On my mind (MONDAY Nov. 6th)
I can’t stop listening to ‘Right Where You Left Me’ by Taylor Swift.
This is par for the course at the onset of the holiday season—apropos for the nostalgia avalanche nestled between October and January. My mind swims with references to Novembers past as I wrestle my sweaters from the grips of a box in the back of my closet, remembering when my mom used to sit on the floor of my bedroom and carefully switch my summer clothes with my winter ones, the former occupying a clear bin that would slide under my bed. Everything fit so nicely back then. I was a fly on her wall. I trade memories of merry little Christmases, family blowups and turkey trot mishaps with my boyfriend while he grabs my hand under the covers. Covers we share, in a home we share. I wished away 16 with a vengeance and it is bitter sweet now, to think of sixteen. I always wished to be in love back then. God, I don’t even remember growing up. But I guess I have.
I want to hunt down those viral ELF lip oils.
I mean, everyone on TikTok says they’re, like, ‘soooooo good’. I scroll on my for you page and get two ads and two organic videos about them. Someone found all four colors at a Target in Boston. Someone else says they’re a dupe for the more expensive, more admirable product one could own. I watch beautiful girl after beautiful girl (I think all girls are beautiful) apply it to their lips (and I wonder if they have lip filler too, or if I’m the only shallow bitch in New Jersey) and then marvel at the way it glosses and hydrates, plumps and tints. In my room I have a bin of half finished lip products. I sometimes shift through it to look for something new. I do not need another lip oil, and I hate myself for wanting, wanting, wanting. Sometimes I think I couldn’t possibly own one more thing, and yet I want. I hate myself for thinking that those girls are just pretty, and the lip oil won’t make me pretty too.
I think I should redo my apartment.
I watched an Instagram reel of someone decorating a perfect apartment for Christmas. I bet you some people watch my apartment and think it's perfect. I feel ungrateful for complaining that the decor is all mismatched. But it is. I can never seem to have it together. I love to rush things. When I was a kid my mom said I was a hot mess. I can’t mind being organized when I’m most fond of all the thoughts I need to sort out. I’m so busy in my mind, the rest can get on without me. I wonder how that girl affords her floor to ceiling windows and I feel like a bitch for wondering. It isn’t my business—why does everything feel like my business? Why does everything feel like a dig in my side? Why do we make videos of our own spaces and then compare our spaces to ones we perceive to be nicer, cleaner, more expensive? I’m not inspired by the nice apartments. I feel envy and then dread. The reasons for all of it beat me. Mine still feels cluttered and too colorful. I try to keep it spotless so it doesn’t feel so distracting. I wonder if anyone posts their relationships and apartments and live’s online for any other reason than to show off what they have. I feel bad for doing the same. If my phone didn’t exist I’d probably just feel grateful. I remind myself of that before bed.
Every time I tweeze my eyebrows I wonder why.
Mostly how many hours I, collectively, have sat in front of a mirror that zooms in on my pores and makes me hate myself, trying to make myself beautiful? I cringe at my undone nails as though paying for a pretty color would make me somehow different; somehow better. Disney princesses never have undone nails. Sometimes Taylor Swift’s are chipped but she’s a billionaire so she can get away with that. The more you have, the less you have to show up for. I don’t like getting my nails done and I hate the upkeep. I just want to run around in a field of flowers and like my bare face but, apparently my bare face isn’t worth liking. That’s what they sell me with every new product. I need to be a clean girl. I need to be a nice girl. I need to be a shiny, smooth girl. I just want to be a fucking girl, but its too late for that apparently. I hate shaking people’s hands, it’s so aggressively formal and awkwardly intimate. I was always told I didn’t play by the rules right. Can’t a polite smile be enough from a girl?
I’m rewatching Sex and the City and wondering if I played it too safe.
