A Night Awry

I've had a lot to drink, I can barely type straight. But before I clean off my makeup, before I clean up my desk, I want to remember what I'm thinking tonight because I do feel as if it's important.

I've always believed that alcohol doesn't turn you into a different person, it makes you more of yourself. Dancing at a bar downtown tonight, I realized that I can no longer wonder what's wrong with me. I feel as if I have wasted so much of my time and energy wondering how I can better accomodate people who don't give a damn whether I'm alive. (I'm not trying to be melodramatic, I really feel it's the truth.) Tonight I kept dancing with strangers whom I didn't even like and I kept thinking about the same individual and I kept wondering what I was doing wrong, time and again. And this is detrimental thinking. The truth is, I did nothing wrong. It's an insight I had lately regarding jobs and I mean to apply it to all aspects of life. There are times when you are true to yourself and live life correctly and you are still unwanted. And it's better to know that now than later.

When I was in high school, I was so held back by my own imperfections. I knew their names: insecurity, unattractiveness, naivete - I made them up as I went along - and I tried so hard to fight them. I changed my personality and I stopped eating and I pretended to a greater knowledge than I actually possessed, all with a great belief in my own power to confuse other people. And nothing happened.

I have to stop wondering what's wrong with me. Maybe it is something, and maybe it matters, but how much can I apologize for myself? My background, my interests, my race, my personality, my religion, my desires, my ambitions? How much can I take back or hide? How much is it worth it?

I thought I learned this lesson in high school but I'm still learning it: that I am not that important nor that interesting nor that pretty nor that anything. And none of it matters, because nobody is. What matters is some other strange quality that I don't have, and I have to stop obsessing over it.

Not because it isn't important. But because I can only live a certain way. Tonight, Sara said, "I can't date that Indian boy because I know where it will go. His parents will hate me, and he's not Jewish." And so I said, because let's not let her off too easily, "So your parents will hate him," and she said, "My grandmother." And the truth is, this is all a lie. His parents won't hate her, any more than they hate anything they don't recognize. And her grandmother will get over it. And my parents would never hate anyone. They taught me, from the beginning, that I should pursue whatever and whomever made me happy, and that is what matters. It was a disservice because I grew up believing that happiness has no rules. And to most people happiness is nothing but rules. That is the difference that matters.

This fall in New York I saw so many interracial couples and every time I saw one I was struck by the thought that there are parts of the world where people still take chances on each other. And I used to live somewhere like that, whether it was a real place or my own mind. In losing my context, I've lost myself, lost my belief in my own worthiness, in all the values I was raised with. I've found myself in conversations where boys will tell me that I would be great if only I were white or Christian and I've nodded fucking along as if this is okay. As if it just happens.

Tonight, one of these boys said, "I don't get along well with smart girls" and I said, "You and I will never get along." And he said, "You are way too personable, and way too cute, to be here." Sometimes, that is how I want to feel. Better than everyone else. As if I should never have come here, never have left home, never have doubted anything in life.

This is my last and most important thought. When I was a freshman in college, I fell really hard for this one kid. I've never admitted it to anyone (probably a mistake in and of itself) but there are many times when I think, what was wrong with me? I wanted him so much. And I hate knowing that my self-esteem depends so much on a circumstance, an individual, and a series of meaningless moments I imagined to be more than they were.