I heard a piece of disturbing gossip this week, and I've got to say, it upset me.
What happened? Someone mentioned that people were chattering about my piece on being Heathered.
They didn't like it (apparently). It wasn't "fair."
The words "slander" "moral" and "bitter" were thrown around rather liberally (or so I heard).
The issue is that I used full names. I used the first and last names of select individuals to describe exactly what happened to me.
So.
I'd like to share just a few of the comments made by those who were brave enough to share their opinions in a public forum. I won't share their names, however. In this case, I don't see the point. (That's the key, kiddies. The point.)
Opinions regarding first and last names in "Heathered: a high school horror story."
I just went back and read this posting after missing it the first time around. I honestly have chills as it took me back to Grade 11 and the "heathering" in my life that year. I think it is fair to post names in the story. I also hope that these now women have drastically changed for the better but a big part of me has my doubts. I will now pass you the "talking stone" Jen, just try not to trip. :) - JL
Name them all! -CH
I would expect that you're right in speculating that they are worried about facing their own high school stuff. And I think that that is exactly why you were right in using their actual names - the only way to stop the hate is to take the difficult step of facing the ways in which we all have been less than kind. The power in a piece like that is recognizing times in our own lives when we have been on either side. -JR
They hardly sound like the type of people who spent a lot of time on their emotional growth. Truth hurts. I say if you do it then own it. I know a few people in high-school I wronged. If I read a post they wrote on it that named me I'd come right out and apologize. If I felt they weren't representing my truth I'd comment directly. If they don't have the guts to do either then they should just shut their mouths which is ultimately their downfall in the first place. It seems that they haven't changed and therefore you're well rid. Passing the talking stone back to you Jen! Oh maybe they figure they can't talk because they're not holding the stone! - HC
Don't let it get you down. that they're angry shows they see nothing wrong with what happened in the past. Which is more disturbing. - KV
It's fair game. What you have proved is that some people never really grow up or have the maturity to accept that they may have wronged someone. Instead of gossiping, the mature (or brave) thing to do would be to apologize for making you feel the way you did... - RM
Someone needs to be at least a little bit contrary, I think: even as a person who was generally on the receiving end of nightmarish behavior in high school, I should say that I was uncomfortable with the whole full name thing. (If the last ...names were absent, I would be totally comfortable with it.) It was more than a decade ago, too, which is plenty of time for people to change, and is a long enough time that it probably isn't fair to write something that might come up as a Google result *now*. (And so can be read by their employer, significant other, family... kids?) The internet has a way of collapsing the distance of time in a way that makes every story sound and feel immediate, too, and so even explaining that this story is from the previous century can't quite bridge that affective element to it. Anyway, I can see why they might not be happy about it - and why their anger over being outed for something they did as teenagers might outweigh their feelings of stupidity or guilt. - NS
It's worthwhile to note that these gossipers were all people I knew in high school. Not one of them was mentioned in the piece. And not one of them has bothered to comment on it to me directly, here on the blog, on Facebook, via Twitter or even by private email. I suspect they were each feeling guilty about their own complicity in the situation. After all, they were the people laughing in the hallways and doing nothing to help.
Sigh. Even so, because I'm sensitive, their secondhand criticism DID hurt my feelings. I wish I could say it didn't. I'd like to be the sort of person who doesn't care.
But I do. I DO care. I think this kind of thing matters.
That's why I wrote about it in the first place.
I'm not worried about slander/libel or anything like that. (And for the record, those words have specific legal meanings which the gossipers obviously don't understand.)
Confessional writing isn't about bitterness, or being angry, or getting even. It's about insight and growth. And if the piece concerned you, simply because it was honest and because it included names, that's probably because you missed the point.
And you're not alone. So rest easy. I'm not alone either.
Last night, I had a dream about high school. No big deal. Who doesn't dream about school from time to time? It's pretty common.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I've forgotten to graduate and have to go back. Occasionally, I have to sit an exam for a class I never attended. Once in awhile I'm in a school play, and can't remember my lines.
Pretty basic stuff, really.
School dreams are usually about stress.
They suck, but I expect you're used to them.
The dream I had last night was not a school dream in the traditional sense. It was a dream about something that actually happened, something I hadn't thought about in years. A nightmare, really.
It was a dream about being Heathered.
That's how I like to describe what happened to me during my last year of high school. "I was Heathered," I say, laughing. I've never found a better way to explain the systematic destruction of my reputation and social life lead by a small pack of girls who, once upon a time, I considered my closest friends.
We were an unusual group, I suppose. Smart, certainly. Or devoted to seeming so. We were girls who did our homework. Or rather, they were girls who did their homework. I never did my homework. If an assignment wasn't going to be graded, I just didn't see the point. My clique was full of brown-nosers, so I think this reflected badly right from the start, though we all got good grades.
