Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned

by Lena Dunham

  14. “Sometimes a dog smells another dog’s tushy, and it just doesn’t like what it smells.”

  15. Family first. Work second. Revenge third.

  1. A stained, tattered checkbook. Because you just never know.

  2. My new iPhone, along with my old broken iPhone, because I can’t risk having someone find that iPhone who would know how to fix it and then see all the images I took of my own butt purely to educate myself.

  3. An eyebrow pencil because I overtweezed my eyebrows like every child of the nineties and am now stuck with what my sister calls balding caterpillars. Weak eyebrows = weak presentation. It’s like having a bad handshake, but worse because it’s right on your face.1

  4. Advil, Lexapro, Mucinex, Klonopin, and Tamiflu, for emotional security. If you have any spare pills, I will take those, too, just to up the diversity of my portfolio. To be clear: I rarely take them. It’s a knowledge-is-power situation. Sort of.

  5. Business cards. For women as diverse as Ingrid the Muscle Whisperer and Sandra Fluke.

  Once I was sitting in a Barnes and Noble café at 9:00 P.M., absorbed in a book about olive oil and waiting for a friend, when a business card appeared on the table. Handwritten, it said, “I just want to go down on you. I ask nothing in return. I will come to wherever you are. Please call me at: 212 555 5555.” Later, dying of morbid curiosity, I pressed *67 and dialed. “Hello?” He sounded like Bruce Vilanch. I could practically sense his dying mother in the background. I ripped the card into tiny pieces, afraid of what might happen if I kept it in my possession. I so badly didn’t want that guy to eat me out that it seemed destined to happen.

  6. My building newsletter. The average age of our building’s residents is eighty-five. The first night I slept in my apartment, I awoke at 7:00 A.M. to what can only be described as cackling. From my corner window, I could see three or four elderly women on the roof (enough to constitute a coven) wearing white hand towels on their heads and safari hats atop the hand towels, running through a choreographed routine.

  The only neighbor close in age to me is a nine-year-old named Elyse. Hoping to be a writer/baker someday, she took it upon herself to start the first building newsletter. There, she details holiday events, stoop sales, and the status of ongoing elevator repairs. She highlights exceptional neighbors. (UN translators! Opera singers!) Her prose is minimal and breezy, her layout festive. My only critique is that she’s not settling into a regular publication schedule.

  Elyse was not responsible for the memo about how to properly dispose of adult diapers that circulated last March.

  7. My wallet. I bought my wallet while high off my ass on legal prescription drugs in the Hamburg airport. It is decorated with clowns, cars, and dachshunds and is uniformly beloved by children and Japanese women alike.

  * * *

  1 Since writing this, I have discovered dyeing my eyebrows, and life is approximately 63 percent better.

  I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN there was something wrong with my uterus.

  It was just a feeling, really. A sense that things were not quite right down there. The entire system. At a young age, four or five, I would often approach my mother with a complaint of stinging “in my area.” Her cure-all was Vaseline, which she applied with a scientific distance. “Remember to wipe well,” she reminded me. But I swore that wasn’t it. I appreciated that she never used embarrassing pet names when it came to my private parts, unlike some other girls whose mothers say “pinky” or “chachi.” In middle school, as my body prepared to menstruate for the first time, I could feel an electric current, an energy that felt wrong, intersecting lines of pain traveling through my pelvis and lower abdomen.

  I got my period for the first time the summer before ninth grade, and that fall I took a dance class with my friend Sophie, whose mother was French and therefore encouraged ballet as exercise. Every Tuesday we would take the train to Park Slope to spend ninety minutes with an instructor named Yvette, whose mane of Flashdance hair, bell-sleeved shirts, and chipper demeanor could not mask how disappointed she was to still be doing this in her late thirties. In a windowless studio with scuffed wooden floors and a crooked Merce Cunningham poster, we learned modern ballet routines, running back and forth to the strains of “Nine to Five” and “Daydream Believer.”

  “I can’t go,” I told Sophie one Tuesday. “I have my period.”

  “A period isn’t a reason to cancel something,” she said, annoyed. “You just do everything you would usually do, but with your period.”

  But to me, it felt like the onset of the flu. A dull but constant backache. A need to bend and crumple at the waist for comfort. And an itchy sting, like an encounter with bad leaves, in my vagina and ass. How could anyone do anything when they felt this way? And would this really happen every month until I was fifty? My mother was fifty, and her nightstand was stacked with books with titles like A Woman’s Cycle and Second Puberty. I asked her if she’d ever had cramps like mine. “Nope,” she told me. “My period didn’t give me any problems at all until it went away.” Now she had to take all kinds of pills, use creams. I had recently found a medication of hers whose instructions said, “Insert pill vaginally at least five hours before a bath.”

