My 2025 writing project is to pick three cards at random from Esther Perel’s “Where Should We Begin?” game and construct them into an essay. This is the first one.
On New Year’s Eve this year, my brother had a dinner party and everyone went around the room and had to say what their attachment style was. I said I was anxious-avoidant, but less so than I used to be, so much less so, really everyone, I’m almost secure, and someone who had never heard of attachment styles looked up on their phone what all of them meant and apparently sometimes anxious-avoidant is referred to as disorganized and I’d never heard of that, but it makes sense because that’s how my entire body feels when I am stressed and
I have always carried my nerves in my stomach and I remember my mom said that to me once, that she carried all her nerves in her stomach, too. When Molly told me that Will died, I crumpled over in our garage because as soon as I heard the words, I felt like I was being stabbed. And I remember thinking, before anything else, before “this can’t be happening / I have to tell my family / why / why / why / why / why,” my first thought was, “Oh, I am like my mother,” and every time my stomach hurts from anxiety, I think of that day in December, the first time that feeling ever happened, and I can’t believe, still, that it’s been 15 years and
I had never heard of attachment styles until a man I was dating one summer called me out of nowhere to tell me he thought mine was anxious. And I thought it was wild for him to call me, just to tell me that unprompted, but I liked him so much that I was glad he called me for anything and before we stopped dating, we would sometimes Facetime before bed and I’d fall asleep with a smile on my face, but later, when he pulled away, I would feel that anxious feeling in my stomach and wonder if he was right about my attachment style or if I felt this way because he told me I would. I didn’t eat for days during those stretches of silence because I couldn’t keep anything down and that seems so dramatic now, that’s what I mean when I say I am better now, I am more secure and
I do check my Co-Star every day and I know it’s silly, I know it’s not real, but also, I spent $14.99 to see what their predictions for my 2025 would be. You know, just in case. The app says that this winter I will be moving in silence which I guess feels right because sometimes it seems like I talk and talk and talk and no one hears me, I am too quiet, so maybe I will just stop talking because the app said so and my brother went to a party once where he met a copywriter for them and he asked how it felt to know she had the power to ruin everyone in Bushwick’s day, but today, mine said, “Nothing will surprise you like your own body” and you have to admit, that’s generic, but it is real and
I am in a subway car that has three dogs in it and they are whining at each other. I wonder what they are saying / I wonder when I will feel completely secure / I wonder when my body is not going to be so unpredictable. Ash is the only other person who took Katrina’s sex writing class who also lived in Brooklyn and she said once that she wrote in her notes app every day on the train, so that’s what I’m doing now, typing this into my phone and listening to the dogs and
Every day, before I get on the train, I stop by the bodega next to the station and buy a banana and two power bars. The same man is working the register each time and I am embarrassed, always, about what he must think my life looks like, but I am just trying so hard to feed myself, to be better than I was before. I used to not eat and sometimes, when I am feeling anxious, I still have trouble forcing food down and
In December, I cried on the subway eating a banana and re-reading a story I wrote about my ex-boyfriend. I wrote it when we were still together and looking back on it now, I am so sad for both of us. I sent it to Katrina because I didn’t have a title for it and I needed one before I share it with her new writing groups and when she sent it back, she had called it “A Shell of Myself” and I cried when I read that, too and
Last month, before I sent it to Katrina, I was working on editing it while I was sitting on a grey couch in the sun-drenched room of a guy I am seeing, someone who had only seen me happy. And he asked if he could read it, I think thinking that a story I wrote in a sex class would be hot, but it’s not hot, it’s the saddest fucking thing I have ever written, and I wanted him to read it badly, so badly, but I couldn’t let him because he didn’t know me that sad and
I think it’s also because I wrote a poem once and published it and, in it, I wrote that my boyfriend smelled like home. He read it and we never spoke about it and we broke up five days later and I never saw him again and sometimes I wonder if it was because I showed too much of myself, if I was too vulnerable / too comfortable / too much and
One time, before we broke up, I was sitting on his counter and unprompted, he said he didn’t understand why I wrote my little stories for the Internet and my face was very still, but my entire being shut down because I realized then that if he didn’t know why I had to write, he didn’t know me at all. And I didn’t say anything, just carefully got up to go to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for what felt like hours, but was probably just minutes because when I came out, he didn’t realize anything was wrong and maybe that was the moment I realized I was going to leave. I knew I needed to leave, but I stayed and I felt like an imposter to my own independence for the rest of our time together and
I used to feel like an imposter when I was drinking. Every time I was at a party, I felt like that scene in “Garden State,” you know the one, the GIF everyone had on their Myspace page or maybe that was just me, too, the one where everything and everyone is moving around Zach Braff and he is completely still and in my mind, the scene happened in a pool, but I just looked it up and in the most famous GIF, he’s sitting on a couch and I guess that depiction makes even more sense. That’s how my head has always felt, at parties, in social situations, everywhere and isn’t it funny, but not funny, that I have known that since I was 15 but could never put it into words until now and that I never knew it was anxiety until I said it slowly out loud to my therapist this year, as if I was testing it out and she nodded, just as slowly, letting me come to the answer myself. I thought about that scene when Will died and everyone came to our house and I felt frozen while all the people who loved him were moving around our kitchen and I knew all of our lives had changed and
