Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

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Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
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In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

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‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
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There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

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It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
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I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

By The Bad Advisor

“My 27-year-old daughter and her best friend, Katie, have been best friends since they were 4. Katie practically grew up in our house and is like a daughter to me. My daughter recently got engaged to her fiancé and announced that Katie would be the maid of honor (Katie’s boyfriend is also a good friend of my future son-in-law). The problem is that Katie walks with a pretty severe limp due to a birth defect (not an underlying medical issue). She has no problem wearing high heels and has already been fitted for the dress, but I still think it will look unsightly if she’s in the wedding procession limping ahead of my daughter. I mentioned this to my daughter and suggested that maybe Katie could take video or hand out programs (while sitting) so she doesn’t ruin the aesthetic aspect of the wedding. My daughter is no longer speaking to me (we were never that close), but this is her big wedding and I want it to be perfect. All of the other bridesmaids will look gorgeous walking down the aisle with my daughter. Is it wrong to have her friend sit out?”

— Via “Dear Prudence,” Slate, 6 September 2017

Dear Mom,

It’s generous of you to want to involve your daughter in her own wedding, but if she’s not going to ensure that this event does not have any unsightly local limping women in it, she needs to relinquish the big decisions. This is as much your wedding as it is anyone else’s — more so, really, because you had a baby one time. What has your daughter done besides literally be the reason for this whole shebang? Sadly, it sounds like your daughter values the lifelong relationship she has built with Katie more than she values her mother’s approval of a temporary matrimonial tableau.

It is a shame that she won’t stick Katie in the corner because you don’t like the way she walks, but weddings mean different things to different people. Your daughter obviously believes that her day is about surrounding herself with people she loves, rather than about recruiting whoever is available to traipse down the aisle without a gait that you personally find distracting. Hers is not a particularly tasteful approach, of course, but it’s the one she’s chosen instead of casting aside her closest friend because you find Katie’s body so repulsive that the mere sight of it will permanently mar the day in your memories forever.

Beauty only comes in a limited range of sizes, colors, and abilities, and anyone who falls outside that range is prone to destroying weddings, which don’t count unless everyone involved looks like they jumped out of the placeholder in a JC Penney picture frame. Your daughter’s wholesale disregard for shallow sociocultural imperatives that tell people they are worthless unless they conform to the physical standards of manufactured normativity is cute, but this isn’t a gathering of her nearest and dearest in celebration of a milestone that has nothing whatsoever to do with how anybody looks. It’s a wedding, for chrissakes! Not some kind of familial bonding ritual, and if it doesn’t mimic a goddamned Modern Bride spread, what is the point? Eternal love and mutual affinity between and among people who aren’t singularly concerned with your approval at every turn? Please.

We all do the best we can by our children, but some apples fall very, very far from the tree. Through no fault of your own, you simply got a child who grew up to love and appreciate people for who they are, rather than for what really matters — whether you feel that they can walk across a church looking like they came out of central bridal catalog casting.

“A few months ago, after an increasing amount of silence on her end, an old friend told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore. So I backed off. I found out from a mutual friend that she’s now engaged. I feel like I can’t let this event go unacknowledged. Would it be wrong of me to send a card of congratulations and a gift?

I have no expectations that this will rekindle our friendship; I just want her to know I’m happy for her and still thinking of her.”

— Via “Old Friend,” Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 23 August 2017

Dear Old Friend,

Newly engaged people have so little going on, and so few people interested in their lives, that they often welcome any spare demands for their attention that others can offer. Your situation is a little more nuanced since this lady 100% told you to lay the fuck off, but there’s no reason not to offer this person an opportunity to experience the opposite of the thing she expressly told you she did not want — a friendly relationship with you.

It’s hard to say why she’d want to cut off contact with someone whose instincts guide them to deliberately disregard the express wishes of others, but it’s great that you’re so selflessly willing to give her a chance to think about you thinking about her even after she specifically told you that she didn’t care to be friends with you, specifically.

I mean, what are you supposed to do here? Respect the fact that this woman explicitly told you that she does not desire your company or communication, or go to not-insubstantial lengths to make her aware that you have positive feelings about her upcoming nuptials? Is she supposed to go the rest of her life just not ever knowing whether you, someone she unequivocally said that she did not have a mutual affinity for, feels pretty good about her engagement?

What kind of life would that be, really, to live day after day, year after year, decade after decade, not knowing that somebody you didn’t really like all that much was glad you got married? So few people will be offering this lady their thoughts about her engagement, it’s important to make sure she knows that at least your feelings still matter.

Bad Advice On Asking A Woman Out When She’s Dating Someone Else

“I just finished my sophomore year of college. For the summer, I got a three-month internship at a company that does work in the field I am getting my degree in and want to work in after I graduate. This was my second job, after the internship somewhere else I had last summer. I was hoping to get some good experience like last summer.

I was paired with the same person for two-thirds of the work I was doing. She has lots of skills, but I noticed when she types she uses the caps-lock key each time she needed to make a capital letter instead of using the shift key. She is only five years older than me, and she is very good with technology and computers. I didn’t understand why she would type this way, because even though she does type fast and efficiently, using the caps-lock key would slow her down. I mentioned it to her and even showed her, and she said she had no idea but she would keep on using the caps-lock key.

I thought she just needed to see how efficient it was so when I was using her computer I disabled the caps-lock key. She was very upset when she found out that it didn’t work and I explained what I did and why she should give the shift key a chance. She complained to the manager, and even though I was just trying to make things more efficient, the manager sided with her and I was let go a month into my internship. HR sided with her too when I went to them. I’m confused because I was only trying to help and make things more efficient. Did I really do something wrong or did the company overreact?”

