faux Moroccan tumblers from Pier 1. Meanwhile, for four years I ate off plastic plates and drank out of the same weird Co
medy Central mug that I stole from some guy.
My fridge and cabinets were stocked with food, but just not food for me. I had all sorts of fancy Himalayan pink salt, mānuka honey, olive spread with different-colored olives in it, dark chocolate covered in goji berries (or whatever the berry of the moment was). All unopened, all waiting for the day that someone whose approval I needed came over so I could impress them with my cornucopia of overpriced garnish that made me worthy of eternal love.
• • •
Perhaps the most obvious area in my life that codependence has kicked my ass is with romantic relationships. Until very recently, I thought that dating someone meant abandoning your own life and disappearing into the wormhole that is the studio apartment your boyfriend shares with his three roommates. When I started dating someone, I would literally go missing. I’m actually kind of offended that none of my friends put me on a milk carton or at least called the police, because when I was in a relationship I was gone, girl.
At a young age I learned to make a man my first priority. Revolving one’s life around a man is the perfect medicine for someone with low self-esteem. “This guy wants to hang out with me, I can’t be that terrible.” I outsourced my self-worth: If someone else “loved” me, I didn’t have to love myself. My philosophy was, if a man asked you to jump, you asked, “Off which cliff?” And I’d take a cab to the cliff so he could have my car after I die from the fall, since he probably didn’t have his own car or had his license taken away for driving when drunk.
When I was growing up, all the behavior in my home was reactive to the men. We ate what the men wanted to eat. We had heat when the men paid the bills. When they didn’t, we froze our tits off. When men wanted to cheat, the women chose to believe their lies, knowing full well that nobody got hung up at an office job overnight or were in “crazy traffic” at eleven P.M. To make this dynamic even more pernicious, I also had very entertaining men in my family; they primed me to think men were more fun to be around than women. My dad and uncles were hilarious and charismatic, always acting out scenes from the Vacation movies (“Big Ben! Parliament!”) and skits from the old Saturday Night Live shows (“Land Shark!”), whereas the women in my family were tired and mercurial, complaining about how much work they had to do and always asking me to do boring chores. I learned pretty early on that “Guys are a blast! Women are a buzzkill!”
In retrospect, I now know the women in my life were like that because they were essentially the first generation with nine-to-five jobs who were also expected to be full-time homemakers. Of course they weren’t laughing at Chevy Chase impressions—they were exhausted. They worked too hard and slept too little, while getting poisoned every morning by hair spray and being asphyxiated by those hateful control-top panty hose that get swampy and basically shut your intestines down.
When I was old enough to start dating, I applied my codependent chameleon ways to boys. I was so afraid of my real self being rejected that I would shape-shift into whatever I thought would make the relationship work. If we met and had nothing in common? No problem! I’ll fix that by pretending we do! Camping? Sure! Never mind that I hate camping and am allergic to bees, not to mention I can hardly sleep in my own bed, much less in a tent on a fire ant hill. A bar crawl? OMG, that sounds amazing. Even though I don’t like bars, beer gives me migraines, and I hate crawling. (Seriously, my parents said I started walking at like six months because crawling was so boring.) You’re not funny? No problem! I’ll laugh at your terrible jokes anyway! You’re broke? No worries, I’ll max out my credit card so you can buy video games and protein powder! You’re married? Even better! That means you’re not afraid of commitment!
I could be any dude’s soul mate. I had racks full of jerseys representing almost every football team: Jets, Seahawks, Dolphins. My closet looked like a Foot Locker. And not even a Lady Foot Locker. I would commit so hard to supporting a man’s sports team that one time I went so far as to buy some Giants lingerie on Etsy with Giants helmets on the bra, which seriously almost amputated my nipples. Hot tip: If you’re going to wear lingerie with your man’s team on it, make sure the team didn’t lose the day before, because that’s all he’ll be thinking about when you’re having sex. Walking out in lingerie is a very vulnerable moment for a girl and nothing is worse than strutting out and seeing a guy’s face fall from having to relive the previous night’s disappointing performance on a football field by some player who doesn’t even know he exists. Anyway, the point is that I’m from D.C. and I can finally admit that by blood I have no choice but to be a Redskins fan, or whatever the name of the D.C. team is when this book comes out.
