“Can I call?” I texted back. I wanted to level with him and it didn’t seem fair to stop seeing him without giving him a reason and a chance to fix it.
So in the back of the bar where I had been drinking and commiserating with a friend, I called him and decided to be vulnerable.
“I need you to talk,” I bluntly told him. “I have a really hard time with silence and quiet people. It makes me talk too much and I hate having one-sided conversations and I know you’re probably just nervous, but talking too much makes me hate myself. Also eating in silence gives me a panic attack” (one of the last leftover symptoms of my eating disorder).
Vince laughed and apologized and promised he’d start opening up, blaming his quietness on nervousness because he liked me and didn’t want to screw it up.
“I’m one of the goofiest people you’ve ever met once you get to know me,” he told me playfully.
“Prove it,” I flirted back. He did, and he is. I even included my love for his goofiness in my wedding vows.
* * *
When I look back to my months-long relationship with Aiden, there were so many warning signs and red flags that I willfully ignored. The constant look of tension on his face even while he professed his love for me. The slight hesitation every time we kissed. Just those two things should have been enough … but I was young! I was trusting! And back then, I believed in my daydreams and fantasies more than I believed in listening to my gut (see “Georgia’s Take on Red Flags and Riot Grrrl Courage”). I don’t mean that you should ignore your fantasies, but there’s a healthy balance that we should all be striving for in life. Not many eighteen-year-olds have that balance yet, so back then, I fell quick, I fell blindly, and most of all, I fell hard. I fell in a way that I later worried I’d never be able to fall again, but at the same time hoped I wouldn’t, so I could spare myself the pain.
The night Aiden dumped me, I knew it was coming. Ghosting wasn’t a term yet, but that’s what he was trying to do to me. You gotta laugh in the face of a dude who thinks he can ghost a desperate, obsessed eighteen-year-old girl.
“HAAA!” I said to myself as I paged him over and over and over. We could only page with numbers, no words (what was this, the fucking Dark Ages??), but we had codes to get a message across. Paging someone with the code 143 meant “I love you,” so I blew his pager the fuck up with those three little numbers. I called his work, I called his home, I called his friends. I was embarrassed for a long time after about my behavior when he dumped me, but as an adult, I’m like, “Fuck that guy!” Clearly he didn’t leave me as he had found me. I wasn’t a broken, blindsided teenager who felt like the biggest fool on the planet when I met him.
When he finally realized he wasn’t gonna be able to slip quietly into the night, he called me at home, and as I sat on my mother’s childhood bed, on the same now-faded brown-and-teal-striped sheets from Sears that she had slept on, he told me that he had a girlfriend and couldn’t see me again. I cried and begged him to see me one more time so I could convince him that he loved me, but he hung up on me.
At that moment, at the tender age of eighteen, I built a wall around my heart. One that would take several relationships and over a decade of therapy to dismantle enough that I could have a relationship in which I didn’t use this wall as a point of reference. My relationship with Aiden validated the fears that I’d had since childhood: that I wasn’t enough, that I was stupid and everyone knew it, that my capri-pant confidence was a joke. Those validations just made my heartbreak so much worse.
It was the point in my life when I realized that dudes who talk about their “crazy ex-girlfriend” are full of shit. What they’re really talking about is someone they hurt and didn’t leave the way they found. These guys put their ex-girlfriends in a position that makes them do things so extreme and out of character that they seem crazy. The night Aiden called me, after months of “I love yous” and making plans for our future, and told me he had a girlfriend and couldn’t see me anymore, and then hung up? By dawn, I was parked outside his work, I hadn’t slept the entire night, and I waited for him to show up because I needed an explanation in person. I didn’t get an explanation. I just seemed crazy. And in that moment, I was a little crazy. Love is supposed to make you feel a little bonkers and batshit, but there’s bad crazy and good crazy, and you realize which is which when you love someone who doesn’t love you back.
