soopastryheart

A little while ago, a friend commented on one of his friends’ posts on Facebook, congratulating her on getting an article published in a major magazine. Her name was not familiar. We had never met. I’m sure she’s a lovely person. Or a total cunt, I don’t know, I don’t know her.

I don’t know why this showed up on my feed, since it was on her wall, and we only have one mutual friend. But regardless, we were suddenly connected by Kevin Bacon degrees, which meant by some obscure way or another, I knew her. That meant I had to read her published article, and I had to go full Michiko Kakutani on her ass.

I read it twice. That’s a lie; I read it three times, and with each review, I felt a reluctant heat behind my ears intensify. The first time, I thought, what the fuck, this was worthy of being published? This was good enough for this magazine? The second time I read it, I examined each paragraph as if I were a gemologist, picking out the most minor of flaws. There was nothing particularly noteworthy in her article, I concluded. No specific style, no unique voice. The article lacked substance, and the very meat of the story felt barren. I made rationalizations in my head that the magazine needed a filler, some fluff piece to take up some space. She probably knew an assistant editor that granted her a favor. Yeah, that was probably it, it happened all the time.

Before I could calm down, I found myself googling this chick, this no talent hack. Okay, so she earned her degree at an Ivy. So? Plenty of ordinary, slightly above average folks went to Ivy league schools. Her writing was proof that she wasn’t part of the demographic of extraordinarily achieving superstars. I found her Twitter and read a page worth of tweets. They weren’t clever or witty. She called herself a foodie and a “mom” despite not having any children, which I concluded meant she had multiple cats. It was pretty clear that her personality was as vapid as her writing. And, she had a wonky-ass looking nose.

That burn behind my ears lingered for weeks. In fact, it started to spread to my shoulders and my chest, like some sort of emotional leprosy. I didn’t write once during that period. Each time I tried, her stupid face would hover over the screen, taunting me. I kept checking her Twitter, twisting my fingers for news that her insipid article was retracted on the case of her having sperm brows. It didn’t happen. In fact, she tweeted links to other articles that were being published (on a much smaller scale, for local vendors).

It’s an odd conception, to feel such potent doses of hatred towards a total stranger. And it’s toxic as hell, because it begins to contaminate so much more than the artificial layers of your consciousness; it starts to seep into your insecurities, exposing them so openly when you’ve tried so hard to hide them in between the cracks of your façade. And the worst part is, I knew what I was feeling from the moment I saw that Facebook post. I stared at it square in the eye but allowed it to come inside anyway.

Jealousy is the uninvited guest who crashes the party. It’s spiteful because it’s been deemed an outcast, so it does what it can to taint the mood of everyone else. It turns into an SNL skit, as it sits with you on the couch and ruins conversations. It’ll stand next to you at the refreshments table, compliment you on your new expensive dress, and then tell you about the thousands of malnourished children and how it only takes forty cents a day to keep them alive. Oh, your mom has been diagnosed with cancer? It had an uncle with cancer once. He died.

That’s what jealousy does. Once it appears, it will pollute you with reckless abandon, especially if you’re pretty fragile to begin with. It detects vulnerability like a shark in the water. It manipulates your self worth. It dilutes your confidence. It diminishes your abilities, your skills, and your achievements. It suffocates you with evil thoughts and words, aimed at both you and your aggressor. Jealousy will FUCK. YOUR. SHIT. UP.

There’s the finest of lines between allowing jealousy to turn your soul black, and using it to fuel your ambitions. One tiny trip can place you on the wrong side, so it’s imperative that you know where your feet lie. But the one redeeming quality to jealousy is that it’s also just as easy to get out, no matter how deep you’re in with it.

Pretend like you’re playing Jeopardy, and you’ve selected Obstacles for $1000. Whatever clue is behind that block, you know the answer: What is, my insecurities, Alex. If you can get your anger and jealousy to subside for a minute, you can find the roots of why they appeared in the first place. Chances are, they weren’t buried that deep to begin with.

