Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Years later, you will recognize the same desperation in other young people, especially young women, and you will know: You were desperate for the respect the customers gave to you as a professional violinist, respect you had never experienced in previous jobs as a waitress, receptionist, or assistant. In those positions, you acted flirtatious yet docile. You endured condescension and even harassment by imagining the work was temporary, though it never quite felt that way. The pose felt intertwined with a more permanent position: female. But playing the violin for money had no such associations. What you felt that day in New Hampshire was freedom. You wanted it so badly you didn’t dare question whether or not it was real.

Years later, the writer Malcolm Harris will articulate the ways in which people of your generation were taught to value work as an end in itself, rather than a process through which something tangible is gained. “When students are working,” he writes of the typical millennial classroom experience, “what they’re working on is their own ability to work.”

When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders. What’s curious about this epidemic is that its adolescent female victims are middle class. They come from stable, loving households and have attentive parents. Even stranger is that, as people say in the 1990s, It’s the nineties!, meaning, “women are equal now.” A teacher tells your class, “You can be anything you want if you work hard enough,” and then adds, “This is true for girls now, too.” What no one ever says during your entire upbringing is that there has been a cultural price to pay for equality, a counterattack aiming its weapons at your fast-developing female body.

Born into the first generation of girls whose political and civic equality was already assumed, you are told from the earliest age that you can become an astronaut, a doctor, the president of the United States (if you work hard enough). The potential for your life supposedly has no bounds. But by your twelfth birthday, you have a sinking feeling. You can’t do life in this body. Not this body, the one that is appearing slowly, then suddenly before you in the mirror. This body is a stranger; you don’t know it, you don’t like it. It’s certainly not the body you would have ordered from a catalog. You have a new vision of yourself, a vision of what you are actually going to look like as a woman. And in that vision—a short-legged, big-thighed brunette with monstrous eyebrows and a crooked smile—you no longer see a place for yourself in the world.

The talents that a short time ago won you admiration from your friends, the winsome qualities that led the fourteen boys including the set of twins to ask you to the dance, have become irrelevant. No matter how hard you work, you find yourself sliding down the social hierarchy, while other girls—quiet, skinny, pretty (impossibly pretty, a phrase from Teen magazine, which you have recently begun reading, devouring its beauty tips)—are making their ascent.

You can’t tell her because you are ashamed that you have a problem so clearly unfixable, a problem that can’t be solved by working harder. Everywhere you look—magazines, TV, movies, high school pep rallies—you see that not being pretty enough will mean your life will be much different—more difficult, more restricted—than you would have ever imagined a few years before. And even if you somehow did become beautiful, you know it would not be enough to put you on equal footing with the boys.

(As a teenage girl, you are a world-class expert—a veritable PhD in visual semantics—on the subject of the facial expressions of people who are looking at you.) When you put your violin under your chin, there is a brief moment in which your worth as a human being is not being gauged on a scale of relative beauty (her face is a six, but her ass is a ten). When you play the violin you are able, for a moment, to leave the female body in which you are contained, the body that signals sex, whether you want it to or not, yet is somehow never sexy enough. By putting a violin under your chin—or even carrying a violin case through the puke-green corridors of your high school—it is as if you’re telling the world that you have authority on something, and in having this authority, you are more complex, more consequential than your young female body suggests. For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.

Years later you will read that a panic attack is a scrambling of the same flight instinct that tells the human being to run from a bear. But you’ll never find that description to be accurate. The panic you experience for the first time on stage in Little Rock is not like the panic you’d feel if you were being chased by a bear. No, it is, instead, like the panic you’d feel once the bear has already caught you and has begun to eat you, the panic of someone with no chance of survival, in the last moments of consciousness, when neither fight nor flight will help.

There is a particular, feminine shame in the act of crying “I’m dying” when nothing is actually wrong. Panic attacks serve as confirmation of the very things women spend their lives working to negate: suspicions of female silliness, stupidity, hysteria. Panic attacks involve the removal of the mind’s control over the body, and in this way are aftershocks of an earlier mind-body separation—the moment when adolescent girls realize that no amount of brains or charm will save them from life in the body.

What I did, instead, was apologize. Perhaps I did this because immediate apology is the default female response to male rage (survival mechanism). Perhaps I did this because The Composer was my boss and I was his employee (The Money). Perhaps I did this because I was one of many young female musicians The Composer employed, many of whom were more attractive than me, and because of this I often felt unworthy of the job (life in the body). Or perhaps I apologized because I hadn’t yet learned that I was capable of expressing anger. I didn’t know that if I was angry it need not be confined to the quiet pages of a private journal but could be screamed aloud (Harriet running toward the Space Needle). Not expressing anger was what made me “a very easy person to work with.” I hadn’t yet learned I could be so much more than that.

Still, you sometimes feel that you are not a real professor, that you are merely someone who imitates professor-like behavior. Even though you have gone through all of the steps to become a professor, even though you do all the things that professors are supposed to do, the first time a student calls you “Professor Hindman” you feel the same way you did the day Becca hired you as a violinist for The Ensemble. The university has made a mistake in hiring you. There is no way you are good enough to do this job. But after a few semesters go by, something dawns on you: Faking is pedagogy. Faking is teaching and faking is learning and faking is the way that all human beings grow, from babies faking speech to teenagers faking coolness to professors faking wisdom. You assign readings in your classes so that your students can imitate other writers, for it is in the faking of other people’s writing that one learns to write.