In retrospect, I see how important our image was. We were so modern. So multicultural! So perfectly 1990s. Charoula was the prettiest (and the whitest -- not a coincidence). Sonia was the sweetest. Devyani was the richest (with mixed-race parents, like mine, but much more panache. Hers were famous.) And Lucy was the artsy-est (ironically, I heard she ultimately became some sort of art therapist or counselor in Montreal, which will make you laugh once you get through the story).
I don't know what I was. Mixed race, I suppose. I filled a niche. The first time Lucy visited my home she commented, with some disappointment, on how "normal and Canadian" it was. She expected more "Indian stuff." I felt, at that moment, a slight shame. Though the decor certainly wasn't up to me, I had the sense that I was failing somehow. Failing to be "ethnic enough" to fill the role they'd picked me for.
Anyway. None of that matters, really. What matters is that I made two fundamental mistakes between 1996 and 1997. I got myself a boyfriend and, like an idiot, I fell in love.
Matt was older. Already in university. And though he was friends with my friends, and for a time, we all hung out as a group, he wasn't around in the day to day. And slowly, but surely, the day to day changed.
L to R: Matt, me, Sonia, Lucy, Charoula, Devyani and a perfectly nice person named Kenny
I don't know who said what. I don't know who started which rumour or how they spread. On the surface, at least, nothing was especially wrong. My friends were still my friends, though they stopped calling me, and I found myself left out of plans and conversations more often than not. When I mentioned it (which I did, being unaware of subtlety and unable to read between the lines) the girls said, straight out, that they felt we were "drifting apart." That I "didn't understand" them anymore. That we had "different values."
They were 17 and 18 and had, as people say, "never been kissed." I was 16 and in love with someone I thought I might actually marry. Ultimately, I think that's what it was about. "We just don't have much in common anymore," said Sonia, during one memorable lunch hour. It stung at the time, but I suppose she was right.
And then it got worse.
Somehow, I became the school "slut." There were whispers. An fringe-friend in a different grade said she'd heard something about me "hopping from guy to guy." It made no sense. I was in love! I was more than a year into my relationship. I guess I had too many male friends. (Though no close ones.) I've considered it, and I still don't get what happened, or why. I only know that it did.
I was a slut. I was branded.
Once, walking down the crowded hallway, someone actually coughed the word at me.
"Slut!"
And there was a burst of laughter.
Other things happened as well. The girls -- my friends -- gathered to telephone my boyfriend Matt. They each took a turn on the line. They just wanted to warn him, they said, about me. Hadn't he heard what I was up to? Hadn't he heard who I REALLY was? They didn't want to cause any trouble, or course. But they cared about him, they said. They were calling for his own good.
I was sitting next to him on the sofa when this happened. He covered the mouth piece.
"It's your friends," he said. "You better pick up the extension."
I did. And we spent the next 15 minutes listening to my friends trash talk me.
When the call ended, we hung up and stared at each other.
"What the fuck was that?" he said. I didn't know what to say. I cried, I think. In confusion.
As the year went by and things got worse, I lived increasingly in a state of social fear, sweating constantly and making multiple trips to a little-used washroom in the school basement, where I stuffed my underarms with paper towels in an attempt to keep the stains from my clothes. (I'm sweating right now, actually. I'm sweating just thinking about it.)
We graduated. The girls and I made a show of going to the prom as a group. Matt drove. We were one happy clique.
Summer arrived. I made plans to go to university out of town. I was desperate, for more than one reason, to get away.
Posing, as teenage girls tend to do. L to R: me, Sonia, Charioula, Lucy, Devyani
The whole thing came to a head in the late summer of 1998. The girls invited me to a "group meeting." They called my boyfriend first. Again. Before calling me. They called to ask him to convince me to attend. Like an intervention. Something about a united front.
He refused, of course. And called me immediately. Whatever his faults, he was loyal, which might have been why I was so very taken with him. He urged me not to go, and in retrospect, I can't imagine why I didn't listen. I was angry at that point, I suppose. I didn't want them to think I was afraid. I didn't want to seem weak.
So we went together. We went to a city park, at night, to face a pack of hyenas. They forced us to sit in a circle and produced a "talking stone." ("Please don't speak," said Lucy, in a syrupy-sweet 'I'm so mature' sort of voice, "unless you're holding the stone.") And then they went around the circle and proceeded to tell me that they were kicking me out of the group, and why I was no longer welcome.
To be fair, not all my "friends" were in attendance. Devyani was out of town and missed the whole thing. Sonia, I believe, refused to attend, for which I thought I should be thankful. I noted at the time, and still remember, however, that the telephone call to "warn Matt" had originated from her house, so clearly, she knew what was happening.
