blindness as cope

how could i have something if i didn't SEE i deserved it?

I’m walking down Morgan Avenue with my arms swinging, chin up haughtily, AirPods blasting w the Smallville theme song as I stride past the converted warehouses, determined to practice walking as if I can do anything I put my mind to.

It’s never “fake it til you make it” for me. If I don’t feel like it, I stride slower, head down, as if the world is weighing on my shoulders. If I had a huge breakthrough that rips a wormhole in the veil that is my perceptual blindness, a fresh hot wind of gusto will keep me on my toes, itching to burst out of me and culminating in a “hot girl walk,” as witnesses have mentioned.

On these best most confident days, I feel not like a “hot girl,” in the vein of female aspiration, but like a SUPERHERO, one who will save all of her friends from sure doom and bring light and joy through maximal openness.

Hot girls are for others to see. Superheroes are for me to see. Who will accompany me on this journey? Doesn’t matter, because I’m there with me. I see me then, when I feel this way.

I live for these moments. But recently I wonder if I’m walking them out to express them and celebrate them, or because I don’t want to feel them.

A old man sitting by the curb on this hot summer day stops me. He has a wifebeater tank on with a brownish, previously yellow Pikachu on the front. He puts down his cigarette, blowing out his smoke curiously at me. He asks me what vibe I’m on to be walking like that.

Usually, when I have these kinds of encounters, I duck my head a little and snarl a half-baked answer that satisfies the basic requirements enough to where they can’t accuse me of not engaging, but doesn’t give them much of an opening to continue speaking to me. This time I don’t care enough to tell him to fuck off, because I want to be seen for a second.

I say it’s a good vibe.

He says curiously that it seems I’m walking, not as if I have somewhere to be, but something to show.

I’m not showing for you!

But no, it’s to show myself and not anyone else, too, for my eyes are fastened in the distance, not on a goal in particular, but willing some feeling to flow in. He has hit the nail on the head. Disinterested in continuing discussion, he goes back to smoking.

Wait, I say, how did you know I’m not trying to demonstrate anything?

He says, it’s also because if I were to think of your aura, you are someone with your third eye squeezed shut, because you perhaps want to be able to do without seeing. Yet you are paradoxically looking far away, as if to demonstrate you “sort of saw,” to blend in, but resigned to a blindness that’s totally in your control.

I’ve begun accepting recently that I radiate this feeling outward, so intensely it doesn’t even come inside me anymore to belong to me. I radiate being able to see, but just enough to fool others yet not me.

I may be there with me, but I don’t see me.

****

In 2008, my first time visiting New York, I ostensibly pointed to the tallest building in Midtown Manhattan and told my mom with eyes shining, someday I’ll live there.

She told me this happened, and that it foreshadowed me ending up in NYC, years later she exclaimed over the phone in July 2022, when I told her I was going out there.

But I don’t remember this premonitive moment at all. I had never thought of NYC as a dream, to be honest. It wasn’t something I yearned for in my sleep, bc it didn’t really feel attainable, nor something that might suit me. I found it tiresomely cliche, and a place that could squeeze any zest for life out of me by being too outgoing, too charismatic, beyond a scope I could accept.

How could I even have desire, if I didn’t believe that desire was even real?

There are boxes of things I do, and other boxes of things I don’t.

Los Angeles is a place that can contain me, because its oppression is familiar. New York wouldn’t limit me, but I’d be the one oppressing me more than anyone externally ever could.

It took years to accept that when I said then that one day I’d live there, it was me willing myself, the innocent sweet unscarred child, to dream something and commit to an idea that was within reach, and indexing this for posterity.

What I recall now from that 13 year old vantage point, is I wanted to be the kind of person that COULD live there, that should, more than live there itself. I was being bullied so hard back then that I’d already accepted life might not ever give me what I believed I deserve, but if other people saw this and took pity on me, it’d justify how alone I felt in believing I should have more. Cry for me, damn it!

I wanted to be the kind of person people say is too big for this small town, that is too ethereal to live in grounded reality, too smart and full of potential to be poor. I wanted to be the kind of person who died young and people were so sad they’d never know who I was going to be.

I wanted an incompatibility in my abstract imprint and my lived experience. I wanted pity as the highest form of compliment, some sort of tragedy as a way to pay tribute to my bigness. I almost became ambitious but with a taglined “it’s never going to happen, but fight anyway” sort of self indulgence.

It seemed prescriptive that as opposed to being just an optimist or just a pessimist, I would sit in a sort of halfway line of, “I’m going to try anyway for things and be foolish and not expect them to happen but be really happy about them anyway knowing full well I’m an idiot.”