— Via “Ask A Manager,” 17 July 2017

Dear Intern,

As long as you’re “only trying to help,” you can do literally anything! Good intentions are all that matters in the world, and the effects of your actions are entirely irrelevant. This company obviously doesn’t know how to handle itself professionally when a world-class efficiency expert such as yourself walks through the front door. It’s very likely they were intimidated by how efficient you are. In the future, just keep fucking with other people’s shit no matter what. It will be an extremely efficient way to bring your efficiency message to a great number of different employers.

Beauty Is A Preposterous, Frivolous, Amazing Gift We Give To One Another

The experience of beauty I share with my friends is a bulwark in a world full of bullshit, a bastion against very real everyday horrors.

Already looking but pre-feeling beautiful on my wedding day, when my father decided to snap a photo of me standing beside a garbage can.

Five years ago today, I walked into a crowded room and everyone stared at me. “She looks BEAUTIFUL,” gasped some blessedly effusive person seated to my left.

Now look dudes, I’ve seen my share of rom-coms and I’ve been to a hell of a lot of weddings based on them. I know the narrative in a traditional-ish Man + Woman tale of matrimony is supposed to go…

and then her nerves vanished when she looked deeply into the eyes of her groom, waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She floated on an ebullient cloud of true love to join hands with her new husband, blissfully unaware of the eyes of the onlookers dazzled by her passage . . .

or something like that.

There’s some truth to the cliche, I think: catching and holding my now-husband’s gaze did make me feel a bit steadier, helped me walk through the sensation of leaping, clawing nerves to meet him in the center of that ballroom to take our vows, but still! The voice from the left, that exclamation from a woman who just couldn’t or wouldn’t withhold verbal appreciation of my wedding day aesthetic, swept me into the center of the room with head high as if my heart weren’t pounding out of my chest.

I don’t know which of my friends or family said it, but I love her. I’ll never think of that moment without feeling the sharp, pleasant pang of sincere compliment, and I still believe that her pronouncement *made* me beautiful in that moment. Perhaps I already glowed from the vantage of outward eyes — I better have looked good, given all the time I spent on my makeup that morning — but it was in that instant that I felt it. “Beautiful.” It echoed in my brain, and that warm, lovely feeling stayed with me throughout the night.

After my brother’s recent wedding ceremony, my dad wrote a little Facebook post that made everybody (or at least definitely me) cry. In it, he made a salient point that, being extremely lucky in the lottery of in-laws, I hadn’t much considered: the legal and sentimental bond of matrimony goes far beyond the two people in the dress(es), tux(es)…or whatever the amazingly Offbeat Bride ensemble(s) they choose to wear for their commitment ceremony.

Marrying somebody is marrying his/her/their entire network of love and acquaintanceship. On a familial level, this becomes pretty apparent as a marriage progresses: your spouse’s family can become, quite literally, your family — you gotta coordinate holidays, you gotta take on pain and part in interfamilial conflict, you gotta go to all the parties. You’re one of the crew now, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

My Hot-Pink-Loving Santa Claus Father Taught Me What Beauty Is

But when it comes to the wedding day itself, your literal and metaphysical family functions more as a (much-beloved) background, a surrounding tableau of smiles and well-wishes that renders individuals near-anonymous en masse. The people who help you battle anxiety and withstand the enormous pressure of that metaphorical multi-person embrace to survive your “special day” and provide a ceremony worthy of memory are a select group of trusted confidantes: your ride-or-dies, your chosen family, your friends. And especially, if you’re a woman (the woman writing this essay, anyhow): your female friends.

I looked beautiful at my wedding five years ago because Jane taught me how to style my hair in finger waves. I looked beautiful at my wedding because, on the morning of, Lauren said “Jenn, get the hell out of the kitchen. Go do your makeup and I’ll wash the dishes.” I looked beautiful because Hannah, bless her most noble of hearts, attended to my excited, nervous mother all day prior to the ceremony, fetching wine as needed and refusing to allow her to call me about anything potentially anxious-making until the vows had safely been said.

I looked beautiful because Beka offered to make the run to pick up the photo collage that was to-be-displayed by the guest book; I looked beautiful because Lindy literally slapped my father-in-law’s fingers when he attempted to snatch a surplus of hand-made favors from the limited amount available.

When it comes to the wedding day itself, your family functions more as a (much-beloved) background, a surrounding tableau of smiles and well-wishes that renders individuals near-anonymous en masse.

I looked beautiful because I’d received bachelorette night hugs from Bethany, Jen, and Lindsey, who’d all traveled from out of town to be there, because I could hear Kaylan’s laugh ringing before I even walked into the ballroom, because Chenoa wore cowboy boots and Jaime accidentally wore a transparent dress to attend my nuptials.

I looked beautiful because I myself, my own super-best friend, spent a lot of time and effort in consultation with all of the above-mentioned women choosing a dress, making my own jewelry to wear for the ceremony, styling my hair, designing and applying my makeup. I looked beautiful because of the effort and influence of a lot of women, and I felt beautiful because of some woman’s exclamation upon observing the fruits of my enterprise. I mean, damn, I know I’ve repeated the word 78 times in this paragraph alone, but it’s just apropos: what a beautiful, beautiful group of women I know. What a beautiful night!

Recently I’ve been thinking about this form of feminine labor, the way my friends and I utilize our bonds of trust to uplift one another during times of celebration or difficulty. It looks a bit different from the models of adult female friendship I observed growing up, but functions so similarly! I have never made a dish to bring to a church potluck or a loved one in bereavement, but I have packed up every mascara I own and sprinted for the faces of friends who are enjoying accomplishment or suffering heartbreak, eager to provide them with the loveliest self-image I can assist in creating. When Hannah married, I spent more time perfecting the makeup of the mother of the groom than decorating my own face (myself, as a sister, being not nearly as important a figure in the resulting photos).

When Lauren, who typically doesn’t wear makeup, was wed last month, I went to painstaking effort to give her the natural-but-OOMPHED aesthetic she envisioned for the day. When Beka received some bad news that rattled her self-esteem, all I could think to do (besides make dumb jokes and help her through a bottle of champagne) was to whip out some shiny shadow and take a photo that, in its gorgeousness, would make plain the absolute ridiculousness of her rejection. Beauty is my gift to them all, a process-based undertaking that serves to offer both me and my friends reassurance and joy.

How To Make Your Face Look Superb For Your Soulmate’s Seoul Wedding

It’s frivolous, I know. Do any of us need to look or feel pretty? We shouldn’t really, I guess. Not like we need to eat. Do any of us need to be married? Discounting depressingly legit reasons like religion-enforced patriarchal tradition and financial dependence, and good ol’ HEY YOU ANCIENT SPINSTER-style societal pressure—of course not!

Nonetheless, I celebrate both on June 30: my marriage, and the experience of beauty I share with my friends. Both are, for me, bulwarks in a world full of bullshit, bastions against very real everyday horrors that would sap my spirit unto death. I need strong bonds with other humans in order to survive, and those I share with my husband and closest women friends sustain me.

“Beauty,” as a process, is not meaningful to me as a dreary prescribed practice of daily maintenance, but functions as more of a spiritual ritual by which I create and reify the relationships that give my life meaning.

Would my wedding day have been as significant if Lauren hadn’t offered to clean my kitchen so I could spend more time on my makeup? Would hers have been as meaningful if she’d been married in her usual bare face, minus my cosmetic wizardry? Well…of course, in the sense that we would both still now be legally bound in commitments to spouses we trust and adore. But would the ceremonies have been *quite* as special, as perfectly personal in lasting memory? I think not.

The last words I heard from another person besides my husband on my wedding night came from the mouth of another friend, a slightly different tone than whoever’d gasped “She looks BEAUTIFUL!” Justin and I had just retreated to our honeymoon suite and slammed the door. We stood leaning against it, grinning stupidly at each other, when we heard the elevator outside DING!, disgorging a load of women who’d closed out the dancing following our wedding.

Do any of us need to be married? Discounting depressingly legit reasons like religion-enforced patriarchal tradition and financial dependence, and good ol’ HEY YOU ANCIENT SPINSTER-style societal pressure — of course not!

“But,” issued an appreciative voice from the elevator, bellowing down the quiet hallway, “did you see Lauren’s boobs?” (Reader, I did. On that particular night and always, they looked excellent.) “Did you SEE THEM?!” My newly minted husband and I both lost it, cackling until we couldn’t breathe, laughing until the clamor of other voices faded into the still of night. I knew again then that I’d made a perfect choice of partner: someone who would never begrudge me the feminine frivolity I cherish in my friendships, someone who delights in myself, my body, my family, my friends, and the absurd ways in which we express our affection for one another.

On June 30 it feels right not only to celebrate my love and ever-increasing appreciation for my partner-in-life, but also the women whose blurted words definitively punctuated our ceremony, the friends who saw us to the point of marriage and beyond. Beauty (and boobs, apparently) have bound us all in a broader web than I was even capable of conceiving when I said “I do” on that swelteringly hot evening in 2012, and five years later? All of those loves shine more brightly than ever. How beautiful is that?!

]]> https://theestablishment.co/how-to-talk-to-your-white-best-friend-about-racism-23b95b30985d/ Mon, 05 Jun 2017 19:38:23 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2224 Read more]]> It’s better to have extremely difficult talks in a real friendship than to ignore the issues and pretend they don’t exist.

After 20 years of friendship, I’m finally starting to talk about intersectional racism with my white best friend.

Not racism in a metaphorical way. Not racism like: “Hey, did you happen to leaf through that Ta-Nehisi Coates book I left on the coffee table?” Not racism like: “Wasn’t that Margaret Cho joke so dead-on?” Racism like: “I need you to acknowledge our lives aren’t the same.”

For a long time, I pretended our lives were the same. Sarah (name changed) and I went to the same politically radical college, where we first bonded over our love for practical joke-oriented performance art, cooperative living, and television. She goes to racial justice meetings and founded an arts residency for social justice. Now, Sarah works at an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse hospital. But (and this is a duh) none of this means she will ever completely understand lived-through racism, and its impact on me.

In college, where we bounded across campus discussing Marxism with pine-scented oxygen in our lungs, noshing bagels on the sunny quad, and baking bread in our cooperative house together, it was easy to pretend that Sarah and I were equals in the eyes of society — even though an unconscious part of me always knew that we weren’t.

For starters, there were the basic economics. Sarah’s parents procured internships for her at prestigious museums, took her skiing in the Alps, and spoiled me like I was their second daughter. My parents, meanwhile, hadn’t been to a museum in years, and their idea of leisure as immigrant restaurant owners was sleeping more than six hours a night.

It was easy to pretend that Sarah and I were equals in the eyes of society — even though an unconscious part of me always knew that we weren’t.
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But there were also racial inequalities between Sarah and me. When I moved to a small white rural town in the Catskills to live with Sarah, I discovered how hard it was for a politically radical person of color to fit in. While some of my new acquaintances were friendly, others were outright hostile when I talked about cultural appropriation. I was told wearing a sombrero at our Halloween party was not cultural appropriation because cultural appropriation is a relic of the past in our post-racial millennial society. When I asked why there were no local anti-Trump protests, I was told that our town was indeed doing activism, but in a grassroots way (read: nothing that changed the status quo). I soon considered moving away as soon as possible, but didn’t have enough cash yet.

Shortly before my departure, the kraken was unleashed: When I posted “I don’t like the way Kimmy Schmidt portrays Asian-Americans,” a white friend of Sarah, Lucy (not her real name), sent me a long, angry, macroaggressing email. Lucy informed me that I was not Asian, because race did not exist. “Like it or not, we are all Americans,” Lucy lectured. (I checked my skin: yup, still Asian-American.) Lucy told me she was “tired of everything being about race” and the “intolerance of the PC Police.” (I’m guessing that’s me.) Since the election, Lucy said, “now is not the time for more divisiveness.” (I didn’t draw these lines.) Erasing my lived experience, Lucy declared, “Now is not the time to look for problems, when they might not be there.” (Good to know racism is the Boogeyman.)

#NotAllWhitePeople, The Quiz
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Furthermore, Lucy understood marginalization, she claimed (not sure she gets what marginalization is). “If you are sensitive to your identity as a person of color, or think that you have been treated as ‘the other,’ consider what it feels like to be singled out as a white person,” she wrote, emphasizing how hard it was to have been accused of racism by her more privileged white friends in the past. She went on to equate my marginalization with being ostracized by her conservative family when she became a “lefty hippie punk liberal.” Lucy wrote that she “felt this deep oppression and lack of acceptance from my family. So I do know what it feels like to be marginalized. Being white doesn’t bring about automatic privilege. We all have our own difficulties, problems and stumbling blocks in life.”

My entire body shook with rage and sadness at the “#notallmen”-style ignorance of the email from a supposed feminist. I knew that she had told multiple friends that white privilege was not real, despite well-researched scientific evidence to the contrary. I couldn’t work or write for a week, disillusioned by the reality of pervasive ignorance in my country. Friends’ replies made it worse — some of my white friends told me they thought Lucy had a valid point in showing she understood racism because of the anti-Semitism her family had suffered.

I wrote Lucy a simple, short email asking her to read about white privilege online, and to get Cornel West’s book Race Matters, because without some fundamental agreements, we weren’t even going to be able to start discussing issues this deep — it would simply be a “yes” versus “no” fight. (She ended up responding, but in lieu of addressing my points, just said I’d always avoided her at parties.)

A couple months later, I finally escaped back to Brooklyn with a sigh of relief, surrounding myself with Asian-American friends and thinking hard about race. But during a one-night visit back to Sarah’s house in the Catskills, I discovered Lucy was coming to dinner. I didn’t want to sit through a dinner party, much less a five-minute chat, with her, and I tried to explain to Sarah that I didn’t want my one night with her to be five hours with Lucy. Sarah said the power wasn’t hers, because her boyfriend had invited Lucy as his guest, and to just try to get along with Lucy because she was her friend too. Sarah had heard about the message Lucy had sent before, but she had not seen it, and she hadn’t asked questions to dig deeper into how it had hurt me. Now, I went into shock at her blasé response.

I spoke not more than three words to Sarah or Lucy during all of dinner — and anyone can tell you I’m usually the chatterbox of the table. Sarah didn’t even seem to notice my intense sadness, which made me even sadder.

Despite our closeness, I realized that Sarah and I lived in two different worlds and probably always would. It was no longer something I could ignore, struggle as I might to keep those rose-colored glasses on by their dangling frame. I fell into a deep depression. A week later, not knowing what else I could do, I opened up my laptop because I was too afraid to call Sarah (and as a writer, I express myself best in words). So nervous that I would alienate my beloved best friend of two decades that my eyes filled with tears at just the thought of no Sarah in my life, I wrote her a letter that changed our friendship forever.

Despite our closeness, I realized that Sarah and I lived in two different worlds and probably always would.
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How do you talk to your white best friend about race?

Imperfectly, stumblingly, emotionally, but with honesty and the hope that you can reach one another across the gigantic divides of systemic American racism. “I want to have a real and true friendship with you, not one where we don’t discuss race,” I wrote. “I live in a world that is different from yours, and I need you to understand that. I have been called racist names on the street and in schools my whole life; I need you to acknowledge that as my best friend. I have gotten emails like this my whole life. It is a lot. I am tired and exhausted. I would like you to support me if you can.”

With truth, revealing all the things you hid from her so she wouldn’t see the ugliness in your life, the shame at what you’ve endured even though it’s not your fault. I tell her about age 11: the girl who made slanted eyes at me between each song in band class, forcing me to grit my teeth and try to focus on the sheet music even as tears blurred my vision. Age 12: the white female bully who slapped me across the face in middle school and called me a “chink,” but who I was too afraid to report to the principal. Age 13: my father came home from the ER with broken ribs because he got into a fight with a man who called him a racist name at the chemical plant. 15: the drama director doesn’t ever cast me in a speaking or named role because I’m not what you’d picture in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, even though I’m more talented than the other contenders. I sit quietly in the back of all crowd shots. 16: the sullen boy who tells me the only reason any guy would date me is to use me for sex “like a hooker” and then dump me to marry a white girl. 17: my white Jewish partner’s mother tells him she doesn’t want “yellow” grandchildren. 18: my teacher tells me math should be easy for me because I’m Asian, so I don’t ask for help (even when I’m desperately drowning), and I end up getting a C-. 20: the Korean guy I’m dating asks me to introduce him to a blonde American girl he can date when I finish my study-abroad program and leave Korea. 21: the man on the street who tells me he wants to make me his Hiroshima bride and eat my “slanted pussy” — not because he thinks his tactics will work, but because he wants to show me who has the power. Welcome to New York! 35: the white liberal New Yorker friends who are shocked and disbelieving when I tell them I have to shield myself from doubly racist and sexist comments on the street every week — yes, in cosmopolitan New York; yes, in 2017 — because it is not their experience and they simply can’t imagine New York is that racist. The fact that I even feel like I need to provide specific evidence of racism to them galls me.

Let’s Stop Pretending White People Can Be Objective On Racial Issues
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It is so cathartic even to write these words to Sarah. I suddenly feel like the tea party in Mary Poppins — am I floating to the ceiling, and will Sarah join me there?

She responds empathetically, stating that “if (Lucy) says anything to me or in front of me that I perceive as willfully uninformed or racist, I will be calling her on it. If it is a fight where she isn’t willing to listen to my side of the argument, she and I will have the same problems that you and her have had, which would lead me to reconsider our (hers and my) friendship. I love you and I NEVER want to behave in a racist manner towards you or anyone.” She asks me to keep sending her links to articles about white privilege and lived racism.

The next time Sarah and I talk on the phone, I feel not only relieved, but that much closer, like our best friendship found a reserve well beneath its surface that we both didn’t know existed, and we’re now both drinking as much water as we can. It’s not perfect, but it’s a beginning. I believe Sarah truly cares about me and will stand up not only for me as a person, but for other people of color who do not have the agency and privilege that I carry as an educated, light-skinned non-black person of color.

It may be frightening to talk to your white best friend about the racism you face, but the alternative is a splintered existence and a constantly code-switching friendship. For a long time, I euphemized my speech about racism as carefully theoretical and philosophical to protect against the white fragility of my friends. I operated under the premise that Trump supporters, not the people sharing my table, were the only racist ones.

Readers of color, it’s better to have extremely difficult talks in a real friendship than to ignore the issues and pretend they don’t exist — all the while feeling alone, unhappy, and confused privately. You are actually doing your interracial friendship — and, IMO, the world — a disservice by shielding it from reality. Your dialogues may or may not synthesize into a lasting friendship, but somehow, a change has got to come, and one potentially fertile ground is in our interracial friendships.

We live in different nations, experiencing different treatment and speaking different languages. But now I know Sarah is listening to my language.

Dare yourselves to reach in.

Winter is lonely.

While Winter is difficult in the best of times, it is significantly more so for those of us who are disabled. Between inaccessible sidewalks covered in ice and snow, chronic pain flare-ups triggered by cold temperatures, and early sunsets eliciting depression, many of us end up stuck at home.

As somebody with a severe mental illness who’s also spent several Winters (and Autumns and Springs) housebound with chronic pain, I’ve had many opportunities to observe the ups and downs of these particular conditions. While I’ve found much joy in being indoors all day everyday (writing a million words a day! Reading hundreds of books! witnessing sunsets that look like rose quartz carnelian lapis lazuli bleeding through the sky! daydreaming! connecting with weirdo cripples near and afar! not being street harassed!), I’ve also fallen into such deep wells of loneliness that I became dissociated and disconnected from reality.

While Winter is difficult in the best of times, it is significantly more so for those of us who are disabled.
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Even for those who are not fully housebound, mobility becomes severely limited when it snows, and our participation in friendships, communities, and public spaces, as well as our ability to do boring survival stuff like run errands, is hindered. Remember, while some of your disabled pals might look cute and productive online, we are struggling at home.

Initially, as I was adjusting to becoming more-or-less housebound, the sheer aloneness of it all triggered some of my worst symptoms, including paranoia, suicidal thoughts, and intense rage and jealousy. I was also sincerely frightened. Frightened that my pain would get even worse, frightened that my friends would leave me. Those things did happen, but I’ve survived thus far, I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and I want to share some of it with you.

Before offering suggestions, I’d like to note that many disabled folks are either too shy to ask for support, overwhelmed with unlearning internalized ableism and navigating our culture’s insistence on self-reliance, or simply burned out. When conditions are chronic, and when we’ve been let down by friends in the past, many of us, myself included, are weary of reaching out.

If you have disabled friends — and most of us do, I hope — I can assure you that they’ve experienced at least one of these barriers to asking for support, if not all of them. Instead of waiting for us to reach out, please dare yourselves to reach in.

1. Bring us food.

Whether you’re gifting us with a take-out or delivery meal, carrying groceries, or cooking at your home or ours, disabled folks need warm, healthy food in Winter. We’re often not able to provide it for ourselves. Ask your friends if they have any food intolerances, and show up accordingly. Consider either gifting us with food, or working out a budget with us so we can give you cash (or a trade, like editing services or a Tarot reading!) to pick up necessities. I personally am fond of burritos (yam! Pulled pork! All the toppings!) and rotis (veggie korma! Lamb! Extra peas and broccoli, please!), and am often in need of vegetables, fresh greens, and bananas and avocados galore. Maybe cantaloupe, kiwi, and watermelon, too?

Disabled folks need warm, healthy food in Winter. We’re often not able to provide it for ourselves.
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Chopping fruits and vegetables is not always possible with chronic pain, so pre-cut and pre-packaged is a better way to go. Many disabled folks are poor, so it’s wise to check in and see what your friends can or cannot afford. For example, I have perishables delivered from Walmart, which means I eat a lot of discounted oatmeal and Mr. Noodles, but fresh produce delivery services, much-needed as they are, are beyond my financial means.

2. Come over and read with us.

Sometimes we don’t need intense conversation (though often we do!), but just company. I read 121 books in 2016, but haven’t had a lot of pals to discuss them with, and am not able to participate in book clubs for many reasons, multiple disabilities being at the top of that list. But I’ve been underlining, taking notes, asking questions, and dreaming. And I’ve been writing. I spend a lot of time in libraries, but that’s not a possibility in Winter. Reading different books in quiet company, chugging coffee together, interrupting the silence now and then to read a favorite line out loud or discuss an idea the author is describing, would be dreamy.

3. Send a text.

Send a text just to say Hi, I’m thinking of you. We don’t have to be BFF’s. If you haven’t talked to someone for three months, six months, a full year, please consider texting them to let them know you value them and haven’t forgotten them. Magic will happen. To be alone at home for such an extended period of time feels, and often is, a form of abandonment. It’s easy to believe you’ve been forgotten. There’ve been many times in my life when I’ve received a short text with a few cute little emojis at a moment of despair when they were needed the most. You could be the person who sends that text. (And hell, maybe we could dare each other to (re-)learn how to talk on the phone as well.)