Lucy was there, of course (she being the meanest of the group and the one who seemed to hate me the most). I must have done something to deserve it, but I never knew what. Charoula was there as well, along with one other person they'd roped in for support. Charoula, to her credit, seemed embarrassed by the whole thing and didn't say much other than that she didn't have a problem with me and didn't really know why she was there (as if she'd just stumbled upon the meeting, against her will.) It was Lucy who did the talking. But as a group, nonetheless, they were quite the jury. Like something out of a movie, which is why I thought of Heathers.
In the end, I had my say. They finished their spiel, the "talking stone" passed to me (how utterly ridiculous) and I spent a good ten minutes spewing as much venom at them as I could manage on short notice. I didn't let any of them speak again. And at around 11 p.m., I stood up and walked away. And that was it.
I went off to University a week later. I made new friends. I never saw Lucy, Charoula or Sonia again.
Despite all that, believe it or not, I tacked a picture of those girls up on my dorm room wall not two weeks later. A picture of us all together. Smiling. I guess I didn't want to seem like I had no friends back home. Or perhaps I didn't really understand that it was over. I let those girls stare down at me for more than six months before I had the sense to take them down. Pathetic, really.
But none of that equals the most important part of the story. Here is the most important part of the story, the thing that matters most after all this time:
When I walked away from them, that night in the park, I tripped.
I was wearing a pair of high-heeled suede boots (with cut-off jean shorts, thankyouverymuch -- stylish!). And I had been sitting cross-legged in a park for over an hour. One of my legs was asleep. And so, when I stood to walk away, I stumbled, my sleeping leg twisting under me and making a sickening pop. I turned my ankle badly, actually. It hurt like bloody hell.
I didn't look back, but I knew as I limped away that my exit had been ruined slightly. Matt and I spent the rest of the evening soaking my swollen and blackening foot in ice water. It was really glamourous.
Why is the fact that I tripped the most important part of the story? Because years later, I ran into Devyani (the one who'd been out of town for my formal execution) and we rekindled a relationship for a brief time. And, somehow, the Heathering came up. She hadn't been there, but she'd been told about it. And what she said about it amazed me.
"I heard you fell down," she said, with a small giggle.
I heard you fell down.
That's the part of the story she heard. That's the part they remembered! That's the only part, I imagine, they found worth repeating.
Hearing it blew my mind.
I was in a play once. I didn't forget my lines.
I rarely think about high school, if I can help it. It was a long time ago. Onward and upward, right? What does it matter?
I don't think my "friends" were bad people. I think they were teenagers. I think they were prone to pack mentality, and without empathy. Maybe all children are like that. Maybe it's how they survive. I'm sure (I hope) those girls grew up to be perfectly lovely women.
When I woke from my fevered dream of being Heathered, I was sweating. Can you believe that? My nightshirt was soaked around the collar. In my dreams, I've been in car accidents, I've drowned, I've even been shot in the head, but I've never been happier to wake than I was this morning. I feel bouts of childhood nostalgia, but I've never been happier to be in bed beside my partner, with endless work days on the horizon, bills to pay, dishes to wash, laundry to do, and an appointment with my mechanic in the afternoon. I've never been happier to be grown up.
High school is, more often than not, just something we have to make it through.
It's January bloody 17th and I STILL haven't taken down the Christmas tree.
Every time I pass it, it mocks me. And as I live in a small apartment, with an open concept living room/dining room/kitchen, I pass it a lot. I'm in the room with it right now, sitting at my desk by the front windows, and I can see it out of the corner of my left eye. It's just standing there. Mocking me. For being lazy. For failing to acknowledge that the holidays are over. For being, at heart, what I am (a ragamuffin, a slob, a TV watcher, etc.)
It's mocking me because it's January 17th and It's been up since the first week of December. And despite being made of metal and plastic and whatever foul substance they use to simulate pine needles (which may be plastic too, I don't know)... despite that, it knows as well as I do that I have a tendency to let things go.
The Christmas tree is just one example. One manifestation of my many weaknesses. Proof that I need to stay vigilant, lest natural inclination take over and I become what I was meant to be: a lounging, stay-at-home-hobo, shuttling from bed to computer, computer to bed, bed to sofa, television to book, stove to bath to bed with occasional forays to the kitchen to stand in front of the open fridge door stuffing yoghurt into my mouth, hair matted, teeth unbrushed.
December is the darkest month, but January is the coldest. And December is propped up by the holidays, the early evenings hung with twinkle lights, the mornings swaddled in pancakes. January, by contrast, is all winter light and icicles. Snowy mornings and shoveling. It's a time when other people flock to the gym and the After-Xmas sales, buying for their new, resolutioner lives.
I see them huff past me on the sidewalk in their brand new workout wear, and I want to laugh. At the same time, I know they are more virtuous than I am. I'm sure they've taken down their Christmas trees.
