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.