Thanks.

I don’t normally write straight-up personal stuff on the Internet. I usually write personal stuff masked as a story, or an essay, or (gag), a listicle. But right now, I really feel compelled to break my pattern in order to express my deep gratitude for the people in my life who have been there for me, recently and always.

Something that I’ve learned during this particular rough patch is that unconditional love comes in all shapes and sizes. Like Mick Jagger says, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need.” And when what I wanted didn’t work out, I had so many humans near and far who stepped in to give me what I needed. I could just say an all-encompassing “thanks, guys,” to make this a quick and easy read, but I think these people deserve to be named and acknowledged, specifically and wholly, for their selfless contributions to my life.

Rachel, first and foremost. Thank you for letting me cry on your couch and watch Law & Order SVU for weeks until we could both robotically exclaim at the end of every episode, “EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF.” You let me sleep in your bed when I wasn’t really sleeping, and you ordered grilled cheese sandwiches for me when I wasn’t really eating.  You invited me out when I didn’t feel like going, walked me to work when I didn’t want to leave the apartment, and downloaded Tinder on my cell phone so that we could make fun of the guys who propositioned us for “sex & Seinfeld.” You got me a half-birthday card when I missed my grandparents and hung out with me when I was all woozy-weird from my migraine medicine. You stepped in as Florence Nightengale and as Detective Benson and most importantly, as my best friend. Eating nachos with you every night for two weeks probably saved my life.

Lindsey.  Thank you for sending pizza and coffee to my apartment when I didn’t want to get out of bed. You sat with me outside of my apartment and inside the bar below my apartment and told me your stories. They helped. You wiggled your shoulders and told me every single day that I was the best, best, best, even though I certainly didn’t feel like it. You let me order buffalo chicken nachos and picked around the chicken even though you’re a vegetarian. You bought jeans that one day so that you could sleep over at my apartment when I didn’t want to sleep alone. You got a wet napkin and mopped beer off that guy’s dog at the park, which wasn’t really a thing you did for me, specifically, but it just goes to show how incredibly kind you are to everyone around you.

Kati. Thank you for making me a collage of all my favorite foxes/Fawkes-es, and for making a list of questions that every new person who enters my life has to answer correctly before they’re allowed to love me. You’ve been rooting for me since I was a kid, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. You talked to me for four hours when I was sobbing on 8^th avenue alone, and reminded me that I have mystere. I had somehow forgotten, but that’s why you’re the best; you constantly remind me that I’m cooler than I think I am. I’m always kidding when I say that I hope I get famous, but you never are. You’ve told me since I was six years old that someday, everyone is going to see me the way that you do. I hope you know that I could always just have you, and that would be so much more than enough.

Jackie. Thank you for texting me 500 times until five in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. You always know just what to say. Probably because you’ve been dealing with the inside of my brain and my heart since 2^nd grade. You’ve dropped everything to be there on every single one of the best and worst days of my life. You were the first person I told when my parents got a divorce, when my grandfather died, when my heart got broken five million hundred times. You were there when my mom announced her engagement to Alan, when we brought Pooches Leia home for the first time, when I finally got boobs and had to buy bras at Limited Too. It means just as much that you’ve let me help you navigate the good and bad stuff in your life, too. I love your heart and your spirit and your never-ending desire to watch Ewan McGregor movies and talk about hobo sandwiches from summer camp.

Jessica. Thank you for driving all the way to Brooklyn just to eat pizza with me. I don’t know how we do it, but we come up with a new, gut-splitting inside joke every time we’re together. Reading the titles of all those landscape portraits at three in the morning with a Sean Connery accent was exactly the right proscription to get the healing process started. You and Tyler told me to go on a date with my writing, to fall in love with my writing, and to fuck the shit out of my writing, which made me giggle and feel a thousand times better. You checked up on me the entire drive home, and never let me forget for a minute how awesome a duo Rabbit & Rocketship can be.  You reminded me how good we both are at surviving. I wouldn’t have survived any of it without you.

