How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  This jacket was a good one for shoplifting. It belonged to Jen Spicoli, the most popular girl in my class and my own best frenemy. Often I would stay the night at Jen’s house, planning the all-pickle “health food” diets we would go on beneath the posters of Sylvester Stallone that lined her bedroom walls. In the morning, I would be told not to tell anyone that I’d spent the night. It was like we were having an affair, Jen Spicoli and I, though I swear nothing ever happened between us. I actually sort of hated staying at her house because she slept with the radio on, which I thought was really cool but which very much impeded sleeping. I’d lie awake next to her in bed, having what I now know to be a panic attack. Still, I always wanted to stay over. Jen was cool: She had an older brother who was into AC/DC, she wore black eyeliner, and she had superstraight blond hair pinned back from her forehead, and the softest, tenderest hairs would straggle out from her hairline—baby bangs, she called them. She wasn’t just a member of Chelsea’s Pop Warner football cheerleading squad; Jen was head cheerleader. And in spite of her ambivalent feelings toward me, she’d let me borrow her cheerleading jacket. It was amazing: bright-red corduroy, with her name in cursive on one arm and a patch of the devil on the other. As much as I hated Chelsea, it was cool that the city’s mascot was a leering, mustachioed Satan. As a bonus, the wrists of Jen’s jacket were tight elastic, meaning that anything stuffed up the sleeve wouldn’t fall out.

  I would have made it home with my watermelon kissing potion if not for the daring of Elena Rubinski, and my own stupidity. Once safely outside the Kmart, huffing and puffing and glowing with the wild dopamine and adrenaline surges shoplifting released in my hormonal body (for sure, this was my first drug), Elena, who had been too chicken to lift anything, decided she wanted the watermelon-scented eraser that had been packaged with the gloss. I was so excited for my friend, that she would soon know the rush and material gain of shoplifting, and I was proud to be her mentor, showing her the ropes. We walked back into the fluorescent-lit apocalypse of Kmart, the stink of fake-buttered popcorn and tangy blue Icees all around us. We walked back to the pile of pajamas and found the gloss packaging right where I’d left it. Elena snatched the eraser. And then the security guard snatched us.

  If only, if only! If only I had taken the stupid lip gloss out of my coat and stashed it in a trash can or something. But I hadn’t. When the plainclothes guard brought me and a crying Elena into a back room hung with the Polaroids of fellow shoplifters and ordered me to take off Jen’s coat, the gloss fell to the floor. The guard didn’t put us in handcuffs or call the cops, though he threatened us with both. I managed to convince him that the eraser belonged to Elena, and that she just had the misfortune of befriending a shoplifter. She was let go, and the guard called my mother. I was banned from the store, and Jen Spicoli was pissed that I got Kmart-arrested in her cheerleading jacket. What if they thought she was me next time she went in for an Icee? I looked at her like she was nuts; Jen Spicoli was waaaaaay prettier than I was. I wished it took but a cheerleading jacket to make me look like her. Nonetheless, Jen became less fren, more nemy. And that was pretty much the end of my criminal career, minus a few forays into, you know, drug dealing and prostitution.

  As much as I might not care about people lifting a bottle from Sephora or any other megachain, I myself cannot do any of it anymore. Quite simply, I’m too old. Too grown-up to get caught. The thought of getting busted, Winona-like, for stealing an unnecessary luxury is totally humiliating. As the late, great comedian Lotus Weinstock said, “I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.” And leaving a Bloomingdale’s in handcuffs for boosting a pair of earrings is just not dignified. (Though, goddammit, try as I might to resist, it does have a gritty Courtney Love–type glamour to it, does it not?) Being engaged with Buddhism helps me keep in mind the recovery assertion that every problem is a spiritual problem. If I want to steal something, I must think I don’t have everything I need already. And in my case, I do. I do have everything I need. Recognizing that lays bare my thieving desire as the bundle of greed or fear that it is. And then I can deal with that.

