I Tried to Be Good

I bring my grandmother her pills and make her take them in front of me. She’s sneaky sometimes. I shuffle downstairs and cram a cold tortilla into my mouth while waiting for yesterday’s coffee to do its rounds in the microwave. I smoke and shit and get back in bed. I open the book I’ve stalled out on, skim a page and return it to its place on my bedside table beside a million cups, all housing mystery liquids in varying stages of decay. I feel fifteen again. I'm so self absorbed that I spend more time upset over the fact that my jeans feel tighter this week than last, than I do reading the news or checking in on my friends. 

It’s not cute anymore, panicking about your skin and your stomach while ignoring the world. Dressing up your vanity and political apathy as “self care” is no longer an acceptable coping strategy. I know this, so why can’t I look beyond the end of my own fucking nose? 

I keep catching myself acting like somebody I wouldn’t want to be friends with.

I’m at a beach bonfire talking to a girl I’m intimidated by. Her clear skin and quirky interests and seemingly solid sense of career direction makes me feel bumpy and small and behind. She’s telling me about a road trip she took last summer with her lover. Somewhere between New Mexico and Louisiana they picked up a rather loud cricket. The size of the insect was unconfirmed, seeing as they never actually saw the thing, but its song sucked up all the air in the truck at night, and they spent their mornings yawning into gas station coffee and shaking out blankets. 

For the last few months, I have been being fucking hunted by crickets. It’s like there’s this constant high pitched whine that rings in both ears and prohibits me from hearing and feeling anything fully. 

That’s not entirely true. Anger and envy and resentment have made themselves very comfortable in my head lately. But contentment and creativity and joy have been MIA for a while now. Even worse, most of my coping strategies and treasured forms of distraction are losing their effectiveness and destroying my lungs and liver. 

I know I need to be patient. Ups and downs are part of the deal. Tides change and feelings shift and wounds get flushed out with time.

My problem, however, is that I have a history of lying on my floor and drinking cheap wine from the bottle while I wait for my life to change. I’m incredibly efficient at passing off accountability to someone or something else. In another lifetime I would have made a fantastic Evangelical. 

My grandfather was like that. He had many excuses for his numerous personal and professional failures, none of which ever involved his own behavior. If you asked him, he’d tell you it was his family curse. I think he really did believe that he was just born under a bad sign, that he was set up to fail by some all-powerful force nobody but him could see. 

He was one of those men who metabolized following directions as being disrespected. 

He spent most of his life walking off construction sites and storming out of cubicles, ranting into his beer bottle about how he was underpaid and overqualified, how nobody took him seriously. Not long after the wedding, my grandmother had had enough. My mother maintained a superficial relationship with him for a few decades, but she too grew tired of his arrogance and denial. He died a few summers ago. We didn’t attend the funeral. 

I do believe that my grandfather was cursed, but not by some God-like figure or cloaked heretic. His curse was his hubris, his ego, his unrelenting belief that the cause of his suffering was someone else’s doing. 

He was allergic to examining his own fractures, and as a result he lived hollow and died lonely. I don’t want to be like that. 

But who we want to be and who we are aren’t always consistent. Lately, it feels like the only thing I can do sufficiently is find someone to blame for my stunted and stalled-out existence. 

I spent a bulk of last year convinced that my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend was the cause of my returned social anxiety and self-loathing. They were together for longer, shared apartments, had adventurous sex and did mushrooms in Joshua Tree often. What she lacks in height she makes up for in confidence and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was always playing catch up to her. She teaches yoga and makes wire-wrapped crystal necklaces and only needs mascara. I can’t touch my toes or sew a button on without blood and tears. Psychedelics make me paranoid and I have a pathological fear of unprotected sex. I was sure that it was a matter of time before he and our friends figured me out, saw me as an unstimulating, replaceable, good-for-now seat filler and bid me farewell. 

No such horrors occurred. I continue to envy her ability to pull off Birkenstocks and hold a handstand, but I’m no longer stewing in fear that she is my superior. That being said, once I realized that blaming her for my self-loathing wasn’t fair nor useful, I was back to square one. 

Jealousy is a wonderful distraction. 

Distractions wreak havoc of course, but in that sweet middle ground, before shit really hits the fan, fuck they’re fun. 

When I was twelve I got off the bus, shuffling under the weight of my backpack and bedazzled UGG boots, expecting to be met by my mother and her buffet of healthy, carb-conscious after school snacks. Instead, I was greeted by a couple dozen men dressed in vests that read DEA and FBI. As it turned out, my father had been buying some things on the internet that he shouldn’t have been, illicit substances meant to distract him from the crippling pressures and suffocating monotony of his daily life. They dismantled our cabinets and overturned some furniture, but he weaseled his way out of the consequences. Hired a fancy lawyer and spent my college fund avoiding jail time. After the dust had settled, when my mother finally confronted him, pleading to understand why, his answer was brief and unsatisfying. He needed something else, something easy, something to look forward to. 

We all have our ‘something’s. My mother distracted herself for decades with juice cleanses and a vigorous, almost punishing yoga practice that held until her hips gave out a few years ago. I’ve been sampling eating disorders and religions and cancer-causing substances on repeat, certain that the ultimate tonic to my self-absorbed misery is just around the next corner. 

A few months after my father died, I flew to Italy. My plan was to spend a month lapping up the blissful ocean views, dancing with strangers and writing every day. On the other side of it, I would be all better. My fractures would be healed. I genuinely convinced myself that limping down cobblestone corridors in some hideous espadrille wedges and getting wine drunk alone at noon was going to make up for the fact that my father overdosed on the bathroom floor eight weeks ago.

In reality, I spent every evening at my laptop, puffy-eyed and anxious, taunted by a blank page, waiting for the time when I could call my mother in California without waking her up. Very little healing, a whole lot of hangovers, distraction at its finest. 

I’d like to say that I’m working through it, that I’m growing up, that seeing the flaws in my logic has pushed me towards some great renaissance of empowered accountability. 

Last week I spent an extra twenty minutes doing my makeup for a party on the chance that my boyfriend's ex would be there. She wasn’t, but I still spent the entire evening straightening my posture and nervously glancing at the front door while regretting my shade of lipstick. 

None of them are to blame. Not my dead dad or my delusional grandfather or my partner's flexible past lover. Tragically, it would appear that I am the one who has to get her shit together. I’m the one who has to patch up the fractures and cast out the distractions, however seductive they might be. 

I have to find and quiet the cricket. 

D

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