Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.

But after nearly four decades on this planet and a long, nightmarish conversation about “economic anxiety” and the “forgotten working class,” I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.

These days we tend to talk about bubbles like they’re bad things. A bubble connotes a lack of awareness of what’s really happening, a disconnect from the real world. But bubbles have transparent walls and gossamer skin that allows sound to permeate. Bubbles, like the kind you blow from a wand dipped in soapy liquid, don’t keep anyone out or anyone in. They’re just different environments.

And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.

Dateline investigations are never in crack houses. They are always in split-level homes owned by a dentist who snapped.

I’m not trying to spend years saving up all my coins and pouring all of my worth into a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom rancher in some neighborhood where there are stringent rules for what color your mailbox is just to be surprised by my own murder. If you’re going to kill me, I want to expect it. That’s the real American dream.

When I was growing up, my mother used to joke that our interior design style was “Deceased,” meaning someone has died and left us their furniture, whether we wanted it or not.

much like it was possible to be constantly hounded by grief, yet funny and charming.

With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

It’s strange when the thing behind the door isn’t terrifying or wonderful, but rather just plain. When you find your people and realize they’re just people.

After all, I’d been wait-listed at Harvard, so essentially I was a moron.

Which is hilarious because that’s the reason 65 percent of people leave home and come to New York. That’s the city’s slogan: “Come here and tongue kiss a boy or whatever. Then write a solo show about it. BTW, the L train isn’t running this weekend.”

Most of the time, I don’t write for websites that have a comments section, because I’ve learned the hard way that even if there are a hundred comments that are like “LOL, you’re hilarious. You’re my favorite person. You’re the hero of this story,” all it takes is one person to write “Meh” to send me spiraling into despair. I am serious.

I love when hot people nod at me; it reminds me that I exist.

Is there such a thing as internal validation? I know we’re not supposed to hang our hopes on external validation. “Love yourself!” everyone says. “Or at least like yourself. Tolerate yourself!” But a lot of the time, being told that everyone else—or anyone else—finds worth in you carries more weight than telling yourself that you’re worth it.

There is nothing in the world like a server who has been around the block, has seen it all, and lived to tell the tale.

I needed to belong, as much as I am loath to join things.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months. Community goes from being a distant goal to a forgotten idea.

I also hate small talk. What am I supposed to do with it? Small talk is always shouted. “Nice weather we’re having!” Okay, well, the ice caps are melting, so lower your voice, honey. Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

For years, I thought that the way to keep from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light. I didn’t know that I was a phoenix, growing more powerful with every unsuccessful attempt at the drag of presentability, every hurled insult, every strike, and every split. The flame is not my liability but my strength. It was inside me all along. (That’s what he said.)

The plan was to drink until the pain over / But what’s worse: the pain or the hangover? —Kanye West, “Dark Fantasy”

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a masterwork, but it’s also an incisive exploration of Kanye’s deep depression, his substance abuse, and his thoughts of suicide. It’s like if Virginia Woolf wrote bangers.

Beethoven was losing his hearing; Kanye was mocked on Saturday Night Live.

Indeed, Beethoven once said, “I will take fate by the throat. It will never bend me completely.”

And I went to collect the things I had left behind like Horcruxes from Harry Potter, the things I didn’t need with me, but still needed, the things I wasn’t done working through, the things that had survived the relentless grinding of the wheel.

This disaster is your life. (Stitch that on a pillow.)

I stared at them forlornly, like you do when you have to get rid of a book because you’re moving or you’re Marie Kondo or your house has a hole in it, and you know they have to go but you want to honor them for the role they played in your life.

I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life.

If I don’t know what I want, how will I know if I’ve got it or if it’s lost forever?

What’s a red flag and what’s just a weird personal detail that you can spin into a charming anecdote? The line is thinner than you think.

There’s little that I love as much as a kitchen appliance.

I hadn’t really thought I was a good match for standup; I have trouble memorizing things and also I like to sit.

“The demons come through the cable wires, even if the film has been edited for network television! That’s how they get you! It’s in the Bible.”

I wanted the passersby to see him the way I saw him, but in so doing I tried to change him. I didn’t want him to change; I loved the person that he was.

I can’t say, however, if it’s what Jay wanted. I assumed it was because I assumed that’s what a relationship was: getting everything you want exactly the way you want it, a melding of minds but not really a melding so much as my mind staying the same and the other person just sort of being subsumed. That may sound bad to you but I encourage you to think of it as romantic instead.

I crossed myself even though I grew up Baptist and I wasn’t really sure how to do it.

One of my spiritual gifts is the ability to spiral out of control at the smallest provocation,

And when you’re unboo’d and still sort of sad, the winter feels like dying.

as if none of the sadness left a mark, as if winter never came, as if now is all that matters. But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don’t go away just because times are good. We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck.

I think the worst thing about winter is that I always think it won’t be that bad, and it always tricks me. It’s all gently descending temperatures and entreaties of Pumpkin Spice Lattes and then BOOM! There’s a foot of dirty snow on the ground and you’re locked inside a ship en route to the Island of Lost Boys.

It’s because of winter! It gets in your mind. It short-circuits you! It makes you think that Colin Firth isn’t just creating a hostile work environment because he’s lonely. I get it. But we have to tell the truth.

There’s that moment in the late fall when you think you may have dodged a bullet, when the air is balmy but crisp and all you need is a jacket. Every year I think that maybe it will stay like this.

It smelled like biting into that perfect peach you get on that first truly warm day after a long, hard winter. The peach that reminds you, as juices run down your hand, that being alive is generally a good and pleasant thing and you should keep doing it.

You’ve heard of spring cleaning? This was fall hoarding.

But I kept it and, for a while, pretended I did like it. Because it cost me $150 at a time when I was kind of broke and kind of broken. I kept it because I thought money could buy me happiness and for a while I was right.

sometimes clichés are true and that’s a real paradox for a person who is trying to write interesting things.

I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.

All of this was new, but also so familiar—in both meanings of the word.