4. Text to say more than just Hi.

Let’s have real, tough, vulnerable, magical conversations. Let’s share what’s going on in our lives beyond small talk and the weather (even though I actually love discussing the weather, and it’s something I’m doing this very moment). Let’s ask each other difficult questions. Let’s ask each other about our dreams and then work toward making them come true.

5. Set writing goals together.

I’m lucky to have many friends who are writers and zinesters. Whether or not we can be in the same space, we often share word count goals, writing prompts, and words of encouragement. Alone but together, we get stuff done. Writing can be lonely work. It makes a difference to have a few pals to check in and exchange ideas with.

6. Shovel and salt our sidewalks.

Many, if not most, of us are living in buildings with negligent landlords (to say the least). Whether or not other tenants in the building understand that we’re disabled and take these small tasks into mind, many don’t, nor should they have to. While general maintenance of the building is the landlord’s legal responsibility, in my experience, it’s been rare indeed to have a landlord who keeps up with ordinary chores. Have you ever tried to push a wheelchair through snow? Have you ever held your cane’s icepick toward the ground, only to watch it slip out from under you? Clear sidewalks are necessary for the safety of everyone, especially disabled folks. A small path cleared from our entrances to the sidewalks (and garbage bins!) is a lovely gift to give a friend. Remember to clear the pathways at your homes and workplaces, too.

7. When you invite us somewhere, please give us as much accessibility information as possible.

A few years ago, I created the term “accessible physically, financially, and emotionally” as an attempt to define and navigate various forms of in/accessibility beyond ramps. While exploring this term is beyond the realm of this specific piece, you’ll find it useful to think of these terms when describing spaces to your friends. Are there stairs? Is it scent-free? How much will it cost? Will there be seats to rest our sore bones? These are just some basic, beginning questions to ask. Whether you’re inviting us to a public event or into your own home, these queries are crucial.

8. Support our work.

As you may have noticed, disabled folks have tons and tons and tons of incredible writing and art online! And in books! And in zines! And more! And more! And more! And even more! We’re everywhere!

Disabled folks are creative as gosh.
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Disabled folks are creative as gosh, and many of us write compulsively — not because we’re getting paid or getting paid well, but because we must. If you like our writing, a) tell us so, b) share it, and c) keep clicking on our Paypals, Cash.Me’s, and ko-fis. I and many of my friends are on social assistance. Although it’s recommended that one spend 30% of their income on rent, most disabled people spend significantly more than that to live in substandard housing — for example, I spend 75% of my income, and rent in small towns and cities alike is only getting higher. That means literally every penny and every dollar count.

Be kind, be generous, show your appreciation! (But also, don’t just value — or co-opt! — our work: value us.)

9. Understand that while our pain must be acknowledged, it’s not the only thing we’re capable of talking about, and many of us may not want to discuss it at all.

I write about pain often, but I don’t love discussing it in person because it often turns into a trigger-y cryfest for me. Experiences of chronic pain are not only physical, but have emotional, financial, and spiritual repercussions as well. For those reasons, it’s a complex and stressful topic. If you haven’t experienced debilitating pain resulting in limited mobility, as well as the misunderstanding and invalidation inherent in the medical health-care system, please know that it can be a sensitive topic. If we don’t want to talk about it, please don’t take it personally.

10. If you say you’re gonna show up, please do your best to actually show up.

We all cancel plans for various reasons, and that’s okay, but when folks say they’ll be able to give us rides or help carry groceries, and then stop calling, this has devastating consequences on our mental and physical health. Here’s another term I recently created: “Inconsistent (or intermittent) interdependence.” In cripple communities and disability justice spaces, we talk a lot about interdependence. But because I’ve never felt a sense of belonging in a particular community, or experienced consistent and reliable care and support, I haven’t been able to relate to the interdependence model. Instead, I’ve labeled it as inconsistent, which is more true to my own experience, but leaves space open for possibilities — sometimes friends, new and old, really do show up!

This list is necessarily incomplete. I encourage you to try a few of the suggestions, see what works and what doesn’t, and write your own lists. Talk to your sick and disabled friends. Talk to each other. Stay warm, stay weird, and keep living.

Original illustrations by CB Lavery.

By Jillian Richardson

If being alive has taught me anything, it’s that a woman’s worth is equivalent to how much dick she’s getting. Her number one priority should be getting the D. And getting it on the reg.

Unfortunately, some ladies suffer from a chemical imbalance that leads them to selfishly crave other things — like fulfilling friendships and a rewarding job — which they believe can make them happy. In extreme cases, they even want to love themselves for who they are.

During a particularly dark period in my life, I personally struggled with this disease.

I would awake in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat, my hand journaling of its own accord. I’m ashamed to provide the full details, but let’s just say some of the entries involved plans to sign up for yoga, creating a vision board . . . and helping others.

Worse than a foreign desire to understand and better myself as a person, I realized that I had sick thoughts that strayed from P in the V penetration:

I can enjoy my life without sex. I am worth more than my body. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t shake the idea. I scrawled demented ideas: “I can be fulfilled on my own,” and “I really should think about something other than the sexual approval of men.”

Once, I woke up happy, even though there wasn’t a man next to me in bed. Enough was enough. I made an appointment with my gynecologist immediately.

The following day my doctor my informed me that it’s normal — if troubling — for thoughts of self-love and independence to surface in women from time to time. He also assured me that daily birth control pills could help refocus my thoughts from grad school applications to getting a good, hard pounding. In other words, taking a birth control pill would regularly remind me that I needed to have sex to be happy.

