Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

I decided I liked him about three years into our working relationship; one night we went to a bar for an ostensible quick post-work drink, and several hours later, somewhere deep in a pile of shoestring fries, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to leave. I stayed out until close to midnight, pushing back very important plans to watch the Veronica Mars movie in favor of more face time with him.

  For nearly ten months, my Max runs were a deep pleasure, rife with visions of desk sex, Chinese food, bad movie marathons, and blue-eyed babies. These daydreams were safe from the corruption of reality—I had no intention of revealing myself to Max, and so there was no opening for him to tell me he’d rather slice off a toe than engage in that desk sex with me. Real Max and I hardly spoke, giving Dream Max free run in my head.

  And then, something startling happened: months into penning diary entries that started with “Just like fuck literally everything, I don’t even know,” or “Another day, another chance to be ignored,” or “Everything’s stupid today. Everything sucks. I will never have sex again” (these tragically, are real), Max started to like me back. At first this was a good thing, and my runs went from far-flung fantasies to replays of recent events, like how he drove me home and checked out my ass at a party and flirted with me in the office and told a room full of strangers my favorite musical artist was Taylor Swift (it is not, but it is also not not, not that Guns N’ Roses fans need to know this about me). One day we made out on a couch and in his car and in a bathroom stall at a bar in Park Slope, and my “Chinese food and babies forever” runs kicked it up to eleven. Were Dream Max and Reality Max on their way toward merging into one?

  Not a fucking chance. Up front, Max made it clear I was nothing more than a fling. We worked together, he pointed out. We were friends. Why screw all that up by dating when we could hook up a few times instead? Current me might have been smart enough to sprint away from that cop-out, but then I was young and stupid and had wasted so much time on my fabricated Dream Max that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the living, breathing, thinking version who didn’t want me enough.

  You cannot make someone like you. You cannot make someone stick around. This is something most people figure out quickly, but I slept with a security blanket until I was eighteen and am not good at separation. I feared that if Max and I did eventually sleep together, he’d flee me the instant he climaxed, and so I decided it would be best to pretend I was the one in control. I did this out of sheer terror. I was not ready to part with my imagined future.

  It turns out trying to hang on to someone who doesn’t want you will make you insane. One night a bunch of us went out in Brooklyn after work, and I drank six beers and made Max drive me home. It was then, with my brain mostly turned off, that I decided it would be a good idea to have a frank discussion about my feelings.

  “You’re not going to hurt me,” I recall telling him as he wound down Bushwick’s dark streets. “I’m going to hurt you. I’ll destroy you.”

  “Um,” Max said as he approached my building, “okay.” He dropped me off and drove away.

  Two days later, he met someone he liked, started dating her seriously, and neglected to tell me. He started throwing around the word girlfriend and invited her to his childhood home to meet his parents. I was informed of this burgeoning relationship several weeks into it, during drinks with yet another coworker, because when you shit where you eat, everyone around you slips in it. I cried in the cab home from the bar and then continued to cry nonstop for the next four months.

  I had liked him so much I thought I would die if he didn’t feel the same way. He didn’t, and I didn’t die, though I did spend weeks in daily hysterics on my couch, much to the chagrin of my poor roommate. But I could not escape him. At the office, I sat across from him for weeks on end. I listened to other people praise his work and his genius. I noted jokes he laughed at that were not mine. I overheard him drop hints about cute date nights with the woman he’d chosen over me. I remembered every minute of every single day that I was not enough, that someone else existed for him who filled my colossal gaps.

  The long runs and free time to dream up the future transformed from pleasure to punishment, and I spent each mile envisioning the two of them unfurling further into each other’s lives. Every step was a new form of pain. He picked someone else. He is in love. He did not want me. He is happy without me, I huffed uphill. On the way back, the self-torture: Of course he doesn’t want me. Who could want me? He’s seen me eat. I am a monster.

