I know you are, but what am I?
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[originally published July 27, 2009]
Like everyone, I have certain flaws that I nourish and groom, fussing over them like little lapdogs, holding them up to the light of public scrutiny, glossy and bright with ribbons. These are the flaws that I’ve accepted mainly because they have some level of public charm … either they blur the boundary between virtue/vice to the point of obscurity (think: every dating show you’ve ever seen or job interview you’ve ever attended … “I trust too much!” “I work too hard!”), or else they’re kind of weird and cute and funny, and make me seem totally self-aware and self-confident, like this plucky rebellious Everygirl who’s all, “YES, I NEVER LOOK AWAY DURING HORROR MOVIES! YES, I WATCH TV SHOWS JUST FOR THE ADORABLE COSTUMES!” And the crowd melts.
In fact, I mostly make massive amounts of jokes about watching television shows, because watching trashy television is the perfect flaw: embarrassing enough to seem honest, but ultimately unthreatening and socially-sanctioned, an opportunity for either a) bonding or b) allowing the other person to feel mildly superior and amused. If I ever went to parties, I’m sure this would come in handy … as concretely as if I had an actual dog I used to pick up fellow joggers in the park. (I don’t have a dog and I never jog, for the record.)
But I have other flaws. I have flaws so petty, humiliating, and pitiful that I keep them in the dim corners of the basement, stuffed in with the old stationary bicycles and sofas leaking upholstery.
Obviously, there’s a spirit of compulsive, unscrupulous soul-vomiting that comes along with keeping an online journal or diary or blog or MySpace or anything. Chances are high you’re writing to absolutely nobody, but since it’s sitting right there on the internet, stark-naked, there’s a possibility that hundreds upon hundreds of strangers are reading your words AS YOU TYPE. Although I’m fully aware that the only human eyes to touch this particular site are my own, as I lovingly re-read and laugh at my own jokes and push semicolons around, I always have an imaginary audience inside my brain:
- guys who currently have crushes on me
- guys I used to have crushes on
- mergers of the two (the general idea being that my old flames are reading this and developing crushes on me as they go along)
- everybody in the world
- people who make me angry out in public … like when I venture to the grocery store for sugar-free gum and cat food*, and an old tourist lady pushes in front of me at aisle 2, I can make myself feel better by thinking, “IF YOU’D READ MY WITTY ONLINE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SEVERUS SNAPE YOU WOULDN’T BE SO QUICK TO PUSH ME AROUND, LADY.”
- Sam Rockwell and Robert Downey Jr., palling around as they film their sexy action movie together
- my boyfriend, I guess
- my mom’s friends who think I’m so quiet and weird and once found me sleeping in the storage closet at my mom’s gallery because I was exhausted and didn’t want to take the time to walk home
But in reality not even my mother reads this thing, even though I link to it RIGHT THERE, in the little box on my Facebook profile, right beneath the Lady Gaga lyrics that I re-appropriated as an Emily Dickinson poem because I think that’s funny. So when I confess to terrible things, I mean really embarrassing things and not just adorable flaws that will eventually get me laid (not seriously, of course, because I’m prudish) … I’m actually writing them to myself. Not my child self or my self in ten years or my 80-year-old self or my healthy self or my eating disorder or whatever, but just sort of myself. The girl sitting in her mother’s office at the keyboard with bad posture and chipped fingernail polish, my stomach filled with lemon shortbread cookies that are vegan even though I’m not vegan at all, my head hurting a little because I drank too much last night. I’m writing to myself. This is so sad and weird, actually.
It’s hard to look at myself in the mirror and admit to my flaws. That’s because I always devolve right back to thinking about the same old physical flaws, and it just becomes an hour-long session of me hogging the bathroom, yelling at myself about my weight, and my bad eyeshadow application skills, and my frizzy hair which the hairdresser called “coarse” about twenty times last time it was cut. And it feels silly and empty to sit in a chair somewhere and THINK about my actual flaws, because I get distracted by a magazine or a bird outside the window or my own foot. My big toe looks like a cartoon thumb! It does! So really the only way for me to wallow in my flaws, really just dive in there and come face-to-face and don’t flinch and don’t look away and be like plucky Diane Arbus photographing a two-headed redneck child, is to write about my flaws in a theoretically public forum, and illustrate it.
I’m not going to list any more flaws today because this whole entry ended up being sort of humiliating, albeit still in a look-how-cute way. But the flaws will be coming, and you better believe you’ll feel morally superior when you read them. (Unless it’s myself reading them.) * it’s my mom’s cat … does that make it worse?
