Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else

by Maeve Higgins

Here on dry land, I blunder around the place making mistakes all day long, misunderstanding others, managing to over- and underestimate my own motivations and capabilities as I go about the endlessly tricky business of being a regular human being.

Aside from getting champagne in your eye, or being snapped at by your pet toucan, bemoaning a lack of purpose is the most privileged problem in the known universe,

I found myself in that awkward position of doing an amusing thing with a group of people I didn’t know, but who all knew each other. I kind of laughed along aimlessly to show I was fun and relaxed and recognized the humor in situations, and that I certainly wasn’t some kind of dangerous drifter who studied human behavior so she could mimic it and pass as one of them, no, no, not at all.

Even in fancy places you don’t want to stand barefoot in the bathroom, because rich people have worms, too.

With the shining example provided to us by the history of U.S. involvement in Iraqi affairs, I knew that nothing could go wrong.

Art is not exclusively created by and for the lucky ones. Each life is a deep mine of events and emotions that is ours to dig up and use if we wish to.

the comedian’s duty to punch up, not down,

I have come to accept that my name is synonymous with “kooky.” Do I act accordingly? Why don’t you tell me? Right after I place a raspberry on each fingertip and giggle down from my unicycle into a Super 8 camera that’s permanently trained on me.

Working from home can mean many things. Lengthy studies of Action Bronson videos, hours spent gazing at the patterns on the floor, counting down the hours to my next snack. It also means being alone most of the time, trying to maintain some belief that I’m doing a normal thing and am not a madwoman who is alone most of the time.

St. Pat’s for All was founded many acrimonious years after the 1992 ban on gay people marching under a banner at the Fifth Avenue parade. This ban seemed off to me, for many reasons. The first is the fact that parades are the gayest way to travel and should therefore never exclude gay people. And also, it showed how out of step the Irish-Americans behind the parade were with the country they claimed to represent. While they clung to their “traditional values” and fought to exclude gay people from their parade right up through the courts, Ireland itself moved on. In 2015, Ireland voted by a huge majority to legalize same-sex marriage, becoming the first country in the world to do so by popular vote.

These testimonials are known as “the Twelve Letters,” and gathering them is a mortifying process for anyone remotely insecure about their worth as a person and an artist. You may run into some psychic trouble if you are, say, a woman, or an Irish person, or a person who was raised Catholic.

I get nostalgic around these teens; it’s as if they’re from the 1990s, so different from the confident teens of today, with the vocabulary to deal with their mental health and access to wonderful dermatologists.

children shyly approach and pet your French bulldog as if he’s a magical creature from another land. Which he is: France.

MY FRIEND EMMA and I took a car home on one of those hot summer nights when the subway was not running and the MTA had put some shoddy excuse on an official-looking sign that made everybody feel even more furious. THE F TRAIN ATE DINNER TOO LATE AND ISN’T FEELING GREAT. MEANWHILE PLEASE ENJOY THE DEMISE OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THIS GREAT NATION BY TAKING A CAR HOME INSTEAD.

I suspect part of my “no thank you, now put it away” attitude toward compliments is the fear of what would happen if I accepted them. Not being second-rate is scary, because it means you’re good to go, there’s no more waiting around required. God help the person who pushes compliments at me, because that makes me scared and mean. Oh, I’m clever and funny and pretty and good, am I? I guess that means I’ll have to step up and do a great job at life. How dare you? I am but a wilted flower being blown around by a fickle wind, and I must wait here meekly until death. So keep your compliments for someone who cares, you absolute clown! Compliments don’t jibe with my natural style, which is lamentation and self-pity, so I throw them back like a too-small fish, and while I’m at it I curse the river that sent them my way.

I know that many people dread the prospect of being alone; they fear that the solitude will magnify their flaws and force them to face up to who they really are. But the funny thing I’ve discovered is that being alone can actually be a way of escaping who you are, or who you think you are, a chance to make up new versions, better versions. I’m not talking about the witness protection program here, rather the gentle way you can surprise yourself, the way that is too easily undone by a companion with a set idea of how you should be. I’ve found that being alone allows me to become part of a place, to somehow melt into the fabric of it, however foreign I may be to that place. When I am alone, nobody will say, however fondly, It’s so like you to say that, Maeve. Or, Hmm, I didn’t think you’d like Turkish coffee. I’ve been to all sorts of places—a dumpling house in Melbourne, a wedding in Brooklyn, a public park in Shiraz—and I have really been there, really experienced them. Those places have absorbed me without question, because I was able to disperse myself among them. I was not this whole formed thing, this solid block, I was just floating particles that formed and reformed as they wished or needed to, with no clear set of rules, nobody else’s expectations to act into.

I’ve always been this way, wincing when a barista recognizes me and shouts my order down the line. My nightmare gift is a box of tiny thoughtful gifts collected by an earnest boyfriend. You know, a book I read and loved at fourteen, a handful of all-yellow Jelly Babies, a framed photo of my nieces, and, God forbid, some kind of mixtape! I would say thank you, politely, eyes shining with fear that he would mistake for gratitude, then I’d excuse myself and jump right out of the closest window. I don’t want to be scrutinized like a set of blueprints, I want to be off by myself, alone in my thoughts, able to vanish whenever I need to.

But freedom from what? I can’t seem to say, it’s just that my personality’s instant response to anything and everything is a little-red-hen-style shimmy and a quick, I’ll do it myself.

That being said, something odd has been happening. On occasion, throughout this past year, I’ve begun to cross over from the highness of aloneness to the lowness of loneliness. It’s a deeply unpleasant feeling, that one of not being enough on my own, of neediness. It lasts somewhere between ten minutes and a day at a time. This loneliness occurs at predictable moments, like an ill-planned holiday weekend when I remember too late that the library is closed, and I have cramps, and I find myself thinking about people who are thousands of miles away, and I badly need a hug. It creeps up on me at unexpected moments and takes what I think are unfair opportunities, like when I’ve done something really great and I want to talk about how great that thing was, and how well I did it, and how nobody in the world could’ve handled it like I just did. I want to relive it and embellish it and have some outside voice comment on just how glorious I am! You know, everyday modest appraisal of my actions. But my friends are caught up in their own particular lives and don’t always have time to amplify mine.

I soon realize I’m more focused on planning my morning, specifically my breakfast, than on finding true love.

Stepping onto the dating field makes me feel like a discus thrower, and the discus is my self-esteem.