The James. Thank you for calling me every single night on your drive home from work, even if I was busy and you knew it. The fact that I saw your name pop up on the screen, without fail, night after night, meant more than I can tell you. You sent me that IMDB page for the movie we watched in the hotel room at Disneyworld when we were kids—I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember the title for YEARS, and you did it.You reminded me that I’m more fun when I’m not attached to anyone or anything. You reminded me that I’m happier when I’m free. You bought a plane ticket to come see me the minute that I told you I was sad, and have been counting down the days with me ever since. I can’t wait to see you—nobody can set me up for jokes like you can.

John. Thank you for helping me process everything. You sat with me outside for two hours and let me show you all of my favorite songs. You flew all the way out to New York from Austin just to do yoga in Strawberry Fields with me and those two super friendly dudes for an hour, and kept your zen even when I got lost on the way over and showed up ten minutes late. You’re great for bouncing ideas off of, and instigating movement in the heart for change. I don’t need to tell you that you’re the best listener in the world, because everyone does, but you are.

Eric. Thank you for inviting me to The Pizza Underground show. You have no idea how badly I needed to get out of my apartment. Their incredibly “cheesy” performance reminded me that I have a hundred million pizza-and-music soulmates out there in the world. You bought me beer and waited in line with me for an hour just to get donuts. You shared your new friends and your new home and your new city with me. Everyone I met said, “We heard so many good things about you,” or introduced me to other people as, “basically Eric’s best friend.” I have no idea how you come up with cool things to tell your friends about me, but it made my heart melt. I could watch movies and say snarky things to the screen with you for hours. You always have the right amount of tequila.

Hannah. Thank you for sitting at the bar with me for two hours and letting me talk about myself nonstop. I think I asked a total of two questions about YOU, which must have been incredibly rude and annoying, but you were incredibly gracious and funny and amazing, as usual. You showed up for me even though I’ve been MIA for like, six months, which isn’t something that many people would do. As my first real best friend in New York, you never, ever fail to show me the best time in the world.

Taryn. Thank you for texting me and offering to eat Cinnabon ice cream and drink wine with me.  The snacks are on me as soon as you’re home from one of your many adventures out of town. I can’t wait to re-instate Whitney & Taryn weekends where we marathon hang out at the park and eat brunch and buy infinitely cool matching tank tops.

Dan. Thank you for being my Snack Spirit Guide. Even from halfway across the planet, everything you say makes me snort-laugh whatever I’m eating out my nose. Your List of Fun Things To Do (like watch Almost Famous and read The Princess Bride and eat Cool Ranch Doritos and look forward to watching the chronological edit of Back to the Future) saved me when I didn’t want to move from Rachel’s couch. I would have absolutely cried if I wasn’t laughing so hard picturing you at a Balinese silent-disco.

And to the innumerable amount of friends that I didn’t list by name because I’m approaching 4 pages and that’s just too much to read on the Internet, THANK YOU. Thank you for listening to me whine and telling me jokes and sending me music to listen to. Thank you for being encouraging and reminding me to focus on my work and making pizza topping recommendations based on my moods.

I know everybody says this, but I feel as though I truly have the best friends in the world. I have people in my life that are willing to commute across the country to visit me when I’m not feeling worth visiting. I have people in my life who tell me how great I am when I’m feeling like the biggest fucking loser on the planet. I have people in my life who love me just as much when I refuse to get out of my sweatpants, or eat anything other than whiskey, as they do when I’m functioning normally. And I have no idea why any of you people do it, but I am so very lucky that you do. I can’t repay any of you for the kindness and unconditional love that you’ve shown me. I can really only hope that you know that you all have made the largest possible contributions to the universe just by being the people you are.

There were a lot of times in the past few weeks when I wanted very, very badly to explode into sub-atomic particles and move to a different state and throw away my phone and my computer and live with the bears on the Pacific Crest Trail or in Alaska or somewhere that no one could find me. There were a lot of times where I wanted to rip out my stomach to keep it from hurting, where I wanted to hibernate in my shitty apartment and call the HR department at work and tell them I died. There were a lot of times when I wanted to just listen to Elliott Smith on a loop and try to find a way out of my sadness with more sadness, where I wanted to be somebody, anybody else for just five minutes so that I wouldn’t feel like this.

There were a lot of times when I wanted to just fucking fall apart.