  Precept Three: Avoid sexual misconduct. This is so personal, and so subject to interpretation. I think it comes down to this: Do you think, in your heart, that your sexcapades might be hurting you or others? Are you cheating on someone, or helping someone else break a commitment? Are you a sexual thrill seeker, putting yourself in danger by recklessly hooking up with hoodlums? Do you use sex to manipulate people? (And I don’t mean a stripper manipulating a dollar off a gent—that’s a job. A job that might include such sexual misconduct, and also might not. Totally a personal call.) As someone with a bit of sex addiction mixed into her addiction Christmas stocking, sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was feeding the beast or, you know, just enjoying the privileges of a single lady in my place and time—privileges my foremothers died for! It’s tricky, these precepts. And yet, I believe that figuring out how to handle your sexuality with respect and dignity is a crucial part of growing up. Sometimes being at the mercy of my libido made me feel powerless, and feeling powerless made me feel like a child. Taking control and building that scaffolding of Rules for Love led me to a place where I was calling my sexual shots from a place of sanity, thinking about the whole big picture of my romantic life as opposed to the instant gratification of a two-bit hookup.

  What other Buddhist precepts do I maybe sort of obey, maybe not? False speech is variously interpreted as lying, or gossiping. I am guilty of both. I don’t lie to my loved ones, with the exception of my mom, because it is a daughter’s job to lie to her mother, and plus it’s good for our relationship. I would say I lie rarely. A big part of my 12-step practicing is accepting life on life’s terms, and if you feel the need to lie you probably aren’t doing that. Was I accepting life on life’s terms when I decided to lie by omission to my department head at the fancy college and jet off to Fashion Week? No, I guess not. Knowing that telling the truth would get me fired, I opted for deception. This might be the career equivalent of a hungry person stealing a loaf of bread, and then again, I might be delusional.

  As these gray areas of lying may make me a compromised Buddhist, so does gossip. It’s not that I enjoy laying a reputation to waste—I truly don’t. But I’m a writer. I love story. And what is gossip if not story? It is the same oral tradition that created the best of our myths and legends, albeit in a super-duper debased form. As someone who has tried to shut my trap and felt, well, trapped, I have come up with some guidelines. First and most important is, whom am I talking to? My significant other? My tried-and-true bestie? I think this is fine. Do I run around sharing the business of people I hardly know with other people I hardly know? That looks tacky. It is tacky. You’re sending out a big message to all that you’re not trustworthy. And guess what—you’re not!

  Also, what’s the purpose of the gossip? Although the individual being gossiped about may not appreciate being discussed regardless of the purpose, I think there is a difference between sharing a compelling story and trying to turn people against a person. The former is a minor sin, understandable and human. The latter is just mean. I’ve indulged in both and the contrast is visceral—when I’m gossiping with an agenda I’m hot and cold, sweaty and clammy, and there’s a dark jaw gnawing in the pit of my stomach. (Or maybe I was just on speed. Most of my harmful gossiping happened whilst under the influence of the hot-cold sweaty-clammy substance.) Bad gossip makes me feel bad: I’ve given in to my desire to control what people think of each other, which is always—always!—none of my business. The conversation sits in my guts for days; I’m hungover from it. Like getting caught shoplifting, the punishment is preventive. I don’t want to feel like that. And I don’t, in my heart of hearts, want to strew negativity and ugly feelings throughout the land. If someone truly is a lousy person, their behavior will doom them without any help from me. Then I can just sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude.

&nbs
p; The final Buddhist precept I actually aced by failing: Avoid fermented beverages. I tried my best to drink like a lady, but heedlessness prevailed, and I had to cut the sauce or watch my life swirl down the toilet. Although many people seem capable of imbibing the occasional cocktail without destroying everything they love, many others cannot, and are oblivious to the fact that it’s the cocktails that are ruining everything. It’s one of the great and terrible powers fermented beverages possess, this ability to get you hooked, wreck your life, and still have you wondering what the hell the problem might be. It took me forever to figure out I was an alcoholic—fighting every night with my boyfriend, feeling sick every morning, a sense of hopelessness, spontaneous weeping, blaming everything but booze for my ever-saddening life.