January, quite frankly, is an idiot time to make resolutions. If humans were remotely smart, we'd make our resolutions in May, when the weather and the light might be cooperative. But we're not smart. We make our resolutions in December, and fight to keep them in January, when it's cold. When the calendar gives us only Valentine's day to look forward to. A "holiday" that doesn't even come with a respite from work.
On second thought, why shouldn't the Christmas tree stay up? Why shouldn't it twinkle it's way deep into the New Year? Why does it insist on looking so forlorn and out of place? Stupid Christmas tree. Though, I suppose if I lived in a box in the basement, I might not be accommodating either.
Tonight, Nathan and I are going to watch five straight hours of Lost. We're going binge on homemade Indian food, and curl up on the sofa in heavy sweaters. We're going to drink martinis and eat almond cookies for desert. And we might (we MIGHT) even light up the Christmas tree.
When I was 20, ten years ago now, I wrote a poem. It was part of an assignment for a poetry composition class I was taking at Queen's, and it kicked off a little jag of poetry writing that I went through in my early 20s.
Looking back, I think the poem says a lot about what the decade was going to be like for me. It's so very juvenile, so rhyming and earnest. So... heartbreaking in a way.
Ten years ago, I was just out of my first significant relationship and I was having a hard time. The whole decade was hard, in one way or another. Not that a ten year period really means anything. I know that such divisions of time are arbitrary. Nonetheless, ten years feels significant. Nice and round and solid. It feels good to put it behind me.
For Nathan and I, 2011 came in with a whisper. We spent New Year's Even in a small cottage in the Bahamas. I was alseep by 10:30 p.m. I made no resolutions. It was the best start to a new year I think I've ever experienced. A good omen.
That said, I think it's always worthwhile to look back. To constantly drive forward, with no examination of where you've already been, seems like a waste..
With that in mind, I'm going to share my little poem. It was inspired by a novel I read as a young teen - Paula Fox's A Place Apart. (If you haven't read any Fox, you should. Here's a good article about her.) I remember, at 13, being so caught up by a moment in A Place Apart that I held my breath. For minutes. I held it until my heart heart, without even realizing what I was doing. And it was that memory, I think, that made me write this poem
Be kind, blog friends. I know it's bad. I can see my many errors. It was a first effort. And remember, I was still practically a baby.
tierra del fuego
sheets lifted above our heads as we lie in bed and consider the morning
you’re wondering what i’m doing
i’m offering you a dream with my bare feet and our cold sheets, warm now, with you and i inside them
this is our house on Tierra del Fuego where we live, all alone, you and i high, high in the mountains away from everyone
this is our house on Tierra del Fuego where we have a bedroom painted in gold to catch the light of the bold afternoon sun an encompassing auburn brought to life by our walls
this is our house on Tierra del Fuego where we grow vegetables and have enclosed a small cow named Daisy who gives us milk
we have given up meat, which is easier here remember, before? that time that we tried, but weren’t satisfied? and didn’t succeed and you, especially were filled with the need for the taste of blood in your mouth?
this is our house on Tierra del Fuego where we want for nothing because together we make somethingwholly satisfying
later much later thinking about those sheets on our bed, back in place now, i read a little about Tierra del Fuego
the island is cold and the Patagonian Andes are, i’m told, harsh and unwelcoming
Tierra del Fuego is an island that’s vulnerable, exposed to the competing winds of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, bringing nearly constant rainstorms
we had a house on Tierra del Fuego but i’m renting it out because i can’t take the rain anymore, or your snore, or the cold that even the gold of our bedroom isn’t warming and the Yagans of old have left Fireland and the tourists are coming
this was our house on Tierra del Fuego i’ve opened the pen and let Daisy go and if there’s only one thing i want you to know it’s that Tierra del Fuego’s a lie it was always remote and too difficult for us so i’m saying goodbye
on the Isle of Fire, Tierra del Fuego the winds can blow a house down but just so you know, i’m not waiting around i’m burning our house to the ground
I'm sure I must have been, at one time. I must have been unconscious of it, as children are supposed to be.
I just don't remember.
What I do remember is that even when I was too young to think of weighing myself at home, I took note of the weights and measures quoted to my mother by my pediatrician. I worried about them and what they might mean.
At age ten, Grade 5, my doc logged me in at 72 lbs.
"Too much," I thought at the time. 72 lbs was already much too much.
I don't know why this happened to me. I don't know what made me worry.
It is strange... to hold in your head an encyclopedic memory of weight. The numbers are there, but I'm not sure what they mean.
September 14, 1990: 72 lbs. October 22, 1993: 117 lbs. July 17, 1996: 125 lbs. December 25, 1999: 130 lbs. September 1, 2007: 173 lbs.
I remember other people's weights as well. My mother, for example, weighed 78 lbs on her wedding day. She is 5' tall and was living in India at the time. She had Malaria.