Cut to a couple of deeply depressing months later, when I bought myself a present that initiated my slow climb out of that hole: a tattoo. Two red hearts, the size of silver dollars, on either side of my upper butt. Like mud flap décor. The tattoos (my first real, professional tattoos) that I got while I was still grieving his bullshit were a welcome distraction. They took my mind off the emotional vacuum that my life had become; they were the first thing I had been excited about in months.
After what seemed like eons of heartache, the pain slowly dissipated. I was able to make sense of it and see myself as the protagonist in the story, not as the stupid, foolish love interest. I stopped looking for him in crowds, stopped dreaming of running into him, stopped imagining some magic bolt of electricity hitting his brain, causing him to realize the error of his ways and beg for me to take him back.
But what I didn’t get over was the feeling of riding through my adopted city on a purring scooter with the wind in my face, the smell of two-stroke oil, and the snug fit of a (safe, up to code) helmet on my head.
So after six months of squirreling away those little envelopes of cash I’d get from the shop every week, I’d saved enough for my own vintage Vespa.
She was so beautiful, straight out of an Audrey Hepburn picture. An ET3 Primavera, dark blue with baby-blue trim. This loud, crowded city is empty like the apocalypse has come and gone early Sunday mornings, so although I am and always have been a late sleeper, my excitement for that scooter had me up at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings for months so I could have the city to myself for a while and just get lost on my scooter. It was my church.
I’d ride for hours and find new neighborhoods and new shortcuts. I’d laugh out loud when I’d pass a bunch of cars at a stoplight or shimmy through stopped traffic. I rode east into unfamiliar neighborhoods in Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Echo Park, all neighborhoods I would eventually live and love in.
I learned the layout of my city on that scooter, and I gained my confidence back by having bought my own shit.
Breakups will make the best of us go fucking batshit, but if you learn through it that you can rely on yourself to mend, you’ll go a little less crazy each time they happen. By the time I met Vince, I was a confident person who, while wanting a relationship, didn’t stake my personality, my dignity, and my life on it. It became a nice addition to an already lovely life instead of a mad, needy thing that identified me like it had with Aiden.
Almost ten years after I got my scooter, which I’d long since sold when I realized how dangerous and risky riding was, Aiden added me as a friend on Facebook. I was momentarily stunned. I hadn’t heard from him since that awkward, tearful confrontation where I demanded an explanation on zero hours of sleep. By then, I had gone through so many other things—years of happiness, good friends, and a trusting relationship—I had a better grasp of the world and my place in it. We chatted a little online, like normal old friends, and I realized he was just some guy … that’s it. I realized, for the first time since then, that I was over it … I even said it aloud to myself, just to make it real (something I do every once in a while). That feeling of freedom made my heart skip a beat, just like it used to when I’d ride on my Vespa.
Karen’s Advice on How Not to Be Thirteen Forever
I’m not sure how it started, but I had a bad habit in junior high of asking people to give me things: a bite of their Snickers, thirty-five cents so I could buy my own Snickers, whatever it happened to be that lunch period. It was usually Snickers-related. And I always asked one of the shyer girls in my class. They were usually pretty low-key about it. I certainly coul
dn’t ask my loud best friend, Hannah. She’d just bitch endlessly about how her mom never gave her money and how I was spoiled. And I was spoiled. But I was also very addicted to sugar and the jet engine of my eating disorder was just getting warmed up, so I did what I had to do to get my Snickers-related fix.
Now, I was new to this Catholic grammar school and found it to be a deeply creepy place, inside and out. The first- through eighth-grade classrooms were all housed in the “new” building, a two-story, cement leviathan that was built in the ’30s. It was cold and dark and echoey, with high ceilings and lots of paintings of Jesus looking super bummed out at you. The plot of land it sat on took up almost an entire city block and included the original school that had been built in 1888—the year Jack the Ripper terrorized London. Not that I knew about that at the time, but I was definitely getting a Victorian England vibe. Maybe that was because between these two large, ominous buildings lay a rectangle of asphalt lightly covered in gravel and that was our playground, not a blade of grass in sight. Or a swing. Or a monkey bar. Just some faded yellow lines that had been painted onto the asphalt decades before. And to up the weirdness factor, although the buildings themselves were level, the playground was on about a twenty-five-degree angle. So whatever you were doing, you were either walking downhill or uphill. That aspect gave you a strange, boaty feeling that kept you permanently off-center. It was as if they’d plowed the land to specifically make fun a chore, while maximizing our skinned-knee potential. I did not like this school.
