‘Well in our country’, said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. How to have a panic attack

The most important thing is not to panic.

Some people will tell you that panic is essential. Do not believe them. Sure, you could have a panic attack in the fast lane on the 405 freeway and have to pull over onto the hard shoulder, while traffic goes whizzing past and the misty LA light starts to fade. You might stagger into a hospital, gasping and wild-eyed. There might be tears, flailing, falling. These things might happen: but it’s just as likely to be slower, more subtle. Maybe you won’t even notice. Maybe years will go by before you identify the feeling as something significant.

Lie in bed, on your side, facing the wall. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, maybe someone once tried to teach you to meditate, and you think you can trick yourself into feeling calm. Feel dizzy anyway, maybe because all those times you were “meditating”, you were really just napping in the presence of incense. Feel your heart racing. Wonder if this is what dying feels like. Keep wondering this. Tell yourself that you would know if you were dying, in the same way you know if you’re about to vomit or when you’re hungry or tired. But you don’t know. Worry that you don’t know: is it good or bad that you don’t know? Is not knowing the same thing as knowing?

Wake up in the morning pleased and surprised. Go to bed the next evening not knowing if you’ll survive the night. Repeat until something more interesting happens in your life: you get drunk for the first time, you get a C on a calculus exam and have a meeting with a stern teacher who expected more of you, you get into college anyway, you spend two hours after the prom making out with a boy you didn’t even know you liked, you go to Europe for a month, you move across the country.

2. How to talk to doctors

Go running every day. When winter sets in and it’s too cold to run along the river, start spending your evenings at the gym, which is in a humid basement with a sweat-stained carpet and flickering lights. Run fast, but never very far: your usual distance is four miles on the treadmill, and the funny thing about this is that even four miles later you’re still standing in exactly the same spot. Play your music loudly and try not to look at the television screens flashing news at you. Lift weights sometimes, just the lightest ones, in an attempt to tone your arms, which is something you’ve read about in magazines. Lie on a purple mat and do a few sit-ups and wonder when you’ll start to look like someone who goes to the gym.

Then, at some point, late one evening, begin to feel a pain.

“What sort of pain?” the nurse in the campus clinic will ask you, when you arrive for your appointment and tell her you think you’re going to die.

Tell her you don’t know what sort of pain. Pain, in your chest. That can’t be good, can it? She’ll take your blood pressure, say it’s good. She’ll say you’re a healthy young woman. She’ll want to know if you do any other exercises at the gym. Any weight-lifting? she’ll say.

Tell her: a bit. Not very much though, can’t you tell? You’ll think this is funny, because you’re still pretty scrawny, or at least your arms are. But she won’t laugh; she’ll just say, without missing a beat: well, you’ve probably just pulled something.

Tell her you don’t think you’ve pulled something.

She’ll ask if you have any other symptoms. You’ll say, restlessness, inability to sleep, palpitations – only you won’t know the word for palpitations, so you’ll just say, my heart feels funny. You’ll tell her about that time you went to the ER for something that turned out to be nothing and the attending doctor said he thought you had some sort of heart murmur, and that you should ask your family doctor about it, but you didn’t have a family doctor because you were not from around here and your insurance didn’t cover things like that, so you were asking her about it, now, months later.

She’ll absorb all of this. She’s in her fifties. Maybe she has daughters of her own, college-aged girls. Maybe she thinks you’re crazy. Start to wonder if you’re going to be late for your 3 o’clock class after all. Is this the sort of thing you can get a doctor’s note for? Imagine visiting your professor during office hours, saying, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to discuss Discipline and Punish, I was keeping an appointment to announce my impending death.

Finally the nurse will say, alright, fine, I can refer you to a cardiac specialist. He’ll probably do an EKG, she’ll say. But I still think you’ve probably just pulled something, she’ll add. You have no idea what an EKG is but you’re happy to be taken seriously.

Go home. Look up “EKG”. Start to worry.

Tell your boyfriend that they’re going to hook you up to a machine. A machine! But he’ll be asleep, so you’ll mostly be talking to yourself. A machine!

