Nobody Cares

by Anne T. Donahue

  Healthy solution: I would have to make peace with the inevitable realization that independence is an important part of friendship.

  My solution: Silently force that independence on them by refusing to commit to plans in any capacity for the entirety of time.

  Problem: I cut off wise, old friends in lieu of new friends who enabled me because I was only telling those new friends part of my story (and of my capacity for self-destruction).

  Healthy solution: I would have to acknowledge and admit that I had many problems, friendship being the least pressing one.

  My solution: Please see the essay on alcoholism.

  Problem: I interpreted texts as something passive-aggressive or judgmental, and instead of saying, “What does that mean?” I’d just ignore all texts until we finally came face-to-face at a Christmas party years later and were forced to confront the palpable tension.

  Healthy solution: I would have to risk confronting what that meant.

  My solution: Bring on the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  So just tell your friends the truth. Tell them you’re angry, sad, annoyed, hurt, tired, anxious; that you’d rather eat poison than go to a birthday party at a fucking nightclub again, and that you’ll just take them out for dinner instead.

  Save ghosting for when you’re an actual denizen of the underworld and can appear silently in the bathroom mirror of your worst enemy, standing behind them as you scar them for life.

  Mistake #4: Making it about you

  When working retail in my early twenties, a friend of mine got a phone call at work letting her know that a close friend of hers was in the ICU. The event was tragic and unexpected, and it hit her hard. As a result, I was asked to come in and close for her that night. I didn’t want to. I was in a pair of faded PJ pants and a T-shirt with seagulls on it, and I was watching Forensic Files and pretty sure I was getting a cold. I went in wearing exactly what I’d been solving crime in and complained to customers and staff alike about how hard done by I was to do her this favor.

  I opened the back door to the breakroom and found her crying.

  “He’s still in the hospital, right?” I said, stone-faced, before offering a hug or any means of comfort.

  “Yeah —”

  “Well, he might not die,” I said matter-of-factly. “So don’t overreact.”

  I put my coat and bag in my locker and complained about how tired I was and how I hoped I wouldn’t get everybody sick since it was obvious I was also at death’s door. She kept crying, and I kept reminding her that until her friend was pronounced dead, “you never know, so calm down.” She left soon after, and he passed away shortly after that.

  My friend has a capacity for love and forgiveness and compassion and empathy that I don’t think I ever will. She is kindness and generosity personified. She is the type of friend who manages to dole out real and concrete advice while exposing her own vulnerabilities to make you feel more comfortable. She hugs like no one I’ve ever met. And she never brought up what I’d said to her. I finally apologized for it.

  “Oh, Annie!” she said. “It’s okay. I know you were frustrated that you had to come in.”

  Which, like, no. Nobody cares about your bullshit when there’s an actual tragedy or a life on the line. Shut up, stop speaking, and don’t make it about you. Most things — 99% of things — are not about you, and when another person is combating trauma, they’re especially not.

  And for the record, I did get a terrible cold. And I deserved it.

  Mistake #5: Too much honesty

  In 2006, I wanted to look “indie” and “hip,” so I dyed my brown hair blond and cut it into a shag-mullet. And, despite looking terrible and the worst, I was not judged. My friends promised that my chicken-fat-yellow hair looked great, that I would easily be mistaken for the lead singer in a cool band. I just had to get used to it.

  In 1989, I wasn’t as accepting.

  My friend and next-door neighbor had long, beautiful blond hair. She had natural curls in a way I never would, and I was understandably in awe. Which meant that when she cut it all off into a mullet, she’d shattered not just her mother’s dreams, but mine too. I was horrified. I was disgusted. I was appalled that she didn’t see her grave mistake in taking the kitchen scissors and mutilating something I couldn’t have.

  I ignored her for days, turning down her invitations for playdates and telling her I didn’t want to play outside with anyone — only to play with the other neighbors minutes later. Finally, she offered a bribe. She stood at my front door with two freezies, one blue and one white — my favorite colors.

  “Annie,” she said, handing one to me, “do you wanna come outside and play?”

  I took the freezie and looked at her. I smiled softly, looking upon her and her bad hair in pity. “No thank you,” I said, closing the door.

  I wandered into the kitchen, where my aunt and mom were sitting. They asked where I’d gotten the freezie.

  “Julia gave it to me so I would play with her, but I said no.”

  I have never found myself so quickly whisked outside and into the company of a person I didn’t want to be around. I barely felt my mother’s hands on my shoulders as she guided me out the front door, ordering me to play with my friend for a least an hour because I was being rude. What was rude, I remember thinking, was cutting one’s hair into such a terrible shape.

  I patted my own mushroom cut and reveled in my excellent taste. Perfection was a curse, and clearly I was suffering from it.