  This wasn’t the first bitter rejection. I get those like headaches. But for months my secret pining had fueled my brain and body, and made me feel like there was something worth moving for, something more than the amorphous pile of anxieties—career? babies? home? the impending collapse of the Arctic glaciers that will eventually plummet us into a modern ice age???—that kept me up at night. Now the happy daydreams that consumed me were the cause of my pain, and I was left without any way to cope. I was in free fall. I could not escape the bad thoughts. I could not block out the image of them entangled supine in his bedroom on the lazy Sunday mornings I spent alone. I could not stop thinking about how all my daydreams belonged to someone else.

  These cursed images didn’t just pop up on runs, though certainly they dominated them. Indeed, they took up residence in my head at all times—when I woke up, when I brushed my teeth, when I showered, when I walked, when I rode the train, when I worked, when I breathed and swallowed and blinked my eyes. Every piece of me hurt—every muscle, every joint, every bone and tendon stiffened and ached and clenched in pain.

  It occurred to me that I needed to stop thinking altogether. And so I went to a yoga class.

  Westernized yoga is billed as an exercise class, but yoga is less about movement than stillness. Unlike running, yoga offers little to no room for your thoughts to wander. Serious yogis learn to sit and stand in poses for minutes and hours, focusing on their breath to stay sane. Yoga will make you strong and bendy, but it’ll also teach you to quiet your mind, a welcome thing to master when your mind has become a weapon against you.

  My yoga enthusiast friends had long been trying to sell me on this very theory: if I mastered crow pose, I’d get my brain to shut up for five seconds. I still wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of tumbling over in public, but I was also desperate to stop the self-harm that had taken control of my headspace, so I accompanied one such enthusiast to a “gentle yoga” session.

  “Gentle yoga” wasn’t so gentle I didn’t feel my bones break in my first warrior pose or pray for death in pigeon. It was also very hot (DID YOU KNOW THEY HEAT YOGA CLASSES???!!), and at the end of the session my mat looked like a crosswalk in a rainstorm. But no one sneered at me when I struggled to hold myself up or bent my knee in the wrong way, and I felt surprisingly stretched out when the hour was done. I decided to start going to a beginner’s class, then graduated to a regular class, then eventually signed up for a monthly membership at a yoga studio near my apartment, which smelled like incense and was full of lithe instructors who recognized my face.

  It turns out no one cares if you suck at yoga. All that matters in class is what’s going on with you on your mat, since everyone’s deep in their own shit, and no one has time to think about what a crappy job someone else is doing when they’re fighting back tight-hamstring tears. Some people can twist themselves into boneless little knots, and some people can’t touch their toes. No one gives a fuck who does what. If you want to bend your body into a full wheel, be my guest. If you believe strongly, despite the absence of any evidence, that doing so will curse you with premature arthritis, you can put your legs up the wall instead. No matter how hard you work or how much time you spend luxuriating in child’s pose, at the end we all lie on the ground in the final resting pose—that is to say, Adult Naptime.

  Sometimes in class you chant together for a few minutes, which can be nice or it can be stupid and performative, depending on the mood you’re in. Sometimes the instructor reads an “uplifting” mantra or p
rompt, which can be nice or pretentious. Sometimes at the end of class, when you’re done with Adult Naptime but aren’t quite ready to face the world of the Awake, the instructor tells you to roll onto your right side in the fetal position and feel the ground support you underneath, which can be soothing and restorative or piss you off because you’ve needed to pee since the second sun salutation and you know you’ll have to sit through at least three collective oms before you can utter Namaste and hit the bathroom stall.

  When I first started doing yoga, though, I leaned in hard to the chanting and positive reinforcement. I looked forward to lying in a fetal position on the floor. When the only thoughts you yourself can create comprise a continuous stream of self-flagellation, it’s useful to have a stranger tell you you’re strong and powerful, even if they’re just doing it because it’s their job. “Speak kindly to yourself,” the teachers would intone as we sat cross-legged in a candlelit room. “You are powerful. You are strong. You are supported. You are enough.”

  None of these yoga instructors knew me, and certainly if they’d seen me try to unscrew a jar, they’d have reconsidered some of their meditations. But at this point I was spending approximately a fifth of my waking hours sobbing on my couch and wishing I were dead, and so the few hours a week I got to stretch in a quiet room and have someone call me powerful were a real respite, even if I had to return to the darkness once I rolled up my mat.