Arrive at the clinic wary but fully intending to go through with this thing, to find out once and for all what’s wrong, or not wrong, with you. Sit in the grim waiting room. Take stock: note the 70s brown carpet, the dirty yellow walls, the hazy late winter light trying to push its way through greenish-tinted windows. Note that nothing seems very clean, even though nothing is obviously dirty. Keep thinking: oh my God, I need to get home and have a shower. Wonder if heart disease is contagious. Reach for your hand sanitizer; rub the gel between your palms. Wonder if the people working here really work here at all, if the other people in the waiting room – quiet, like shadows – really exist outside of this space. Wonder if you’ll emerge as the same person, or if you’ll emerge at all. When the doctor calls you in, don’t tell him about the heart murmur or the palpitations (you still don’t know the word, and you can’t tell a doctor – a cardiac specialist, no less – that your heart feels funny), just that you’d had a bit of pain in the chest area. Play it down: say, my chest, maybe my shoulder. The nurse thinks it’s just a pulled muscle. The doctor will do some poking and prodding and ask a few questions and in the end he’ll say exactly what you want him to say: that he thinks the nurse is right, you probably pulled a muscle lifting weights at the gym. And because a doctor has said it – even a doctor with an incomplete picture of an incomplete problem, in a dubious clinic populated by ghosts and shadows – it’s okay. Buy a new pair of running shoes on the way home to celebrate.

A few years later, realize that you can Google all your symptoms. Learn the word “palpitations”. Feel immediately better: as soon as you find a word for something, some evidence of it existing, being a thing, it becomes easier to deal with. Visit your doctor. Try to tell him what you think is wrong without actually describing anything: say that you want to do something about the physical manifestations of your anxiety. He’ll think you mean diarrhea, so it will come as a big relief to both of you when you can laugh and say, no, no, heart palpitations, things like that. Things like what? he’ll say. Do you have any other symptoms? You’ll say, Not really. Well, dizziness at night. Sometimes nausea. Shivering, uncontrollable shivering.

Any shortness of breath? he’ll say.

No, you’ll lie.

Fill the prescription. Forget, for years, that you even have this problem. Let it become something that’s past: and forget about that Faulkner quote you once read, the one that says, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Forget what any of it feels like, so that it can seem new each time it resurfaces.

3. How to fool yourself into thinking you look like a grown up

Get a job, preferably one that you hate, though you could settle for one that you just find boring. Commute. Start to become one of those people who shouts at pedestrians when they walk in front of your bike and realize you’re not angry because someone could get hurt: you’re angry because you’re in a hurry, and you were going at a good clip, and they’ve fucked with your momentum.

Make photocopies and send emails. Become one of those people who distributes agendas before pointless meetings and uses the word “pipeline” regularly. On your lunch break, take a walk and wonder why everyone else looks so much happier than you feel. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the darkened window of a recently-shut shop. Think that you look pretty happy, actually, and that your expensive new haircut certainly looks expensive, or at least it looks expensive if you know how much it cost, which you do, because you paid for it.

Pay your rent. Pay your phone bill. Pay your other phone bill, even though you haven’t used a landline in about ten years. Pay your gas bill. Pay your electricity bill. Pay your credit card bill. Pay for your gym membership. Pay for your groceries to be delivered to your house in the evenings because you just don’t have the time during the day anymore. Go to the bank on a Saturday because you just don’t have the time during the week anymore. Discover that you’re not going to have enough money to pay your rent and your phone bill and your other phone bill and your gas bill and your electricity bill and your credit card bill next month, even though you have a job that you hate (or at least a job that you find boring). Start to dream about work: compose emails in your sleep, look for solutions under your wilted pillow. Wonder if you’re doing it right. See: 1. How to Have a Panic Attack.

4. How to actually be a grown up

Don’t.

5. How to not feel jealous of people who are fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you

You could try telling yourself that they’re not fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished or more interesting than you, but you probably won’t believe it, even if it comes from your own trustworthy mouth. Start to resent yourself for trying to deceive you: you don’t deserve to be deceived, even if everyone else is fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you. How dare you do this to you! How dare you!

Go to the pub. Sit in the corner. Have a drink and scowl at everyone. Feel marginally better, in an “I feel worse” sort of way. Go home. Go to sleep. Dream about something boring, like buying groceries. Wake up. Think about how everyone else probably has better dreams than you do. Slide into what’s commonly known as a funk, but know there’s nothing common about it: you’re the Queen of Funks, and this is the Funk to End all Funks, and if nothing else – if nothing else! – you can be a superlative failure.

