The Audience in my Head
“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
- Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” February 18, 1982, Malcolm X Weekend at Harvard University
"I'm responsible for my own happiness? I can't even be responsible for my own breakfast!"
- BoJack Horseman, BoJack Horseman, “BoJack Horseman: The BoJack Horseman Story, Chapter One,” 2014”
“The person who runs my life hates me.”
- Me, misc. rants, Wesleyan University, 2015
In the months leading up to my 21st birthday, my stressors were simple but thoroughly overwhelming:
I had stopped showing up to 3 of my 4 classes weeks ago, and finals were looming
Leaving my apartment resulted in a panic attack about 80 percent of the time
My main source of nutrients was humus and pita bread, eaten sloppily over the kitchen sink
I had an obsessive crush functioning like a parasite in my body
I was lying to everyone about all of these things, and the next available appointment at the psych services center was in the following academic year
Everything I did was an act, and I was doing my best to play the role of the person I thought I was supposed to be. In some ways, I have always felt myself to be a performer, not in some formal way, but on the mundane stage of daily life. I liked the performance of interaction and engagement, the performance of self and creativity, the performance of emotions, big and small. I liked the drama; it made the fun moments more satisfying and added some tongue-in-cheek humor to the hard ones. But these days, I wasn’t enjoying it. And neither was the audience in my head—groaning and whispering as I missed assignments, missed calls, and missed plans, pretending to be asleep while I smoked weed, wrote sad poetry, and rewatched the same shows on Netflix over and over and over again. But even when I showed up to nothing else, once a week, I dragged myself across campus to meet with the director of a fellowship I had been awarded back when I was still treading water. I went because the facade was everything. If I stopped going, she would follow up with me, send more emails I couldn't respond to, talk to my professor, find out what my schedule had devolved into, call the dean, or even my parents. It was the end of April, and everything was precarious, so my limited energy went to maintaining the precarity.
The doctrine of achievement was instilled in me before I could even say the word. By the time I was applying to college, I had a loose plan for the next decade or so: I would go to a good college, and a good law school, then I would enter a conscience-driven field like environmental or human rights law. I chose Wesleyan because there was no higher reward for my success than the freedom to study exactly what I wanted and nothing else. This was the path I would take to life satisfaction, and since I had largely been satisfied with my life up until that point, fulfillment felt like a medal I would inevitably get as long as I did my part: maintaining the balance of curiosity, charm, confidence, and luck that had carried me this far.
It only took two years of quasi-adulthood for me to lose the momentum, the passion, the ambition, and the self I had built over the previous eighteen. A past version of me, one with a fairly intact self-concept, knew that she didn’t want to become a professor, but she also knew the fellowship was a good idea. She had tied me to this obligation, and a year later, I couldn’t shake it. I had traded my freedom for a biweekly stipend and the increasing pressure to string a thesis project together, while everything else fell apart. Even when it felt impossible, I went to Krishnas office and tried to muster some enthusiasm (I didn't have any) for a research project (I didn’t think I could pull off) about how urban gardens presented a solution to the growing landscape of food insecurity and environmental injustice (which it didn’t). Where I may have been flying under the radar in most of my classes, there were only five fellows in my cohort, and Krishna had a hawk eye. She didn’t seem to like me very much, but she presented herself as an authority; so in my mind, I handed my life over to her, and then I told myself she snatched it. Krishna asked me why I didn’t reply to my emails, she asked me how my project proposal was going, she asked me what plans I had put in place for the fellowship’s summer research requirement, she probably even asked me if I was okay. Every answer I gave was a half-truth, at best.
At the end of our meetings, as I slipped out of her office, I’d mutter under my breath, feeling badly for myself, “The person who runs my life hates me.” On cue, the audience in my head would groan, but on a level I couldn’t appreciate at the time, there was some truth to what I said.
I learned a few things in those final weeks of my junior year, though. I learned that I could take ‘incompletes’ in the classes I stopped going to, and finish them up over the summer for full credit. I learned that my favorite professor had agreed to become my thesis advisor for the following year. Eventually, I would even learn that I didn’t have to research urban gardens, so we spent our weekly sessions building what would become my proudest accomplishment, a hundred-page paper on environmental reclamation and afrofuturism in visual art. I learned that my crush was hooking up with someone new, and I learned that documenting my heartbreak in an essay rather than embellishing it in poetry helped me to feel a little less alone. I learned that I could fill the holes in my transcript, left behind by abandoned environmental science classes, with my first two art classes (well, one studio art class and one art history class). My senior year took everything I had left, but it was better. I still cried while I cleaned and packed up my three-person house alone, wore leggings to my commencement ceremony, and asked (read: begged) my family to take me straight home after a quick lunch on Main Street.
I had felt the need to escape, almost immediately upon my arrival. I don’t even think first-year orientation had ended by the time I knew that I needed to get out. But it wasn’t Wesleyan that I wanted to run from; I couldn’t transfer schools to get away from this. It was the way my world was expanding around me, it was the suffocation I felt in the face of everything I didn’t know, it was the pressure of choice, the responsibility of selfhood. I didn’t know how to escape that. So instead, over those four years, my vision narrowed to a point, distracting me from the core belief I kept locked away: up until this point I had spent my life tricking people into believing that I was smart, fun to be around, interesting, and full of potential—but for some reason my tricks didn’t work anymore. Maybe that was growing up. But I did it, I graduated. Polite applause echoed in my head. And for a moment, I was free of everything that I had been hiding from. Then I wasn’t, because life didn’t end when I left college; it, in theory, had just begun. Suddenly, the emptied-out husk I had become was responsible for finding a job and an apartment, for learning how to be an adult.
