I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(60)

That’s probably the first and last way in which I relate to movie stars, but I do relate. It’s fair to want some parts of an experience but not all. It’s fair to realize that while you did indeed mean to take every step that led you to where you are, now that you’re there you realize you don’t love everything about it. It’s fair to say, Stop. Not all of this is okay.



* * *



So I had mixed feelings about this Fashion Police thing.

But I’m not a quitter. Anyone can give up on something; the trick is staying the course when things get hard, right? Rising to the challenge. Pushing through. When it feels like something can’t be done, a real achiever finds a way. A real achiever doesn’t squander an opportunity.

Or does she?



* * *



I blew an interview on purpose once.

It was eleventh grade, and I’d been contacted by the Governor’s Honors Program—a summer camp of sorts where kids from all over the state lived on a college campus and took classes in leadership and team-building and the performing arts and calculus and all sorts of other advanced subjects. It’s not something you apply for; one day you just get a letter that says, “You’ve been selected to interview,” and you’re supposed to show up and talk to somebody who will determine whether you’ll be one of the lucky ones.

Except it didn’t sound so lucky to me. It sounded boring. Four weeks of forced socialization with people I didn’t know? School in the summer? Oh, hell no.

Summer might normally be a perfectionist kid’s nightmare, what with all that time off from studying and getting grades. But summer, to me, was sacred. Sanctioned by school itself as a break from the classroom, summer existed purely by nature of the school year that surrounded it on both sides. Like the negative white space created by not painting on part of a canvas, the weeks from June through August were meant to stay blank. One could still fill them with accomplishments like reading fifty books or swimming two hundred laps or eating a Popsicle every single day for a seventy-day streak. But one should not be in school during the summer. I may have been a nerd, but I was a real human kid, too.

But what to do? I’d been chosen. I did like being chosen.

My gut churned as my mother drove me to the interview office.



* * *



The first several questions passed easily. What’s your favorite subject? (English.) What do you do for fun? (Read.) What do you like about leadership? (Leading. And being right. And getting shit done.) Then we got to this one:

“What would you do this summer if you weren’t selected for this program?”

Huh.

That’s when I took a sharp turn. I did what I had never done before and wouldn’t do again for a long time.

With no one watching—it was just the interviewer and me in the room—I decided that while I liked being chosen, I didn’t like what I had been chosen for. As Cheap Trick said, I want you to want me, but I didn’t want all that came with this “honor.”

So I answered: “I’d be pretty happy, actually.”



* * *



I got in the car. Buckled my seat belt, eyes on the dash.

“How’d it go?” my mom asked.

“Fine, I guess.”

I felt like I’d just committed murder.

My heart still races when I think of it.



* * *



One Tuesday several months into my tenure on the Fashion Police force, we received in our weekly packets a photo of the singer Kelly Clarkson wearing a T-shirt tucked into a full skirt made of fabric printed with records all over it. A music skirt! It was adorable. Also? Props for knowing how to tuck a top into a skirt, Kelly. People act like that’s a skill women are born with, but I’m here to tell you, it’s not. Every time I try it, the skirt ends up hiked up in the back and down in the front with my shirt blousing out around my belly like I’m Eloise.

I couldn’t make fun of her or her outfit. I wanted to send in, “This is how to set a record for looking marvelous, fuckers.”

I knew I couldn’t send that in, so I started making a list of music puns instead, rolling my eyes at every stupid phrase I typed.

I felt like a faker.



* * *



It goes against my nature to leave a task incomplete. I’ve only recently been able to let myself give up on a book I don’t like without reaching the last page, and to do so I had to convince myself that because part of my job is reading and evaluating books, I technically am completing the task by deciding which books are worth reading to the end. I’ve set my phone to chime and go dark at 10:20 p.m., because I know I have a habit of checking Twitter before I go to bed. It’s impossible to reach the end of the internet, and without a reminder to put my phone away, I’m in danger of scroll-scroll-scrolling infinitely, scanning screen after screen of tweets as if there’s a last tweet coming, a window that will pop up and say, “All done. You finished the internet. Good night.”

But maybe the trick isn’t sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying “No, thank you” to something you’re expected to accept isn’t failure. It’s a whole other level of success.

It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends. The novelist Katie Coyle once tweeted: “Last week I killed a book I’ve been writing for three and a half years and now I feel drunk with power.” The older I get, the more I find Katie’s right. A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don’t really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.