6. How to get out of bed in the morning, even when you don’t want to

Find someone you love who loves you back and will make you a bacon sandwich but refuse to bring it upstairs, even when you say that there is no point in getting out of bed and you’d rather starve because frankly starving would be more interesting than not starving at this point. Wait a few minutes for the smell of bacon to climb the staircase and enter the bedroom. Decide that you’re still not happy with things, that you’re resolutely unhappy, in fact, but that you may as well go downstairs and have the bacon sandwich, as it’s there, because no one else is going to eat it, and it would be a shame to waste a bacon sandwich.

7. How to feel more productive

Stop reading things you don’t want to read. Even that. And yes, if it helps, even this. Also, add things you’ve already done to your to-do list. I know it’s cheating but it still feels good and it will always feel good, no matter what they say.

8. How to feel smug

Don’t own a television. Don’t own a car. Don’t tell people that it’s mostly because you can’t afford these things.

9. How to avoid awkward conversations

Don’t talk to anyone. Ever.

10. How to avoid feeling lonely

Talk to people. Often.

n.b. This originally appeared in GENE 01 last year. Some of it’s fiction. Some of it isn’t. Its alternative title, in my head, is, “It Would be a Shame to Waste a Bacon Sandwich”.

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First, let’s get a few things out of the way: I’m a white American female. I went to a private liberal arts college. I’m a (struggling) writer. I’m in my mid twenties. Very probably if the target market for Girls took singular physical form it would look exactly like me. I also understand that a portrayal of a world in which everyone is like me is ridiculous. I understand the exclusionary, maybe dangerous implications of such a portrayal, and I understand the need for criticisms of it: that Girls is too self-centered, too small-minded, fails to represent or even acknowledge huge swathes of society, emphasizes a certain kind of privilege. But this is, nevertheless, the show we’ve been given: the show in which four straight white college-educated chicks from comfortable economic backgrounds try to forge a life for themselves in a big city.

So. The point of Girls, as its name, I guess, is meant to indicate, is that the women depicted in the show are still uncomfortable about their “adult” status. They’re wriggling around in this tight new skin, trying to figure out how to be. They’re all grown up, except they’re not, because no one ever really is. That’s the joke, right? That we’ll still be thinking, “but I feel like such a fraud!” even when we’re successful, when we’re experts, even when we’re in our thirties, or our nineties, for that matter. We’re always still kids, always just faking it.

The anxieties that the women in Girls experience are, largely, anxieties of comparison – the virgin is uncomfortable because her peers are mostly not virgins; the writer is peeved that someone she took a writing workshop with in college has already been published. Some of them are my anxieties, too: when Marnie worries that she’s barren because she’s been sexually irresponsible a few times and has never gotten pregnant, I’m forced to acknowledge that, however irrational it sounds when it’s actually said out loud, I’ve had this exact thought; I know what it’s like to think that way about things entirely beyond your control. Again it’s about comparison; all the anxiety boils down to this fear of having to deal with a situation which is unique or un-mappable, a situation that our worst enemy or our best friend isn’t also in: why is what’s happening to her not happening to me? how do I deal with something different?

On the other hand, there’s this scene, with Marnie and an artist. They’ve left a gallery opening to go for a walk together; they’re standing at an entrance to the High Line. She’s got a boyfriend, but she’s flirting, or fawning – it’s difficult to tell exactly which. She tells the artist she’s not going to kiss him. He tells her he might scare her the first time he fucks her, because, “I’m a man, and I know how to do things. See ya later.”

Cut to Marnie, marching through the gallery to the bathroom, locking herself in, reaching under her dress to touch herself.

What? Is this an earnest commentary on what people our age are meant to feel – turned on by the firm promise of real adulthood, of real men (or women)? Is it a commentary on the ridiculousness of the way we’re condescended to? Or is it just a really, really bad call on Dunham’s part? So yes: Girls is hit or miss, sometimes downright awful; it relies on shorthand in the form of caricature; it’s self-consciously self-conscious to a painful extent; it’s got moments – like the Marnie/artist scene – which are utterly baffling.

Sometimes it’s hit and miss in the same moment. The very first episode – and therefore the series – opens with Dunham’s Hannah, at a restaurant, being told by her parents that they can’t continue to support her financially. There’s a disconcerting instant – why are her parents supporting her? they’ve just been congratulating her on how well her job is going – before we understand that the job in question is an internship – unpaid, of course. The scene is indelicately handled; Hannah’s infantile responses – “But I’m your only child, it’s not like I’m draining all your finances!”, or, “This is nuts. I could be a drug addict. Do you realize how lucky you are?” – do seem to warrant her mother’s final pronouncement: “No. More. Mo-ney,” she says, slowly, as if speaking to a baby. The scene seems to condense all kinds of potential (and potentially serious) problems and anxieties into a single, glib instance; it worries me how easily this could be construed as proof of the idea that there’s a prevalence of whiny, lazy privilege amongst people under the age of 30.