On some level, I worried I had left the last sliver of myself back in that little house in Connecticut, tucked between the desk and the wall, under one of the legs of the bed, tangled into a dust bunny on the floor of the closet. I wanted to grow up, I wanted to take care of myself, but my only reference point seemed to offer up the conclusive proof that I definitely couldn’t do those things. Finding a job took a while, but I found part-time work as a seasonal employee at the Macy’s in Flushing after being home for almost six months. I was embarrassed that I wasn’t going to grad school, or starting an office job like most of my friends; but I found some energy, chatting with people from behind the Clinique counter, and then maybe even something resembling confidence when I was placed at one of the central check out locations just as the holiday rush began. They liked me, they trusted me. I stayed on after the holidays for a few more months, but in March, I finally updated my LinkedIn profile with my first “real” job. I became an assistant at a nonprofit in Manhattan. And in my mind, I had put myself on the track that I needed to be on. I learned the job, I wrote on my commute, and even hung out with friends after work sometimes. I waited, somewhat patiently, for everything else to fall into place: the apartment, the partner, the sense of purpose, and the desire to live my life. They didn’t come. I settled into a routine of overachieving that felt familiar. My vision was still narrow, but now centered around what I saw as the short list of things I would need to be a real adult. But it only took two years, one promotion, and a billion hours on the train for the smile plastered on my face to turn into me openly sobbing at my desk.
When I told my therapist I was thinking about moving, she asked me why I wanted to leave. I told her that I didn’t want to leave, but that I needed to be different in order to grow up, and New York was too familiar a place for me to actually change in. In truth, I couldn’t face the reality that returning home didn’t return me to myself. The quiet and increasingly sparse applause turned to whispers when I quit and told everyone I was moving across the country.
I flew out to Los Angeles and stayed for a while, then I flew back to New York, and I bought a car. I packed it full of my books, my clothes, all of the things I loved, and a stack of paper maps from AAA (that I still have). After a few weather delays and with a meticulous plan, I set off on a solo cross-country road trip. I waved at my parents as I backed out of the driveway of the house in Queens that I grew up in. I ventured out west, like a modern-day pioneer looking to discover something already named, and actively in use, my own selfhood. A week later, I arrived and I drove straight to the part of Ocean Ave in Santa Monica where I knew I’d be able to see the Pacific Ocean from my car. Then I doubled back to my cousin’s apartment to unpack the things I’d driven over, into the room I had already been living in for over a year. In this new life, I picked up running, I was writing pretty regularly, and strung together data scrubbing gigs, copywriting projects, and part-time jobs at coffee shops and crystal stores. My vision was still narrow; I often felt like I was wasting time, my life felt small, and it didn't look the way I wanted it to, the way I thought it was supposed to look. The list of things that would make me a real adult never went anywhere, nor did the pressure. I told myself that moving across the country bought me some time. A global pandemic brought me a little more. But as I pushed myself to follow through with freelance marketing jobs, berated myself for not having my own apartment, and put myself in the position to be rejected by the same man three times in under a year, I came across the familiar feeling that the person running my life didn’t like me very much. In those 5 years, I had traveled further from that dorm room in Connecticut than my college self had the perspective to imagine, but I was still offering up the seat of power in my life to anyone who would take it, and I still didn't know it.
But I'm 30 now, and something has finally clicked.
Not my life clicking into the mold of my expectations (or rather the expectations I inherited from the world around me, then laid claim to) but an appreciation of time. Time was passing. Time would keep passing, whether I chose to engage or not.
I have never classified my avoidance, my passivity, my desire to be anywhere but the driver’s seat of my life, as self-hatred—I do not identify with that term. But there’s an element of self-indifference that I have definitely encountered. I had tried to find the guidelines for a good life in the judgment of people who didn’t care about me, in the stories strangers told about their own lives, in the choices of my peers that poured gasoline on the fire of envy within me. Back in college, the fellowship offered a future in a way that none of my classes seemed to. If I were going to become a professor (I was pretty sure that I wasn’t), I didn’t need a post-grad plan. I could trade the pressure of not knowing for the certainty and authority that was Krishna, and I am still doing this. I am still making the choice to get up onto the stage only to immediately look out to the audience for direction, for someone to direct me. The great energetic pull toward self-determination, intercepted by the anxiety of straying too far from the norm, becoming too hard to understand, losing everything the moment the clapping turns to snickering. But it has already been a decade, and contrary to my perception of the world, no one has come, as of yet, to tell me that I have been doing it wrong or right. Not all at once, but in pieces spread throughout my thirtieth year (or if I’m thirty, is it actually my thirty-first?) I started to come to terms with the fact that my life is mine, mine to live, mine to create, or mine to ignore while I search for answers in someone else. I think this is called autonomy.
When I was 20, I couldn't admit that I was struggling because what would the audience in my head think of me if I couldn’t handle the rigor of a “good” school? If I didn't end up with the degree to show for my potential? What would the audience in my head think if I didn’t work in an office? If I didn't move into a small apartment in Bushwick or Bed Stuy or Echo Park or Atwater Village? What would the audience in my head think of me if I threw away the trappings of a successful life to live one that prioritized freedom over achievement, alignment over image, and genuine fulfillment over conformity? What would the audience in my head think if I turned out the lights and kicked them out? If I screamed as loud as I could for as long as I could while the sounds reverberated through the auditorium? If I jumped off the stage and chased them through the rows of seats? If I hunted each and every one of them down? What could they do, really, if I finally decided the show wasn’t for them? It is my show, after all. And as it turns out, they had nothing to say when I started to disappear them, one by one. Or maybe they said a lot, as the theater began to empty, the echo of my own voice got louder until it became hard to hear anything else. Some days, all I can hear is the performance.
“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.”
- Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” August 25, 1978, The Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College