  But, for the Record: I Am Not Fun

  It’s important that you know, dear reader, that I am not fun. If we have hung out and you had fun, odds are that you’re not fun either. I like sitting, eating beige food, driving around, walking around malls, buying stuff at malls, and taking a lot of photos for Instagram. And I hate everything else. I hate most parties, and I hate clubs, and I hate bars that don’t have chairs, and the only concerts I care about involve Harry Styles, Beyoncé, and assigned seating — but not if they start any later than 10 p.m.

  I know I used to be fun. I used to go out dancing and to concerts and suggest that my friends and I “make an appearance” at parties. I used to exclaim things like “I’m down for whatever!” and sleep on the floor of friends’ houses and say I didn’t care where we went for dinner. I went to DJ nights. I suffered frequently from FOMO. I used words like “adventure” and “exciting” together in a sentence, but not in the form “It is exciting that we managed to avoid an adventure,” as I do today.

  With age, I’ve come to embrace who I am. In my case, I am a person with a fantastic capacity for setting boundaries. More than I love saying yes, I love saying no. I love rescheduling. I love cancelling and being cancelled on. I take delight in declining Facebook event invitations. I love going to an uncool family chain restaurant with a best friend and talking shit for three hours, blissfully aware we will see nobody we know. I love not knowing what cool bands are playing at a music festival I don’t care about and will never go to. Ultimately, I love not doing shit I hate. Freedom.

  But it took me a long time to get here. If we’re being specific, it took about 31 years and was crystallized by personal realizations, like that to successfully be a living person, you have to cut something out. For me — and the majority of my close friends — that was agreeing to do things that made me miserable.

  Nothing in this world bonds people together like collectively hating a thing that everybody else seems to love. The majority of my adult friendships formed over the realization that we dislike the same people or the same scene or the same trend, and the rest have been forged through detesting everything else. So in the celebration of freedom through disdain, here is a starter list of things I hate. Feel free to hate them too.

  Especially brunch.

  Brunch

  Fuck brunch. Fuck it. I will not wait in line for eggs and salmon when I can make eggs in my home and
defrost smoked salmon in my sink. I will not pay $10 for a plate of leaves. I will not pretend that I am happy sitting alongside a 14-top table, propped up against a stranger whose hangover is overpowering the scent of my $25 breakfast. I do not think it’s “cute” that it costs extra for sparkling water, nor do I want my pancakes to be seasonal or rich in flaxseed.

  I am not interested in brunch. Brunch is not interested in me. When all-day fast food breakfast was introduced to the masses, I knew the rest of the world was on my side.

  Sommeliers

  I am not impressed by how much you know about wine. I also know a lot about wine, and that’s because I consumed it in great quantities, often without a glass, alone. No one’s identity should be defined by how much they know about grapes, nor should anyone be shamed for how little they know about them. If you want to earn my respect via alcohol, be the ghost of my Irish great-grandmother, who bootlegged in Canada to ensure my grandpa and his siblings survived. And honestly, something tells me that Esther Watson Donahue wouldn’t suffer sommeliers either.

  Any concert without chairs

  As I’ve mentioned, I refuse. I understand that this isn’t a particular band’s fault, but know that if your band is playing a chairless venue, I will not be there. I need to sit down and put my shit down on the floor in front of me. Plus, I would like to enjoy a beverage and a snack, using my lap as a kind of buffet stand. Standing in the corner of a hot venue feeling a twentysomething named Reid sweat his mustache on me does not allow for either of the aforementioned.

  When I was 24 and 25, I went to concerts almost every night, and I wore out my patience for concert attendees back then. Now, even when leaving a concert with assigned seats, I channel Billy Zane in Titanic, grabbing the hand of whatever friend I’m with and yelling, “I have a child!” in an attempt to escape quickly.

  DJ nights

  Can you even fucking imagine?

  The beach

  The beach is a trap. It is a villain and a bore. I grew up going to the beach with my parents, more psyched for the drive up north than I ever was to sit around watching waves. And then, as a teen, the beach was where you’d see and be seen; where, after over an hour spent driving to a Great Lake, you’d descend on the sand and pray that the guy you liked would be there (and that he hadn’t gone to one of the other beaches situated an equal distance away). One year, a bunch of us went to Grand Bend for Canada Day, and all the boys we went to school with got nipple piercings at the same time. I should’ve known then that I didn’t belong. Also, I got a heat rash.

  There are always too many people at the beach. A woman I’d never met once infringed on my towel territory by kind of sitting on it. Another year, a bird shit on my leg. Too crowded. Too hot. Too boring. Too sandy.

  I went to two beaches in 2016, and both times I spent maybe half an hour onshore before putting my feet in the water and congratulating myself for engaging with nature, and then I decided which restaurant to go to following my escape from the beach. I also pulled my calves because my body wasn’t built for walking on sand. I am not Luke Skywalker. This is not Tatooine.

  Cheese

  I hate cheese. I hate cheese as a lactose-intolerant person in a largely lactose-tolerant world, and I hate cheese as a person offended by the smell of cheese. I hated it as a child, I hated it as a teen. I do not miss cheese on my pizza, because it tasted like elastics.