When I reread the article the third and final time, I didn’t find it as clichéd and stale as I originally had. It read like a news report, because it was one. It wasn’t a fair comparison, between her and I, because she was more of a journalist, and I am most certainly not. Our writing styles, our audiences, and our goals for writing were vastly different. And this was a well-known and respected magazine, so her draft was more than likely combed through by a proficient editor, who deemed that it was an article indeed worthy of being published. Was I better than the magazine editor? No, of course freaking not. It wasn’t a horrible article. It was articulate, well written, and served its purpose.

What triggered my hasty initial response was not due to this relative stranger being published, but rather, my lack of doing so. When I had read her article, I was hitting a particularly rough patch, where I could barely write a grocery list. I hadn’t submitted a thing in months, and here she was, showing bravery where mine had scuttled off to a corner. Hating on her achievement wasn’t going to relieve me of my creative block, it was only going to heighten my distractions (this resonates).

For the sake of repentance, I liked her article through the magazine’s website and left a generic comment about it being well written. And then I returned to my own writing, where I think I wrote two paragraphs before I retreated to the floor with Instagram. Relieving myself of the jealousy didn’t undo the funk I was in, but I wasn’t drowning in it any longer.

I’m a big fan of feelings and shit. You want to be pissed off? Be pissed off. You want to break into hysterics at a Target parking lot? You break into hysterics at a Target parking lot. If it helps alleviate any sort of anxiety, I say it’s better to express yourself than to hold it all in. But when your emotions start to interfere with your personal growth, that’s when it’s time to reign in it a tiny bit. Sometimes, you have to think of your emotions as invisible muscles, and you have train them to improve overall functionality. Jealousy isn’t a horrible thing; it keeps you humble, and it can help you stay hungry. But you have to provide a little discipline so that it knows where to go when it materializes. Declare your dominance, and make sure it knows who’s boss.

After my jealous episode, I’ve definitely gotten better at controlling the ugly. When upcoming writers I admire hit milestones, I don’t see red anymore; instead, I observe and learn. When I feel the urge to compare, I choke it back down because I’ve trained myself to understand that that gets me nowhere, that it’s not constructive in any way to me. Word by word, day by day, that’s the one way I’ll get to where I need to be.

Do you boo, do you.

It’s fair to say that you change a bit when in a relationship. You’d be naïve to think that you remain exactly the same person as you were before. I’m not saying you get an entirely new identity, just that you realize who you were wasn’t as set in stone as you originally thought, and that you are much more pliable than you wanted to be.

Prior to meeting my Boyfriend and moving in together, my life consisted of scenarios that many single people (without roommates) will recognize: a meagerly stocked fridge, laundry that goes unfolded for weeks (on an ever growing mound on your couch), and idiosyncratic beauty routines that you would rather prefer nobody ever see (ladies, you know what I’m talking about). When you start sharing your life with someone though, things change: bimonthly Costco trips make it impossible for your freezer to ever have room, a large washer/dryer becomes a prerequisite in finding a place, and you always have to be on alert for surprise bathroom intrusions.

And if you’ve been on your own for long enough, having another human being living with you can really test your patience sometimes. Especially if your significant other has an apparent aversion to throwing away candy wrappers and Q-tips, no matter how close the trashcan is to him, or if he can’t keep pistachio shells out of the shag rug to save his life. Though it’s often tumultuous at first, you learn to become more patient, more tolerable, and more accepting of the fact that there are just quirks you have to get used to, and continue to remind yourself that he too is dealing with your annoying oddities. You let the small things slide. You ease up. You learn to stop complaining about the toilet seat (you can just as easily put that down as he can put it up).

Living with your significant other can reap great, albeit, simple rewards too: you always have someone to yell “YO! I’M OUT OF TOILET PAPER IN HERE!” And before you know it, you’ve found your groove together, one where you spend nights watching American Ninja Warrior, go out on 9pm frozen yogurt runs, and share your chores more or less, evenly. Even when you realize that your life has now become unbelievably domestic, you understand that that’s not such a horrible thing, that there’s comfort in the fact that your feet never have to remain cold in bed ever again. And if your boyfriend also happens to be incredibly old fashioned and chivalrous, you never find yourself lifting the heavy shit ever. You never have to worry about your lackluster driving skills, because he’s always behind the wheel. You realize that your mom was wrong in that you don’t actually have to learn how to cook if your dude does it better than you can.

