by Trish Ryan
Twenty minutes later, I was dangling by my perfect nails from a rock face thirty feet above a ribbon of river. I was terrified of heights, but even more scared of looking like an idiot in front of Josh’s entire family. How could he love me if I wimped out? So I jumped.
Afterward, as we floated in the chilly water, I stared into Josh’s deep blue eyes, drinking in his admiration. How could he not love me? I thought. I didn’t consider the false picture I was painting, how I was encouraging Josh to fall for a high-flying, adventure-seeking, throw-caution-to-the wind version of me that existed only in onetime snapshots. I thought one jump would give me lifetime bravery credit, like a merit badge in Girl Scouts, and then we could move on to the next project, something involving cuddling or romantic dinners. Dating Josh marked an evolution for me: it was my first experience with lying about who I was and what I wanted, of guessing what a guy wanted and then pretending to be exactly that.
During this time, Josh promised me the moon. He loved to dream and plan, loved to seek adventure. I graduated and went off to law school; he skied in Colorado, dove for pearls in Majorca, smoked pot for the first time on a layover in Singapore. (“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “Of all the places in the world to get stoned, you picked a place where it’s a capital offense?”) And then he came back and adored me, sweeping me into his arms over and over again like a hero back from war, casting dreams for our future together late into the night.
“We could move here, you know,” he said one evening in Oregon as we sipped wine and watched the sun set from our private hotel deck overlooking the Pacific. “You can take the bar exam anywhere in the country, right?” he asked as if mapping out our future. We’d looked at diamonds earlier that day—a two-carat pear-shaped stone had been his favorite.
“I could,” I said, realizing for the first time how broad my options were.
“Imagine the life we could have here,” he said, his eyes sparkling with fun and promise. On our way out the next morning, I tore the legal section out of the yellow pages, wanting a point of reference for when the time came to look for a job.
I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but something inside me still held fast to my childhood notion that everything in my life would be better once I was married to the right man; Josh, I thought, was that man. And while I knew from reading articles in Glamour and Cosmo (not to mention my own experience with Chip) that I wasn’t supposed to look to a man to save me, I also knew this: I couldn’t save myself. I wasn’t cool, together, and independent like I pretended to be; I did feel like half a life waiting to be made whole, and despite everything I’d been told to the contrary, I did believe that a man—this man—could complete me. I devoted myself to Josh as though he was my personal messiah.
THE NEXT SUMMER, I was clerking for a criminal court judge, and I got a call announcing that I’d made Law Review—the brass ring for every law student with dreams of success and greatness. Once again, it seemed like everything was coming together. Upon hearing my good news, the judge graciously offered me the phone in his chambers to call my parents. I called Josh instead.
He didn’t say much as I raved about what this appointment meant for us in terms of job opportunities and earning potential. After a long pause, he responded. “Yeah—um, that’s great. Well—um—hmm. Yeah. There’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you. I guess this might not be a great time, but . . .”
Ten minutes later the judge found me sobbing into his phone, tears and snot running down my face, littering his immaculate desk with piles of wadded-up tissue.
WHEN JOSH BROKE up with me, it was like someone hit the “pause” button on my brain. All but the most involuntary forward momentum of my life stopped, and I lost the will to keep going.
“I guess this is how it is for me,” I told Kristen that night on the phone. “I sew up one end of my life, and the other end just comes unraveled.”
I moved in a sort of semifunctional hibernation, going through the motions of finishing my clerkship, attending classes the next semester, pretending to take notes. I had a mountain of student loans (a mortgage on my brain, as one friend called it) that kept me from quitting. So I soldiered on, dragging my body from class to class, not caring a whit about corporate reorganization strategy or the intricacies of federal taxation. I’d look at the pile of photocopied caselaw stacked next to my desk and think, Who cares? I couldn’t see the point to being a lawyer—to being anything, for that matter—if no one loved you, if no one chose you to build a life with him.
