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.  

Sorry.

You told me not to apologize anymore, but I don’t know what else to say when our old apartment smells like Thai food and cigarettes and you’ve been gone for six months. I don’t know what else to say to make you like me. I want you to like me, maybe not in the Han and Leia kind of way, or in the Jay and Daisy kind of way, but in the Ted and Robin kind of way. You know, where we still care about each other, and you still answer my text messages, but we don’t kiss anymore or go to dinner alone. We could just go to the bar and you’ll buy the drinks because you have a better job, and I’ll talk about how I want to get married someday. Not to you, obviously, but to someone who makes me forget what it was like to wake up alone after you left.

Maybe I’ll snap out of it one day, and I won’t need your friendship to feel whole. I won’t feel like walking on egg shells when I text you, timidly, asking you how to turn on the food processor you left in my kitchen. Maybe I won’t want to cry in a restaurant on the Lower East Side when they play Israelites by Desmond Dekker.  Maybe I won’t need to apologize for wanting to be honest. Maybe I’ll figure out how to stop feeling like the villain and the victim all at once. Maybe I’ll forgive myself for the things that we did to each other without needing to hear you say, “It’s okay.”

The happy ending in all of this is that I’ve actually found someone who doesn’t mind when I want to listen to sad folk tunes and snuggle when it's snowing in Brooklyn. Someone who stays put when I’m crying and wiping snot on the bottom of my Rolling Stones shirt, and probably thinks it’s kind of funny because he hates the Rolling Stones. Someone who hates when I publish stories about ex boyfriends and hates when I compare him to other people like I’m doing right now, but loves going out with me on Fridays and loves the way my hair smells and loves my stupid laugh and loves when I don’t want to make dinner because we both love ordering pizza.

And these things take time, you know. But that is, at least, a start.

FUNemployment

"Are you almost ready to go?"

“Well,” I replied, jamming my laptop into its case along with the little owl-shaped dish where I kept my keys on  my desk. “I just got fired. So we can go NOW.”

“Are you serious? Why?” Hannah asked.

I shrugged. “Let’s get out of here.”

We went to a restaurant, and then a bar, and then another bar where I proceeded to spend the rest of my last week’s pay on Fireball Bombs and shots of Patrón XO Café.

“Unbelievable.”

“That’s retarded.”

“You’re gonna find something better, don’t worry about it.”

I called my parents. They didn’t believe me. My mom cried and my step-dad tried to console both of us with his British accent. 

"Don't worry," he said. "It'll all turn out right in the end." For a second, I wanted to believe him.

I started to dial my ex-boyfriend’s number and changed my mind.

He would only be relieved that his timing was perfect. Who would want to date an unemployed loser like me?

I woke up early on Monday even though I had nowhere to go. I reached for the phone and dialed the number for the New York State Unemployment Department in my pajamas. I fiddled with my hair until Tammy, the operator, picked up.

“I got fired,” I blurted out.

She didn’t care.

“What’s your social? Where were your last five places of employment? Do you know the consequences of a fraudulent report?”

Tammy had Hurricane Sandy victims to worry about. She probably had five mouths to feed at home. She probably hated her job as much as I hated not having a job.

She signed off on a check for $175 every two weeks. It was less than I made working retail three days a week. My stomach flipped over at the thought of hanging my head and asking for my job back as a cashier at Urban Outfitters.

Over the next few weeks, I would wake up and text Hannah and make her perform subtle acts of guerrilla terrorism at the office.

Steal all the string cheese. Hide the mouse pads. Eat all the gluten-free crackers. Take home  the padded manila mailing envelopes. Send.

I had spent the past year trying to figure things out. Trying to plan everything, trying to micromanage, trying to be better than what I thought I could be. I juggled school and an internship and my impending graduation. I got a job that paid nothing, so I got a second job on top of that. I paid my dues. I started at the bottom. I worked 13-hour days and I gave up eating food and sleeping and seeing my boyfriend. And then, my boyfriend left me. And my boss let me go. And for the first time in thirteen months, I had no idea what the next move was.

I watched Mulan one night as a part of one of my Netflix binges. 

"Be a man," they told her, and she climbed to the top of that wooden post with weights around her wrists faster than anybody else. Hadn't I tried that? Hadn't I?

I applied for ten jobs a day, everyday, but nobody bit.

“I’ll pass your resume around at work to see if anybody is hiring,” my friend Rachel offered over our sixth grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-Intervention-marathon date that week.

I networked with everyone I wasn’t too embarrassed to tell what happened. I was terrified to see half of the people I was friends with, because I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want to hear them say, “I told you that you weren’t cut out for this.” I didn’t want to not-hear the things they would say when I left the room.

I stopped calling my parents and my friends from back home because I didn’t want to have to lie to them and tell them I was okay. I was only okay when I was distracting myself long enough to forget about my dwindling bank account. I was forced to grit my teeth and withdraw from my savings when I hit $64 after buying a bagel for breakfast at the deli counter below my $2400-a-month apartment. I felt like there were hundreds of people rooting for me to become a comedienne or a writer or SOMETHING back in Texas and California, and I had failed all of them. 

