Really Good, Actually

by Monica Heisey

Or because I was anxious, and this made me controlling. Or because red wine makes me critical. Or because hunger, stress, and white wine make me critical, too.

Or because, in 2015, we attended nine weddings and got carried away, and a big party where everyone told us we were geniuses for loving each other and gave us $3,000 seemed like a great idea.

Of course, it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved.

To have had a boyfriend, then lose that boyfriend and several dress sizes, perhaps enough to fit into one of the cursed polo shirts Abercrombie sold in its dank, perfumed mall caves? I could not imagine anything better.

The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the “what if two meals a day were soup” stage.

I was not about to be the first woman alive to experience emotional devastation without the sudden, dramatic emergence of my collarbones.

The world is falling apart, and our phones are just there, glowing in our faces, full of news about what the president has said and which of our exes have recently gotten haircuts.

And now I was alone on a hot June evening, eating bread and butter in my wedding lingerie because the rest of my underwear was dirty.

Anyone trying to comfort me had been dealt an impossible task: too much attention and care felt like pity, not enough was proof that I was worthless and no one wanted to be around me.

Their love language seemed to be tagging each other in flattering photos captioned with long descriptions of their friendship and the way life together felt like an adventure.

I know what I want long term, but sometimes in the moment you really need to know someone has never seen anything better than your ass.”

Missed a deadline for work? The thing is that life is actually a joke, and nothing is guaranteed to us, and anything you think is guaranteed will probably be taken from you unexpectedly, and also it seems like deep down you may be an unlovable shrew, which is probably a bigger problem than some late assignment—let’s give that a big haha, so what!

I reminded her I was also good at making copies of things and tactfully telling undergraduates when it was clear that they had plagiarized their essays from the introductions of easily searchable books on the same subject, and she said she’d see what she could do.

Suddenly all I wanted was to sit on my floor and cut out images about my feelings, to wear a nightgown that looked like a curtain and know things about attachment styles.

Everything felt heightened: making tea was a ritual, the time I spent ignoring work emails was sacred, buying a garish lipstick I would never use was an important act of self-care.

Technically speaking, I am an “average-sized” woman—still, it is very difficult for me to buy pants, like it seems impossibly hard, and I don’t totally understand who pants are for, if not average-sized people in general.

I think most intelligent people are a little bit mean, and all nice people are a little bit stupid.

The last time I had been available, dating meant putting on a Going-Out Top and sneaking Smirnoff Ices into a movie theater.

I felt myself cross the threshold between fun drunk and “about to quote a song lyric from my past,” but there was nothing to be done except drink through it.

The experience of my marriage ending felt like the closest I would ever come to a kind of grim local celebrity:

It didn’t matter if it was a buzzy new fitness trend or an aspirationally useful class or something fun and specific, like life drawing or an Italian conversation group—everyone involved in adult learning was running from something.

“She keeps saying, ‘We must admit that the heterosexual experiment has failed.’ And like, I agree with her, but she’s not a lesbian, so . . . I don’t know what she thinks the plan is.”

This I left after the instructor hollered, “There are more important things than MONEY!” and the entire class cheered, even though it had cost them all forty-seven dollars to be there.

I recently gave a blow job in full view of some teens jumping on a trampoline.” “Jesus.” “The man had no curtains!” I said. “There was literally no other option.” “Guess you could have not given the blow job,”

Keeping a journal seemed like a slower, somehow more tedious way to think about the things I had already bored myself with by overthinking.

She patted my thigh lovingly so I would know that although she sometimes found me maddening, she would also, literally, die for me.

Call it what you must, but you need to practice walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time.

It was awful to watch, but I knew from experience that it felt amazing to be on the receiving end of this parade of generic compliments.

I figured this was life: I’d spend the next twenty years alternatingly hydrating and pissing, then all the water on earth would dry up and I would know it was time to die.

“I’m angry that my threshold for discomfort is so low. Like, I can function totally normally as long as there is no uncertainty in my life, but if I’m waiting to learn the outcome of something, the entire day is fucked.”

Friends who seemed completely normal IRL were taking slow-motion videos of themselves weeping and putting them on TikTok with messages about how to respect but also push past one’s comfort zone.

I knew, theoretically, that to err was human, but it sort of seemed like there should be a limit on how much erring one human could do.

“This sounds very basic,” I said, “but you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.”

“I’m going to start today’s session by challenging you not to try to make me laugh during our time together. This is not because you are not an amusing person, but I wonder where we might get if we did away with the idea of trying to entertain.”

I want to be good at sports or at least a good sport.