I’ve been a very different person in every relationship I’ve had. Different style, look, everything. I went through more hair colors than a prostitute on the run: I had black, blond, and greenish hair from trying to do red hair by myself. When you’re insecure and codependent, every day is Halloween. My style choices for guys included everything from English schoolgirl, western cowgirl, Goth apocalyptic princess who shopped in the children’s section, and way-too-much-spandex girl. Basically the rule of thumb in getting dressed for a guy was if my body hated it, he loved it. After much soul searching, I found out that my authentic self is a jeans and T-shirt type gal and that’s okay because I now know that if a guy isn’t into that, he’s either gay or very gay.
Looking back, I actually might have even switched ethnicities for a guy. I dated someone who had only dated South American girls, so naturally I doused myself in self-tanner. If you’ve seen me—even if only on the cover of this book—then you’ve realized that I’m basically an albino, so when I put on self-tanner, I end up looking tie-dyed and slightly ill. Because I also have no patience and won’t sit still long enough to let the self-tanner dry, I end up having what look like brown skid marks all over my sheets. News flash: Brown stains in your bed are not an aphrodisiac. When I look back on how much I morphed my skin color, I’m shocked I wasn’t arrested for a hate crime. Or at the very least, didn’t get a Facebook message from Tan Mom.
Another reason to get a handle on codependence is that when your identity is contingent upon the person you’re dating, you end up eating a lot of very weird shit. I put so many things in my mouth to avoid conflict in relationships and I’m not even talking about the thing you’re thinking about. I ate pickled eggs. Once I ate prawns on a boat. Prawns. I don’t really know what a prawn is, but I just Googled it and it seems to be a shrimp with a weave, so apparently I ate fishy hair.
I even put myself in physical danger because I couldn’t say no or stand up for myself. I went scuba diving at night, which may sound really fun to some of you, but it’s my living nightmare. You don’t need to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to know that fish are designed to swim underwater while humans are clearly not. I felt like Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill had his night-vision goggles on and could see her, but she couldn’t see him. The only saving grace of night diving is you can piss yourself and nobody can tell.
I was so reckless in my codependent attraction to people that I should be rotting in a Guatemalan jail. It all started when I met a cute French guy on a flight. He slept most of the time, so I projected an awesome personality onto him. Once he woke up, he didn’t live up to my fantasy, but he was interested in me, and that’s usually all I needed to give a year of my life to someone. He spoke just enough English for us to communicate, but not enough for us to be able to argue too much. And due to the language barrier, whenever we did argue, we both thought we had won, when in fact we probably both lost.
I should’ve known it wasn’t an excellent idea to travel with him after I came across a shoe box in his closet full of credit cards with his name spelled differently on each one. I also found another shoe box full of photos, one of a girl with whipped cream on her hoo-ha and boobs. This was pre-iCloud, when we had to print dirty photos. I found this stuff when he was at work, so I obviously couldn’t confront him about it. I di
dn’t know how to confront someone, I only knew how to quietly fester. I was eighteen—gimme a break. And to answer your question, no, he never tried to put whipped cream on my boobs, which really hurt my feelings. That being said, I’m thrilled that there aren’t hard-copy photos of me with my tits looking like sad cupcakes available on eBay.
To make things weirder, he lived in Fort Lauderdale. I had been spending most weekends commuting there to see him, and one night out of nowhere he asked if I wanted fly to Mexico, then drive to Guatemala. At the time I thought it was romantic and spontaneous, although now I suspect he was probably avoiding some kind of legal issue. Since this was before I had any idea how to say no to things I didn’t want to do and felt a lot of socially constructed pressure for us to be soul mates, I enthusiastically responded, “I’ve always wanted to go to Guatemala!” I mean, no offense to Guatemala, but I had not always wanted to go there. The country is gorgeous, but it’s also corrupt and intimidating. The first thing I saw at the border were fourteen-year-olds with machine guns, so I felt a low-grade sense of anxiety the whole trip, as if at any moment we could be punished for being American. Luckily, my dude was French, and his accent made everyone want to rob us just a little less. He told me since I was American to just be quiet in public, which was very insulting and very hot.
I loved Guatemala, but I spent most of my time there trying to pretend that I didn’t have headaches and explosive diarrhea. Again, as a codependent I can’t admit that I have needs, ask for help, or allow anyone to know that I’m human. This was quite a challenge, since our hotel had one “toilet.” You had to pull a rope to “flush” it, and it was about four inches away from the “bed.” Clearly whoever built this hotel did not believe in love and was very interested in challenging others’ belief in it. The good news is that the French guy had a habit of drinking a lot of tequila during the day, so when I knew I was going to have a gastrointestinal episode, I’d push even more tequila on him to ensure he was knocked out cold so I didn’t wake him up with what felt like giving birth to triplets every night at two A.M.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 5