Night after night, I gulped down shots from the bottles in my roommate’s liquor cabinet, hoping they would help me sleep, or maybe even get me addicted. It’s a fair depiction of how far I’d fallen from my perch on the “I’ve got it all together” pedestal that I actually envied people who qualified for twelve-step programs: alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual compulsives; from where I stood, they had it made. Preconstructed groups of friends—people obligated to love them if they just showed up—stood waiting to welcome them, exorcize their demons, and invite them to gatherings to smoke and drink coffee. I longed to stumble into that sort of ready-made network. But people like me who couldn’t seem to stomach more than two drinks at a time had no such group. I poured out my heartache in my journal, scribbling worriedly: I’m afraid I’ll remember my twenties as the decade I just floundered about.
Wandering through a bookstore one day, I came upon Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. As I pulled fourteen dollars from my wallet, I told myself that reading her story would help me recognize signs of depression in people I cared about, to empathize with their plight and love them through it. It was a nice rationalization, but the truth was I wanted a point of reference from which to evaluate my own instability, to see if things were as bad as I suspected they might be. A quick scan of some middle pages was reassuring; I wasn’t slicing myself with a razor (something I hadn’t before thought to celebrate). But I was intimately familiar with the feeling she described in the beginning of the book, of waking up in the morning, terrified she might live.
Looking around, I could tell I wasn’t the only girl losing ground in the relationship wars. On the surface, my friends and I were the accomplished single women magazines raved about: we had advanced degrees, cute haircuts, nice cars. Poised and together on the outside, but baffled and heartbroken underneath, we were the women people always asked (earnestly and with the best of intention), “Why aren’t you married yet?” expecting a cogent answer.
We found different ways of dealing with our stress: Alicia said rosaries to repent for impure thoughts; Janna joined the Junior League—“Wealthy women have wealthy husbands who have wealthy friends,” she explained. “I’m accessing a higher quality talent pool.”—Kate pined her nights away wallowing in an unrequited crush; Liza hooked up with every guy she fancied—as well as a few she didn’t—wanting to capitalize on her opportunities. “Carpe diem!” she’d cry, ordering another round of tequila shots. Holly clothed herself in pious virginal innocence, while Laura learned to bake gourmet cupcakes. Annie dated two best friends who were both named Brad, hedging her bets that one of them would come through with a ring. Heather spent a year in shocked denial when her boyfriend burst out of the closet on the night he was expected to propose.
Kristen called me from her new apartment in Manhattan one night. “Help me! I have a date tonight with a guy who looks like Benjamin Franklin!”
“How did that happen?” I asked, trying not to laugh.
“I didn’t want to be rude,” she explained, sounding despondent.
“Well,” I said, “have you tried imagining what Ben Franklin might look like with a fashion update? You know, like a nice suit from Brooks Brothers?”
“That’s what he was wearing the other night,” she said. “I still felt like I was talking to the head on a hundred-dollar bill.”
We were all doing the best we could, but no one seemed to know the secret password that would get us thr
ough to our next stage in life.
THE NEXT FEW years are a bit of a blur.
I graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and went to work for a firm that defended grocery store chains against the claims of people who’d fallen on wayward foodstuffs. My caseload included an eight-year-old boy who said he’d slipped on the floor of the men’s room (requiring a site visit to photograph urinals and antiskid mats while trying to keep the bullet holes out of the picture), and a woman alleging that her sex life was ruined by soft tissue injuries sustained when she slipped on a grape. It was ridiculous work, and I was miserable. So miserable, in fact, that my father begged me to make up something—anything—good to say in my weekly calls home to my mom. For months, we talked about the weather.
Kristen married Ben Franklin. They bought a Volvo, a cocker spaniel, and an apartment on the Upper East Side. I felt like Little Orphan Annie, curled up alone in my studio apartment with a half-dead plant.
