Quietly Hostile

by Samantha Irby

Have compassion for myself ? But I’m a dumbass who sucks at everything and is unworthy of love. I don’t have a lot of coping mechanisms that aren’t wholly self-destructive, but here is one good one that I will recommend: saying I like things that I like.

I have no idea what news is real or which celebrity is an actual good person or what zeitgeisty show most deserves my attention or which cause is the correct one for me to text my $10 monetary support to, but I do know that if I pick the wrong one, someone I don’t know very well, or maybe don’t even know at all, is going to demand to know “WHY?” I can’t live in hell and make excuses for ravenously consuming a shitty reality show produced by a person I don’t know personally on a network I am unaffiliated with. You can use “I like it!” (the exclamation point is necessary) any time some freak questions a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and it’ll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.

I want to push back against this idea that it’s not real love if you’re not passionately chattering at each other all the time, that it’s just as valid (and romantic!) to know instinctively when to shut the fuck up.

nothing I do is important, but you can’t tell that to Hollywood people or it literally short-circuits their brains.

I crank in some salt and pepper, and ten-plus dashes of Cholula while playing air saxophone. I played the saxophone in marching band in middle and high school, so my fake saxophoning is extremely realistic.

So I ordered some flowers from the internet (I cannot walk into a florist, I do not know what to say, I have no idea what to do with my hands)

“Level with me, baby: Don’t you wish we’d gotten serious back in the day and had a kid?” I damn near choked on my own tongue. Excuse me, sir? What are you asking me? Do I wish that instead of talking about weed strains you and I were instead arguing about summer camp fees and community college applications?

“Don’t you wish you’d had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill? I absolutely do not!

Though I am an ardent rule follower, I possess zero personal discipline and have no idea how to instill that virtuous quality into another human being. Cut to Future Me and Future Baby eating chips and not doing laundry. Every day.

QUIETLY HOSTILE is how I would describe my public personality; I am mild-mannered and super polite, but just beneath the surface of my skin, my blood is electrified and I am one inconsiderate driver away from a full Falling Down–style emotional collapse. I don’t know how to teach a child not to seethe and instead to develop a healthy coping and communication style, because I do not know how to do that for myself.

What misery it is, being a person and existing in a human body over whose chemicals and hormones and cells you have very little control. With all the evidence you’ve gathered for this experiment otherwise known as life on this dying ball of garbage, level with me: Would you choose this again? You spend your whole youth eating french fries and fucking up and crying, praying for stability and confidence, and then, as soon as you get close to something resembling self-sufficiency, your nerves get bad and you spend the better part of most days covered in at least a microscopic bit of your own waste. While you contemplate your mortality and endless human suffering, weighing it against [name me one good thing], I present to you an exhaustive list of things I’ve peed on over the past few years:

Do you know I purchased something called a “chore coat” because he made it sound so appealing? You know who needs a coat for chores? A hardworking lady who lives on a farm! And by that I absolutely do not mean me! But I wanted (and deserved, frankly) that coat, so I could live out my fantasy as a person who needs to throw a little something on to “dash to the market for fresh cream.” I’ve never dashed anywhere a day in my life. But with this luxurious Deals on the Daily chore coat on my back? MAYBE I WOULD.

This might be “easy” for me to say as a person whose ideal marriage proposal would go something like, “I have health insurance, and I also love Fritos. Should we go to the courthouse?”

Once during a book tour stop in San Francisco, the store I was at got fucking robbed while I was standing behind the lectern making my little jokes, and they told me to just…keep going?

I have just taken my first sip of water today at 2:57 p.m., I cannot be a person who reliably gets treatments done to herself.

I don’t like the nail salon because in my daily life, I am trying to apologize less for simply existing, and that’s impossible to do in a place where a stranger you’ve known for thirty seconds acts personally insulted by the ragged state of your cuticles. I hate being attended to, even when I’m paying and tipping 25 percent for it, because not only do I not deserve it, but I will also never maintain it.

Being perceived is excruciating, especially if you can’t go person to person explaining why you look like that. I’d go to a lot more stuff if I knew I could take each person aside and explain to them why I look and dress the way I do.

I was ecstatic because I usually never have the tools I need to do the thing I decided to undertake on a whim in the middle of the night!

I found a half-empty bottle of acetone and some cotton pads and cursed myself for being so insecure that I did a thing I don’t even like, something that has nothing to do with my personality, just to trick people who already know me into thinking that I’ve become a better version of myself.

And even though a licensed Blue Cross Blue Shield professional emergency telephone nurse had told me my death was imminent, I am so ashamed of myself and so averse to making a scene or doing anything that might bring negative attention to me, that I stood in fucking line and patiently waited to check in.

Imagine being such a fucking sicko that even though your eyes are two bruised fists, and your mouth has tripled in size, you’re worried about imposing on the woman trying to save your life.

When you go into anaphylactic shock, they have to keep you for four hours, because, apparently, when the epinephrine wears off, the symptoms can come back. Life is hell. Every time I learn new shit about the human body, it makes me yearn for the grave.

No one’s guest bed is ever tall enough, and their houses are never cold enough. And you can’t call me a bitch for thinking that if I’m up the road at the Comfort Inn. No one down at the Radisson is counting the number of minutes I spend in the shower. But the worst thing about staying with someone is risking their being the kind of person who doesn’t have a well-stocked medicine cabinet.