Seventy Five Really Really Hard

Reflections on moving and discomfort at arrival.

When I was eight years old, I sat next to a confident, lanky, intelligent boy in homeroom. Early in the school year we were divided into our math classes, with a lucky eight chosen to be in the advanced math class. That year there were nine. I felt like the ninth. 

The smart lanky boy that took up most of our shared homeroom desk told me I was lucky I got into the advanced math class. Told me I wasn’t going to be in the class very long. Told me I would eventually walk of shame back to the simpler math classes, with candy and games. For the next seventeen days I woke up at two a.m. and threw up in my toilet. At first, my mother cared for me, afraid of what could be plaguing her daughter. Eventually she couldn’t handle it anymore, and she threatened to pull me out of my dance school’s Nutcracker performance if I kept vomiting. Mind over matter she said. Mind over matter. I stopped puking. 

In college, Buddhist thought of embodiment, theories of mind-body duality, Foucoult’s writing about docility gave dimension to my mother’s mantra. Soon the fitness community, which tends to include pretty girls’ undiagnosed eating disorders and right wing encouragement for obsessive treatment of our bodies, became enamored with the 75 Hard. 75 days of waking up and eating well and staying sober. 75 days of following through on your own high standards. 

I moved to New York five days after graduating, my anxiety in my stomach if I’m lucky, in my throat if a lanky man says the wrong thing. Fearful of the unknown, I promised myself that I would show up for the only person I knew in this city: myself. Even if I’d never done it before, I would do it now. So for the first 75 days of New York City, I offered myself full forgiveness. It would be okay to miss trains, cry on them, be late, be a little too early, get stood up, get rejected, work retail even if it meant I had to hear family wonder what I wasted my degree on. I would venture forward. I would wake up and respect myself, I would forgive the days I laid in bed crying at the episode where Marshall Erikson loses his father. And I would do three things during these 75 days. I would get a part time job. Until I got a full time job. And I would find and move into an apartment. Okay, four things. Anything else was a bonus, putting me ahead of my own curve. My 75 Hard was defined by the difficulty of forgiveness and love. The difficulty of struggle. The desire to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. Happy uneasy. 

No other city could have given me so many opportunities to learn and grow, because no other city would have slapped me so many times in the span of 75 days with no remorse or guilt. I learned three things, and now I have to incorporate and implement those lessons into my life. If I don’t, I will just know more about the shitty reality I am too tired and scared to change. Self awareness by itself is evil self negligence. 

A new friend of mine told me I thought too much. And maybe all of it would be easier if I thought a little less. If I can’t stress less, I could just think less. Like most women in crisis, I thought of my mother. I remember her giving me the same criticism. I was young, twelve or so, and she told me she wished I was dumber so my life, and her life, wouldn’t be so hard. I must have just yelled at my elders for being sexist in some way. If it wasn’t cogent, they could call me crazy. Since I was, they called my mother a bad mother. 

I wasn’t angry with her for wishing I was dumb. We sat there in silence. She wished my life was shallow out of love. It was the truest I had been loved. 

But I never took that claim seriously. I never truly wanted to be an idiot. I wanted to be smarter, so I could horseshoe back to amicable. I wanted to know why I was angry, so I could put it away, use it. Turn my responses to structural inequalities into an arsenal of strategic tools. But somewhere, I got lost. And I just thought about everything and everyone with this insane desire to be right. Right about things that have nothing to do with me. Right about why my friend struggles to talk to her parents or why my dad gets defensive. I cared so much about being right, I forgot why I wanted to cultivate my brain at all. 

Drunk at the Cobra Club, I was steered back on track by a simple judgment. I thought too much. Maybe, or I thought too much about the wrong things. Lesson one, I want to alleviate the pressure to be right. I want to be present, such that my thoughts are not obsessively reflective, but trained in having my back as I experience life as it moves through me. 

Second thing that I learned is that I am not good at moving in silence and I don’t know how I feel about it. I used to believe that secrecy and love could not coexist. Unless of course, you were planning a surprise birthday party. Otherwise, it was withholding. I can’t withhold anything really. I am an open book. There’s simply a lot of book. I think I’ve learned that just because I love through honesty, dishonesty does not mean there is lack of love, just a fear of judgment. People don’t have to know everything about you to love you. You can trust someone and it’ll be okay. Just because you’ve trusted before and you were wrong doesn’t mean you should never try it again. Would you look at that, you just watched a girl take down one emotional brick from the heartbreak wall. 

I used to love so easily, so stupidly, so excitedly. And then I gave it all away. And it turned me angry. And sometimes I feel like all I’m doing is working hard to recognize myself. It just sucks because I know I’m secretly working harder to be unrecognizable, someone different who can be rejected or not loved and that leaves me, the hidden me, unaffected. Someone who is respected before she is cherished because disrespect doesn’t hurt like the revocation of love. 

I have often defined love as vulnerability to be witnessed. But now as I start to get scared of what I’m doing, because what am I f*cking doing, I wish there were less people to witness it and more people who loved me. I don’t know if that’s possible. Maybe the biggest lesson is that I don't know anything at all. 

Lastly, I’ve learned that wanting is better than having. I’ve always known that, but this summer I learned it. Having a crush is more fun than dating, window shopping more fun than wearing, dreaming more fun than being. I want to want less. I want to be so fulfilled that I don’t ask for anything more. So that when it is time to have, I am able to actually engage with it.

It was freeing to forgive myself for 75 days while I floundered in place, wading nowhere in murky waters, crying a lot about nothing. I slouched to Bethlehem with nothing but a suitcase and a dream. Cliche transplant written on my forehead. And I did get employed and find a place to live. I did what I wanted and I still look in a mirror and hate her for not doing everything ever the best ever. I am a mean person. A kind person wouldn’t have created such impossible conditions to receive her own love. A kind person would not have to unlearn it through a queered workout challenge where she wasn’t allowed to be her harshest critic. Why did I think to do this at all. That’s insane. And I still feel stuck, unmoving, stagnant. I want to do more, I want to be better, I want to be unbelievably perfect. I want to trust that wanting is still a form of saying I love you. I want trying to be enough. And I want to stop wanting. I want to stop.

But the way to start is to start. The fastest way to be opportune to make opportunities. And I’m so paralyzed by fear of failure, that anything I do feels like I’ve failed. I always feel like the ninth.

But I think I am held together by some deeper, core belief that all this manic pixie dream girl, tortured artist cosplay is temporary. And I can break out of the ever moving paralysis spiral and begin.

And I can’t move in silence, so here’s proof of my moving at all.