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For a certain type of Manhattan parent, tennis has always been the athletic arm of social etiquette, a necessary part of the budding socialite’s curriculum. For others, it has more recently become the female equivalent of high school football—a sport that legitimizes underage players as professionals at the highest level, attracts college recruiters to midrange players, and if nothing else, earns adult admiration in summer communities.
I am preoccupied with the urge to tell him how trapped I felt on those bus rides, and the equally strong pull to keep my weird anxieties to myself. I bet he’d understand, or at least encourage my complaints. He has that gabby female quality that suggests he bonds through mutual disdain.
What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone.
Is there a word for a fantasy you don’t enjoy, a waking dream that you didn’t have, but rather it had you?
For a decade I’ve been writing and editing women’s lifestyle content for major news outlets. Reporting was an aspect of the job, but what constitutes women’s lifestyle hovers between news and entertainment. At each publication, the criteria for women’s content have been carved into categories: food, fashion and beauty, relationships (though limited sex), health and diet, and parenting. Politics were filtered through the lens of fashion (what [insert first lady’s name] wore to the state dinner), entertainment through relationships (what we can learn about love from [insert celebrity
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I’m in the second row holding two roses. One for Bianca and one for Sarah. This is one of several activities they perform as a twosome. They were best friends first. I get that. They have a secret language of tallness and romantic maturity I will never understand. I get this, too, but it makes me nervous.
A boy had died. I hadn’t understood what that meant. I still didn’t understand. But I’d seen his friend’s face in the window, and now I wished more than anything else that I had gone inside the temple. I wanted to be brave enough to open those doors and mature enough to handle what was behind them. I wished I could share his grief, so that he didn’t have to carry so much of it. I wished I could be the kind of person who didn’t care about outfits and guest lists. I wished I hadn’t laughed like an asshole. I wished I wasn’t so self-absorbed, but instead was more compassionate, more comforting to
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What we know is that teenagers are capable of anything—from setting Olympic records to suicide—and when they recognize the extent of their newfound potential, they are primed, biologically, to act on it. This may be why the doctor told me to wear a rubber band on my wrist and snap it whenever I felt the urge to cut. He was bargaining with my teen brain—which couldn’t be talked out of its cravings, only talked into alternative methods of relief.
“My mind slows down, I stop crying, and I just feel better,” a fifteen-year-old girl explained in a 2008 case study on self-harm, published in the journal Psychiatry. Later she was asked by a psychiatrist what coping mechanism she used before she discovered cutting. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never hurt then like I do now.”
The explanation that “girls crave attention” has been used for almost every broken taboo adults can’t or don’t want to understand. If anything, many girls at that age feel too scrutinized and search for ways to counterbalance the attention they’re receiving.
Even now, when I think of those nights, hiding behind an armchair in my teenage bedroom—the pinch and swell of a dull kitchen knife, the sacredness of the ritual I’d invented—I almost wish I could feel it again.
George, Jane, Virginia, Sappho, Mary—the whole lot of us hold hands in a circle before the play starts and the drama teacher leads us in a nondenominational prayer to the goddess of school plays. We are wearing shawls and dresses with puffy sleeves, and blouses that button to the top of the neck and itch. The bonnet tie is too tight under my chin, but my hands are occupied by other sweaty hands. With heads bowed, I stare at George Sand’s boots and the bottom of her pants cuff. I wish I were George Sand.
You’re supposed to want to play Viola, the play’s heroine, or Olivia, the girl everyone is in love with. But I found that Feste suited me. I didn’t mind being called a fool, because the fool opened and closed the show. He was never entwined in the actual drama, never pivoted the plot, but observed it all—the theatrics and the audience observing those theatrics. His purpose was to remind the audience and the actors that it was all a play, and with his ironic dirge about death, that none of it mattered anyway.
I have always believed my failure to be a main character, the heroine, the object of desire, makes me, by default, the villain. But Feste provides a third option. The fool is off to the side, but always onstage. He doesn’t break the fourth wall, he is the wall—a fictional embodiment of the author, there to remind the audience that all this drama will eventually end. He is the only character who doesn’t covet a romantic partner. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t need one, I think.
When my relationship with Alex failed, I was told not to question what I did wrong, but why I chose such unhealthy partners, why I didn’t love myself enough to recognize the right ones. Not bad advice, but still, reinforcement of the issue that might have kicked off my poor choices long ago. Something was still wrong with me that needed to be fixed in order to be worthy of love.