My sister, 5'2", dropped down to 90 lbs during the first trimester of her first pregnacy. She had terrible morning sickness.
After my 72 lbs weigh-in, I waited until I was alone in the house and slipped my mother's wedding dress out of her bureau to try it on. It smelled of the Irish Spring soap she keeps unwrapped in the drawers. The buttons wouldn't close.
I have wide shoulders, a broad rib cage and a wide back. Even at my thinnest, I need a bra that's close to 38 inches around. And I've never had Malaria. Nonetheless, I felt like a failure. The fact that the dress didn't fit seemed to say something about me. Something bad.
I stripped it off and went outside to smash rocks with a hammer. I turned stone after stone into piles of glittering grey-blue dust. Then I blew it all away.
High school was... traumatic, as it is for so many of us. I went out for track, my signature sport, but didn't even come close to making the team. Girls built like gazelles seemed to sprint past me in the heats with no effort at all.
I did make the swim team. Just barely. I had no real training, but I liked the water and copied the other girls' smooth strokes.
At practices, I was slotted into the slowest lane with an unfortunate, unpopular girl named Bopinder. As her body brushed past mine in the water, I'd shrink away. As if she might rub off.
Once, in the locker room, a girl talked about her body, her pool-white hand pressed across her flat, speedo-covered stomach. "From the side, I'm perfect," she said, "but from the front... ugh!"
I jumped in, eager to make a friend by way of shared experience. "Me too," I said, "But I'm okay from the front and fat from the side." I demonstrated, twisting to reveal my rounded mid section.
Even Bopinder laughed. It took me ages to understand. Those girls were smarter. They saw it right away. We were all women, all young, but we were not the same.
In those early days of high school I dropped from what I considered a disgusting 125 lbs to a borderline-acceptable 115 lbs in less than three weeks thanks to my first short-term starvation diet and fanatical exercise in the pool. I swam every morning at 6 a.m. I ate celery sticks exclusively, and only when my stomach literally ached with hunger or when I felt too dizzy to stand. At night, my pool-sore arms spazammed and shook.
Besides the celery, after each practice, I'd down a half-litre of Gatorade. The most delicious thing I'd ever tasted.
By November, I'd quit the team. At my first meet, I placed last in the 200 metre butterfly. I didn't really know the stroke. My goggles came off on my dive, scraping over my cheeks. I thought I might drown. By the time I finished, the other girls were already out of the pool.
Looking at myself in the changeroom mirror, I remember thinking that my arms looked muscled and huge. I was built "like a freight train" said my very first boyfriend, also a swimmer. He was paying me a compliment.
In University, I was okay at first. I didn't own a scale. But when I realized I was back up to 130 lbs, I immediately went on something called the "Ultra Fit Diet" -- an idiotic thing that involved drinking protien powder and eating as few as 500 calories a day. I made it back down to 115 lbs, at which point my boyfriend at the time said, "I'm afraid I'm going to break you," which was exactly what I wanted to hear.
I left school and stumbled through my 20s and my weight crept up, keeping pace with my growing anxiety. In 2004, right before I moved in with Darrell, there was a constant churninging in my gut, a steady stream of fight or flight adrenaline in my blood. Eating until I was full -- too full to move -- helped slow my fast-beating heart.
In early 2007, I weighed 170 lbs. I lived entirely on simple carbs and alcohol. I had new, angry-red stretchmarks around my belly button. Concentric circles of ragged skin, a result of repeated rapid weight losses and subsequent gains. When I couldn't fall asleep, I'd think obsessively about my stomach and the way it sloped down to rest on the mattress.
And I'd cry.
Back in Toronto, alone in my new, singles apartment, I lost 30 lbs quickly, eating approximately 800 to 1000 calories a day and playing sports five times a week.
But in 2009, I had minor health issue and went on a medication that comes with weight gain as a common side effect. In less than 6 months on the drug I zoomed back up to nearly 160 lbs. New budgundy stretchmaks appeared below the faded white ones.
And it's making me crazy. Because for once, I'm actually healthy. I eat things like quinoa and kale in normal, human amounts. I exercise occassionally, but not obsessively. My partner thinks I look great. But when I see myself, the first thing I think of is "fat." I think of the numbers on the scale and want to cry.
"You are disgusting." That's what I hear in my head. That's what I've always heard.
I NEVER think this way about other people. Never. I don't even like the word fat. Intellectually, I think of it as a kind of hate speech.
I only do this to myself. I only have the capacity to be this mean to myself.
I'm not a stupid person. I know it's crazy. But the knowing doesn't seem to translate. Why am I like this? How did this happen? And how can I keep it from happening? That's the most important thing. It's the thing I think about even more than the weight itself.