No longer would I be tormented by thoughts of being “my own person.”

After I filled my prescription, the effect was immediate. I would be sitting at my desk, wondering if I should ask my boss for a raise, when my BC alarm would go off. The simple act of placing the pill in my mouth helped me, psychologically, understand that I hadn’t gotten laid in eight days.

I knew that I couldn’t let all of that sweet, baby-blocking estrogen go to waste! Within 20 minutes, I was in the bathroom with that kinda cute guy who wears vests and works in IT. Birth control helped me remember that I needed penetration in order to have a life worth living.

If you ever find yourself thinking about anything other than sex, don’t worry — there’s a solution for you. Birth control. The pill is a daily reminder that there’s only one path to true happiness and self-worth — sex. No profound self-love or devoted friendships can replace getting laid.

So here’s what you do: Just once a day, check in with yourself to confirm that you’re not getting laid. And then do something about it. And by something, I mean someone. It doesn’t matter who. Go get your freak on, ladies. Never forget your priorities again.

Remember, you don’t need to “be fulfilled.” You need to “be filled.” With dick.

***

Lead Image: flickr/ Sarah C

Here’s the thing about queer girl friendships that I find inexplicably essential to being alive: There’s a formula to them.

It starts with two girls who have been loved differently or not kindly or just plain wrong. Girls who find out they love girls and want to love them rightly and samely and gently. Girls who, at many points in their lives, have figured out that they were wired wrong, or inside-out, and live their adult lives as mechanics. Girls who get greasy fixing themselves and fixing others. If executed correctly, it continues as such with more and more tools added, or at least tools that become more and more efficient. You begin by taking a pair of nail clippers and attempting to cut out rot from the body. Eventually, you take a cleaver. But only a cleaver for the heart. You need a separate tool for the liver, the eyes. The mind is a mess — you not only need different voltages of fuses, but machinery both delicate and heavy-handed: screws, saws, scalpels, needle-nose pliers.

The tools aren’t just tangible, which is what complicates the whole muck of relationships. You can be a proficient mechanic of the body, as I’m forever learning to be, but you’ve still got to be able to intuit problems and solve them creatively. Which is the entire mess of existence, really — many are skilled in one or the other, but so few know both. You have a leg up if you’ve experienced trauma or life in the margins (and this may be the one area of life you’re advantaged in), but only if you’ve had enough resources to heal a bit. Only if you have a legend on the big map of how the fuck to love people who have been wounded deeply, including yourself.

It starts with two girls who have been loved differently or not kindly or just plain wrong.
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What I mean to say here is that we are girls who have wants so big, they encompass many things, especially ourselves. And when you have two girls who love girls and who have seen the raw edges of life — loss and abuse and trauma, mainly — and who share a deep love of communication, of finding and losing oneself in the sanctity of words, and who are, above all else, survivalist —

I fail, here. My best friend, Francesca, wrote it better than I can:

“We talk about the lack of language that queer people have for the kinds of relationships that populate our lives. Once, last spring when my heart was broken by the woman whose office is next to mine said that one day I would meet someone and that person would mean home. How I accepted that as true, how I attached to that idea. I do imagine loving someone, being real and present and at home in that love. But one person meaning home? I don’t know July. What say you?”

I say, this kind of queer girl friendship burns stars so brightly, everyone knows they never last.

I disliked Francesca the moment I met her. Which is very typical of me — I am the kid in class with arms crossed, saying Prove it. She had a heaviness of grief around her that I didn’t believe in at first. Her face was the color of the sun clouded over, and I was unsure if I wanted to gently wave the clouds away or be the hurricane of sadness that drove her sadness away.

Apart from struggling with Savior Complex, I also felt entirely unnerved by her — her sharp eyebrows framed cutting eyes, almost too-alive on a startlingly pretty face. I say startling here, because I can’t summon a better adjective. You don’t expect someone who can both hold a knife and a baby with equal proficiency to appear delicate. That was my first lesson: the best pretty wasn’t delicate at all.

At UCLA, I walked around her terrified, projecting the air of the studiously aloof, worried that she’d discover my softness.

She had a heaviness of grief around her that I didn’t believe in at first.
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We were both Lambda Literary Fellows in Poetry for a week, and were seated across from one another in the university’s sterile, exam-room-like lecture hall, where Eloise Klein Healy was teaching us about the sacred.

“We need to establish trust here,” Eloise was saying, her hair bright white and sticking up in a beautiful manner. “Because everyone is bringing their current lives with them, and we will be intimate with those lives this week.” Everything we were thinking about would end up in our poetry. She told us about writing her book The Islands Projects: Poems for Sappho. “I had pitched the idea to the Los Angeles Arts Commission and gotten a grant. While in Greece, my mother died. It was no longer a book about Sappho.”

This is how I got to know Francesca, through her poems written in that room. The whole week, we circled each other, sniffing for the profundity of the grief all over our hair, trapped in the creases of our eyelids. Hidden in the black glass of our pupils, daring them to change size for light or pleasure. On our very last night at the residency, we were given unlimited drink tickets at a fancy wine bar. I was unfathomably drunk. My lipstick kept smiling off my face.

She reached for the bright red pencil. “Let me,” she said. And as she leaned over to fill in my sloppy mouth, the room got brighter and the sun came back to her face. When she was done, the lipstick was perfect, and she had proven it, as it were.

How We Heal From Sexual Violence Against The Queer Community
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A little over a year after Francesca and I met, my partner left me for one of her students. In the dishonesty of hindsight, the affair is obvious — the late nights at school, the sudden earnestness in our conversations about nontraditional intimacy, the (I thought) excessive moral support said student needed during her divorce from her husband. Relationships have a verisimilitude of honesty and transparency, until they suddenly don’t.

Is this why we are so mortified when affairs happen? Because our unmet needs for accountability and communication are suddenly, too-brightly appreciable?