Which I think is largely how it’s been read, either critically (gosh those twentysomethings are entitled!) or sympathetically (yeah, I’m four years out of college and still doing unpaid internships!) – both of which are valid but rather surface interpretations. Because the meat, the heart, is this: here we see, laid bare, the two-faced self, the self that understands intuitively the role of marketing even in times of desperate insecurity, the self split by a desire to look good and a desire to acknowledge a sinking, desperate kind of doubt. One face tells one story, the other another: there’s the young woman, two years out of college, working at a publishing house in New York City, writing a book, being positively encouraged to continue, making it; and then there’s the young woman, two years out of college, without a job, without a book deal or a finished manuscript, relying on her parents in order to sustain herself, adrift. They’re the same person, and neither version is any truer than the other, really.

And this is where Girls does get it right. Last year, after the first episode had aired, and every writer, blogger, and clown with a pen had rushed to dissect it, I tweeted this:

“Wow, just fell down the “responses to HBO’s Girls” rabbit hole. Almost feel like I don’t need to see the show – like it’s been created to be ‘viewed’ remotely, via the medium of hype/criticism.”

I have, now, obviously, seen the show, but I don’t think I was wrong: I think the beauty of it, if you can call it beauty, is that it exists beyond its material form. It’s viewable even if you never watch it.

There’s a point in the third episode where Hannah, back from a reunion with an ex-boyfriend, sits on her bed, composing a tweet. We see the screen as she sees it, the empty box, the potential.

“You lose some, you lose some,” she writes. Delete.
“My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy,” she writes. Delete.
“All adventurous women do,” she writes. Tweet.

So we literally see Hannah editing (or creating) her own image, forging a version of herself designed explicitly for consumption. What she decides to tweet is not revelatory or even meaningful on its own – but the expression that forms on her face as the words appear on the page suggest Hannah feels she’s hit just the right note. “I am busy trying to become who I am!” Hannah tells her parents at the start of the show, and here we see the evidence of this: we see her, hard at work, trying to become the person she is. And even if no one else is listening, she’s said the kind of thing that person would say.

This performance isn’t notable in itself – we do it all the time, even those of us who never touch a computer or a smartphone, who revile “social media”. But to see it acted out like that is, I think, notable. Perhaps Girls is not significant for being devoid of color, or for having been written by someone who was just 12 when Sex and the City first aired: perhaps it’s significant simply for being the first show of its kind, the first show to have been created in and for a world in which the careful construction of a tweet is as much a part of an encounter with an ex-boyfriend as the actual meeting itself.

Girls gets a lot of things wrong: but it does get this right, almost exactly, painfully right. The biggest anxiety of all, it seems to suggest, is not the one about how to be, but how to appear to be. How to enact that appearance. How to look like the person you want to be, even if you’re not that person, even if you never can be, because, remember, underneath, like the duck gliding serenely across the pond but paddling furiously underwater, we’re all faking it anyway. Girls is bigger than itself; it is also its critical context, a product of its own hype. You could watch it, I guess, without having read a thing about it, but I think you’d be missing something. I think it was created deliberately for an audience who watch with the noise turned on, who contribute to that noise – I think that’s its natural environment. I think you can read about it without watching it, and still be watching it, but it would be harder to watch it without reading about it and still be watching it.

p.s. I haven’t seen any of the second series yet

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I’ve been traveling. Or at least this is what I tell people. The truth is that when we arrive at LA neither of us feels different or amazed in the way you feel different and amazed to discover yourself someplace entirely new. The air is warmer and heavier than it was in the place we left; in England there was a summer wind, blowing big clouds across a narrow sky, whipping my freshly-washed hair around my face. But we have a history here – if not here specifically then here generally, in this part of the world – and the pleasantness of familiarity borders on mundanity. We take a shuttle to the Hilton and check in. Everyone is cheerful, and the mirrored elevator whisks us up a dozen floors. Our room looks out over a parking lot. Anonymous lights flicker and blink in the distance. We’re in a no-man’s-land. Hard to believe this place ever had any other purpose, though it must have, once. We fall asleep with the TV on – a film with Russell Crowe, I think, or someone like him, playing a cop in 1970s America. He’s yelling at a junkie in an ambulance when I nod off.