  When I was drinking, my rapper ex and I fought all the time. This was at least partially my fault. That’s the thing with being a drunk fighter—you’ll never really know if you were correct to take offense or if you were just being wasted and irrational. But one thing is certain—you’ll be the one apologizing the next day. If you are the drunk person in the fight, you are the one who has to grovel and beg for forgiveness. Sure, maybe your date did say something passive-aggressive, but your judgment was so busted, how can you be sure? The only hard fact is that you were wasted. If you consume fermented beverages with your significant other, be ready to spend some mornings humbly soliciting mercy from behind the veil of your dehydration headache.

  The best worst drunk fight I ever lost had me hopping out of the car at a red light in Los Angeles and running onto the freeway exit, to hide out on the little slope of bushes and shrubs. He’d never find me there! I eventually left my slightly dangerous hideout and sulked down to the Frolic Room, a real drunk’s bar, where the patron saint of asshole alcoholics, the poet Charles Bukowski, used to drink. I ordered a cocktail and sat there, angrily smoking. The bar phone rang. The bartender walked it over. “There’s a person on the phone asking if there’s a girl with blue hair here.” This was in the days before cell phones, thank God, because if there’s one thing an alcoholic loves to lose track of it’s her cell phone. My ex picked me up from the bar, then drove to the taco truck where transgender hookers hung around selling crystal meth. I would have preferred some speed but my ex made me buy a couple of tacos. I ate them with bizarre defiance, the cheese spilling down the front of my shirt, making a performance of how pissed I was with each petulant chomp. What were we fighting about? I don’t remember, though I’ll never forget the fight itself because for years my ex liked to tell the story of when I ran away to the side of the freeway and then angrily ate some tacos. He is likely telling it to someone right now. It’s a great story. Drinking fermented beverages really puts you at a disadvantage in an argument.

  These five precepts I have more or less struggled with throughout my life, and I expect I will continue to flail and to fail in my efforts to uphold them. And what I like about Buddhism, what has drawn me to its message and kept me there in spite of how fickle I can be with my spiritual practices (remind me to tell you about when I interviewed to join Aleister Crowley’s creepy Thelemic temple) is its embrace of failure. Buddhism embraces failure because it embraces humanity, and to fail is human. It is a study of human nature and potential, offering a sort of best practices guide to getting over yourself. When you inevitably fuck up along the way, there is no old man doling out punishment prayers, as there was in the spiritual practices of my youth. There is a larger, transcendent view, and the opportunity to try again. Buddhism is just like life in this way. Buddhism is life.

  Another famous Buddhist countdown is the four noble truths, a cluster of hard-won understandings about our shared life on earth. The first noble truth is, people suffer—something that in the moments after my breakup I took to heart. People misunderstand it as all life is suffering, which paints Buddhists as a pretty somber lot, and I suppose they can be, but not always. It’s more like, in life there is suffering. Suffering is real; it exists. (Bonus—in the Pali language, suffering is called dukkha, which sounds a lot like dookie, which means “shit.” In life, there is dookie.)

  The second truth is that there is one reason for all suffering: We humans have a hard time adjusting to reality. We often have a desire for life to be different than it is, and that hurts. In my case, I wanted my ex to just admit he was a fucking asshole and that we broke up so he could go and date a DJ. Knee-deep in dukkha, I mistakenly believed the cause of my suffering was my ex’s inability to give me this simple acknowledgment. The reality of the situation was, I was in pain because I needed my ex to be different. In Buddhism, when you have a problem, you have a problem. It’s yours. When you get over the tantrum you inevitably throw about the injustice of this, it’s actually quite nice. If you have the problem, you also have the ability to solve it.

  The third noble truth essentially boils down to: If you stopped giving a shit, you’d be happier. Why did I need my ex to admit he’d left me for a DJ? Because I wanted us to be on the same page about our breakup. But we’d never been on the same page about our relationship, so why did I think our coming apart would be any different? Okay, maybe I wanted to win. I wanted the simple, time-honored pleasure of being the “good one” in the breakup. After all I’d done for him, couldn’t he at least give me that? Apparently not. And I couldn’t make him do it, but I could stop needing it. And according to the final noble truth, getting into Buddhism and following the eightfold path (damn, do Buddhists like to number things or what?) is the way to stop needing all the things you can’t have, and thus be happier.