All along the east and west perimeters of the playground, there was one continuous low bench where every kid in the school had to sit and eat lunch by grade. Then, when the bell rang, the younger kids jumped up, screaming, and ran around. The older boys played intensely vicious games of dodgeball. But the older girls simply sat on that bench in groups of three and five, whispering and stewing. The school was comparatively small, about forty kids in each class, so the line between popular and unpopular had long since been drawn and was clearly defined. I arrived in sixth grade with all my country-school Montessori confidence, thinking I would fit right in. Reality quickly taught me otherwise.
The girls in my new class were sharp-tongued and distant and shockingly uninterested in my fascinating personality. On my second day there, I overheard one girl say to another, “Ew, look how greasy her hair is!” while making a face right at me. I was floored. After that, I washed my hair every day and stared in the bathroom mirror every night, searching for all the other flaws I hadn’t been noticing. But this was junior high. The only rule was the rules kept changing. You were never safe. It was the perfect breeding ground for anxiety, a feeling I’d never really felt before. It was like being forced to wear an itchy coat that was one size too small. The only thing that made me feel any better was food. So I waited for lunchtime with the longing of a war bride waiting for the mail. And when it would come, I couldn’t eat enough. Even after a whole deli sandwich and a bag of chips, the empty panic remained. I’d always need to go back to the snack bar for one more thing. But sometimes, I’d run out of money. And that’s when the borrowing habit began. The first time I did it, it was casual and conversational. I didn’t have any money on me and I knew we’d just be standing around on that slanted playground for another half hour, so I turned to Hannah and asked if I could have some money to get a candy bar. When she said no, I just asked the girl standing next to her. That girl opened her hand. She had thirty-five cents right there. I took it and never looked back. After that, borrowing got easier the more I did it. Up until that one fateful lunchtime, when Daisy Todd said no.
Daisy was mousy and odd, one of those girls who continued to intensely and publicly like horses long after the rest of us had been shamed out of it by older sisters or each other. She was the type of kid you didn’t really notice, but when you did, you saw that she always walked on her tiptoes and her voice shook when she read aloud in class. She was also the kind of girl who seemed like she might start crying at any moment, which was definitely a huge liability in junior high. Unless you were trying to mooch money off her. Then it was the perfect asset.
So I didn’t give it a second thought that day I walked up to her as she sat on the far end of the bench among her friends, and I asked her for a quarter. Maybe in my mind I thought she’d already lent me money, like it was our tradition; or more like I was a fun waitress and it would be a tip she wanted to give me just for swinging by and acknowledging her existence. That’s why it was so very surprising when she looked me right in the eye and said no. She didn’t just say no, she repeated exactly the question I’d asked her, but with a no at the top. “No, Karen, you cannot borrow thirty-five cents from me for just a second.” Except instead of giving it the casual, friendly tone I’d been using, she said it with the same intensity and tone that one usually reserves for saying, “I hate your guts.” Here I was, borderline popular and generously pretending to have some sort of social connection with her in exchange for money while she, quiet and mousy, was negating my improvisation. This wasn’t the part she was supposed to play. Suddenly, I didn’t recognize her. This was not a girl on the verge of tears. This was a girl who was mouthing off to me in front of all her friends. I was immediately horrified, but somewhere inside, I also kind of respected it. At least she wasn’t crying. I made a lame joke about her being scary and started to walk away. But then she said, “Maybe you don’t need any more candy.” And then all the girls sitting around her laughed behind their hands, eyes wide with delight.
