Eventually, you’ll reach a level of acceptance with your responsible self. It’s much easier to do once you’re past your mid-twenties, when everyone is slooooowly getting more and more accountable and less and less likely to climb onto roofs at 4 a.m. I’m not saying you’re going to wake up one day and love that you pack the right (ugly) shoes for vacation or that you’ll start to feel like eating healthily is its own reward. It’s just that you’ll give in eventually and stop fighting responsibility so much, someday. Sometimes that’s its own kind of relaxation—the letting go of the fun, fancy-free person you thought you’d be.
You’ll make friends with other responsibles, too. You’ll plan together. You’ll ask clarifying questions before renting kayaks on your friend-vacation. You’ll remind each other about sunscreen and heartburn tricks and mutual friends’ birthdays. You’ll send links to pillows that help with bad backs. You’ll help each other figure out the unemployment benefits website.
It’s my strong recommendation—not that you asked—that should you date or fuck or marry (or kill) someone, you pick a fellow responsible person. Someone else who had to help around the house too young, who raised their siblings or got a job at sixteen. Because it’s very hard to love someone who has never known vigilance, who has only known invincibility, who isn’t going to ever recognize the extra work you do. Surround yourself with people who understand that the world is onerous on a good day, people who understand that it is in and of itself worthwhile to try hard and put in effort and give back to others and to care.
Just don’t hold your breath for anyone to thank you; they’re having too much fun.
Love,
Sophia
Riding Shotgun with My Hair Undone in the Front Seat of Margaux’s Truck
When I was a freshman in high school, I met one of the most delightfully singular people I’ve ever met in my life: Margaux Meyer. Her name alone in a sea of Kathryns and Caitlyns and Kaitlynns let you know what to expect—the glamour of that X. She was a grade above me and we met making costumes for a musical; I’m not sure why she was making costumes—it was probably a capricious whim of hers. For me, it was because I loved the theater department but couldn’t sing, so for the spring musical each year all I had to offer was costuming help. We sewed dress after dress for The Pirates of Penzance and over pattern cutting and sash attaching and bust measuring, Margaux and I became friends.
Margaux was the kind of person who was not necessarily popular, but rather beloved. She awed people everywhere she went. She wore rain boots with dresses and drove an old pickup truck and ran cross country and had short hair and guys liked her a lot and she would tell you precisely what she thought at any given moment, which was often terrifying to witness. She was unflinchingly honest, just wildly herself all the time. Oh, and she loved Taylor Swift. And this was like early country + god Taylor. It was Taylor Swift, Fearless, and Speak Now. It was what the popular girls who actually loved Jesus listened to. It was not what someone like her was “supposed” to like. I’m not sure Margaux even noticed; she just adored Taylor Swift, and that was that for her.
It made me itch, to be frank. When she gave me rides home my freshman and sophomore year before I could drive, she would blast Taylor in her beat-up pickup and I would sit there mortified. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Taylor Swift’s music or Taylor Swift herself or anything—I did. But I felt sure that this was not the stuff I was supposed to like. Mostly, I felt it was waaaayyy too girly, which I presumed was a turn-off for guys, not that any guys were (a) around to see us or (b) interested in me. I also felt the music was not just girly, but dumb. I figured this kind of music was embarrassing to listen to and I couldn’t figure out why Margaux refused to be ashamed of it.
In fact, I often felt embarrassed for her, as if I was following her around, cleaning up after a messy toddler, but instead I would follow her around and try to stay small and try to express contrition with my body language just in case she pissed someone off. It didn’t occur to me that she didn’t need me to do that, that in fact her very purpose was the opposite.
Instead of ever discussing it, I just observed Margaux’s confidence, her insistence that she get to be allowed to be herself, without a hint of self-editing. I wish—God, how I wish—that I had simply picked up what she was putting down, that I could say I left high school having learned that being anything other than yourself doesn’t just lead to an anemic existence, but to bone-deep exhaustion. But I didn’t learn that. When Margaux left for college my senior year, I was nowhere near ready to actually be myself. The thought utterly terrified me, even as I felt slivers of envy toward Margaux for barreling through life no-holds-barred.