  And so, post-breakup, I made my way to the Zen Center, a large, beautiful, welcoming compound that invites the public inside to learn more about the practice through meditations and those wisdom-sharing monologues called dharma talks. The wide hall is intimidating to enter when you are but a failed and dabbling Buddhist whose “practice” consists of a couple of Pema Chödrön books sitting by your bedside for when you’re too angsted-out to sleep. The room exudes a dignified calm, covered with a tatami mat, the Buddha in his many incarnations represented by a row of statues next to what appears to be an altar. The respect I felt as I entered was enormous, creating a fear that I would somehow disrespect it by, like, walking somewhere I wasn’t supposed to walk, accidentally and unintentionally sending a fuck you to the Buddha. It seemed that when people walked to the far end of the room they did a little bow toward the Buddhas; the thought froze me in terror. I decided to not cross the room. Thus began my practice of grabbing a zafu—a round black meditation pillow—from the shelf by the door, then finding the closest spot on the mat for me to shove it under my butt and wait for further instruction. Eventually, a real Buddhist—someone who had taken the vows, who had trudged the long, hard road of true Buddhist practice—would take a seat at the front of the gathering, ring a little bell, and impart some simple meditation instruction: Sit like this, keep your eyes open, bring your thoughts back when they stray. Okay, go. And the room, packed with people, became totally quiet, and together, we strangers, all of us engaging with the miseries that brought us here (few Westerners turn to Buddhism because life is going awesomely), hoped this new way would give us something. Peace. Wisdom. A new perspective. Acceptance.

  There was no end to the misperceptions about Buddhism I encountered as I told people about my cool new hangout. Oh, I can’t meditate; my mind just jumps all over the place; I really can’t do it. Uh, that’s sort of the point of meditation. You’re not special. Everyone’s mind jumps all over the place—that’s what a mind does. Meditating doesn’t make that go away—well, maybe it does for super extra awesome meditators who have stuck with it for a decade, but for the average monkey-brained human who sits down and tries to be silent and still for a moment, the whole experience is about sitting there with your crazy jumping thoughts. You sit and observe your jumbled inner narrative—Hmm, what word should I get tattooed on my neck? I should write a television show! I wonder how so-and-so is doing in t
he wake of her failed marriage; I should call her—would that be awkward? Speaking of awkward, I can’t believe I said that thing to that man about his artificial eye five years ago; God, that was so shitty of me—should I apologize? Huh, I know who should apologize—my ex! I’ve done everything for him and he’s done nothing for me! And as you observe this circus, your perception of your own thoughts begins to change.

  We love our minds so much in this culture. I think; therefore, I am! My opinions are super important and also witty and smart—I think I will broadcast them all over the Internet! Our minds are everything. A good one can get you into a good school, which then gets you a good job and all the good cash and prizes that come with it, right?

  More important, we are our minds. Our thoughts define us. When we’re impressed by someone’s intelligence, we say they’re smart. We don’t say they think smart thoughts or express smart opinions; we say they are smart, as if there is no separation between what we think and who we are. I am Michelle Tea because I think Michelle Tea–esque thoughts. But the more you sit back and experience how little control you have over your mind’s ramblings, the more your mind seems to be, like all the other organs in your body, on a sort of autopilot, pumping out thoughts and opinions like your heart pumps blood and your lungs pump air. And, like an immune system that has turned on itself, my mind was pumping out sentiments that were harmful to me. They were harmful because I believed them. If I think it, it must be true—right? But maybe I didn’t have to believe in the things my mind insisted upon. Maybe I’d be a little bit happier if I didn’t.

  Sitting in meditation, you get to understand the nature of the mind in general, and your own in particular. Increasingly I began to relate to my mind not as the highest point of my being, the apex of my essence, but more like a rambunctious toddler who wants everything and likes to pout and throw fits—something that required my firm and gentle guidance. And in discovering this, you acquaint yourself with the mind behind your mind, the one that can tame the chatter, take you out of the imaginary fight you were having with your ex and return you to the present—you are sitting on a pillow, your legs cramped into a pretzel, counting your breaths. One, two, three.