And none of you let me.

WildThing.

This time, I say, I will let you go. Like the very last pages in my favorite childhood book, the one

with all the monsters. Wild Things, they’re called. You called me that once, too.  I will gnash my terrible teeth and roar my terrible roar and roll my terrible eyes, and you will get in your boat and wave goodbye.

That’s okay. I’ve got the whole world inside my body. My belly is the mountains that line the coast in California. My legs are the sections of I-35 freeway that try to run away to Austin or Dallas, but always stop in Waco to breathe. My hands are still wrapped around that mugger’s skinny elbow on the subway in Barcelona. I was so proud of myself that day. My lungs are the windowsill on the bar below my apartment where I suck down free cigarettes with a bouncer named Lenny. My lips are wrapped around endless ice cream cones in freezing London, sometimes kissing strangers in twin-sized beds.

The things I like best about myself are that I have my grandmother’s smile and I always survive.

I wish I could tell you that the girl ripping holes like mouse bites in the front of your t-shirt isn’t me. That the girl running hard on the burning asphalt under the summer moon isn’t me either. That the girl who makes sounds like a goose with broken vocal cords isn’t crying hard enough to illicit such a noise. That those scratch marks on your wrist when I wouldn’t let you go weren’t made accidentally by my manicure.

At least Bruce Banner had the sense to hide away where no one could find him. At least Bukowski kept himself locked in a post office for years. At least Carrie Fischer subjected her memories to ECT.

What do I have?

I have a shiny, fleeting thing, like Daisy Buchanan right before she hits Myrtle with her car. Like Holly Golightly after she applies a fresh coat of lipstick and before she throws Cat out of the taxi. Like Clementine Kruczynski with her Blue Ruin hair before she drinks all that whiskey.

I need to leave you because you don’t know how to stay.

At least, not with a girl like me, anyway.

Nerd.

I wish I could go back in time and tell 10-year-old-me that someday, she would be making a living by reading books all week so that she could buy more books to read on the weekends. I wish I could tell her that 13 years from the time she felt like a loser for coming in second-to-last-place during the mile run in PE, she'd be sitting in a cafe in New York reading and some dude would come up and say, un-sarcastically, "I really like your Han Solo shirt."

I wish I could tell her that she will never be cool, but that someday, it won't matter. That the world is full of nerds and geeks and dweebs and losers, only none of them are really losers at all. That Mia Thermopolis and Wilma Sturtz and Violet Baudelaire and Hermione Granger didn't get to where they are by being pretty or cool. That there are more important things than being pretty or cool, like being smart or interesting or funny or brave. That surviving a lot of years of being not-liked for arbitrary reasons gives you practice on how to treat others.

That one day, you will do things by yourself, like eat breakfast and read books and do yoga, because you want to, not because you have to. That you will tell people, "I LIKE STAR WARS AND I'VE READ THE FIRST HARRY POTTER BOOK 17 TIMES," and no one will laugh or trip you or try to kick the soccer ball into your stomach during recess. (Mostly because you don't have recess, the only real disappointment so far in growing up.)

That someone might even respond, “Me too,” a phrase you never knew existed until you got a little older. Me too. It will be the most beautiful phrase in the English language, because it will mean that you have friends.

You will have friends who like you whether or not you're wearing glasses, that will still invite you for sleepovers even though your teeth aren't straight. You will have friends that will not call you names, because people don’t call other people names when they get older. And if they do, they are not met with high-fives or invites to play on the Varsity volleyball team, I promise.

When you grow up, you will find out that people are mean for very different reasons. Kids are mean because they have so many feelings in their tiny little bodies that they don’t quite know how to express just yet. Adults are mean only when they are scared or hurting. You will learn this, and you will not judge so harshly the popular girls. You will make friends with the popular girls, and sometimes they will laugh at your jokes, and sometimes they will not, and that is okay.

You will date boys who are both popular and not popular and eventually there will be no difference. Eventually, you will not be able to tell if they were picked first or last in gym class, because eventually, that stuff won’t come up in conversation. Instead, you’ll talk about movies and books and artists and they will teach you things and you will teach them things and it won’t matter that you ate lunch alone every day back then. It really won’t.

One day, your heart will hurt because you have traveled and lived in so many different places, not because you feel the crushing weight of being the only 8-year-old with purple-and-steel headgear at a birthday party. You will love so many people in so many far away places, and they will love you back. You’ll meet other girls who are kind and funny and smart and interesting and you will miss them when you move to New York. You will meet boys who kiss your freckles and tell you that the scar on your leg from summer camp is cool. You will meet all kinds of people, and you will not be alone.

So keep reading those books, 10-year-old me. Keep memorizing Return of the Jedi, and practically move into Barnes & Noble. Keep reading books where the women are strong and brainy, and keep reading books that encourage you to solve mysteries and take train rides and explore other places. Keep reading books where people overdose on drugs, where people fall in love, where people hurt each other and where people listen to good music. Keep reading memoirs and sci-fi and fantasy and fiction and don’t pay attention to the kid pulling your pigtails or calling you, “weirdo.”

You will always do that nervous talking thing when you meet new people. You will always hate the gym. You will always love stories. You will always prefer the company of dogs over the company of actual people. You will still ruffle the back pages of your book before turning the page, and you will still eat a whole bag of Goldfish every 10 chapters. You will still be weird. You will still be kind of a nerd. You will never, ever, ever be cool. You will never be popular or "hot" or the life of the party. 

But someday, you will be me. And someday, you will really, really like that.

Tired.

I am tired of being the victim, and not the victim all at the same time. I’m tired of having “daddy issues” and not quite understanding what that means. I’m tired of being a writer who isn’t famous for my work. I’m tired of being a spoiled, bratty, white bitch. I’m tired of knowing and understanding and not knowing or understanding anything at the same time. 

I’m tired of men. I’m tired of men who say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not the girl I fell in love with.” I was never the girl you fell in love with. I have been the same person since I was thirteen years old, albeit a college degree and knowing how to pay my electricity bill, and I will not apologize for that. I am tired of men who say, “You’re crazy,” I’m tired of men who say, “Your body is mine, I own you.” I’m tired of knowing that nothing I say or do can explain myself. Because I’m just wrong. We all are.

I am twenty three years old. Do you know what that means? To a geriatric someone, that means that you have years and years of life ahead of you. To a real, true, twenty-something, that means that all of your friends are sending out wedding invites via some social media platform that you don’t quite understand, and you are powerless to stop it. It means drinking three beers and watching girls you went to pre-school with say, “I do.” It means being a failure, and I will not apologize for it.

I am tired of women. I’m tired of my mother saying that I don’t look good in glasses, or that I’m too fat. I’m tired of girls who undermine you at work, throw you under the bus during a group project, and make you feel dumb. I am tired of the Gatsby girls. You know the ones. The ones who are beautiful, little fools and know it. You know what the difference is? They convince people that they are not crazy, and then when the moment is right, they prove that they are. The truth is, that all women are crazy. All men are crazy. We’re all going crazy.

Because this thing, this life that we experience, is hard. And I’m not talking about AP Government during senior year of high school hard. I’m talking real, true-blue difficult. The kind of rough, rough, roughness that makes you listen to Poke by Frightened Rabbit on repeat four times in the shower and your roommate pretends not to notice.

Poke out my iris / Why can’t I cry about this?  / Maybe there is something that you know that I don’t.

There is something that you know that I don’t. There must be, or I wouldn’t feel this way. Tell me how you keep a boyfriend, a fiancé, a husband for five years without screaming “I HATE YOUR GUTS” on the streets of Manhattan, even once. Tell me how you get ahead in your career with your brown sugar and peaches. Tell me how you got through college without a panic attack. Tell me how you survived.

Because the truth is, I’m not sure that any of us survived, past tense. I think we’re all still surviving. We’re surviving parents from a generation where you were “special” if you went to college, when merely attending classes at a university earned you enough merit to get a job that would support your family. We’re surviving centuries of misogyny and misandry, decades of hating one another for our sexual orientations and genders and the colors of our skins and the sizes of our thigh gaps. We’re surviving laziness. We’re surviving the comment sections on blogs and Seamless coupons and 24 hours of Netflix a day. We’re surviving unemployment and underemployment and we’re all spoiled brats because of it. None of us are checking our privilege properly. None of us are addicted to the right things. None of us are the voices of our generation, because really, who has a true voice today? You? Because you write on the Internet and produce television shows and think that you’re special? No. Not you. And not me. And I won’t apologize for it.  

I’m tired of falling in love. I’m tired of love not being enough. I’m tired of girls talking behind my back because I’m a nerd. I’m tired of not being able to afford my rent. I’m tired of pizza making me fat. I’m tired of fighting and fighting and reading hundreds of articles that say the same thing, and I’m tired of nothing making a difference. I’m tired of Social Distortion being right.

Well, it’s been 10 years and a thousand tears / And look at the mess I’m in / A broken nose and a broken heart / An empty bottle of gin.

I’m tired of arguing with my boyfriend when we both know we love each other. I’m tired of going to yoga classes when I know they don’t calm me down. I’m tired of having a job when I just want to drink whiskey and be a writer. I’m tired of having a life when I just want to drink whiskey and be a bad person. I’m tired of software upgrades and Justin Beiber and having all the people that I love live too far away. I’m tired of missing my parents and my dogs. I’m tired of taking a Xanax at every family holiday, I’m tired of 80’s movies that promised us we would all be okay by now.

But if you’re tired like me, keep fighting. And please, don’t apologize for that. I’ve heard it gets better. Maybe.

Girls.

Men will always leave me

For simpler girls

Girls whose last names

They do not need to know.

Girls who are pretty and dumb

Girls from good families

That fuck

Like they’re not.

Girls with nice dresses

Girls who sleep through the night

And don’t ask you

For coffee.

You will leave me, you know.

And find a girl

Who doesn’t hate her mother

And doesn’t remind you of yours.

You’ll find a girl who drinks,

But not too much

Curses,

But not too much

Talks,

But not too much.

You’ll find a girl who

Eats better than I do

A girl who doesn’t think

Ice cream and whiskey

Or nothing at all

Is a meal.

But you won’t find a girl

As exciting

Or interesting

Because even when I’m dangerous,

It’s still an adventure.

At least
I have that going for me.

Disclaimer, Round 2

I feel as though I have to post this, in light of some recent conversations with the people in my life that I have written about.

Being a writer is a tough, tough thing. For starters, there are a million words and sentences bouncing around in my head. I speak too much. I don't speak in short enough sentences. Employers hate this, my parents hate it even more. Ex-boyfriends probably hate it the most. I talk too much, I write too much, I reveal too much. I am too much.

It is also difficult to navigate the grey areas: There's a fine line between writing about heartbreak and talking shit about your ex. It isn't easy to write about your family without revealing any skeletons in the closet. You can't possibly describe the worst, lowest moment of your career without making yourself look like a jackass.

If you want to write, and really, really write, you have to be honest. You don't have to be mean or purposefully negative, but you do have to be honest.

If every writer refused to tell a story because it would make another person look bad, or hurt that person, we wouldn't have stories. We wouldn't have A Million Little Pieces or Wild or Wishful Drinking. Without Darth Vader, there is no Star Wars. And that's something that I'm sure none of us could live without.

Therefore:

- I do not apologize for the things that I have written about. They are stories that are important to me. I would like to preserve my right to free speech.

- I do not aim to vilify ANYONE in any of these stories. I do not mean to martyr myself either. If those things happen, it is completely unintentional. I promise. I'm not here to out you as an asshole to your mom and our 3 mutual friends on Facebook.

- I have written stories about men that I have dated, former employers & coworkers, and my own family. I've also written shitty listicles that mean nothing to me, and those aren't the pieces that I'm proud of. I am proud of the pieces where I feel that I am being honest and intentional.

- I also recognize that I am no where near as popular, talented, or publicized as James Frey, and that it is a little pretentious to write my own Oprah interview (minus Oprah) about this. I am small time. I have 21 blog followers. I don't pretend for a minute that anything that I'm saying matters to anyone else in the grand scheme of things. If the world was going to explode and the public had to vote which important stories to bury in a steel time capsule for future generations, none of those picked would be links to my posts on Thought Catalog.

All of this being said, thank you for reading. Truly. It means the world to me.

Adiós

I don’t think its fair. You got to say goodbye once, 7 months ago. You packed up your stuff over the course of two days and drove until you got someplace where it was finally safe, a place where I wasn’t running down the street screaming and you weren’t convincing me to eat like a human and shave my legs.

It wasn’t like that for me. For me, there was that first night, where we sat next to each other at that bar on the Lower East Side and you drank pickle back whiskey shots and I picked at my salad and cried and the waiter looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care because I loved you and you were leaving me first thing in the morning. Then, there was the next day, when I thought that maybe if I walked you to the bus station, I could convince you not to go. I didn’t think about how it would feel to walk back to our half-empty apartment alone. I didn’t think about what would happen if you said no.

There was also the following week, when you came back to get the things you had forgotten, like your chef’s knife and your school books, and you took me to a Thai restaurant and said that you didn’t think that I was smart enough. I cried into my noodles and we went home together and I felt so far away from you in our bed, two inches apart.

And then there was the time that I texted you to see if you still had my beach towel and you told me, plainly, that you didn’t love me anymore and I went outside and smoked exactly three cigarettes and called Kati who called you a robot and deleted you on Facebook and told me that I was the one who had made you cool in the first place. I invited you to dinners and parties and suddenly, you were best friends with all of my friends and writing me poems in San Francisco.  I liked the version of you that wasn’t the one where I found you at your grandmother’s apartment and there were bottles on the coffee table and everything was sticky and the curtains were black.

I said goodbye to you again when I met someone else and asked him to stay far away from me and he responded, “Why? Are you going to explode into sub-atomic particles?” and told him I thought that I might.  We listened to folk music, the sad kind, and I thought about how you never let me do that, not even when we were young, driving across the country in a dusty Ford Explorer full of heartbreak and illegal New Mexican fireworks. Instead, we listened to the Clash and the Specials and now I can’t stop crying when I hear Israelites by Desmond Dekker.

I said goodbye to you again when I realized that you had never asked me to be your friend. I said goodbye when I told you that my new apartment was above Kalustyans, that spice shop where you used to buy me peri peri sauce, and you never responded. I said goodbye when I packed up all of my shit to move out of our old apartment, finally, and found a giant stack of your paystubs from when you were a chef at that Balinese restaurant in Greenpoint. Remember that? You would bring me home black rice ice cream that would half-melt on the G train and then you’d hug me for ten whole minutes when you walked in the doorway because I was the best part of your day, and we were in love. You’d get mad at me for cleaning the apartment because you wanted to lie in bed and watch How I Met Your Mother and I wanted the place to be nice for you when you got home. You didn’t care if your shirts were folded, or if the ring inside the tub had been scrubbed away. You wanted me. 

Me, even though I only made $200 a week wrangling tourists at a late night talk show, me, even though I couldn’t stop crying for months or get out of bed, me, even though I either ate ice cream sandwiches or absolutely nothing at all for days. Me.

I said goodbye to you last Sunday when I went back to the old apartment to clean before the inspection. I scrubbed the walls with shaving cream and a Magic Eraser and washed away the time you came home from that WWII re-enactment and left your boots leaning against the side of the wall for too long, and the time that you accidentally sprayed the kitchen with Sriracha, and the time when we had everyone over for Passover and you invited that girl that you met at the airport and I was so mad that I wanted to cry, but instead I spilled wine and it seeped into the floorboards. I scrubbed away the ashes from the cigarettes I smoked by the open window for weeks after you left, the tops of my shelves where your foreign spices and weird noodles sat, the inside of my heart, and the outside of my stomach lining. I cleaned and I scrubbed and I bleached and I scoured until I couldn’t find you in the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the air vents. I cleaned until I couldn’t feel you at all anymore.

And then I went and got a manicure. I picked out this gunmetal grey color that I thought would look nice with the pants I had to pick up from the dry cleaners. “Armed and Ready,” said the bottle, and I believed it. And then I said goodbye again, just for good measure, because one more time wouldn’t hurt.

At least not a lot, comparatively speaking.