Carrie Bradshaw never gets writer’s block until she does. But she’s hot so they pay her anyway. She lives in a castle in the west village and she is thin even though she’s never worked out. Dating is the most massively disconcerting thing we do with each other, and for whatever reason the only lessons we get on the topic are from tv shows and movies. As an 18 year old I put Carrie and Big on a rose colored pedestal—next to Chuck and Blair and Rachel and Ross and Jess and Nick— failing to see them all as the mess they were. That was the goal, they were the goal. Foolishly I believed they were showing me what it’s like to be in love—which is like me teaching a child math (I do not know how to do math). It’s no wonder we don’t know how to ask for what we want. Nobody ever showed us how. They showed us adrenaline and what it’s like to be rich in New York or LA. They romanticized heartbreak with a production budget and very hot actors. What’s worse, evidently, I wish I went out more and got drunk more, so I force myself to go out and I hate it, and I’ve ruined a good outfit and hair day on a bad night. Oddly enough all I want to do back home is watch Carrie Bradshaw fuck up again.
I can feel the cysts on my right ovary.
They always tell me the right one is worse but I already know. Of course I do. I am a woman and I am a writer, I feel everything right away and with shocking potency. I told my mom when I was sixteen years old that I knew I was going to have trouble having kids. I feared telling the guy I chose to spend forever with about this before I even met someone I’d consider for the role. I felt like I was always auditioning suitors and that felt shitty. She told me it was just my anxiety. For years she was the only one I told. But it wasn’t my anxiety—it was knowing. This was a fact, sleeping in my bones, keeping me up all night. I feel like the moon and I feel like a mother, already, at 25. I’ve always known it was something I was here to do and I’ve always known it would be harder for me than most. And then when they told me about the cysts on the phone I kind of laughed. I felt miserable and affirmed. It kind of felt good to be right. I have to have a daughter so I can teach her about Gloria Steinem. I told my boyfriend this through a conversation about freezing my eggs. I hate needles and I hate shots. I know I will, though, have the daughter, that is.
People mispronounce my name every day.
I correct them 50% of the time. I used to correct them far less than that. Sometimes someone corrects them for me and it’s embarrassing that I couldn’t stand up for myself but I hate making other people uncomfortable. I want to live in a world where people are comforted by their ignorance or their blissful naïveté, where they don’t wonder if they upset me— because I’m fine. I’ve always been fine. When I hear the name Ellie sometimes I respond. It’s like a gut instinct, denying my own being. It’s just a name. I guess. Or is it? I am fine knowing my name, and then there are the people who mispronounce it time and time again and it feels like they were never even trying to get it right. I am fine being the only person truly in touch with me.
Most of the time when I go somewhere I wish I stayed home.
I check the clock whenever I’m out, wishing the time would move faster so I could leave. I hate to admit it. I want to pretend like I’m ‘living’. I just don’t think I’m really made for parties or nightclubs. My ears hurt when music is too loud. Home is quiet and it has all the things I like. Usually when I go on a trip I try to come home early. I scan flights to see if I can exchange mine for no additional cost. I love home. It is safe. I never overthink anything I’ve said even if that’s just because I am all alone. I don’t give a fuck if I’m a loser because I’ve accepted that I am one. I am not asking you to say I am cool. I hope you will realize being cool doesn’t count for much. I used to be very fun in the way society thinks of fun. I could drink 7 shots of tequila over several hours and go home with random people and make choices that made good stories in the morning. Now I am very fun in a way I think of fun. My best friend tells me she forgot to tell me she ran into the guy I used to sleep with in college (who I was in love with) (he did not love me). She says he looked hot and it is a wonder of the world that I do not care.
People fear me for being loud and speaking my mind.
