But I also graduated early because nobody wanted me on campus anymore.
In my line of work, I had learned a great many things about interviews and story structure, politics, and people. But I still had not learned how to be kind.
At UC Santa Cruz, I lived like a girl who had just escaped the gallows. I took all the Goldschl?ger shots and stole bags of chicken nuggets from the dining hall. If I wanted to get to a seat in the middle of the lecture room but there were people blocking my way, I did not shuffle through the aisles delicately. I jumped onto the desks and danced to my seat. In an attempt to become the humor paper’s most popular writer, I pulled many extremely stupid and offensive stunts. For one story, I wore a nude bodysuit that I drew boobs and a bush on with Sharpie, declared myself a militant feminist, and ran around campus trying to get free things from various cafés as reparations for patriarchal oppression. When an employee chased me around the bookstore insisting that feminism did not entitle me to free Slim Jims, I screamed, “Good woman, wake up! This is no mere snack! It is a phallic symbol of male dominance!” and ran away.
But even though I got more courageous, I also got angrier. For example, I actually encountered very real misogyny and racism for the first time in college and did not take it well. One white guy asked me at a party if Asians had slanted vaginas; another told me not to cover my mouth when I laughed because it made me look like a passive Japanese schoolgirl. When another guy groped my butt as he rounded third base during an intramural softball game, I grabbed a metal bat and chased him, threatening to crack his head open until my teammates tackled me. I was wild, swinging blindly at the terrifying world around me, hurting people in the process. I told myself that I needed to be this way to defend myself. I told myself, I am not a girl. I am a sword.
And one of the most shameful things I did happened when one of my best college friends was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Cancer. She wasn’t even twenty-one yet.
She and I were partners in crime. We co-wrote a sex column even though neither of us knew anything about sex. (You’re embarrassed about your queefing? Next time keep an umbrella by the bed and open it in his face each time you toot, he won’t even notice!) We shoplifted at Ross together, went to the gym together. We went to bars even though we were underage and hid under the tables when they came to card everyone. At karaoke, we sang “Freebird” in matching Daisy Dukes, and at the end, she threw me into the air as I flapped my arms. But when partnership really mattered, I left her hanging.
I should have been there for her after her diagnosis. I should’ve made her soup and asked how she was a hundred times a day and taken her out for walks and stolen cute shoes for her and listened to her fears. I should have made that entire time about her. I should’ve listened. Instead, I went over to her apartment and lay on the couch as she played with her newly short hair, droning on and on about how I’d just now realized that racism sucked. I gave her my pain to hold in this horrible time, instead of cradling hers.
A few months later, when she was in remission, her boyfriend knocked on my door. “I’m sorry to break this to you, but she doesn’t want to talk to you anymore,” he said. I was blindsided. I had no idea why this was happening. I cried and I begged. “But I love her! What was it I did wrong? How am I supposed to be?” I asked.
“She says it’s unfair to ask you to change because you are who you are. You should just go be who you are somewhere else,” he said, and they both unfriended me on Facebook. When I tried to look at her page later, I saw that she’d posted a photo-booth picture of me and her hamming it up together. The caption read: I had to go through chemo, but the real cancer is pictured sitting next to me.
What a bitch, I thought at the time. You really couldn’t trust anyone in this cruel world, could you?
* * *
—
It’s no small wonder that I had more enemies than friends at college by the end of my sophomore year. The pile of abandonments started to make me feel like my life was a broken record. I kept spinning around and around, finding myself back where I started—watching people’s backs as they walked out the door.
I wasn’t self-aware enough to see a way out of the loop, so I considered the sleeping pills once again, then settled for chugging a bottle of whiskey that I kept at the foot of my bed. In the morning, I added another five credits to my schedule to keep myself busy.
It took two more years to understand why this was happening. One night, lying awake in the tiny San Francisco room where I moved after graduation, it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t everybody else—wasn’t human nature and its treachery. Maybe the problem was me.
I had just turned twenty-two, and my friends and I had gone out to karaoke to celebrate. Some guy started hitting on me, and I told him to go fuck himself. He flipped his badge open. “Is that any way to talk to a police officer?” The night devolved into chaos and tears, with my friends holding my hands behind my back to keep me from getting arrested. The anger was getting me into trouble again. Was it my fault? Did the cop deserve my wrath? There was no point in asking these questions. All that mattered was that afterward, my friends’ lips were tight, their eyes exhausted; why did nights with me always have to end in disaster?
It was only then, in the wake of so much I had demolished, that I realized I had done this to myself, and I had done it because it had been done to me. My anger was a reflection of two people who had self-immolated with their own anger. I could see that I was already kind of an asshole, and if I continued down this path, I would transform into them.
But how was I to begin letting it go when anger was the force that gave me momentum? My anger was my power. It was what protected me. Without it, wouldn’t I be sad and naked?
I decided, in the end, to cleanse myself of all of it. An act of radical forgiveness was the only thing that might rip me out of the loop. And so, one by one, I counted the people I hated and told myself that I could not know their struggle. I tried to see things from their perspective. And I wished them the best.