And soon, that single life you lived for so long becomes nothing but a distant memory. You find it harder and harder to remember a time when you used to do things on your own, for your own.

For this past year or so, Boyfriend has had to travel quite a bit for work, mostly trips to Florida where his partners are located. His Florida visits are never more than a week long, which you would think isn’t too bad, but when you’ve gotten as comfortable (coughlazycough) as I have, that week can feel like the most boring seven days to ever experience.

His most recent trip required a redeye flight, which meant I had to crawl out of bed an hour of the day I rarely see. When I returned home, I crawled back in bed for a couple more hours and spent the rest of my day essentially acting like a total asshole. I walked around in my underwear (although being pantsless at home is the norm for us) and took multiple naps (on the couch, on the floor). I half-watched some shows on Hulu while online window shopping, and ate cereal out of the box like a neanderthal. I tried to read but ended up taking another nap instead. I played an inane amount Candy Crush on my phone. Besides a three-sentence exchange with my sister via text, I didn’t interact with a single person. In fact, I think the only time I actually used my voice was to scream at Nick Cannon on TV, “NO, AMERICA, YOU DO NOT HAVE TALENT.” Before his trip, we had stocked our fridge with groceries, but I felt so unmotivated to cook anything, which resulted in me having a can of ginger ale and a package of dried seaweed for dinner.

At some point in the night, between my first and second Haagen-Dazs bar, I caught a reflection of my sorry ass in the window, and I tried to figure out how I managed to feed and take care of myself before I became a we. What did I use to do on all those nights I spent alone? Didn’t I read? Write? Do anything without turning into a pathetic sloth?

It wasn’t that I had become incapable, but I had become unwilling to take care of myself. I had let Beyoncé down.

Feeling truly disgusted with my state of being, I got up and started cleaning. I washed all the dishes and put away the open boxes of food I had left out throughout the day. I picked up the pants that I had taken off at the entryway when I had come in, which were coiled down so perfectly that you could see carpet through the leg holes. I wiped down countertops, watered the plants, took a shower, and broke down boxes for recycling, all at 2am.

The next morning, I got up particularly early, made myself tea and eggs for breakfast, and sat down at the desk, not the couch, with my computer. I wrapped up some edits for work by the late afternoon, and met with a friend and her dog for a walk. I actually chopped some shit and made dinner. Instead of spending the rest of the night flipping channels, I started and finished an entire book.

Aside from that first day, I actively spent each day forcing myself to do something productive, even if it meant walking to FedEx to drop off a package. As ridiculous as it sounds, I forced myself to remember that I was a perfectly capable human being. I did not cease being one simply because Boyfriend was not there, and his absence did not mean my life had to come to a stand still.

It’s actually quite embarrassing to admit morphing into a total sack of crap simply because I forgot what it was to be alone. It’s just so easy to fall into the routine of togetherness, because you get comfortable. Most of the time, you don’t even realize that it has has happened, because if you had, you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to slack so willingly. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling like you’re part of something – the opposite in fact. But finding yourself with someone else doesn’t mean you have to lose everything you used to be. Having a crutch is nice when it’s necessary, but not if it’s because you don’t want to walk on your own two feet. And just because you don’t want to carry your slack, doesn’t mean someone else has to. It’s unfair, lazy, and frankly, a shitty thing to expect.

Being independent is not a quality exclusive to single folk. You can’t wait for someone to help figure out who you are (that’s called brainwashing), even though it’s more convenient to do so. Your identity is something only you can make happen: you ultimately decide how you want to turn out. You can’t let being in a relationship be the only marker of your personality. Ciphering out who you are is a lifelong battle in which you can never win, but in which you’ll never lose either, as long as you continue to try. We change with the ebbs and flows of life, but at the end of the day, you have to be someone that you can be happy with, not ashamed of.

Being in love is pretty fucking awesome, but that person deserves to have the best of you, not a half-assed version. Because mon chéri, if you don’t love yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?