* * *
I eventually talked to her about it a year or two after I graduated high school, during a college break when we were both back in St. Louis. She said that she had been so loud and confident and weird in high school on purpose, with intention. She figured that if she could be odd and loud and utterly herself, it might invite other people who felt less sure of themselves to take small steps to do the same. I still wasn’t there myself, but I loved the sentiment. After a year or two in college, I finally at least wanted to shed my insecurities, my shame about simply being alive and being a woman. Margaux was never worried about her femininity being held against her. She cried in front of guys; she was dramatic, impulsive, loud, and critical. She was exactly what straight cis guys would describe as “too much.” And it didn’t kill her. I admired her so much, but I didn’t feel like I would or could ever get there. For a few more years after our talk, I didn’t. I would privately cringe when she would tell me the latest thing she did to get a guy to ask her out, or how she drew firm (and sometimes unusual) boundaries with people because she figured that if they cared, they’d adhere to them. I would shudder at her boldness, the way she called people out. I was still indoctrinated in the school of “Impress Straight Cis Men at All Costs and Never Mention That They Messed Up.” When Margaux was moving in with a guy after a third date or living in a bus with a man, perceptions be damned, I was still a clenched fist of nerves around pretty much everyone, especially men and authority figures and hot people and my family and anyone more successful than me in my industry. I just wanted to make sure they all liked me; God forbid I ever say out loud—or do!—something I wanted.
But then, slowly, something happened: I got tired. Not just tired, but exhausted. I wish I could say that I finally gave up on impressing my family and my bosses and people online and, perhaps most of all, men simply because I realized it was the right thing to do. I wish that I had woken up one day and been like, “Okay, wait a minute… this is bullshit.” But that wasn’t the case. The truth is, I just got tired. I got tired of feeling like every minuscule decision I made had the potential to make or break someone’s opinion of me. I got tired of feeling like other people’s opinions of me were my business, and not just relevant to me, but that they mattered.
At first, I didn’t know what the alternative was to caring what everyone thought. (Yes, the answer might seem obvious but I was also about twenty-two years old! Please!) I was just tired; I was tired of feeling like I couldn’t win no matter what I did, that someone, somewhere, was always going to be a little upset. It was, I realize now, a dynamic I was familiar with as a child of divorced parents who each wanted me to live at their house 24/7. No matter what you do, it’s not enough. That was the messaging of my childhood in many ways, and it became the messaging of my teenage years and college years and eventually my adulthood. No matter what you do, it’s not enough. And I couldn’t think of an alternative to caring about that truth. I felt bad—genuinely bad!—that I couldn’t do enough, be thin enough, write enough, read enough, tweet enough, work out enough, call home enough, stay up late enough, be friendly enough, be quiet enough. I felt sorry that I didn’t succeed in pleasing other people. But I ran out of fuel.
Eventually, after enough time of being tired and being a bit angry that I was so exhausted for the sake of o
ther people—which in itself is tiring—I discovered that I had given up. I didn’t realize it at first. I didn’t recognize immediately that I no longer cared because it didn’t happen at one particular moment. It happened in fits and starts. Some days, I would leave my house wearing ugly clothes and go to work with no makeup on and all the men in their thirties and forties would talk to all the young twenty-year-old interns instead of twenty-four-year-old me and instead of feeling shame for not being appealing enough, I was like, “What a relief to be left alone!”I Some days, I wouldn’t stand in the mirror for twenty-three minutes and catalog everything I hated about how I looked; I just didn’t care to spend my time that way anymore. I knew I didn’t loooove my body. Okay. Boom. Next question. I’m busy. Some days, I told people to not use certain words around me. (Preferably not around anyone ever, but what can I do?) Some days, I told white male actors to shut the fuck up when complaining about not getting parts because they were white and male.II Some days, I still cared a lot!!!