  It didn’t happen every month, as it turned out. Some months it happened. For days on end, it happened. Other times, it would seem like it was gone, and then I would wake up and think I had been shot in the crotch. The months it didn’t happen at all never concerned me until I became sexually active and started keeping pregnancy tests in my sock drawer.

  When I was sixteen I went to the gynecologist for the first time. They tell you that you can wait until you’re either eighteen or sexually active, and I was neither, but I needed help. My period—the pain, the volatility, the feeling of utter despair—was taking my family hostage. And if my father asked whether I was possibly menstruating I screamed in his face so loud his glasses shook. Despite my virgin status the gynecologist prescribed birth control, which has helped with regularity, but nothing can help the mood that still descends a few days before my period begins, like a black cloud rolling in. I am uncharacteristically dark and nihilistic. Everyone is out to get me, to hurt me, to uninvite me from their tea parties, to judge my body and destroy my family. I am like a character on Dallas, obsessed with subterfuge and revenge, convinced I have discovered unlikely yet real-seeming plots against me. Once, while in the throes of PMS, I became convinced a man in a black overcoat was following me down La Cienega Boulevard. “The police will never believe me,” I sighed, and began hatching a plan for losing him on my own.

  When menstruating, I am the definition of inconsolable. Cannot be consoled. My friend Jenni swears my eyes take on a catlike slant and my face grows pale. If someone suggests it’s hormonal, they are met with a deluge of verbal abuse, followed by aggressive apologies and pleas for forgiveness. Tears. I lie facedown and wait for it to pass.

  Menstruating is the only part of being female I have ever disliked. Everything else feels like a unique and covetable privilege, but this? When it began, it held a morbid fascination, like a car crash that happened inside my underpants every three weeks. I was happy to be admitted into this exclusive club, to finally regard the tampon machine with the knowledge of the initiated. But it soon became tiresome, like a melodramatic friend or play rehearsals. There’s something so demoralizing about the predictability of it all: We want chocolate. We are angry. Our stomachs puff out like pastries. Early on, I made a promise to myself never to use menstruation as a comic crutch or a narrative device in my work. Never to commiserate in a group about which pills actually take care of cramps. Never to say anything but “I have a stomachache.” And I do.

  Last summer my vagina started to sting. I would wake up more conscious of my genitals than usual and, as I came to, I’d realize why. As work began, as we all waved hello and ate our eggs on a roll and decided who to hate that day, I would feel it. It was like someone had poured a drop of vinegar inside of me, followed by a sprinkle of baki
ng soda. It bubbled and fizzed and went where it would. I chugged water, having decided acidic urine was the problem. I took pills found in the refrigerated section at Whole Foods that my hairdresser suggested. I asked the doctor to test my urine and questioned the lack of results. I imagined the worst: a flesh-eating bacteria acquired in India making its way up my urethra, soon to turn me into a bag of bones. A tiny tumor, like a pea, sitting high up inside me. An imperceptible scratch from a sandy tampon.

  I have a lot of worst nightmares, and chronic vaginal pain has long been among them. The Camera My Mother Gave Me is Susanna Kaysen’s lyrical little memoir about her struggle with vaginismus, a pain in her vagina that she could neither explain nor ignore. I’m telling you: never have you read such a page-turner about female genitalia, and Kaysen masterfully illustrates the fact that the vagina is an organ uniquely qualified to express our emotions to us when we aren’t capable of listening to our brains or hearts. And the vagina is our most emotional organ, subject to both science and spirit. At the height of her saga, Kaysen says:

  “I wanted my vagina back.…I wanted the world to regain the other dimension that only the vagina can perceive. Because the vagina is the organ that looks to the future. The vagina is potential. It’s not emptiness, it’s possibility.”

  As a result of this book, I associate pain in the vagina with weakness and sadness. Kaysen has made a career out of turning her madness inside out for the world to see, and the book never does pin her vaginal pain on a single medical cause. Rather, she finds relief by exiting a bad relationship, reclaiming her life and spirit and, in the process, her vagina. So what could I be suppressing that was filling me up with pain? Was it ambivalence about sex? Was I ever molested? (If so, that would explain some other things, too.) Was I afraid of where my career might be taking me, and was I running so far ahead of myself that I couldn’t catch up? Did I even know the difference between my urethra and my vagina?

  The pain came and went, but my anxiety about it grew steadily. I avoided the doctor, sure the prognosis would simply be “basket case.” But eventually my catastrophic thinking became unbearable, and my incredibly patient boyfriend became sick of the refrain “My vagina hurts.” So I went to see Randy.

  Randy is my gynecologist. I have had a number of gynecologists over the years, all talented in their own ways, but Randy is the best. He is an older Jewish man who, before deciding to inspect ladies down there for a living, played for the Mets. He still has the can-do determination of a pitcher on an underdog team and, to my mind, that is exactly the kind of man you want delivering your babies or rooting around in your vagina.