I wanted to call my University and tell them that with all of their tests and pop quizzes and attendance policies, they didn't prepare me for this. I wanted to blame my parents for giving me everything and not teaching me how to live without a paycheck. I wanted to get in everyone's face who had ever believed in me and say, "YOU WERE WRONG. I'M NOT ANY OF THOSE THINGS. WHY DIDN'T YOU SUPPORT ME LESS SO THAT IF I FAILED IT WOULDN'T BE A BIG DEALl?!" But I didn't. 

Instead, I let Eric come down from Philadelphia and buy me drinks. I helped Rachel move into her new apartment. I started taking up Clay and Hannah's invitations to re-join the living. I listened to my step-dad, and I tried to breathe a little deeper every time I inhaled. It wasn't always perfect, but I tried. 

And then Max started taking me on adventures, each one grander and crazier than the next. He described himself as an imaginary friend, and he was. He had a personality like Iron Man on sixteen cups of coffee, which he always drank black.

“Maybe I could be a janitor?” I asked him half-heartedly in line at Shake Shack for the fifth time that week. “Or a stripper. Or a bartender. Or one of those sex-hotline operators.”

“You’re a terrible dancer,” he said. “And you’re being ridiculous anyway. Stop being so cranky.”

We went to the Natural History Museum and climbed inside a giant replica of a whale’s heart. I folded my legs Indian style like I did when I was small, and listened to the rhythmic thud of the blue whale’s heartbeat until a guard asked us to leave. We sprinted home to grab blankets and snacks and stretched out in Central Park to watch the Shining with five hundred other New Yorkers in the summer heat. We devoured hot dogs and walked around the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center. He kissed me on 72^nd Street and Columbus Avenue with a mouthful of Grey’s Papaya, surrounded by rats.

He took me to bars and parties and museums where we drank too much and stayed out too late. We bought finger puppets at the Chelsea Market and sang the White Stripes at karaoke. We wrote postcards to our parents from Jupiter and Pluto at a physics conference led by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s students at a bar in Brooklyn. I sloshed my way back to his apartment, babbling about molecules and atom expansion and dwarf stars and Mercury in Retrograde, and he laughed and helped me order a pizza on Seamless. 

We ate coffee ice cream and watched documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle and meth addiction in Wyoming and whether or not Stanley Kubric directed the moon landing. He introduced me to the film Road House with Patrick Swayze and I think I found god. We bought coloring books with his discount at the MoMA after giving more creative titles to all the paintings in the newly-opened Magritte exhibit. We spent hours walking up and down the length of Manhattan, making fun of tourists and joking about Paul Shaffer’s sunglasses.

I still had tiny explosions of panic, usually when I was alone. I saw my bank account drop again, this time to 58 cents, and I cried in the Staples Print / Copy Center where I had ironically just spent my last pennies printing copies of my resume that I was sure no one would ever see. I ate leftover Thai take out and watched Eternal Sunshine on repeat. I read every Clementine von Radics poem I could find and had to physically restrain myself from copy & pasting each and every one of them into an email to every guy who had broken my heart in the past five years. I would forget to eat, and then I would eat five cupcakes in a row from Sprinkles to counter-balance it. I tried to hide the crazy from Max and all of the people I interacted with by telling really bad I-just-got-fired jokes. I dubbed this period in my life “FUN-employment” and pretended to be having the time of my life running around New York City, watching the Statue of Liberty light her torch from a mini-golf course in Battery Park, or scoring free-tickets to see the xx play at Radio City Music Hall without any means of supporting myself. I loved every single minute of free time, but I was also completely frozen with panic.

One night, Max and I ventured down to Williamsburg to watch Goldfinger with a live band playing the James Bond intro music along with the film. We ate hipster food sold in tiny carts along the outskirts of the industrial park, like Honey Buttermilk Biscuit ice cream and popcorn drizzled with lime and cotija cheese. I stuck a temporary tattoo to my upper arm and drank Brooklyn Summer Lager beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in the moonlight. Afterward, we walked around until we found a bar that served garlic mashed potatoes and Shiner Bock in cans so that I could show off the Russian fur trader cape I had purchased last year at the Brooklyn Flea.

Somewhere between the strung up Christmas lights that read “Save Domino” on the side of the old sugar factory building and the Bedford L train, I started freaking out. My heart rate increased to fifty times the BPM of the blue whale’s heart at the museum. I couldn’t breathe. My fingernails were digging into the palms of my hands and I wanted my black flats from Target to hold me to the sidewalk, but I didn’t know if they could.  

“I’m a mess,” I said simply.

“I know,” he replied.

But then, something really rare and really beautiful happened. Something that hardly ever happens on the subway in Manhattan or in Brooklyn or in Queens. A tiny miracle that only graces the broken New Yorker in their hour of need; the New Yorker who moved from another city to follow their dreams, only to end up dejected and heartbroken, the New Yorker who was born here and waited for decades to find out if this is where they’re meant to be, the New Yorker who visits and falls in love with the place and is searching for a sign that they should stay.

We descended into the nearly deserted subway, and suddenly I felt the roof open up and the floor fall away and a guy in a beat-up American Apparel sweatshirt began playing the first few chords of Blackbird by the Beatles, my absolute favorite song.

And that’s when I fell in love with New York City for the very first time, amongst the giant subway rats on the tracks, and the homeless people sleeping on the stairs, and the dirty air rushing past us in the wake of a Brooklyn-bound train, and a skinny little hipster singing the only words that my heart needed to hear: 

All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to be free.