A lot of the time, especially when I worked at the improv theater—which had a revolving door of new people in all the time, creating opportunity for hundreds of first impressions a year—I got told I was intimidating. I wasn’t. There is nothing I was doing that was intimidating at all, because intimidating is simply the descriptor being used by the person being intimidated. The only thing that I was doing actively was not caring if I was likable. Nota bene: I was extremely professional and good at my job. But I didn’t care if people didn’t like me for not bending rules for them. I didn’t care if guys were flirty with me in order to get what they wanted. I didn’t care how I looked, I wasn’t trying to get ahead, I wasn’t trying to dazzle anyone. I just did my job and minded my own business. Anything else genuinely felt too tiring.
Gradually, this exhaustion-cum-detachment seeped into more and more parts of my life. I’m not saying I don’t care about people—I do, very deeply. I’m also not saying that I don’t care at all what people think of me—I still do, very deeply. But I care less and less about people with power, people with influence, people who demand that you impress and suck up to them. I care very little about people who insist that you can never do enough for them. I care less now about being likable and more about being a good person.
While I certainly learned from my own depletion, my own weariness at trying to behave for other people, I can’t claim to have done this alone. I did it with the help of Margaux, and my mom, and my sisters, and my best friends, and my aunts. I did it with the help of thousands of women online. I did it because people before me showed me what it could be like to let go of being well-behaved. No one woman did it alone or did it constantly—all of us are still hemmed in by and upholding and celebrating and rejecting societal expectations on and off and on and off again and again. No one is constant. But the moments when I saw other women be unafraid mattered a lot to me.
I hope you got some of that feeling out of this book. This book was not intended to be instructional—can you even imagine if it were? Yikes! All I wanted to do was lay bare what it took for me to get away from trying to live my life for other people. I wanted to tell you the truth, which in my experience is: you’re fucked. You’re fucked no matter what you choose. This axiom is shitty, yes, but I encourage you to find it freeing as well. The truth is that when anything you do will be met with criticism, when anything you do will get you objectified, ignored, belittled, dismissed, etc., then you can do anything.III
The really good news is that, like in High School Musical, we’re all in this together. Not in the corny, two-dimensional Zac Efron/Vanessa Hudgens way. I’m not claiming that something as flimsy as surface-level unity will fix oppression. I’m not saying anything like, “We all just need to get along and support one another!” When I say, “We’re all in this together,” what I mean is this: you’re not alone. You aren’t the only one trying to figure out how to be a good person. You aren’t the only person who feels like they’re getting conflicting messages about what a good person looks like. You are not alone, and it’s not hopeless. Some days you’re probably going to conform, some days you’re going to buck the system. Sometimes you’re going to try to get straight cis white male approval and some days you’re going to be like, “Okay, why the fuuuuck was I trying to get straight cis white male approval last Thursday??? Idiot!!” But you aren’t an idiot; the system is set up for you to fail. You fail when you try, you fail when you don’t.
Sometimes you’ll do a really excellent job of living fully for yourself and then two months later your crush comes around and you act like a completely different person, a person with opinions on The Lord of the Rings or something. It happens! It’s fine! As far as any of us can tell, it’s your first time on this planet; you are bound to get things wrong. Especially in a world where no matter what you do, you’re fucked, you’ve disappointed someone, you’re not good enough.
My hope for you is just that you choose to behave in ways that suit you, that benefit you, that affirm you as often as possible. I hope that you get away from trying to please others at the expense of your own desires whenever you can. I hope this book made you feel like there’s someone else—lots of people, even—experiencing some of the same pressures and strains that you are. (Not all of them, of course. I’m still a cis able-bodied white lady with US citizenship.) My story isn’t everyone’s story; it isn’t even most people’s story. This book isn’t saying, “Here’s what it’s like to be a person.” It’s saying, “Here’s how it was for me. Maybe you recognize some of the pieces. Isn’t this shit absurd?”