Though I felt blindsided, there must have been a deeply unhappy part of me, for when I read my emails sent to Francesca from Salt Lake City (where I’d moved so my partner could pursue her PhD), I read passages like this:

“I’m heartbroken, & wondering what the fuck I’m doing here. Except living. & why isn’t living enough when living is already so hard in the first place? Isn’t it, being alive, so fucking brave already? Enough? Oh, sweet friend. I could use your words of comfort & wisdom. Could use your poetry & gentle face. I brought home two cases of wine from California, come have a bottle with me, sit in the slough of crickets & the horrible songs they sing.”

My partner and I had broken up during Hannukah, though neither of us is technically Jewish. Sitting at the bright little red dining room table with the brown leather watch I’d bought her — with the extra-thin band so she could type her dissertation comfortably — I was on the cusp of the exaggeratedly tragic. She opened the present with a long sigh of anguish, and explained that she’d fallen in love with one of her students.

Only she didn’t actually say that. She said she’d fallen in love with herself.

Afterwards, I drew myself a scalding bath that went cold fast as Utah’s December leaked in. I sat in it for a very long time, naked and covered in little fleshy peaks, thinking about what our breakup would have sounded like if I’d been underwater the whole time. I imagined it sounding like a phone ringing and ringing and ringing, someone having forgotten to turn on the answering machine.

It was five in the morning in Francesca’s world, which was Michigan then. On good nights, this is when she’d be finally heading for bed.

She said she’d fallen in love with herself.
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“Am I an idiot?” I said into the phone, crumpled on the back stair to my apartment. I was staring at my garden, with rows and rows of brassicas and onions beginning to break through the snow.

“Oh, July,” Francesca said as one word. And then a long pause. “I have points — I booked you a ticket to come here. You leave tomorrow morning.”

Born and raised on a trout farm in Northern Michigan, for Francesca being queer was largely a private, sheltered thing — or something to be shouted in the canyons small urban communities made. Once, while she was visiting New York, she wrote to me about the magical disorientation of being in a place where women were openly gay: Every time I see women holding hands I think oh God: ‘have you too, come here from a far away terrible place? Probably. I love you.’

The penetralia of queer girl friendships is the unspoken; Am I an idiottranslates to My entire life fell apart SOS SOS SOS. The bait and switch: when to take the reins and when to let someone else steer. Francesca could know the profundity of my breakup, my breaking apart, and take control of my well-being when I could not. Because when push comes to shove, all queer folks come from a far away terrible place. The responses from friends who don’t have that experiential insight, though well-intentioned, often falls flat — queer breakups are given the same kinds of commentary and reassurances that all breakups are given, often decontextualized from the history of trauma, coming out, alienation, and general feeling of scarcity (I’ll never find another queer person to love me ever again) — all of which are the town and country of A Far Away Terrible Place.

These are just a few things I think about when I think about home and love and queer girl friendships. I think about queerness as a community made from the tectonic plates of trauma — from a history/lineage of trauma, as well as formed from people who have sometimes been harmed for being queer. By strangers. By their families. I think about femininity specifically, in regards to queerness. Not only because feminine queerness is an intersection that often faces harm from both sides of homophobia and misogyny (even within queer communities and definitely within older waves of feminism), but also because I read something Elizabeth Marston wrote a few years ago in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme.

Marston wrote that femmes, or queer folks who fall on the feminine/femme spectrum, are unauthorized copies of femininity. That because of their queerness (gender, orientation, presentation, radicalization — everything queer means universally and individually), they cannot occupy mainstream femininity, but rather an unauthorized copy.

How much I love that, cling to it.

I think that Marston’s concept is dually applicable to friendships between two feminine queer girls — an unauthorized copy of what we think of when we think of intimacy between women. Queer female friendships occupy a space that is not platonic, but is not not platonic. Not romantic, but not notromantic. And there we live, in the space informed by the trauma of queerness (as well as our personal developmental traumas and upbringings), where our friendships accelerate and traverse across borders and boundaries.

Our straight friends believed Francesca and I were together, or that we would eventually be together. Because it was unfathomable that two queer girls could decide to decimate the countries whose rules they followed, and make their own.

We were as intimate as I’ve ever been with anyone.

It’s illuminating, starlight. One evening, after I’d bought my nephew a telescope and we sat on his front lawn trying to see something through the city smog, he asked me if I believed stars were our ancestors. I considered this. I asked him what he thought. Resolutely, “Yes.” No pause from him.

I’m not sure if I entirely believe that, but I don’t not believe it. Regardless, I think the remarkable thing about stars is that if they aren’t our directancestors, they at least show their own ancestry. We can trace them. The stars that we see in the sky are unauthorized copies. We see them and the bright scars they leave on the sky, though we see them long after they’ve grown so intimate and fiery that they combust.

So bright-burning, we knew they could never last.

On The Beautiful Futility Of Writing
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The fact that my relationship with Francesca has, in a sense, ended is beside the point here, except to illuminate our celestial qualities. And it hasn’t ended, really. It’s just that we are both partnered to other people, and our intimacy funnels itself elsewhere. Which is the downfall of being two feminine, queer girls in this world: we are taught to prioritize romantic love above all else. I’m guilty of this. We are all guilty of this.

Last night, Francesca called me at almost 2 in the morning, an old mainstay of our friendship. I didn’t pick up, since in our five years of friendship, I’ve developed my own circadian rhythm that has me sleeping by 10, up by 6:30.

“I’m just calling you. Because I’m reading Annie Dillard, and it’s killing me. I’ve just opened a new bottle of red wine. I wanted to read you this passage . . . ” Her voice so intimately familiar my heart lost a shard when I heard it the next morning. “You’re you, and sleeping. And I’m me, awake.”