  Which is exactly what he did one Thursday, as he asked me about work and told me about his son’s new French bulldog. “Does it hurt when you schtup?” he asked. I nodded yes. He inserted the speculum as he described his wife’s commitment to her spin classes. He said “I’m not a foodie” at least three times.

  “Well, it all feels okay to me,” he said. With the exception of a small bump of inexplicable scar tissue, my vaginal canal was just great. “But let’s just take a closer look to be sure.” He summoned the ultrasound tech, Michelle, who kept her engagement ring on her tanned, lumpy finger as she snapped a rubber glove on and covered the ultrasound wand with what appeared to be a dime-store prophylactic.

  “Is that a condom?” I asked.

  “Yeah, basically,” she said.

  “But is it different than a condom? Like, what do you call the product?”

  “A condom.”

  Kind but firm, she slid the ultrasound wand inside me and watched the screen closely as she moved it back and forth. Randy watched with interest as Michelle attempted to part my large intestine like a curtain.

  “Her uterus,” she said. “Look. It’s pretty far to the right.”

  Randy nodded. “But her ovary?”

  “It’s pinned against the wall.”

  “My uterus?” I asked.

  “It’s far over there,” Randy said.

  “There’s some adenomyosis right there,” Michelle said, pointing to a roiling gray shape. “But nothing larger than that. No cysts. The left ovary is—”

  “No, it’s the right ovary that’s wonky,” Randy said, taking the wand from her like an impatient kid playing a video game with a friend.

  After a long moment, he patted my leg reassuringly and removed the wand in one swift motion. “Okay, hop up and get dressed and meet me in my office.”

  When they left, the sting was so bad that I shook my legs out, like a kid doing the hokey pokey, trying to redistribute the pain. When that didn’t work, I bundled the blue cotton gown up and pressed it to my crotch like I was trying to stop up a wound.

  In Randy’s office, which is home to two mismatched regency chairs, a charcoal drawing of a pregnant woman, and a pair of decorative boxing gloves, he explained that I had classic endometriosis. Using a laminated picture from approximately 1987, he explained that endometriosis is when the cells that line the uterus are found outside the uterus, rising and swelling with the monthly hormonal cycle and causing many of the symptoms I had always considered to be my unique dysfunction, a sign that I wasn’t strong enough for this world. The bladder pain, the stinging sensation, the ache in my lower back, were all the result of growths the size of pinheads that were dotting my once-pristine organs. He couldn’t say for sure without surgery, but he’d seen enough of these cases to feel fairly confident. And the adenomyosis—when the endometrial cells begin growing into the muscles surrounding the uterus—was a telltale sign. In the drawing Randy showed me, it looked like hundreds of seed pearls working their way into soft pink velvet. He was kind enough to also show me some photographs he had taken during laparoscopic surgeries, of cases worse than my own. The photos looked like the remains of a wedding: rice scattered, cake smushed. A little bit of blood.

  “Does this explain why I’m so tired?” I asked, hopeful.

  “I mean, if you’re in pain half the month, then yeah, you’re gonna be tired,” he agreed.

  “And would this, like, affect my fertility?” I asked tentatively.

  “It can make it harder to get pregnant,” Randy said. “It doesn’t mean it will. But it can.”

  “Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

  “Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I looked at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

  “Does her vagina look like mine?”

  “I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

  One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist, and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.

  My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

  My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.

  For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a mother. In early childhood, it was so extreme that I could often be found breastfeeding stuffed animals. When my sister was born, family legend has it that I asked my mother if we could reverse roles: “Let’s tell her I’m her mother and you’re her sister. She won’t ever know!”

  Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen. But never motherhood. It’s for me. I just know it. Sometimes I lie in bed next to my sleeping boyfriend and puff out my stomach, imagine that he is protecting me and I
am protecting our child. Sometimes we talk about how exciting it would be if something happened accidentally, if we were faced with becoming parents without having to make the decision ourselves. I name them in my head, picture picking them up in the park, hauling them through the Gristedes when we all have colds, stopping by a picnic “just for five minutes because he’s really sleepy.” Reading Eloise to my three-year-old daughter for the first time. Running around and shutting the windows before a storm, explaining: “This will keep us nice and dry!”

  When I tell my doctor aunt about my endometriosis diagnosis (“endo” for those in the know), she says I better get cracking. “In medical school, that was the first thing we were taught,” she says. “After an endo diagnosis you say get started now.”

  My doctor never said that to me. He was casual—now that I consider it, too casual? I had been right all along, known better than any doctor: something really was wrong down there.

  So I have to get started now. It’s time to get started now. And why not? I wonder. I have a job. I am in love. We have an extra bedroom that we are currently using for shoes, boxes, and occasional guests. I am told my dog is unusually good with children. I already look fucking pregnant. Why the hell not?

  I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They’ve come too soon, and I can’t do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive.