Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

You will discover that “make it,” as an expression, emerged in the American vernacular during the Gilded Age. The wealth disparities of that era are reflected in “make it,” which evolved to mean both mere survival (make it through the winter) and wild success involving money, fame, and/or acclaim (make it big), forever linking these two vastly different outcomes in the American mind.

The impact on the audience is a sort of emotional hostage-taking: YOU WILL FEEL SOMETHING VERY POWERFUL RIGHT NOW, the eagle sings in the voice of a pennywhistle. YOU WILL SWELL WITH VAGUE BUT IMPORTANT-FEELING EMOTIONS FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON. Then, the violins return for a few sighing measures, as if to say, let’s be reasonable. Can’t we just have a nice, calm, sensible song? NO, the pennywhistle-voiced eagle responds. I DEMAND ALL OF YOUR EMOTIONS. GIMMEE! GIMMEE! So the violins go along with it, climbing higher and higher into their nose-picking regions. The high-definition nature footage sweeps the audience over the Maine coast, over bucolic dunes and quaint lighthouses until—lo, the Atlantic! Spread out like time immortal! You, the audience member, are flying! You are the eagle!

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.

Those boys do not like you. Those boys have sniffed out your growing insecurity and have pounced on it. It’s the nineties! Those boys—victims of the backlash themselves—are becoming more aware by the day that girls are a commodity, like livestock, to be traded with other boys, and that your value is in a period of deflation.

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.

Absolutely. I experienced this dismissal in the 1990s in my male-dominated profession over and over again. I had to fight everyone, especially myself.

But you had mistaken her success for happiness, which turns out not to be the same thing.

Let us say that being different at Columbia, like any place, led to a certain isolation, and that this isolation was sometimes self-imposed, a way to protect yourself against the rage stalking the periphery of your consciousness.

My college experience in a nutshell.

An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.

A few days later the professor with the white hair tufting out of his ears and nose passes back the map quizzes. As he suspected, many of the best and brightest Americans have failed, do not know the precise location of the country we are about to invade. But your map has an A on it, even though you forgot the existence of Qatar and Bahrain. You have never done this well in school. You have never made this much money. You have never received so many compliments on your appearance, for your body is shrinking into a landless skeletal border, and a landless skeletal border is your nation’s preferred female shape. You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork—your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog—the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone else.

Yevgeny retained one strikingly un-American trait: he was not made uncomfortable by the sadness of failure.

Music that sounded just like a movie about an entire society—rich on the top deck, poor on the bottom—headed for disaster.

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.

At the core of any anxiety is fear, and yours is this: You have lost control over everything.

Any living that sounds too perfect to be true, any living that appears not to include failure, any living that seems easy and unsmudged by shadow, you know now, is fake.

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.