We wake very early; no spectacular sunrise, just a dark grey that lightens as the invisible sun moves behind a curtain of June clouds. I ride the elevator to the pool. There are two men splashily attempting laps as I swipe my card and enter the gates, but they soon leave and I have the place to myself. The pool is shallow, and so small that within six strokes I can cross it lengthways. But the water is warm, and the air outside is cool and the overall sensation is soothing.

***

Orange County is a source of perpetual amazement. In Garden Grove, Anaheim, Santa Ana, I think: people made it this way. But how would you ever know that it was people and not robots, that it was meant for human inhabitants, that it was deliberate at all? Do you see any humans? Do you see anything that’s human-sized? No. You see the drive-thru ATM, the drive-thru coffee shop, the strip malls, the six-lane streets, the parking lots. Even the Crystal Cathedral, with its garish screen announcing services and its spires pricking a white sky, is too big, meant I suppose to contain multitudes but destined, I fear, to look comically (or tragically) like a cartoon version of itself. Where they exist, the sidewalks are hot and narrow, stained by chewing gum and spilled McFlurries, interrupted every few feet by curb cuts. We pass hamburger joints, hospitals, hotels. Nothing seems particularly busy, but there are always cars pulling in and out and people must be inside the cars, compelled to keep moving by some obscure motive or other – errands, lunch breaks, breakdowns. There are people behind counters and cash registers, taking money, making money. We repeatedly seek respite in the old part of Orange, where antique shops and cafés and wide shady spaces make us feel welcome, even a little nostalgic. I fall briefly and irrationally in love with a vintage 1940s swimsuit, made of thick navy blue wool with red straps, “a really rare piece,” the girl in the shop tells me, smiling encouragingly but understandingly; it belongs in a film, or a frame. So I pretend that if I had lots of money, or even any money, this is the sort of thing I would impulsively spend $250 on.

***

I watch episodes of Friday Night Lights and feel nostalgic for small town Texas, even though I’ve never set foot in Texas, even though I’ve never been to a high school football game. My high school mascot was the earwig, which inspired very little spirit in anyone, and all the boys played lacrosse, although certainly not well enough to be state champions. People weren’t really from there, anyway: it was mostly a boarding school, and everyone scattered at the end of each year to go home or to college. I flip through old yearbooks; I note that in my senior year, I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’, alongside a male counterpart. As I was never sure, and still am not sure, what it is I’m supposed to succeed at, I doubt I’ve lived up to the challenge yet. (My primary achievement so far, apart from moving far away and finding somebody who continues to love me even though I never put the bread back in the bread bin, seems to be writing a book centered largely around the idea of changing definitions of success). The boy voted most likely to succeed now, I believe, works in finance, which sounds much more like something approaching success, particularly if success involves being able to pay your rent on time.

I revisit the valley where I went to school. The uncertainty of my relationship with the place now is based on the understanding that I know almost no one here anymore: there’s little chance of a chance encounter, one of those movie scenes where you’re standing at the counter picking up your mother’s prescription and someone taps you on the shoulder and says ‘oh my god, I can’t believe it’s you!’. I keep thinking about how different everything is – none of the places that used to be here are here anymore – but at the same time nothing’s really different. It’s not the same salon, but it’s the same old story, or a version of it – this time it’s the hairdresser’s husband, not the hairdresser herself, who was born and raised here.

I drive home, listening to a mix CD I must have made in high school – Jimi Hendrix juxtaposed with Dashboard Confessional. I always did like to be contrary. The sights are familiar and so are the sounds. I turn the volume up, blaring Weezer like I’m 17 and pissed off at nothing in particular but nevertheless enjoying the freedom and the speed and the inherent understanding that all the big decisions are still somewhere on the horizon, not yet made.

As it happens I’m not pissed off at anything and am feeling pretty mellow, driving slower than I used to, pulling over to take bad photos with a borrowed cell phone, momentarily at peace with the big decisions that have already been made. But I still remember the time I hit the squirrel on this stretch of road and the time we discovered that the cows had escaped their pasture on that stretch of road. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately and I wonder why these are things I remember particularly.

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Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

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Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

- From “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” by John Tierney, New York Times Magazine, August 17th, 2011

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