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It is like listening to a synthetic sea—the sound of one wave blending into the next—languid, insistent, and faintly menacing.
The songs are short and don’t appear to be organized in any particular order, any particular chronology. The feeling you get from listening to them can only be described as watching yourself from a distance, as if you were a character in someone else’s implausibly dramatic movie.
The first lesson in making music, it turns out, is making silence—the blank canvas, the empty room, the white page. A void that must be made before it can be filled.
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. The counterattack
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What strikes you reading Wolf’s words now, as a person born two months after Reagan’s first inauguration, is Wolf’s phrase life in the body, a phrase that separates the theoretical potential of femaleness in the age of equality from the actual, lived reality of it. 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
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Indeed, you no longer see a place for yourself in the seventh grade. 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. By the middle of seventh grade you are friendless and under a daily
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It’s the nineties! Don’t we know that girls can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough? What we want to be is skeletal.
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.
And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.
As you stand on the roof in Cairo with six other young, idealistic Americans on the dawn of a new era, you have no idea that despite hailing from the best Middle Eastern studies programs in the country at Georgetown and Yale and Columbia, despite studying abroad in the Middle East during a time of crisis, despite learning Arabic and analyzing the Quran and spending months assimilating into Arab culture—it will be more difficult to make a living by providing accurate information about the Middle East to an American audience than it will be to make a living by fake-playing the violin.
You lose weight—weight you don’t need to lose—and you look skeletal, anemic, ill, yet people compliment your weight loss, another paradox of life in the body.
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.
For despite his rapid assimilation to American language and culture, despite his willingness to work long, hard hours, Yevgeny retained one strikingly un-American trait: he was not made uncomfortable by the sadness of failure.
On stage in Portsmouth, The Composer’s Ensemble does not look like most orchestras. There are only fourteen musicians, all with strange smiles on their faces, and the assortment of instruments is bizarre: six violinists, one flute player, three cellists, two percussionists, and The Composer at a grand piano.
I have to pee. But I do not have to pee. But how does one ever really know? How did I know before, whether or not I had to pee? When did I learn? If I can remember how I learned, maybe I can relearn. It’s a thing you take for granted, knowing when to pee, a piece of knowledge that you never question until you do, and then everything in life becomes impossible (To pee or not to pee . . .).
Relish each note, some fake cheerful voice inside of me says. Hit each note with the sweet spot of fingertip fat. Warm the note with vibrato. Your fingers are tiny fires, warming up notes for dinner. Next note. Hit. Sway. Warm. Twenty more measures. Fifteen. Five. Six more songs to go. Fifty measures. Thirty. Twenty. Five more songs to go. I have to pee. You do not have to pee. But it sure feels like I do. You do not. Four more songs.
It has yet to occur to me that nothing has to be wrong with one’s body for one’s mind to go haywire. It has yet to occur to me that the mind could play such a mean trick, going after the one thing in life I want to discuss the very least: my bathroom habits. It has yet to occur to me that there is, in fact, a diagnosis for this: crazy.
Crazy is what happens when one person splits into two. The first part deceives (I have to pee). The second part knows it’s a deception (You don’t have to pee).
Part of the problem is the embarrassment. You do not want to talk about having to pee. It is gross, and no one wants to be gross, especially not a young woman still trying to reconcile life in the body. Later, you will find out that panic attacks disproportionately afflict young women in their twenties. Later, your dad will invite you to shadow him on a night shift in the emergency room for an article you are writing, and you will discover the ER at three o’clock in the morning is not full of blood and gore but women in their twenties having panic attacks. There is a particular, feminine shame
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My mind is a CD player with a broken Fast-Forward button, thoughts flying by faster than I can hear them, zooming past any restful pause.
We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. —Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
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).
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.
(Needing a job with health insurance to recover enough from an illness to get another job: an American paradox.)
