Making a Scene

by Constance Wu

Girl wasn’t crazy. It’s that Don wasn’t listening to her…. She had just shared her body with him, was telling him her dreams. But he’s so consumed by his own guilt, he barely registers her. That’s why Girl had to get crazy, make a scene. Just to be heard.

Growing up, I was taught to never make scenes. It’s unbecoming. Unladylike. As a kid, I held back so much. And whenever I reached a breaking point—the accumulated feelings avalanching out of me in tears or tantrums—I found that to be ineffective too.

love theater so much: it’s the only place where it felt acceptable—nay, commendable—to have big feelings.

I stopped thinking of her as a girl making a scene, and started thinking about the scenes that made the girl.

Looking back, it sounds annoying and attention-seeking. And it was—we were calling attention to our joy so that others might share in it. In a naive way, we thought our pranks and outbursts were gifts to the world.

She can’t cry. The world will fall apart if anyone sees her cry. The only way to not cry is to stay silent and angry, so that’s what she does. When the bus reaches her stop, she gets off and the tears finally pour out, one after another, dropping onto the sidewalk as she buries her head and walks away.)

My mind sometimes blurs out painful experiences as an act of

mercy. My breakup with Rob must have really hurt because it is gone from my memory.

Now that I’ve had more loves, I can see that what I had with Rob wasn’t that special, in context. Not that extraordinary in the scope of an entire life.

I’ve always found that the turning point in recovering from a breakup is when you can look back on memories with fondness, rather than pain.

Buck will always be my first great love, when love was still a miracle that could happen out of thin air. “I hadn’t expected you,” he’d said, “you were a surprise.”

He was a nice, older Black gentleman and I’m pretty sure he drove slower to let me win. “You beat me!” he’d say as he handed me our mail. I’d nod, serious, as a way of apologizing for destroying him with my incredible speed. There

I never asked. I started dating a thirty-year-old guy and spent all my time and energy on him—thinking that if I got him to love me, that would somehow prove something.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if an apology is meant for the receiver’s benefit or for the apologizer’s own selfish gratification.

I’m a fucking sobber. I hate it and I’ve tried to squelch it, but sometimes I just can’t.

Or maybe she realized that we weren’t in a battle; we were on the same side, even if we were far apart.

She’s still an introvert, and I’m still very extro, but she seems to have a quiet, grounded sense of her self-worth, whereas I constantly question my own. My identity has always felt like it’s in perpetual flux, except when I’m acting and I’m assigned a role.

And I’m not scared of losing her anymore, because I realize she was never mine to begin with. Her life is her own. She should have an inner life and friendships that I am not a part of, and will never be a part of, the way I now have those things for myself too. I guess that’s what growing up is.

Though I’m passionate about acting and theater, that was my second love. My first love was books. Gosh, I loved books.

What do you do when the truth is not enough? When someone’s disbelief is enough to incriminate you?I

Mrs. Kantor was unable to find anything to incriminate me. She gave me a C on the paper, explaining that it should have been an F, but since she didn’t find the sources I had “stolen” from, she was being fair by not giving me an F. Instead, she took 20 points off for two run-on sentences. I remember feeling tired when she handed my paper back. I accepted the grade. I think I even thanked her. After that, I didn’t want to be a writer anymore.

For what felt like the first time in my life, I wasn’t being punished or ridiculed for having big feelings. I was being applauded.

No one ever talked down to you in community theater, even if you were little.

feels bad when someone says you are not speaking right—to be heard not for what you’re saying but for how you’re saying it.

I’ve spent half my life trying to shrink my big feelings, and when I was unable to do that, I spent the other half trying to not be ashamed of them. I still struggle with this.

am sad I’m not that kid anymore. Sure, she was a terrible actor, but she wasn’t afraid.

I’ve always been a thrill-seeker. I love roller coasters, skydiving, scary movies. But roller coasters were controlled by someone else. Skydiving was tandem. Movies had endings. On this cliff in Hawaii, it was just you and the elements.

There will always be people who don’t get it. You don’t make art for them, so why let their ignorant ridicule inform your artistic choices?

Stereotypes are not harmful for their mere existence; they’re harmful for their reduction of a person or group.

True artists don’t cater their choices to accommodate the idiots. True artists just create something beautiful out of whatever materials they have. They don’t care if the idiots don’t “get” it.

But as obnoxious as I was, they thought every answer I gave them was just wonderful. They shared their love so freely.

That it made me more evolved than other twenty-two-year-olds and also better than women his own age because my youth made me prettier than them (an obnoxious sentiment that would bite me back in the ass years later).

So even though he and I were the only two people in the room, I didn’t fight back because I didn’t want to make a scene.

educated myself on rape culture and the unconscious ways “innocent” men unknowingly perpetuate it—how they let certain types of humor among their male friends slide, the way they make it about themselves (not all men, definitely not me! they cry).

In the past, I’d often played along with misogynist jokes; I liked being the cool girl who could laugh with the boys. It was an attitude that provided safety in places where I felt outnumbered.

She called it a trauma, a designation that felt wrong at times, convenient at others, and sometimes made me cry surprise tears.

But what was most mysterious to me, what I couldn’t fucking get over, was how could I have forgotten? I was angry at myself for forgetting, angrier than I was at him for raping me. And why had it suddenly come up out of the blue? More than ten years later?

couldn’t figure it out. So instead of asking myself why now? I began to ask why not before?

As if the way someone treats you personally is the way they treat everyone.

But instead of forgiving those who know not what they do, I think we ought to just tell ’em what they did. To give them the truth. I give it to you, because you should know how to take it. Because we’re both here.

She wasn’t yet ready to bear the insults and derision that follow when women make scenes. And I wouldn’t make her to do something before she was ready.

“Ingenue roles have a vulnerability and innocence that takes a lot of skill and courage,” one teacher told me. “You’re just scared of it! You have to dig deep. Face your fears. The hardest person to play—is your true self.” She had a point. But how did she know who my true self was?

Though I usually take pride in my scrappiness, sometimes it feels unfair that I’ve had to fight so hard while other people just seem to be… blessed. You know those folks—when they walk into a room, the air changes. They are the Golden Ones; you just know they’re movie stars. You can’t take your eyes off of them. Usually tall and striking, they have that “it” factor that I never had. They can screw up an audition and still get the part because the director feels that they just are the part. That there’s no other choice. That doesn’t happen to me.

I ended up comforting him. It was a next-level manipulation that preyed on my sympathy. Poor shark, I thought.

After that conversation, I felt a lot of things—betrayal, depression, sympathy, fatigue—but also relief. I knew we were just fuckbuddies, but he had confused me when he did boyfriend-like things. He introduced me to his parents, what could that mean? Or He came to my house in the rain, he needed me. Even if he was a shark, it was a relief to finally know that he was a shark.

“Babe… I got a lot of love for you, you know that,” he said. Ha. Even in the moment I thought those word gymnastics were funny. But I didn’t laugh; I let it slide. Then he became sweet and gentle. He kissed me like the old Matt I knew before the truth had come out. He was romancing me all over again. We ended up having sex in the car.

Listing reasons almost cheapens the love, in my opinion. I don’t have an explanation for love. It’s also kind of an insulting question.

But everything and everyone is lovable to someone, even if it doesn’t make sense from the outside. Love is not something earned through merit. It’s something that happens with time. Even with the humans I’ve loved, that’s what it often boils down to: time. All that stuff at the beginning of the relationship, the thrills and passion and attraction and drama… sure, that’s wonderful, and I’ve called that love before. But real things don’t have shortcuts.

So time, and everything that happens in it, is probably where you find real love. Forgiveness is somewhere in there too.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”