There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love...”

I decided to break the seal on a box of notebooks I wrote when I was in my early 20s (that I had packed and taped up in 1996). Reading my 22-year-old self fervently swear that she’ll never fall in love again makes me feel sad, mostly because she didn’t. Almost, but not really.

At 22, I was intensely passionate about many things—not eating red meat (the hormones! The red dye!), writing, feminism, literature (I had just discovered Anais Nin and Henry Miller, if that tells you anything), and love (again, the hormones!). I believed everyone had a soul mate just waiting for them out there in the world, and it was up to me to find him. Over a five year period, I recorded the turbulence of my love life in painstaking detail on page after page. I wrote about infatuations, crushes, obsessions, attractions, and love. Every time, it was the “real thing.” And every time, passion became my poison.

If these notebooks are an accurate depiction of what my I knew then, I can say I have learned a few things in years since. I no longer believe that everyone has one soul mate; I think we have many, and that people are drawn together by fate and circumstance. I no longer believe that such thing as an easy relationship exists or that the level of difficulty has anything to do with love.

I’ve also learned how to protect myself. After putting the pieces of a broken heart haphazardly back together time after time, I decided that spending the rest of my life shielding a heart of glass wouldn’t be a wise move. And I stopped letting other people in. 

Suppose love came knocking on your door. Would you turn it away with a “sorry, all stocked up on that here?” Pretend like you weren’t home? Chase it down the street with a baseball bat? Or would you open the door, smile, and thank it for being so punctual?

What I did was design a complicated mess of a barricade, complete with traps, skill tests, checklists, pulleys, ropes and, I think at one point, even a moat. If someone wanted in, he’d have to run the gauntlet, suffer the proving ground, navigate the emotional land mines, and pass every test. Should he make it through unscathed, I’d make certain he was sorry he even tried.

What I got for my efforts was a series of superficial relationships that never developed any depth or longevity. Or intensity. Or passion. And when they ended, I felt no more than a twinge of regret…a far cry from the anguish I experienced over breakups in my twenties. My thirties were not as melodramatic, but I sacrificed passion for peace.

I am not certain what I expected to find by reading the angst-ridden messages from my 22-year-old self. I hoped to discover that I am better off now than I was then, but I don’t think that’s true. I do mean it when I say I am happy being single, but I’m beginning to understand exactly what I’m missing out on by protecting myself so carefully. Without heartbreak, love and passion are watered-down versions of the real thing. Until now, I didn’t even realize that I missed the full-strength version.

There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love.” At its core is an element of letting go, even if you know there is turbulence ahead, that you’re signing up for an emotional roller coaster ride, and that it might end in tears. The only thing gained by crawling into your shell is, well, a really comfortable shell.

I’ll have to find a happy medium between being head over heels and in over my head if I want to experience the kind of intense emotion the 22-year-old me knew all too well. As for the happy ending, just consider me “in production”—I know that this movie won’t have an ending until I find a way to take heart instead of losing it.

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.

Musing on my muse and writing mojo...

I had a period of adjustment after moving to Austin in January during which I couldn't (or wouldn't) write unless it was work-related. I wouldn't even unpack the boxes marked "home office," just set up my home computer on my desk so Time Warner could hook everything up the first week I got here. My notebook from last year lived in my shoulder bag, but I hadn't been able to write anything but "[fill in the blank] suuuucks" for months.

Every time I logged into my blog, I found good reasons not to write anything. I read old blog posts and they either (a) made me sad or (b) reminded me of when I used to be funny. I also read old blog posts that are still up on the site of the magazine I used to work for and they either (a) made me sad or (b) pissed me off. I also read some of my old essays and wondered if I'd ever get my writing mojo back. Did I accidentally kill my muse? Did I drive her away during one of those weeks last year when I repeatedly told her to "fuck off" and wouldn't get off of the couch? Did I forget to bring her with me to Austin? Did she just get sick of me altogether?

It's taken me a few months to realize all of the above is both bullshit and necessary. I needed some "off" time. I just moved halfway across the country, away from my friends and family and the home that I loved. It's been less than four months. What I really needed to do is cut myself some slack. So I did.

I also decided to put away the 2008/2009-barely-written-in Journal-O-Negativity. I went to a great store here in Austin called Wanderland and bought myself a new notebook and some nice pens. Earlier this month, I started from scratch, writing again. Not just writing again, but writing in a notebook. Not just writing in a notebook, but writing every day. I went back to my 15-year-old "inspiration" notebook. I re-read Writing Down the Bones. And I gave my permission to be my 20-something year old writerself, just stepping out into the world of sharing very personal information, understanding that not every sentence I write has to be brilliant, and even if I'm just writing about how I don't feel like writing, just write anyway to get the pen moving.

It worked. A couple of weeks ago, I unpacked my home office boxes. I threw or gave away anything that reminded me of negativity in my past (why did I pack that crap anyway? Bad juju...). I hung up my inspiration board over my desk. I created my writing space. A new writing space, one that makes me happy every morning when I come downstairs and see my little office in the space where most people have a dining room table. I've nearly filled a third of that new notebook I've had for less than three weeks. Is every word brilliant? Absolutely not. Most of it is crap. But I'm writing again, which also means I'm seeing the world in a different way, which also means I know that one's muse never leaves for good. Mine is lurking around here somewhere; I know she's close by.

Because I wanted it to look that way...

I think if you're over 30 and do something different...or, let's say, unnatural...to your hair, people think you're mental.

I am not mental; it's just that my brain won't age with the rest of me. It still thinks we're a teenager. A teenager who likes to f*ck with her hair.

My most recent hair experiment: Dark brown with Manic Panic "Vampire Red" underneath. I won't bore you with how many trips to the stylist this required and how much work it will be to maintain, but I will share some of the comments I've gotten.

My mother: "That looks (pause) interesting. I mean NICE. I meant nice."
My sister: "It must be nice to not have to worry about what people think of you."
My boss: "I liked it better red all over."
My 3-year-old niece: "What's in your hair?"
The guys who moved in my new sofas: "Cool hair."

Here's the thing: I don't want to grow up. I like changing my hair. I don't want to be conventional. I don't care what other people think. Life is too short not to put vegetable dye in your hair.