so what's next

Recommended Reading & Viewing: Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby, Tavi Gevinson’s “Britney Spears Was Never in Control,” and Leigh Stein’s Self Care.

I’ve spent most of my time since last March reading essays about all the ways I and everyone else feel lonely and undesirable. When I was a little kid I would clip out dating advice from Seventeen magazine and made bucket lists about all the ways I’d love and be loved. My locked diaries were filled with daydreams about how I’d kiss a boy before seventh grade. He wouldn’t smell and would swoon whenever I wore the obviously cool crew socks with my Famous Footwear sneakers. I dedicated pages to the promise that I would have my first boyfriend when I was sixteen so that we wouldn’t need a parent to drive us anywhere. Neither of these goals was met. Life for me is usually best when imagined.

Before I left for El Paso in August I reread some of these diaries to remind myself of who I am. In fourth grade, I wanted a boyfriend that ran a six-minute mile and was nice to me. To steal a line from my stand-up set about crushes, you don’t even have to embody either of those things anymore. I think right now I'm looking for someone who can contribute to my student loan payments and maybe has connections in the entertainment industry. I'll also take a nice smile.

Reading those diary entries is a brutal reminder about how much I thought growing up meant becoming consumable. I hated wearing bras because that meant that I could be sexy. Even though I was obsessed with the breast development diagram in The Care and Keeping Of You (did anyone else skip the pointy tit stage?), it got to the point where my well-meaning fourth-grade teacher asked my mom to buy me a bra. Apparently, my untethered eleven-year-old titties were distracting. I was a fat kid so I found it flattering that anyone was looking at me at all.

Nowadays I wear desirability like clown make-up. I tell my friends that I would do anything to live in the dystopian world of Uglies where I could agree to a lobotomy in exchange for a symmetrical face. I wear tennis dresses I saw on Instagram ads and joke about becoming a brand ambassador. I hate everything about what I want to be and there’s still an itch at the back of my mind to marry rich. Not sure how that fallback plan factors into my ultimate aim of abolishing capitalism. We’re figuring that out one gel penned diary entry at a time.

I'm still making bucket lists and writing fan fiction about the people I want to date. I tell myself that every day feels like an epilogue to some great romance that will thaw my heart. I've been waking up angry and going to bed crying. Not in a romantic main character way either. I'm just another person with a complex. Maybe if I start waking up earlier I'll feel better. More time to read about loneliness.