How can I keep this from happening to my own little neice, my own someday daughter, every other sad little girl? How can I keep them from being like me? Do you know?
* All images from Stock Xchng, by (in order of appearance) Rockelle Munsch, Phillip Collier, Marcelo Gerpe, Stephan Fleet, Alfonso Lima.
I had an interesting experience last week. I realized I couldn't remember the name of a man I'd dated in late 2007 -- early 2008. Couldn't remember it at all. Not his first name, not his last.
It's perhaps not as bad as it sounds. We weren't in love or anything. But we saw eachother for a good few months. How could I have forgotten his name?
It plagued me all day at work. I couldn't stop thinking about it. What was happening to me? At 18, I berated a friend for not remembering the names of all the girls he'd kissed. "How could you not know a thing like that?" I asked. "How could you not remember?"
* Creative Commons image by Ronaldo Taveira from Stock Xchng
I tried and tried to pull up the name, but I couldn't. And I couldn't let it go. So I ended up looking him up. Yep. Right on the computer. My mild OCD and love for technology mean I have a pretty good record of all the dates I went on during the great dating experiment of 2008. I have almost everything written down. Names, dates, activities. It's a little creepy, actually. Maybe I had a sort of inkling. A feeling that I might one day have trouble remembering the details of that foggy, terrible time.
Anyway. According to my notes, the guy's name is Sandy Waugh. Waugh, like Evelyn Waugh. That's what I used to say to myself at the time. To remember. Even then, I had trouble. He was... spoiled. He once took me on a date to the Rosedale Golf and Country Club (on his parents' dime). More importantly, he was (and I assume is) an incredible douchebag. Which is something I didn't realize at the time.
Sandy was the sort of person who thought it was funny to hang up on me in the middle of a phone conversation. When I'd respond to his emails with any immediacy, he'd tell me I was being "clingy." Though he was pushing 30, he'd never had a girlfriend he'd introduced to his parents or even his sister. (He once hustled me out of his apartment in a clear panic when he realized his sis was on her way over and that we might accidentally cross paths.) He had a expensive electric guitar that he didn't like me to breathe on, let alone touch.
Nonetheless, I was kind to him. I took care of him when he was sick. I helped him do his Christmas shopping. I even wrapped the gifts for him while he napped on my sofa. He responded by dumping me out of nowhere on New Year's Eve. (We had plans to go out of town.) I think his friends had been razzing him for getting too serious. It's hard to say.
* Creative Commons image by Pam Roth from Stock Xchng
None of that was the worst of it though.
It turned out that during our relationship, Sandy was not only actively pursuing other women online (by writing them emails filled with the same anecdotes and jokes he used on me when we first met... copy and paste style), but also meeting those girls for dates. During his work day. Lunch hours. That sort of thing. He may have been sleeping with them. That part I don't know.
Of course, I didn't know ANY of this until the end. I found out in February, when I was at his apartment helping him through a bout of the flu. I'd brought over a care package, but he'd barely spoken to me all evening. Mostly, he just lay on the floor, moaning. (What a baby. Eesh.) Finally, he asked me to look up "fever care" online, so off I went to the computer.
And there, on his compter screen, right out in the open, was an email to his most recent date. I think her name was Maria. That's how I found out.
Believe it or not, I didn't break up with him immediately. I just left, pretending nothing was wrong. It was days, maybe even a week later, when I finally ditched him. And even then, I didn't explain. I couldn't deal with a confrontation, and frankly, I was humiliated. Again. I remember thinking, 'There must be something about me that makes men do this.' That's what Darrell had said, after all. That the problem was me.
Even that isn't the worst of it. The real worst of it is that I knew, from the very moment I met this guy, that he was a bit of an asshole. On our first date, I texted a friend about it from the ladies room. I wrote that there was something off about him. THEN I went on to date the bastard for four months. FOUR MONTHS. How can I explain something like that?
Depression, I guess. Anxiety. Post traumatic stress. Horribly damaged self esteem.
At the time, none of this was clear. I suppose that's why his name faded. Nothing was particularly clear back then.
* Creative Commons image by Patrice Dufour from Stock Xchng
Now that I've pondered all of this for awhile, I've come to the conclusion that it's important that I don't forget again. The fact that I even spoke to douchy Sandy, let alone dated him, is an example of how crazy I can be when I'm sad. Of how I have a tendency to let people treat me like absolute garbage. Of how I seem incapable of seeing this happening in the moment. I wouldn't say I owe Sandy Waugh my thanks or anything. But his is a name I need to remember.
Almost six years ago now, I wrote and published a story called "Spring Cleaning: you don't have to be friends with everyone." I pitched it as a "How To" piece. Specifically, "How to break up with a friend." [Click the link and you'll get a PDF of the story. It's clean, I promise.]