That is the way in which we are all in this together. We all have a story about figuring out who we want to be and how we want to behave and treat other people, and often in other people’s stories we recognize ourselves. We read something and go, “Ahhh, yep yep yep. That’s it; that’s what it’s like to be alive sometimes.” And I hope you had moments of that in this book. (Hopefully the time that guy Brandon got come in my eye was not a moment you also experienced.)
Maybe—and perhaps it’s unfair for me to hope for this—maybe this book released a little tiny amount of the pressure. Maybe it made you think, “Yeah, it is fucked-up that there are no older women in my industry,” or “Yeah, it is fucked-up that I’m expected to care for my parents but my other siblings aren’t,” or “Yeah, it is fucked-up how much I’ve normalized my own experiences with sexual assault.”
The world is mostly hard and often lovely and here’s the thing: you can’t be so good that you don’t get hurt. You can’t behave so well that you reap a ton of rewards and everyone loves you and you learn how to do that whistle with your fingers in your mouth and you get a walk-in closet and you have a dog that doesn’t bark and thirty-seven very close friends and no one is ever mad at you. You just can’t. All you can do is try your best and take a lot of naps and be good to people and go really easy on yourself. Find people who seem brave and kind and surround yourself with them and emulate themIV slowly until you become braver and kinder, but in your own ways, according to your own values. (I don’t know; that’s what I did and now I barely even notice what straight cis men think anymore! It’s great!) Seriously, though, when you have the ability to—which is admittedly not always—I hope you take the chance to just do shit your own way, to set your own boundaries, to live up to your own expectations. It’s a lot less exhausting.
Acknowledgments
While I am not a fan of introductions, acknowledgments are my favorite part of any book, so please lend me a little grace, as these thank-yous might go long. It does not help that I have approximately 9,428 immediate family members.
Firstly, thank you to my agent, Jessica Felleman, for taking a wildly disorganized call a few years ago and then spending months helping me actually create something cohesive; thank you for gently insisting that the book did in fact need to have a point. Thank you also for taking all the many, many calls and emails that came afterward and for calming me down about pretty much every step of the publis
hing process. Thank you endlessly to my editor, Rebecca Strobel, for making this book what it is now instead of what it was in the beginning. Rebecca, I can’t thank you enough for the brilliant guidance you gave me and the wonderful vision you had for the book. It was so, so easy at every turn to trust you to make the book better, which is a dream. The biggest thank-you imaginable to both of you for all the times you laughed with me and encouraged me and not just because it was your job.
Thank you to the entire Gallery team who made writing a book a breeze, and who gave me so much of their time and hard work. Thank you to Anne Jaconette and Rachel Brenner. Thank you to Jen Bergstrom, Sally Marvin, and Aimée Bell. (I still vividly remember Aimée mentioning Nora Ephron in the first meeting and knowing I wanted to work with Gallery.) Thank you to Polly Watson for making the book actually readable (and sorry for making you have to address the consistent spelling of come/cum in a professional setting). Thank you to Caroline Pallotta, Kaitlyn Snowden, Lisa Litwack, John Vairo, and Michelle Marchese for making sloppy Word documents from me into a beautiful, physical, actual book. Thank you to Carolyn Levin, who legally vetted this book and asked me if my family would care if I said they drank all the time and understood when I replied, “Oh no, they’re Italian.”
A big shout-out to everyone who has ever found me hot: thank you.
Thank you to the inordinately kind people who own and run Toasted and Roasted and Charlie’s Coffee House, where I wrote a lot of this book before the pandemic.
An enormous thank-you to Josh Gondleman, who helped me every step of the way simply because he’s one of those freaks who like to be nice to people. Josh, I could not thank you—or pay you—enough for all the guidance and kindness you sent my way.
Well, This Is Exhausting Page 27