Such as how I simply got up one day and said, I’m gonna move there to New York. I idealized what I was leaving more than what I was receiving. I decided to view this as a tragedy, that I didn’t need LA anymore, simply because I couldn’t fathom being the person that *had* the thing rather than the person that “could have the thing, but which fate kept from it”. After years of passively noticing I wanted to go there without giving it much thought. It was so out of reach I didn’t even feel pain about not having it. I simply didn’t notice any desire. I wasn’t like I NEED TO GO TO NEW YORK TO FULFILL MY DREAMS. I passively rasped, “most of my friends are there and I guess I’m down to watch myself eat shit more actively.”

It occurred to me the other day that the day career became less necessary for my self image, the times I really stopped giving a shit, I really just sort of passively just did shit and let it work out and went oh okay. No more charge or feelings.

I spent a long time thinking that New York wasn’t even worth looking at as an option to start loving, to start desiring, because New York would just “never get me” because I’m too weak to hustle, even if all I’ve done ever is work hard.

But when I set my suitcase down and stared up into the sky years later on that sunny October day, my first as a resident, I felt a sense of groundedness I hadn’t in years. I felt appropriately small, appropriately humbled, like I remembered what it was like to behold the infinite as something that was real, not as whatever curled up sadness I dwelt in before.

New York has felt less sad, and I almost feel sad I’m not sad now.

If ever I believed I could be something, I found my desires changed accordingly, but letting go of the pity as cope is hard to where it still isn’t often.

****

The first time I had sex, it felt natural, as if I was just automatically doing it. I didn’t feel any extremely foreign feelings. It just felt like it was time to do it, time to experience some sort of implicit physical connectiveness you can’t have just through conversation.

Every time since, I’ve sat on the edge of the bed after, putting my clothes back on, and the man behind me says he’s never had an experience before like that. I don’t bother asking him what he means. Isn’t every experience you have a little different anyway? Why is this worth noting?

I would joke for years I was a virgin, a femcel, undesired even though I’d been desired surely. Before and after 2016 when I started sleeping with people, I felt largely the same - someone that people would never take seriously, and sex was just a hobby to escape that fear for a few minutes at a time. People said it was part of my narrative. I think it’s because I am living in convenience, letting gusto go to waste and drift away without ever grabbing it and staring at it. I’d like to be the kind of person who could kiss hungrily, but poor little girl can’t do it anymore because she’s so twisted and dark, but she could be that way, right? Isn’t that something I can get off to?

I felt lesser than as a result for years. For isn’t life and being human about being able to get people to see what they want in you? Isn’t every person technically good at sales, because we all use social media to curate some idea of ourselves? Can I do that too?

Over time, I started realizing every time I do anything, compared to others, I fail to come out of my body and look at me doing the thing and manipulate the image. I don’t know how to “try to look cool” or “try to be X”. It’s impossible to make people really think something, impossible to play them like a violin. I’m stuck being myself. The only time I can influence someone of something convincing is if I myself am already convinced of it, and don’t need you to believe it too.

So when I was told I was good at sex, I snorted. Like I didn’t even try to do the thing girls are supposed to do which is "be neurotic and try hard to look cute.” This was in fact some hallmark of being a girl, isn’t it? If I didn’t put in effort, did I deserve praise?

Paradoxically, I don’t expect effort to also ever pay off.

Recently, I realized I wanted to be the kind of person that was almost good enough but couldn’t quite make it, as opposed to accept maybe I am good enough.

“If anyone used their brain to assess me, of course they’d realize I suck always,” I said cheerfully the other day. “I’m full of shit though, aren’t I?”

My future self came down and smacked me. “Yes.”

****

The thing is, I spent years chasing the feeling of being enough, no matter its manifestation. It wasn’t even in external forces. I would arbitrarily make goals that felt *befitting* of a girl like me, goals that would add up to some picture of who I wanted the. 

It never occurred to me to just DO things that I feared would be humiliating and just enjoy the humiliation if it were to happen. Taste it. Be sweet. Smirk in the face of humiliation and simply refuse to be.

Blindness went hand in hand with ambition to me. The idea that if I just kept suffering forward, for the PRINCIPLE of being righteous and brave in the face of it, I’d eventually become desensitized, and accept that all I’d ever do is have challenge after challenge lobbed at me and maybe someday I’d feel great.

But if “tragedy” is functionally useful to me, then this is all userless. Ambition isn’t real if you can’t notice if you’re fulfilling what you wanted. A dog can’t catch the car if he doesn’t even see it. Blindness is my cope.

****

I am my best audience, I am my biggest dialoguer. I hang out with people to take a break from hanging out with myself.  

But while I see into their souls, I don’t see the totality of mine. I see myself as a person who does things, who could do things, but not as the person who IS doing them because they DESERVE it.

****

I blink and the old man is gone.

Was he there?

He’s actually on the other side of the street. He didn’t even see me. I had paused in my gusto, staring at him, and I pictured him talking to me, but maybe I just needed a Tyler Durden moment to realize that whoever was speaking to me was right.