An imaginary conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel...

I "get" difficult women. I know a lot of them. I've worked for some and am related to several. I am one. I appreciate the stick-to-her-guns fuck you mentality of not caring (at least, appearing not to care) about what people think about you/her/us.

I read Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir, Prozac Nation, when it came out. I was in college. It spoke to me. I even saw the movie. It didn't speak to me. In the late 90s, I (still in college) read Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. You probably heard me cheering about it at some point. I read her second memoir, this one on addiction, a few years ago. I don't remember a lot about it, but I know I identified on some level. I've never met Lizzie (but in my mind I call her Lizzie because I follow her on Twitter and that's what she calls herself and I think if we met in person she'd be cool about it), but in the past couple of years - since she's popped up again writing pieces for The Guardian and New York Magazine - I've been paying a little more attention. She seemed to drop off pop culture's radar for a bit, and I had the sense that she had gone through something similar to my own (hate to call it mid-life because I know I'll live past 80) crisis. A loss of voice. And these pieces, varied as they were, attempts to find her voice again. Kind of like I've been doing for a while now. Except a lot more public. And with comments. On the internet. It feels like an odd question to ask about someone who wrote a book in praise of difficult women, but I also wondered why all the hating on Lizzie?

She's a little bit older than I am, but I consider her a sort of contemporary. And when I read her most recent piece in The Atlantic, "I Refuse to be a Grownup," I promised myself I wouldn't read the comments. Then I read the comments, or the first 20 or so. I wished I knew her in real life so I could tell her that she's doing the right thing, this writing she's doing to get her voice back. And this is the most "back" I've seen her since the 90s.

If you know me personally, you probably know that I rehearse conversations in my head (and come on, you do too, right?). On my way home from work, during that cursed/blessed worst Austin traffic drive time, I had one with Lizzie. It went something like this:

Me: Hey, so good on you for the Atlantic piece. I hope you didn't read the comments.
Lizzie: (leaves her sunglasses on, which is fine because I am kind of the sophomore to her senior in this scenario) Nope.
Me: I mean, I don't know who has time...but the one from the "TL:DR what's the point?" guy...he didn't even read...
Lizzie: I don't read the comments. I don't care what people think.
Me: Hey, that's really great...so, you of you. There was that one "psychologist" who comment-diagnosed you with narcissistic personality disorder and that isn't even a thing anymore; it's not even in the latest DSM...
Lizzie: (icy silence)
Me: I wanted to tell you that I get it. I hate that you have to see criticism all over the freaking internet when you're just being honest, I mean who isn't a narcissist? What's wrong with not wanting to grow up? For those of us who choose not to get married, not to have kids, to remain emotionally...um, I want to say... immature? Why do people care so much?
Lizzie: I don't. So I wouldn't know.
Me: I wanted to say that I'm on your side. Write all the crazy. Just write. Let the haters hate and do it anyway, even if it's just for lines like "I wish people were judging each other a great deal more, and more carefully, but they are not. Knowing this, I have no trouble being myself. It works well. I will die screaming." BECAUSE ME TOO, LIZZIE, ME TOO.
Lizzie: Calm down. (exhales vapor from her e-cig)
Me: OK, so I'll let you go, but just one more...
Lizzie: No.
Me: DidyoutotallyfreakoutthatChristinaRicciplayedyouinthemoviebecauseherforeheadOMGherforehead...
Lizzie: No.

And that was it. She probably wouldn't like me in person. Nor should she. I wanted to tell her about that one time I was on Prozac because my best friend died when I was 23 but it didn't work and how my mom is a therapist and told me the worst thing with mental health issues is to "be in the system" so I always made sure I saw private shrinks, off insurance, sometimes under assumed names, and I think talk therapy is overrated and that most people think I'm younger than I really am too because I don't really have responsibilities, but I do have one cat and one dog just like she does but the cat has hated me for 14 years now and also sometimes I am ridiculous too. When people grossly underestimate my age, I assume it's not based on my appearance, but on my behavior. I don't behave like a person who has the weight of other people's problems on top of my own, rather, I behave like a person who thinks her problems are the only important ones. And, BAM!, right back to narcissism.

Hate her or don't. Hate me or don't. I have had worry. I have had grief. I have had despair. None of these things permanently damaged me. Not even a line on my forehead (yet, but totally fine when it does happen, because it will). So to the critics, to the commenters and trolls, to anyone who cannot follow her stream of consciousness while she reaches for the voice she might think she lost by detouring to law school and relationships and doing things other than writing - pay attention. You're not. She is. And she says it better than I:

"Nothing is more bracing than not being concerned about what other people think. I have no idea why anyone cares. Trust me: No one is looking. I know: I am looking. People are self-involved."

p.s. If you don't know who Elizabeth Wurtzel is or if you were in a coma in the 90s, here are all the Tumblr posts in the world tagged with her name. Enjoy.