I read a horrifying magazine article, a profile of four single women in their late thirties, each of whom claimed to have “made peace” with her apparent destiny as a single woman. I panicked. Where, I thought frantically, did they get the idea that if we aren’t married by a certain age, it’s time to give up and make alternative plans? Was this written down someplace? Was there an official deadline? And if there isn’t, I thought angrily, why would anyone, at this point or any other, take up the task of making peace with such a plight? I hated these women, with their efforts to “draw meaning” from their spinster fate. I hated how they gave up, battened down the hatches, and settled in for lonely, barren lives, recouping what pieces they could through single parenthood or adopting stray cats. I did not want to be one of those women.
Still reeling from Chip and Josh and how far off track my life had gotten, I started dating randomly: a series of men who took me to nondescript restaurants and waxed poetic about their amazing good fortune, how they couldn’t believe someone like me was going out with someone like them. (This would be obnoxious for me to say if it weren’t so true, if I weren’t dating so far outside the realm of viable romantic partners that my family and friends watched in rapt horror, wondering if maybe they should intervene. Suddenly, it was as if I would consider only men who had dropped out of high school, filed for bankruptcy, or been convicted of drunk driving. Bonus points for guys who still lived at home yet hated their mothers). No longer sure that a real prince would have me, I essentially dropped my asking price and declared a blue light special. I couldn’t get to happily ever after, it seemed, so I settled for I guess this will do for now. As one candid friend put it, I seemed to have broken my chooser.
Chapter Four
Becoming a Fascinating Woman
One night in the middle of this mess, I turned on the television. Larry King was interviewing a pretty redhead; she was wearing an elegant suit and talking about spirituality.
“The answer to our relationship problems is simple,” she told Larry with a knowing smile. “All it takes is a shift in perception. We need to approach life from a perspective of love, rather than a perspective of fear.” It seemed so simple—change my mind, change my life; as if my destiny was up to me. I was captivated.
Her name was not Jayme Brass, although that’s what I’ll call her. She was on Larry King Live to promote her new book about love. She explained how her book was based on a spiritual program called A Course in Miracles. The premise of the Course, she explained, was that only love is real, everything else is imagined, and we are what stands between us and the magnificent lives we wish for. She described how the teachings of the Course had set her free from her fears and neuroses, allowing her to succeed in life and love. “We have no right to think of ourselves as lowly worms, foraging for enough to get by,” she said. “That’s not what we were created for. We were created by a higher power, for the good of the universe. We should be asking ourselves ‘Who are you not to be everything you were created to be? Who are you not to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’”
Exactly! I thought. Who am I not to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? It was the wake-up call I’d been waiting for.
Jayme appeared the epitome of her own sage advice: smart, beautiful, self-assured, funny—she was the type of woman I wanted to be. That night, I became her disciple.
I skipped class the next morning and went to the bookstore, where I bought Jayme’s book, along with three of her audiotaped lectures. I read her story cover to cover, highlighting passages and feeling like a whole new world of understanding and possibility was opening up in front of me. Oh—of course! I kept thinking. It all was so obvious: only the love was real.
Following Jayme’s lead, I bought my own copy of A Course in Miracles. It was daunting: thousands of whisper-thin pages and tiny print, all bound together in a heavy, navy blue volume. These were, the book explained, the newest teachings of Jesus himself, channeled through an atheist professor at Columbia University to correct errors in the Bible. Why not? I thought. Despite my years of Catholic Sunday school, I’d never read the Bible, or thought much about Jesus; I had no basis for evaluating whether or not this sounded like something he might do. I was just glad I hadn’t wasted time on the first edition when there was an updated, 2.0 version to read instead.
The next morning, I poured myself a mug of coffee and started in on the first of the Course’s 365 meditations, ready to purify my thought forms and shift my perspective from fear to love:
“I have given everything I see all the meaning it has to me,” I read out loud. What the heck does that mean? I wondered. Following the instructions, I repeated this phrase over and over again, looking at all the objects in my bedroom that I had, apparently, given all the meaning they had to me.