I was the subject of some kind of a coup. Daisy was going rogue. She was speaking for all the mousy girls around her, for mousy girls everywhere! They lent me money because they thought I’d be their friend, but it was clear I wasn’t. And they’d had enough.
I didn’t borrow money anymore after that. Well, not from them.
But as hurtful as that experience was, it was just a drop in the bucket compared to how awful things would eventually become in junior high. Being a thirteen-year-old girl is simply the worst experience you can have in life, including all cancers and bear attacks. It is a daily series of betrayals and base humiliations that you must figure out a way to look cute during. It’s like, what the fuck.
The Daisy Uprising was my entrée into the realm of personality politics. I pretended to like Daisy and her plastic horse friends so that I could have candy whenever I wanted. But they weren’t stupid. In fact, most of them were the smartest girls in the class. And as trapped as they felt in the weird bog of junior high socializing, they knew I wasn’t a heavy hitter. I couldn’t end them like Carmen Renata could. That Carmen was genuinely frightening. In fact, without being stunningly beautiful or their little sister, our setup wasn’t meant to last.
I said this before when we talked about cults, but junior high is where I learned it first: everyone has an agenda. The horse girls wanted to be included, and they thought giving me money meant I would include them. When they realized that I only talked to them when I wanted something, they were like, “Fuck her bullshit.” And honestly, it must’ve felt great for Daisy, finally being the one saying the mean thing instead of having the mean thing said to her. She got to flex and feel her own power. She got to set a boundary.
And she was right to. Because the harsh junior high truth is, I didn’t like Daisy. Or more accurately, I had no interest in getting to know her. I didn’t have any patience for the mousy girls. They brought their fear of growing up to school and paraded it around like one of those plastic horses the rest of us felt forced to put away. When I turned thirteen, the world flipped over into a frightening battleground, and girls like her put a target on my back. There was no room for generosity or pity. This was junior high.
For girls, junior high is a daily dystopian nightmare of apocalyptic emotional warfare. Kill or be killed. Gossip or be gossiped about. Figure out some way to be popular or prepare to have your body roasted on a spit on the side of the road. This metaphor is not an exaggeration. For girls in junior high, life gets REAL da
rk. Like, Cormac McCarthy dark. And you’re only thirteen, so it’s hard.
* * *
One time in Chicago, I went to a lecture series with my friend Christen, where they had a bunch of people give five-minute talks on something they loved and/or wanted other people to know about. One presenter did a talk on lightning photography. Another talked about volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. And then near the end, this lady got up and said she was going to give a speech in defense of thirteen-year-olds. The second she said that, I started crying. When has anyone in this world defended thirteen-year-olds? They’re the absolute worst, and everyone agrees. They’re rude and sullen and bitchy and no fun. They think they know everything, but they actually don’t know anything at all, which is very embarrassing and painful to be near.
But this lady was explaining why being that age is the hardest age you ever have to be because of all the chemicals and hormones constantly raging through your body at the same time. It’s like you’re being drugged and then woken up with speed on a daily basis. Plus, your skin and hair and privates are all changing and you start to smell and you’re suddenly aware of every pore on your face. Meanwhile, all social structure implodes and resets in a totally unfamiliar way. She pointed out how you’re simultaneously the oldest version of a child and the youngest version of an adult, so you don’t belong anywhere. And the only people who truly understand you are going through the same thing, so as much as they empathize, they can’t connect with you because they’re dealing with all the same horror you’re going through plus whatever personal curveballs adolescence might be throwing them. So it’s very lonely. You’re not cute anymore. Everyone criticizes you. You don’t get babied, and you don’t get respect.
I wish I could show you a video of the level of ugly crying I was doing by the end of this speech. Her explanation forced me to face how the pain and trauma I felt being thirteen injured me fundamentally and in a way that I’d never acknowledged. So it was like a fractured feelings bone that set wrong, causing me to have a severe emotional limp and constant interpersonal relationship arthritis for the rest of my days.
Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered Page 17