I have lived here for ten years, last week, and I read an essay once about living in New York and how everything changes so fast and how, eventually, if you live here long enough, places would no longer become as meaningful as they once were. I guess that’s true because I used to not be able to walk on 23rd Street without taking a deep breath even though I would still go out of my way to walk on 23rd Street because the ghosts of those memories were both my best and worst. And, now, I can walk by the empty building that used to house the bar of my past without forcing myself to breathe through my nose, just like I go by his old apartment, the apartment I ironically live down the street from now, the apartment where we fucked for the first time against the door and I still, almost a decade later, remember the exact sound he made and I look up at that third floor window and don’t really feel anything anymore and sometimes, that makes me sad and
Nine years ago, I walked into his bar late at night and asked why I hadn’t heard from him in days and he gave me an excuse and I accepted it and let him take me home and the next morning, I woke him up asking if he was dating other people and he said “yes,” and I said, “I have to go do karaoke” and we never spoke about it again, but I wrote about it on the Internet and when he reached out this summer after years and years and years of silence, he said he always wondered what would have happened if we hadn’t been avoidant and had just had a conversation and I always wondered, too and
He came to visit this summer, three days that felt like magic and at the end of it, he told me the old days were fun, but he likes this version of me better and hearing those words were the most beautiful gift anyone, especially him, could have ever given me and
The night he flew home, I went to a bar I had never been to with my friends to celebrate my brother’s birthday and now, I am at that bar all the time because a man I am dating lives above it and I love when time is a circle in that way and
When I think of Molly, despite years of friendship, the first thing I always think about is the way she said “Jen, I’m sorry” in the phone 15 years ago and I wonder if that’s the first memory the people I had to tell have of me, too and
Sometimes, at parties, I get in my head that I am too quiet, already practicing that season of winter silence, because all the anxieties that alcohol used to drown out are rushing around in my brain and I know now that they are anxieties, so last month, sober, I forced myself to grab a microphone in a conference room at a holiday party surrounded by strangers and I sang off-key and I felt happy in that moment. I thought, “Maybe I am secure / maybe I am changing / maybe this is good,” but briefly, I was back in that bedroom, putting on my clothes, telling him I had to go do karaoke later and
I think I can control my drinking again, think I could be a different person around alcohol and that feels both exciting and scary. So much of it is because I have changed. Maybe part of it is because he has forgiven me for how I used to be. On New Year’s Eve, I had a singular glass of champagne and I didn’t finish it which would have been unheard of five years ago, I would have finished the bottle and then some, but I can’t lie, it felt good to have that warm feeling in my stomach, the tiny flush in my cheeks. When I started telling my friends I was thinking about reintroducing alcohol into my life, they were supportive, but then Zach said to make sure it was for me, not for someone else, and especially not for a man and then I started to panic because I hate thinking that my life could be defined by someone else’s, especially a man’s. I even hate that some of my best writing is about men, hate that even now, I am on the subway writing this fucking essay about men and their opinions of me and
When I was drinking, I used to need a lot of validation, usually of the male variety and I told my therapist the other day that I don’t really feel that way anymore. I tell myself that I write my “little stories” on the Internet for me and that is mostly true, but I do also love the validation from having my art consumed by other people and every day, I think about deleting Instagram and every day, I don’t and
Last week, I woke up and I felt sad for no particular reason at all. I crawled out of the bed that was not my own and rested my head on the shoulder of the man who had just made me coffee and told him I was sad and he rubbed my back on that grey couch in his sun-filled room until I felt better and I thought, “Oh, I guess he could read that piece I wrote about my last relationship now” and
Fifteen years to the day Will died, I had coffee with the man who once called me to tell me I had an anxious attachment style. We were talking about Co-Star and we pulled up our compatibility profile. We only were compatible in sex and aggression and we laughed and laughed and laughed in the coffee shop because it was true, everything else about us was broken. He used to have a bald spot in his beard when we were together, a blank space that was the perfect shape of my thumb and I used to love pressing the pad of my finger against it. It’s gone now. It had been so long since we’d seen each other that his hair has grown over it and when I instinctively reached up to touch his face, then drew my hand back sharply, I felt a little sad that it was gone. He walked me home and met my cat and looked at the dining room table we used to fuck on and neither of us said anything about that and then he said it seemed like I was doing really well, like I was doing better and I said I was and it felt good to hear it, but this time, with this man, I didn’t need to hear it and then he left and
I thought about the last time he left my apartment, a year and a half ago, on a day he disappointed me. He’d asked me what I was going to do when he left and I said, “Probably cry about this” and he shut the door and I did and we didn’t see each other again and I felt so anxious in that moment, but in this moment, I only felt secure, but
Sometimes I worry that maybe this is the story I tell about myself that isn’t entirely true.