  I didn’t get much better at handstands in my first few months as a weekly-to-twice-weekly yoga practitioner, but I did get better at focusing on the breath, at least if I internally screamed at myself to focus each time I found my mind wandering. Meditation really did have its benefits. Outside of yoga, if I found my brain starting to unspool into a spiral of self-hate, I’d make myself breathe, just as I did in a particularly challenging (that is to say, any) pose. When late at night, passing thoughts like “I should uninstall my air conditioner” escalated into “Oh my god, I’m twenty-five and single and going to die alone while bedbugs feast on my eyeballs,” I’d curl into a fetal position and whisper to myself that I was enough. It was hokey and it wasn’t necessarily true, but it calmed me nonetheless.

  Max and I continued to work together, which was sometimes fine and other times so unpleasant I considered quitting on the spot. He faded in and out as I embarked on other, equally unwise flings. We kept up the Gchats and dog photos. I met his girlfriend, who was perfectly nice. I lent him my favorite book, and he refused to give it back. When we stopped working together, he stopped talking to me. Eventually I stopped thinking about him, though every so often I missed what it felt like to be so consumed.

  It would be cool to say that yoga taught my brain to shut up and transformed my body into a temple of tranquility and killer abs, but less than a year after I started practicing regularly, I regressed into my old lazy, undisciplined self. I abandoned my monthly membership after the fire forced me to move, and though I found new studios scattered throughout the city, once I had to pay for classes à la carte, I stopped bothering to go twice a week. Yoga is still stupid expensive.

  Now if I make it to two yoga classes a month, I feel like a superhero. And my dumb, loud brain, once so duly trained, has gone back to being dumb and loud, so when I do go to class, I can’t seem to focus on the breath. Instead, I focus on everything: dinner, my credit card bill, puppies, whether or not eggs are baby chickens, the old lady I saw eating alone at the ramen place, how depressing it is that Johnny Depp is such a creep now, that really fucking good show Fleabag, orgasms. This makes the time pass, but it doesn’t make me good at yoga, and I still can’t do a goddamn handstand.

  What I am good at, though, is sitting in the pain. They say your yoga pose doesn’t begin until you want to get out of it, and if you’ve got tight muscles and find yourself stuck in a split or a lizard pose, you want to get out of it FAST. When you sit with your screaming hamstrings long enough, the pain grows until you want to die—and then, just when you think you can’t take another fucking second, the pain starts to lessen. I assume it’s because your muscle is now stretched or because you’ve successfully shattered a nerve, but either way, it works. There’s a lot to be learned from sitting with the pain—on the mat with your leg bent weird, or at a bar with a former colleague, learning your old flame got engaged to that girlfriend over the summer. A year ago that would have made you scream with agony, but now the pain passes through you so you can go back to thinking about the snacks you’re going to pick up on the way home.

  Everything in Moderation, Especially Moderation

  One of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest films is City Lights, a 1931 silent picture about a Tramp who falls in love with a blind woman. The Tramp goes to great and often comedic lengths to trick the blind woman into thinking he’s wealthy. At one point in the film, he saves a drunken millionaire from dying by suicide. The millionaire invites the Tramp in, declares he’s his best friend, lends him money and a car, and fetes him all night. In the morning, though, the millionaire is sober and has no memory of the Tramp. He throws him out. Later, drunk, the millionaire invites the Tramp back in. In the morning, the cycle is repeated.

  I watched City Lights with my grandparents as a very young child, and though I don’t remember much else about the plot, I remember the drunken millionaire. “Why doesn’t he know the Tramp?” I asked my grandfather after the millionaire first tossed Chaplin out. “Because alcohol makes you forget what happened,” my grandfather said. “So does he not want to be friends with the Tramp?” I asked. “I don’t know,” my grandfather said. “You don’t know whether he’s his real self when he’s sober or drunk.” The millionaire’s life seemed exciting. I stuck him permanently somewhere in my brain.