I used to think it was antiquated for people to dislike women who like to be in charge. Then I felt it on my cheeks and underneath my skin when I was around certain tables, at certain dinners. I try to hold my tongue but sometimes I just can’t. I try to be a good girl, but I am not. Someone told me once that her friends asked if I was ‘actually like that in person’—referring to my online persona—and she said she told them no. She thought this was a compliment—but it was a deep insult, wrapped up in a bow. She is not an audacious, filterless, vibrator posting crazy person—she is sweet and quiet. Perhaps I was just putting the filter up for the evening, a wall of flimsy plastic, to function around people like her, who I know don’t understand why a woman would ever want for anything at all. I find myself stuck in a web of defense—defending women who don’t want children against those who say they know she’ll regret it. Defending myself. My choices. My work. Lately I’ve been surrendering to the world and not apologizing for who I am.
I wish I could go upstairs in my old college house to talk to a version of me at 20.
I used to stay up all night writing poems about heartbreak. I was very fragile and very funny and very afraid of both of those things. The wall my bed sat up against was always so cold. I used to consider what it would look like to choose a normal path. I used to consider what it would look like for us to be together again. I used to ask myself if I’d ever make it or if it was all a mistake. I’ve surrendered my memories of us, and all of it, since. I took with me just one girl, who used to sleep right down the stairs. We both live with our boyfriends now and not each other. It feels foreign because we thought we’d live together forever. And we love our boyfriends but I know we love each other more. And I tell her this on FaceTime and of course she doesn’t hesitate, she just agrees. People hang out with us and say that we speak in a different language. That’s just being a friend, truly, I think.
I curse myself for complaining. About anything.
On another side of the world a child has their last breath stolen from them. And it doesn’t matter to me what child, because a child is a child. One more, ten more, one thousand more that won’t have a childhood, in the blink of an eye, for no reason at all. A life, stolen, as quickly as I online order a coffee from a global chain that charges me $8 for a fancy drink. I cannot think of anything more evil than stealing a childhood. There is no one reason—that I could name—for terror or violence or war. I cannot imagine the horrors on the other side of the world because I am white and I am well-off and I am in New York City. I watch so many people I know pretend it isn’t happening, or maybe they aren’t pretending, maybe they just don’t care. I get home from a weekend where I spent money and slept in and went to $40 Pilates classes and I sob and sob and sob. I try to figure out what more I could do than what I’ve already done and then I feel like a fool for grieving children on the other side of the world, from my home with central air conditioning and a full refrigerator and a bunch of stupid products I don’t need to survive. I want to save everyone. I know I’m stupid and silly for wanting that. I feel directionless every single day and the knowledge of the horrors, so far from my own home, eat at my mind.
In a year from now I want us to be OK.
It is wishful thinking but I will still wish. I ask for any God to answer my prayer and not to judge me for using prayer as a last resort. I triple check that I’m registered to vote. I order a glass of wine and I catch a glimpse of myself in the antique mirror at the bar and I remind myself to only think nice things about the person staring back. What a privilege it is to take a break from Twitter because the news upsets me. What a privilege to worry so much about your appearance or the state of your apartment. What a privilege it is to want for lip oil. I almost make a nail appointment for tomorrow, thoughtlessly. Then I remind myself I don’t care about having neat nails. I don’t care about being put together. I don’t care about being aspirational or having a carefully decorated space to call my own. I care about other people. I care about you. I care about us. You are a person, in your own bedroom, with cold walls maybe, with a glass of wine or a cup of tea, and you are here with me. Line by line. Word by word. We are here. And we have so many thoughts and good days and bad days ahead of us. You are a heartbeat. You are my wonder of the world. You are the sexy little dance of the candle’s flame and the pretty melody of your favorite song. You are a fucking vision and you are here just for right now. You are your name. And the daughter you’ll teach about Gloria Steinem if you want to have a daughter. You are everything you can do to make it better around here. You are the care in your soul, awake in your bones, that truth—that fact.
I asked to close out the tab at the bar and the bartender said ‘Ellie right?’ And I said yes, because most of me thinks I’ll never really learn. Or maybe I’ll just focus on what matters, because so very much matters, and so much doesn’t really matter at all.