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To capture their full attention, we sequester the participants at luxury retreat centers, confining them to conference rooms all day and sometimes into the night. People get so stir-crazy that the late-night bar scene has become legendary; the executives who spent all day focused on measuring their dicks end up singing karaoke and hugging. I’ve begged off all week. I know it makes me look standoffish, but faking enjoyment in a roomful of drunk alpha males is more than I’m ready for.
Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise.
“If you’re tough and persistent and thick-skinned, you’ll find your way,” I say. “I have.” I don’t mention how she’ll have to work around interruptions and invisibility and micro-aggressions and a scarcity of role models and a lifetime of her own conditioning.
I approached running the same way I approach anything new: by assuming I could throw myself into the thick of it and survive on wiles and charm.
You came far, I thought. You were there. Now you’re here. Just from trying. Trying, and accepting the fact that if you didn’t try, you’d end up all wet. How metaphorical can one person be?
You do not have to answer the phone or respond to e-mail. If you do, you do not have to tell the truth to anyone who asks how you are. Not when your truest truth would be this: I feel like someone changed the angles of the furniture while I wasn’t looking. I feel like I’ve been dropped in Canada and told to buy a car using only Canadian words. I feel like time is stretching in ways that hurt my lungs and heart.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to regret or repent. You do not have to say what you are grateful for. You just have to not drink. Tonight. You can hate it, as long as you do it. You can close your eyes in the summer twilight, chocolate still coating your teeth. Angry and scared. Leveled, so you can rise again.
habitually searching myself for flaws and weaknesses and wondering who the hell I thought I was and why I might not deserve happiness. It’s also true that I was drinking too much.
But mostly I spent that week doing whatever nondrinking thing made the most sense to me in the moment, even if it would have looked random to someone else: walking around Lake Union after dark, alphabetizing all my books, sorting my lipsticks by color. When John arrived home the next Friday evening, I was on the sofa reading a Gillian Flynn novel, a Moroccan chicken stew cooking on the stove.
Life is not like the movies, he says dolefully. Except it is a little, you think.
But he calls the next day, identifying himself by first and last name just in case you forgot, and asks if he can make you dinner. You sit in his tiny kitchen as he chops onions for risotto with a carbon-steel knife. You are completely at sea.
Wheels on means your head hurts every morning but your makeup is perfect and when you speak in meetings, people feel reassured and good about themselves.
I think back to my first six months sober and how clear it became that I needed my life to not, as the man said, suck balls. It hit me within weeks that I needed a happier job, more practice saying no, more sleep, more time outside. More time in general, for walking the uphills. And it felt futile.
Enough with the drunken metaphors. You are in an ordinary human mess that can be fixed.
thought it might feel like a weight falling from my shoulders, but it was more like pushing a heavy door open a little wider—wide enough to walk through.
just randomly wanted to pull the tablecloth out from under my whole life. Or, I just wanted to see if there was still a person in here. Or, you could be like me and chirp, “Oh, just an experiment for more energy and better sleep!” like someone who makes life plans from Women’s Fitness magazine.
But the simplicity also called to me—the notion that the objects around us could signify who we were, especially if we wiped the slate clean first.
For the next several years, I tried to write a story about a woman who sold everything she owned and started over in a single room. I never got very far, because I couldn’t figure out what objects she would put in that room, because I had no idea who she was. But there was some satisfaction in starting her story over and over and over again, thinking each time was the time I’d get it right.
Land planners call them desire lines, which is a kind way to say The places we didn’t think it made any goddamn sense to walk. That’s where you can find me, if you want. And if you don’t want, that’s fine, too. I don’t really want to hang out with you anyway.
It was possible to hold it together for a while if you were young and adrenalized with ambition, or if the only person in your life to let down was you.
I’ve been advised to take a lot of strange behavior as a compliment. When a boy shoved me on the playground, it meant he liked me. When guys dumped me, it meant they knew I was way too good for them. When men talk over me in meetings, it’s because they’re threatened by my intellect; when they catcall me in the park, it’s because I’ve still got it. I’ve been surfing a wave of male aggression all my life. But the nipple icing was a new one.
I’d like to say this was the last time I confused pickled self-destruction with emancipation, but I was just getting started.
I told men I’d come when I hadn’t, because it wasn’t their fault I was too drunk to feel anything. I lied about what I liked and didn’t like in bed to accommodate whomever I was in bed with. If I liked something I thought I shouldn’t, I lied about that, too. I lied to wretched men and wonderful men. When I finally met the one who lit me up through the alcohol haze, who knew exactly how to crack me up and kiss me and love me, I was so scared he’d leave that I spent years trying to make it so. The night before our wedding, I set my hair on fire trying to light a cigarette. I told secrets to
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Not that America doesn’t love its women. Who wouldn’t love those soft, pretty creatures so willing to be sacrificed over and over? Who wouldn’t love those patient, selfless dumb fucks? Believe me, that’s not the kind of love you want. So don’t sacrifice yourself. Don’t roll over. Don’t trust in good intentions. Don’t think you’re too special to be hurt. Don’t blunt your own brain. Save yourself and save me, too. P.S.: And stop calling yourself fat. You’re not. Jesus Christ.
“He’s a good man,” she’d said. “But a good man isn’t enough to make a life on.”
It was gutless and hypocritical and also in the moment seemed like the only honest path.
just want to belong to the day as it forms around me. Or when I’m feeling ambitious, to the city.
“Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.”
I was awkward and embarrassed by every word I said and wanted to feel beautiful and eloquent.
“Meditation at Lagunitas,”
“No,” you said. “It’s the gun on the mantel in the first act, destined to go off in the third.” I frowned when I read that. How can it be act 3 already, when it feels as if we finished that bottle of Avia ten minutes ago? When I felt like a superhero just five minutes ago? When I want so much more? I have a whole book of names standing in for my losses.
You can think this clinically because you’re sober, which is different from being brave or kind.
And that’s what I got: the kind of marriage I’d never seen growing up and had barely realized was available to me.
“Marriage is wide,” we said, meaning it should be able to accommodate our separateness—
But the company’s promotion process was largely secret, and no one could really tell me what I needed to do to be worthy. One boss said my job performance was already there, but my role wasn’t big enough. The next said my role was big enough, but I needed to be better at it. As years passed and I didn’t get the tap on the shoulder, I became obsessed with what I saw as my own overwhelming failure to achieve. Every decision I made hinged on whether it could get me promoted.
He smiled benevolently. “Just change the world,” he said, opening his hands wide, “and it will be an easy sell.”
Because I wanted excitement and the hunt for approval more than I wanted peace or comfort or self-confidence.
And in Colwin Land, men fall hopelessly in love with women based on how they look while reading a newspaper, or the fact that they have odd skills such as wildflower identification or lamp repair. At sixteen I sometimes felt as if I had nothing but oddities to offer the opposite sex. Reading Colwin gave me a vision of the future where someone might love me for at least one of them.
(I was tired of my own misery, too, but I also knew there wasn’t a lot a teenager stuck at the wrong school in the wrong town in the wrong state could do about that, so I bided my time and tried to play off depression as glamour.)
I wanted every day to feel like a movie montage, or at least to end in an epiphany, or at least to have a clear narrative arc, or at least to make some level of sense.
Does anyone know what they’re becoming until they’ve become it?