  Also: I do not want to try your almond cheese or your soft cheese or your soy cheese. I would rather eat socks.

  The VIP myth

  None of us are important, and all of us are the worst. You know this, and I know this, but anyone thirsting for VIP status and sections does not know this. And as a result, we all must suffer.

  We all must wait in a line created solely to make a restaurant or bar look popular. We all must pretend to care about a velvet rope and whoever happens to be behind it. We’re left to assume that someone’s seats are automatically better than ours, or that every movie star is just out of sight in that sectioned-off room reserved for anybody with a certain number of Instagram followers.

  But here’s what I’ve learned after spending time in maybe four VIP areas in the history of my time on this planet: they make me want to die. They are not special. I am not special because I am in them. The VIP section is just an area with free snacks (maybe) and a security dude who did not see his night playing out like this. The best VIP section is always your or your friend’s car with the Hamilton soundtrack playing as you eat McDonald’s.

  Music festivals/film festivals/most festivals

  I cared so much once. I lived for music festivals and for action and for glory and for celebrity-sighting at the Toronto International Film Festival. I lived for the sad belief that I really belonged. But I sure wanted everybody who saw me to know that I had been chosen as an employee or a journalist or a person important enough to own a lanyard — which is why I wore mine miles away from venues, just waiting for people to ask if I was famous. They didn’t.

  And then I just stopped caring. I didn’t have room to care about who was at what anymore.

  Which isn’t to say anybody who does care is making the wrong choice. I was never in it for the right reasons: I wanted to feel special and cool and was in no way an active participant in culture or any definitive scene. I felt out of place at industry parties, backstage at festivals, and especially while trying to act super-chill in the bathroom with Kate Winslet as she and her team changed her outfit. My TIFF will never again be as magical as the one where I interrupted a strange man trying to pawn his mixtape off onto Rachel McAdams. I did it by loudly bringing up a guy I heard she knew from high school. And I know firsthand she’s an excellent actress because she did a very convincing job of making it seem like I was being a completely normal person at a TIFF party.

  No more.

  Game of Thrones

  For years I told people it was “on my list.” For years I said that I’ll binge it when I have the flu. But no: Game of Thrones has never been on my list, and I will never binge it under any circumstances (especially if I have the flu).

  I have never watched Game of Thrones and I will never watch Game of Thrones. It’s my dragon-filled version of The Wire: I know it’s good, I know everybody likes it, but too much time has passed, and I will never watch it because I never wanted to in the first place, and I have been lying about intending to since I was an infant.

  Ruffles

  Ruffles are a brand of potato chip in Canada and also an international fashion trend, and I hope you know me well enough by now to know that I would never use precious pulp and paper to condemn a snack food.

  However, the fashion trend can burn in hell. It is impossible to look intimidating in a ruffled shirt. It is impossible to stomp across the street and yell menacingly about something in a ruffled dress unless you are Beyoncé in the “Hold Up” video. No part of me was built to wear ruffles. Therefore, I hate them.

  Camping

  I have never been camping. (I have slept with the windows open in my room, and in the backseat of a friend’s Jeep while drunk at a bush party. Does that count? No? Who cares.) Even as a small child, I knew that luxuries like beds and walls and locked doors and an indoor flushing toilet were important to me.

  My parents don’t camp, my grandparents didn’t camp, and I am proud to continue the tradition of wondering what the fuck is wrong with you if you’d rather “rough it” than spend time indoors, you nature-loving freak. Why are you choosing to shit on the land?

  Eating on patios at night

  I love eating outside — until you leave after eating your cold-after-two-minutes meal covered in so many mosquito bites that you can’t sleep for two full nights so you stay up Googling West Nile Virus symptoms.

  The hierarchy of hip

  I say “absolutely not” out loud regularly to the majority of Facebook invites and have actively fought the urge to comment “WOW WE GET IT”
on any Instagram photo where it seems like the person is pretending not to know their photo was being taken — by themselves, in a bathroom — and then subsequently posted on social media.

  I don’t want to go to “cool” parties. When someone uses Twitter to elevate themselves over pop culture, I want to scream. (Fun fact: hating Hamilton does not make you interesting.) My favorite clothes are the ones I like and feel powerful in, and I would rather bathe a cat than pretend to have anything other than my usually mainstream taste. I actively cut off people who believe their taste in movies or music or TV shows makes them complex or multidimensional. Nobody cares if you don’t like Drake.

  When I was a kid, my Uncle Dan taught me his motto — “I got no time” — but it took me well into my adult years to begin applying it to myself. Because I don’t. And you don’t. Hanging one’s identity on coolness, hipness, or cultural elitism is as ludicrous as calling yourself a lumberjack because you wore plaid once. That’s not how anything works.

  As a grown-ass woman, I think people who work hard are cool. I think someone who gives a shit about other people is rad. I think being able to hang out with a friend you trust and genuinely like and eat a ton of junk food with while actively avoiding a gallery opening for an acquaintance you don’t like is a dream. I think the mall is the best.