Inspiration here, there, everywhere...

While I love my Kindle (the instant gratification got me), I'm still on the fence about buying books. When I moved to Austin, I culled my five bookshelves down to one bookshelf full of favorites and first editions. I love to run my hands along the spines, turning them over in my hands, flipping through paper pages and reading my notes in the margins (yes, I like to underline things and write in my books). Sure, I can keep thousands at my fingertips with my Kindle Fire, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of these last shelves, these paper memories, these literary giants that sit side-by-side in tidy rows. Vonnegut lives here. Hemingway lives here. O'Connor lives and lives and lives again.

I stumbled across this Etsy shop recently and fell in love with the inspired illustrations with quotes from literary greats. I want to buy them all, hang them so they can be seen from where I work most often (living room, couch, laptop).

These two are my favorites, but it was so hard to choose. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes my heart beat faster. T.S. Eliot makes me want to spill all of my secrets. Jane Austen makes me want to write letters that I'll never send.

I went to Barnes & Noble earlier this week with a friend and we ended up sitting on the floor of an aisle in fiction, leafing through paperbacks (even as we looked up e-books on our phones), pulling books from the shelves based on covers alone, putting our faces close to the open pages and inhaling the paper and ink and wondering if we're going to be the last generation who knows what book stores smell like. Will we someday try to describe it to younger people, our reading glasses perched on noses twitching as we struggle to bring the sense memories back, wishing we would have bottled it way back when, closing our eyes as we remember what it felt like to turn the paper pages? I think yes. We writers love our books. We writers are going to have to be curators of paper museums, preservationists of ink smudges, storytellers of the printed word.

I'll take "things that need updating" for $500...

New health insurance that includes vision coverage = new glasses (to make me feel better about the fact that my vision changed for the first time in six years and I have to get new lenses and I'm probably like a month away from needing reading glasses which makes me feel like young me is trapped in a me that is aging and that makes me feel anxious). So I'm getting these cool-ass frames.


Super cute and I can't wait until they're done (and not just because I have daily eye strain). Blink blink.

So hearing is the next thing to go?

Time flies, which means I am old...

I can't shake a story I heard on NPR's "All Things Considered" last week by one of my favorite reporters, Robert Krulwich (his stories are always fascinating). It isn't the first time someone has asked the question, "Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?" but it is one of the best explanations I've heard. Everything is new when you're young. When you're older, it isn't. There are a few other theories in the story, but the bottom line is that it's true. I left Charleston more than a month ago, I've been living and working in Austin for over a month - and that month has gone by like a DAY.

Sort of. There have been wonderful moments, wheeling a cart through a grocery store or eating lunch at a great Tex Mex place downtown (Guero's last week - yum), when it has occurred to me that I will not run into a single person I know. I don't have to be on guard all the time. I can turn the bitch alert off and not even worry about it. I'm not talking about the wonderful friends and family and other people I miss in Charleston. I'm talking about the "didn't you used to be Kelly Love Johnson" gossipy bitches, the "hey can I pick your brain over lunch" mooches, the "bless your heart, are you ill?" fake people (I've been asked that question when I went out without makeup in Charleston). There is an amazing freedom in being in a city where no-one knows you, where you can leave the house wearing tights, boots, a ripped Depeche Mode t-shirt, sunglasses, and hair like a rat's nest and no one will look at you twice. Or even once. There's no-one here to ask me why I'm no longer writing for/working for the magazine I used to work for. I can be whoever I want to be - who I really am, once I find out who that is.

But I've also been working, so time has flown by. I even began to wonder why my days seemed so short, why I was tired so early (only an hour time difference, folks), and even while writing this, wondering why I haven't been able to write a damn word in my own voice. Until now.

Last year was hard, for me and many people I know for a variety of reasons. The economy, layoffs, the unemployment rate in South Carolina. For me, 2009 will always be "the bad year" when I lost my SELF. I forgot who I was. I stopped believing in myself. I lost faith in humanity, in people I once cared about, and in me. I was my own worst enemy - and a dangerous one. I had to pick up and move to another city halfway across the country to get enough perspective to realize how bad things were. Mostly because I'm really good at pretending things are OK when they're not.

Last year, because it was full of "novelty" for me, so to speak - I've never experienced some of the emotions, the personal crises, and the joylessness that I felt then - made my days, weeks, and months feel like a fucking eternity. I was so focused on survival that I stopped having fun. Time did not fly in 2009.

But it is now. Which means I have perspective. It also means that I'm back. Oh, and I'm old.