  I was fifteen the first time I really tried alcohol. As a kid I’d been allowed one or two sips of wine or beer, but my parents aren’t really drinkers, so I never had a drink of my own as a youth. But I was curious as a teen, about alcohol and about the promise of rebellion, and one night, just a few weeks into my sophomore year of high school, my friend and I had a shot or two of her mother’s Grand Marnier on a sleepover. I liked the way the alcohol warmed me up and blurred all the edges. We stayed up late watching dumb movies and feeling our fingers tingle until the magic wore off, and when I went home the next morning I felt grown-up and alive.

  Even before that first illicit sip of Grand Marnier, I understood that alcohol made things happen. Alcohol helped people reveal themselves, and it made them do things they otherwise feared. One of my favorite movies as a kid was 10 Things I Hate About You, a classic retelling of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, but with Padua reimagined as a grunge-era Seattle high school. In one scene, Heath Ledger chases heroine Julia Stiles to a party; she ends up taking tequila shots to combat whatever fucked-up teen angst the film’s writers had bubbling inside her, and falls off a table while dancing to Biggie. The nineties! Ledger takes her out of the house and puts her on a swing, and she tells him he has pretty eyes before throwing up on his feet. Tween me watched that scene over and over again. I thought it was beautiful.

  There were so many of these moments in my pop culture–smeared youth. In The Wedding Planner, Matthew McConaughey falls for Jennifer Lopez when she gets drunk and cries to him about running into her ex and his pregnant wife. In Working Girl, Harrison Ford’s and Melanie Griffith’s meet-cute happens because she gets bombed at a networking event. Ross and Rachel get married drunk in Vegas. Songs I loved were about drinking whiskey and feeling blue. When Sam cracks a beer after losing his lucky bottle cap on Cheers, I was disappointed he didn’t take a drink. I wanted to see him at his most vulnerable.

  I entered high school believing that alcohol would help me be who I wanted to be, not who I was. When I started drinking, alcohol did become a friend. At parties, where boys made out with my pretty classmates but not me, alcohol smoothed out the baby fat bulging from under my tank tops and convinced me that gobs of MAC lip gloss made me beautiful.

  Alcohol was an equalizer. Whe
n I was sober, it was a chore to find stuff to talk about with the people at school I didn’t know if I liked, but a cup of vodka with a splash of Diet Coke loosened my tongue and made our slurred conversations about how drunk we all were seem seamless. Even kids I didn’t know talked to me when they were drunk and I was, too, the effects of distilled ethanol bonding us together in a shared stupid euphoria. When we were drinking, we all loved this song. We all loved your shirt. We all loved each other and we always would. Until the morning, of course, when we hated everyone and also sunlight.

  Alcohol, like my high school friends themselves, was also an enemy. It made everything blurry but also intense. One time I watched a boy I liked make out with another girl at a dance and burst into sad drunk tears while wailing, “MY LIFE IS OVER!” in front of him and everyone else. Another time I got so drunk at a party I threw up on my friend’s parents’ Persian carpet, then spent the rest of the night throwing up in a bucket while someone’s mother (not mine) held back my hair. And then there was my talent for the art of blacking out—when I drank too much, I started to notice missing patches of memory, which served as a warning that a part of me I didn’t know had time to wreak havoc upon the world unfettered. I couldn’t remember riding in elevators or getting in cabs or crying in public or, to be frank, regurgitating all that vodka on the aforementioned carpet. But someone did all those things. I was told it was me.

  * * *

  In college, I stopped blacking out, probably because I regularly drank so much that my bloodstream became accustomed to comprising 80 percent Everclear. Freshman year, we put vodka in Tropicana juice bottles and drank in our dorm rooms until we couldn’t see straight, still somehow managing to make it to Cognitive Psychology in the morning (I got a C+, thank you very much). We drank jungle juice out of plastic cups in beer-soaked basements and stained our going-out shirts from Urban Outfitters with amaretto sours spilled at bars that let us in with our underage college IDs. We were drunk all the time—in class, in the library, on the quad, and at least once, in the emergency room at the hospital down the street.