Stupid, right? Who was (or am) I to give anyone advice (even semi-silly advice) on how to end a friendship? I only have two kinds of friends: the real kind and the fake kind. And of course, the fake kind are usually the ones to go. What can I say? I'm a conflict-avoider. That's how I end up with fake friends in the first place. So when we're done, it's usually a relief. I've gotten rid of two such friends in recent years, and it's been great. But when it feels like I have to lose someone from category one, it's a lot harder.
ANYWAY.
I know why I wrote the Spring Cleaning piece at the time. I wanted to seem cool. And funny. And I suppose I was feeling sardonic. That's what shines though. It's awful. Insipid and embarrassing.
But nonetheless, I found myself thinking about it yesterday as Nathan and I talked about how it's definitely time for me to give up on a couple of less-than-stellar friends.
Want advice on how to do it? I don't really have any. I have a friend who advocates just cutting yourself off. He says I worry too much. That I don't owe anyone anything. Not even an explanation. He says that, if interacting with someone leaves me feeling worse instead of better, I should just stop. Let it die. Don't reply to emails, don't return calls. Poof. It's gone.
But it's hard.
It helps if you're a little angry, of course. This weekend, as I struggled though a long distance phone call in which I tried and tried to connect with a person who I no longer trust and who didn't ask me a single, substantial question about my life, and who wouldn't (or couldn't) engage with my questions about hers, I started to feel a little of that, and it helped. Then, when my ex came up, she mentioned something about how I needed to "get over it." That helped too. THEN, she commented on how difficult my breakup was. For her. Actually, for our whole friendship circle. My breakup, she said, was really traumatic... for them.
Suddenly, it didn't feel so hard.
The funny thing is, this person has been trying to tell me for years that she's a "bad friend." She mentions it every time I talk to her, and in almost every email. So why didn't I listen before? Why did it take me years to get it?
I suppose because we don't grow up thinking of female friendships as dispensable. Romantic relationship, sure. Men? Marriage? Of course. But platonic relationships, especially between women, are supposed to be forever.
I think we've talked about this before.
I guess the bottom line is that what I said in my post about Craig a few weeks back is true: if you don't feel happy when your friend is happy, you know you're not really friends. And if you're not really friends, maybe you never were. And if you never were, what does it matter how it ends? What was it worth in the first place?
Tomorrow is my ex's wedding day. I keep trying to identify how I feel about this. I know I'm supposed to feel something. People are treating me a bit delicately, so I maybe I'm supposed to feel delicate. I don't know. I keep closing my eyes, diving into the deeper well, and waiting. Waiting to feel something that isn't ambivalence. I didn't even remember that the big day had arrived. Someone had to remind me. But now I know, so I'm waiting. To feel something.
Darrell and I were together for more than 5 years. At least three of those years were seriously problematic. Two were nearly unbearable. Nonetheless, a life like that leaves an imprint, doesn't it? Like an ache in an old break before a thunderstorm. Darrell and I were together. We were in the same space, the same place, living what felt like one life, for years. Once upon a time we planned our own wedding. We even made a guest list.
That's a shocking thought. That I wanted a wedding. An engagement ring. Who was that person? To the me I know now, the whole white dress ceremony thing sounds like a nightmare. The idea of a blood diamond ring makes me sick. I didn't realize this then. How could I not have known this about myself? How could I have not known... me?
I was a very stupid girl. That's the bottom line. Obviously I didn't think carefully or seriously about anything beyond what my life looked from the outside. And if you'd asked me then what I might feel now, in this particular situation, I would have laughed, stupid girl that I was. For one thing, this situation would never occur. Not ever. That in my 30th year Darrell would be marrying a former acquaintance in Vancouver? Not a chance. But if such a thing did happen (not that it would) I'd certainly feel something. I would have called that a certainty.
I suppose I didn't understand what a certainty was. Not then. Darrell and I haven't spoken in nearly three years. I wonder if my feelings about him, my anger, resentment, rage and shame about what happened between us burned out in the meantime. Maybe it burned so hot it turned to ashes and blew away. If so, that might be a good thing. It might speak to a sort of resilience I never knew I had.
Alas, I don't think it's that at all. I'm not resilient. I've never been particularly resilient. I can hold a grudge for decades, feel an imagined slight for months. If I close my eyes, I can call up humiliations that took place fifteen years ago, and in remembering them, I feel them as if they were happening right now. I sweat. That's how real they are.
I don't get over things. I never have.
The truth, perhaps, about this nothing feeling, is that my time with Darrell was largely wasted. Largely meaningless. Maybe our life together was blanketed by a great, suffocating swath of nothing. I didn't know it at the time, and I barely recognize it now, but maybe that explains it. Maybe it never meant what I thought it did. And that is a terrible thing. I let that time slip away. I let it mean nothing. I let those years go to waste. And now there's a girl in the centre of the nothingness who I can't recognize. She's so faded, she's practically gone.
