Somehow the collective silently appoints a French-braided, freckle-nosed spokesgirl.
She looks away from the faces of her friends and over at me. She smiles politely and says, “We’re fine, thank you.”
The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves.
We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.
This is why we live hungry.
My friend Ashley took her first hot yoga class recently. She walked into the room, unrolled her mat, sat down, and waited for something to happen.
“It was exceptionally hot in there,” she told me.
When the instructor—young and confident—finally walked into the room, Ashley was already dripping with sweat. The instructor announced, “We’ll start soon. You are going to get very hot, but you can’t leave this room. No matter how you begin to feel, stay strong. Don’t leave. This is the work.”
The class got started, and a few minutes in, the walls began to close in on Ashley. She felt light-headed and sick. Each breath became harder and harder to come by. Twice her vision became spotty, then briefly went black. She looked at the door and felt desperate to run toward it. She spent ninety minutes terrified, close to hyperventilating, holding back tears. But she did not leave that room.
The moment the instructor ended the class and opened the door, Ashley jumped off her mat and ran into the hallway. She kept her hand over her mouth until she found the bathroom. She threw the door open and vomited all over the sink, the wall, the floor.
While she was on her hands and knees wiping up her own puke with paper towels, she thought: What is wrong with me? Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked.
When I was a little girl, my godmother gave me a snow globe as a birthday gift. It was small and round, like a palm-sized crystal ball. In its center stood a red dragon with sparkly scales, bright green eyes, and fiery wings. When I first took it home, I put it on the nightstand beside my bed. Then I’d lie awake at night, wide-eyed, feeling afraid that the dragon existed so close to me in the dark. So one night I climbed out of bed and moved the snow globe to the highest shelf in my room.
Every once in a while, only in the light of day, I’d pull my desk chair over, climb up, and pull the snow globe off the shelf. I’d shake it, get still, and watch the snowflakes swirl. As they began to settle, the fiery red dragon in the center of the globe would emerge, and I’d feel a chilly thrill. That dragon was magical and scary, always there, unmoving, just waiting.
My friend Megan is five years sober now after a decade of alcohol and drug abuse. Lately, she’s been trying to figure out what happened to her—how addiction had taken over the life of such a strong woman.
On Megan’s wedding day, she sat in the back of the chapel knowing she didn’t want to marry the man waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She knew it from her roots.
She married him anyway, because she was thirty-five years old and getting married was what she was supposed to do. She married him anyway, because there were so many people she would have disappointed if she had called it off. There was only one of her, so she disappointed herself instead. She said “I do” while her insides said “I don’t,” and then she spent the next decade trying not to know what she knew: that she had betrayed herself and that her life would not really begin until she stopped betraying herself. The only way not to know was to get wasted and stay that way, so she started drinking heavily during her honeymoon. The drunker she became, the more distance she felt from the dragon inside her. After a while, the booze and drugs became her problem, which was convenient because she didn’t have to deal with her real problem anymore.
We’re like snow globes: We spend all of our time, energy, words, and money creating a flurry, trying not to know, making sure that the snow doesn’t settle so we never have to face the fiery truth inside us—solid and unmoving.
The relationship is over. The wine is winning. The pills aren’t for back pain anymore. He’s never coming back. That book won’t write itself. The move is the only way. Quitting this job will save my life. It is abuse. You never grieved him. It’s been six months since we made love. Spending a lifetime hating her is no life at all.
We keep ourselves shaken up because there are dragons in our center.
One night, back when my children were babies, I was reading a book of poetry in the bathtub. I came across a poem called “A Secret Life” about deep secrets and how we all have them. I thought: Well, I haven’t had one since I got sober. I don’t keep secrets anymore. That felt good. But then I read:
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours….
it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
I stopped reading and thought: Oh, wait.
There’s one thing.
One thing I haven’t even told my sister.
My secret that radiates is that I find women infinitely more compelling and attractive than men. My secret is my suspicion that I was made to make love to a woman and cuddle with a woman and rely on a woman and live and die with a woman.
Then I thought: So odd. That cannot be real. You’ve got a husband and three children. Your life is more than good enough.
As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life.
Isn’t that interesting?
As if I had more than one.
I sit in a cold plastic seat near the airport gate, stare at my suitcase, sip airport coffee. It’s bitter and weak. I look at the plane through the gate window. How many of those will I board in the coming year? A hundred? I’m bitter and weak, too.
If I board, this plane will take me to Chicago O’Hare, where I’ll search for a driver holding a sign with my (husband’s) last name on it. I’ll raise my hand and watch the driver’s face register surprise that I am a small woman in sweatpants instead of a large man in a suit. The driver will deliver me to the Palmer Hotel—where a national book conference is being held. There I’ll stand on a stage in a grand ballroom and speak to a few hundred librarians about my soon-to-be-released memoir, Love Warrior.