Over the next few weeks, I continued this daily training, often having no idea what I was saying. I hoped that eventually these bizarre declarations would add up to some enlightenment and I’d catch on. The lessons each followed a similar pattern, describing how the negative things in the world—sickness, poverty, disappointment, pain—were illusions. Our job as students, it said, was to learn to see past these falsehoods, to the healing, abundance, perfect circumstances, and joy that were really there. What about people with cancer? I wondered. Or women whose husbands hurt them? O. J. Simpson had just been filmed fleeing the police in that white Bronco; I couldn’t imagine how Nicole Brown’s family would be helped by the news that her suffering and death weren’t real. I pushed these thoughts out of my mind, though; apparently I was still too unspiritual to understand.
Jayme’s advice was easier to apply. “Relationships are divine assignments,” she said, sharing about a man who’d once left her for another woman. “They can be devastating, but remember: even the bad ones teach us something the universe knows we need to learn.” I devoured her stories of relationship misfires, comforted that even she had been stood up, dumped, told she was too crazy/too demanding/too weird. “We overcome our disappointments when we recognize that we are the problem,” she claimed. Jesus could help us, she explained, because he was our divine big brother—a powerful example of all we could be once we reached our own divinity. This was the first reasonable explanation of Jesus I’d ever heard.
With each day that went by, I saw myself less as a lawyer gunning for partnership, and more as a spiritual pilgrim searching for a higher road to happiness than billable hours and sharp suits could buy. I didn’t talk to anyone about my newfound woo-woo perspective of universal abundance and light; there didn’t seem to be that sort of conversational opening in our partner-associate meetings or at happy hour on Friday nights. I knew I wasn’t your typical candidate for psychic transformation. But as I looked to Jayme’s example of what a higher, spiritual life might look like, her words of hope were like an IV drip of reassurance, connecting me to alternative truths and hope the partners in my firm didn’t seem to have. To me, Jayme was living proof that I could feel this bad now, and yet someday look that good.
ONE NIGHT
AT the gym, a tall, dark, handsome man hopped on the treadmill next to mine and started talking.
“I know you,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “You were on that rock-climbing trip to the indoor walls last month.”
I’ve never been one of those chatty runners, so this was a bit disconcerting. “Mmhmmm,” I replied winningly, struggling to conserve my breath. “Thatwasme.” I typically had about fifty-seven seconds of conversation in me before I’d start to audibly gasp for air.
“I’m Tim,” he said, extending a long arm to shake my hand.
“ImTrish,” I replied, praying my palm wasn’t clammy.
Over the next twenty minutes, Tim and I somehow kept up a witty train of banter, and I forgot all about my tiny, oxygen-starved lungs as he smiled at me and flirted. Tim was an engineer; he lived around the corner. He invited me to a party that weekend and I, suddenly breathless again, accepted. Here it is, I thought, my first chance to apply my miracle-minded perspective to a real guy.
Three nights later, at the swank martini party, sparks flew as we shared potent drinks and flirted. At the end of the night Tim walked me home in the rain, pulling me in for a kiss that made the streetlights above us spin. The next day, he called—right when he’d said he would. We talked for almost an hour: he told me how he admired Ayn Rand and that The Fountainhead was his favorite book. I told him about my spiritual work, and my commitment to focusing on love rather than fear. Remembering Jayme’s chapter on “Being a Fascinating Woman,” I assured him that I wasn’t one of those girls—you know, the dull ones who only want to get married. Tim was silent as I said this. I suspect he’d never had a woman start a romantic relationship by assuring him that she didn’t expect anything to come of it.
“I believe in the experience of our relationship,” I explained, “not the title.” I’d learned from Jayme and the Course that evolved people don’t worry about the form of a relationship—dating, exclusivity, marriage. “The form of most relationships,” she’d explained, “is like an ornate frame encrusted with diamonds and rubies.” That heavy frame was bad, according to the Course—the diamonds were our tears and the rubies were our blood. Insisting on a particular frame (such as marriage) diminished the content of the picture (the relationship). “The alternative,” Jayme said, “is for the form to be light and unobtrusive, something you can barely see or feel that holds everything together lightly so you can focus on the content.” Secretly, I assumed that once Tim got to know me, the form would take care of itself.