Who was that girl? Where did she she go? Is she this woman? This self I am now? Or is she just... gone?
So. That's what I'm thinking about today. That's what I'm dredging up from the deeper well. For whatever it's worth.
It occurs to me that I've been taciturn on the personal blah-og lately in part because my life for the last year has been largely about renovation.
I blog about that sort of thing already on the chic page. But the chic blog isn't personal. It's distant. I have fun with it, but I don't really say anything that gets to the core, do I? I guess that's what I'm supposed to be doing over here.
The truth is that renovation works perfectly as a metaphor for my life over the last few years.
Upon extracting myself from the secret fiasco that was my world in Vancouver (let's not get into it), things went decidedly off the rails. For a year or two, I had a lot of fun. I went on a lot of dates. I went back to school. I spent my scholarship money with abandon. You might say I veered off course and backpedaled all the way into 2002.
That was demolition.
Over the last year, I've been rebuilding. Rebuilding a real, grownup sort of life. I moved into this house almost a year ago. I started hauling my stuff over in mid-June and took possession on the first of July, 2009. And since then, we've been fixing it up. Our place is practically unrecognizable from what it was nearly a year ago. And finally... FINALLY the end is in sight.
When you're doing it, the work of renovation isn't fun. A full year of cleaning and scraping and painting and hammering and building and painting and scraping and organizing is... well, hard. First there's the tiling, and the frustration that comes with the fact that you've already cracked a couple of them, and then there's the painting, only it turns out you bought the wrong colour. So there's repainting. And repainting again. And then there's a flood. And then the roofers come. Only they don't come on time. Nobody comes on time. And things break. And other things get lost. And you have an Ikea fight with your partner because you're so frustrated and everyone else in the world (including him, his mother, the checkout clerk, the dog, and that woman standing off to the right) is so incredibly stupid. And you clean and you clean, but there's always more dust. You spend too much money on takeout and gain 12 lbs. And you're anxious, not only because you're sleep deprived and have been breathing lead paint fumes for several months, but because you're living in a world you don't recognize and aren't comfortable with.
You think it WILL be comfortable. Eventually. You have a really pretty picture in your mind about what your life could be. But in the storm of getting there, the windows fog up and you can't remember what you hoped for. Change is unsettling at best, but renovations are terrifying.
Now, leave the metaphor for a minute and imagine that you're not just scraping away at and painting over your walls, you're working on your whole life. You're leaving behind the things you thought you wanted, you're giving up materialism, you're changing the way you eat, sleep, and read. You thought you had an idea of what the future you was going to look like, but you're getting tired and you aren't so sure anymore. Maybe you ARE who you were. You're pretty sure you aren't. You're pretty sure that particular you was horrible and hard to maintain. It can't be right. It wasn't natural. You weren't happy...were you? Isn't that what you remember? Being unhappy? Maybe you should go back. Just to check. Just to make sure.
It's like how you feel when you think you might have left the oven on. Times a billion.
I'll say it again: renovation is hard.
But you take your little steps, you shuffle along, and bit by bit, you get closer. You get closer and clearer until you can see the end you imagined in the first place, and you start to feel... relieved.
It was worth it. All this work. All this change. It was the rightest of all right things.
I have a lot of bad habits. I bite my nails. When I feel nervous, I talk too much. Sometimes I cut my own bangs.
A legion of little sins. Not so serious, really.
But the worst thing about me, I suspect, is that I hold a grudge. In many cases, once I become angry, I stay angry. Forever.
I don't think I'm alone in this. Some of us are just grudge holders. I often read accounts famous people like this, and recognizing myself, am either strangely pleased or horrified. When John Hughes, that captain of disenfranchised youth, died last year, Molly Ringwald revealed in an op-ed piece for the New York Times that he was the grudge holding sort. She wrote:
"Most people who knew John knew that he was able to hold a grudge longer than anyone — his grudges were almost supernatural things, enduring for years, even decades."
Supernatural things. That's what my grudges are like. That's what I'm like. It's vain, of course, to compare myself to someone so beloved and accomplished, but that is not really the point. Look away from Hughes for a minute and at Ringwald herself, and the point becomes more clear. More sad. It's not what I want, but nonetheless, it is.
Often, as I nurse my grudges, stroking their little heads in the dark, I wonder how I got this way, and why I can't turn it off. Other people can, and do.
They key questions come to mind: When did this happen? How did it happen? And if I can dig up the source, dust it off, ponder the root ball and ultimately understand, will that make it stop?
Jen Selk Speaks is the personal blog of ... you guessed it - Jen Selk! Random musings, self-indulgent rants, tmi moments, whatever your voyeristic pleasure, you'll find it here (within reason). Once in awhile, the blog may even contain something substantive.
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