For the past year, I have been tracking every book I read by writing elementary-school level summaries for each of them. They are brief, including only the title, the author and a sentence that usually starts out with “I loved this book…” or “I did not like this book…” and there are a lot of them because, in addition to reading very, very fast, I am also one of those very, very annoying people who refuses to stop a book partway through, even if I absolutely hate it and complain about it the entire time.
This year, I wanted to be able to differentiate between the books that I actively hated or found just okay and the books I thought were lovely and meaningful and whose words will stay with me for a Very Long Time (“Every word of this book made me want to cry” is what I wrote about “In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado last February and, let me assure you, they still do). Someone I have met only once in real life and immediately admired because we were both wearing velvet pants in a professional setting started making collages based off her favorite quotes from the books she’s read this year and, while that is far, far out of reach of my specific skill set, I loved the idea of some way documenting the sentences that meant the most to me. I’ve been trying, for a long time now, to start writing again on here, but have been feeling incredibly uninspired because of……everything. With this project — by taking the words from the books that really stood out to me this year and exploring why they did — I hope to be able to change that.
JANUARY 2021 READS
“She did not understand how to pretend. In her earlier twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her.... [and] if she was not enough for the thing other people had, who could be; if she did not deserve love, who should have it; if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unloveable in her, she would have to create it.”
Once, years ago now, I was laying in bed with someone who had recently taken on the title of being an ex. Because of this significant change in our relationship status, we should not have been laying in bed together, but the night before, we went out as friends for the first time since our break up, a thinly veiled decision that led to us both being a little drunk and a little more than willing to make some old mistakes. We woke up that next morning, as natural as it had always been, and as the light came through my bedroom windows, he said something that I quietly took a snapshot of in my mind, knowing already I would run it over for years to come again and again and again, trying to figure out why someone who had told me he was no longer interested a few months before would choose this moment to say the words: “I just really can’t believe that you are single.”
I don’t believe his intention was to make me feel like I wasn’t enough, but after he said that, I spent so much of my time trying to prove to….myself? him? other people? that I was. He was not the first person to tell me this or make me feel this way — the most significant, up until that point, of course, had been the guy I’d thought I wanted to marry who told me he was smitten with me and to never change who I was because I was so classy, but also that I was too classy for him to be able to give us a real chance — and I was certain he would not be the last. It took me a very long time, after months of forced time apart and the perspective that comes from learning to be intimately comfortable with being alone, to unwrap myself from that narrative, to allow myself to stop making choices that jeopardized mine and others relationships and now, I know I was enough all along.
“Since then [she] has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper.”
Before the pandemic, I was a good dater. I went on a lot of dates, most of which were fine, all of which were not fine enough to make me want anything serious. The person I would be on a date with wouldn’t know that, though. On dates, I was attentive and kind and charming and always made the other person feel comfortable, even in the instances where I was not. If I was on a date and not enjoying myself, it would rarely show. I would know, of course, I’d feel it deep down in the pit of my stomach, I’d feel it in my palms from where my nails were digging into them hard under the table, but I tampered all that down with alcohol, relying instead on the combination of my politeness gene kicking into overdrive with my ability to consume much more alcohol than my frame should allow.
I’ve been living with my parents and my puppy for months now and the only boy I have significant interaction with is my 7-year-old neighbor who talks to me from across the street in his driveway and, truthfully? I am fine with that. I’m not eager to return to the dating world that I used to be immersed in — before COVID, I never truly addressed the unhealthy way I would alter myself to accommodate someone else’s vision of both themselves and me, but now, I can’t imagine letting myself fall into that unfair behavior. I haven’t had alcohol in over 100 days and I love being confident that the decisions I am making are completely my own. When I do go back to my life, when I start dating again, I’m looking forward to being able to fully be myself, to being able to make sure I am comfortable before anyone else.
“And as your body begins to feel like a home, your courage grows.”
My decision to stop drinking did not happen on a whim — it’s something that I have been debating doing for a long time, but could never fully commit to out of fear of… what I am not exactly sure anymore because anything other than the massive fear of the death and utter destruction we’ve been living through this past year seems so trivial now. Still, I never made a real effort, even though I knew for awhile that I was stuck, knew I had to change something about my life, knew I needed to get back to who I used to be, even if I didn’t know who that was anymore.
Right before the world shut down, I slowly was starting to feel like me again. It came in the form of routine-based dance classes that made me recognize the person I had been in high school, the person who spent two to four hours every day in a studio, perfecting the way my body looked while I leaped and turned and synchronized myself with a group of teammates in the mirror. I spent so much of my life — sixteen years — training to move my body, giving a performance with every step, learning what made me strong… and I didn’t realize how much I had missed or needed that until I started dancing again.
I do not think I would have mentally or physically faired as well as I have during the pandemic had I not been reunited with the routine of dance. In the past year, I have transformed multiple locations into a studio — my rooftop, my kitchen, the West Side Highway, my parent’s driveway, the room in our basement dominated by both my brother’s drum set and the largest spiders I have ever seen in my entire life — because dancing makes me feel the person I used to be, the person I was before I got stuck in a cycle of pretending I was having a good time, in a cycle of allowing myself to put others unnecessary wants over my immediate needs.
Combining my athletic routines with cutting out alcohol, I am now proud of how I feel about myself. I never thought I would get here, here to the point of actually enjoying what I see in the mirror, of realizing that my body and what I can do with it is truly beautiful, that I am confident and that I can feel good about myself. I spent so much time convinced that I was not enough, that I needed to change something aesthetic about me in order to achieve something else — and it’s lovely to not feel that way anymore.
