thoughts from 9:15-11:30am

Have you ever stayed in bed waiting for the world, or something in it, to move you? I did in denial and with resistance. Eventually, time moved me. The constant recognition I have less and less of it; that I cannot wait but must act upon it. Last night I dreamt of myself begging, pleading for more hours, more days to complete an application, to put together a manuscript. Whoever I was speaking to, I told I was not ready, that my writing was not yet facing myself. It wasn’t what I wanted yet. It just wasn’t all of who I know is me. Was I experiencing the pressure to be better than I am? Or was I feeling a pressure to admit these were all products of who I am at the moment (like it or not)? 

Usually rain keeps us inside, but this morning it encouraged me out. And I went walking through it in sneakers and a thin Burberry trench. Always feeling I look better with my face drenched, my hair thinned around my head. The air tasted better outside even when water fell through it; I breathed in twice as much to sustain me. At 9th Street Espresso I drank a cappuccino with my face to the wall; a drink I never order, but this morning I wanted to have cupped in my hands the design they are infamous for, that separates them from all the hundred other coffee shops in New York. Milk and espresso swirled together, a heart shape the mouth reached for and that remained unbroken until the last sip. It was a shame I hadn’t done this earlier. I am a long time “user” of caffeine who always orders americanos and red eyes because it is closer to cocaine than a meal. But in doing so, I recognized that I never allowed myself to be different, to be surprised—like so many instances in my life. I am an extremist, when I become fixed I want to consume that thing entirely, and then one day I’ll never be able to stomach its smell or think as I was.

One of my fondest appreciations of living in Manhattan is receiving the Sunday New York Times on Saturday. Even before having it delivered, I use to sneak out at midnight to be the first to purchase it from The Village Farm on 9th street at the corner of 2nd avenue. I felt like I had an in on the world, an in that, well, that anyone could be in on at some point on Sunday if they have five dollars, a newspaper stand somewhere close or access to the internet. A year and a half into this mentality, I became disenchanted when visiting my mom’s side of the family in Atlanta. Coming down for breakfast and seeing the newspapers already flung open, but discovering no New York Times among the mix. It was explained to me that many people outside of New York did not have an interest in reading “your slant on news” and that “there were too many articles, too many options of events happening, opportunities I have no chance in.” I knew then that Manhattan was a city of its own, a destination that felt like another country. We lived in a bubble and it was easy to forget that there were other places, that there were less things. New York was an addiction. It helped me get over one and become healthier, but it also intensified others I didn’t realize I had been prone to. As Ani Difranco sung, "He was a liar with nothing to lie about."

In the length it took me to finish my cappuccino I read “Love, Your Ted” by David Orr in the Book Review Section and “The Ambition Condition: Women, Writing, and The Problem of Success” an article in Bitch Magazine by Anna Clark. For years I rolled my eyes at my sister for buying Bitch. A course at Emerson College on Images influenced my conception of feminism. I will never forget being the only female in the lecture openly resisting the other female voices who tried to dominate my gender’s perception. They did presentations on La Perla and mannequins; arguing the gaze cut females faces off to objectify their bodies. Their words were testaments to their wounds, their voices exploited their weakness. I couldn’t agree and I couldn’t stay silent in passive acceptance either. I was a female and this wasn’t how I felt. I thought La Perla was classy, overpriced, and I never wore lingerie anyway. To me, it was nothing to get bent out of shape about. I had been a model and I never felt objectified, only a little upset when a male was brought on to model jeans because “his butt looked better in the pants” than mine. Mannequins looked more robotic than humane; they were not to be taken seriously. I acknowledged that in the past women were seen and valued in unfortunate circumstances, but in our generation now I felt women exploited themselves at their own will. Regardless whether it was an unconscious conditioning, females and males were responsible for what they chose to do. I hated the blame game I witnessed and for two years I was convinced that was what feminism was. My professor belonged in the Rules of Attraction. He was handsome, someone my eyes and ears could follow for hours and he commuted from Brooklyn. I always had this fantasy that one day we were bound to be on the same Chinatown Bus taking us from Boston into Manhattan or vice versa. I had this idea that I would finally get into college in New York and we would keep in touch, discuss books, art, perception. These were all unfilled desires, except college in Manhattan of course. I knew that when it came down to it, things that involved only my will would be accomplished, it was always the second party I could be unsure of. He ended up giving me the worse grade that I received while enrolled at Emerson. At the time I wanted to approach him about this—I wanted to hear him come up with a reason—I had been the only one that wasn’t on the internet the entire class and if I ever missed, I was told that he had asked about him, where was I? what would they do without me helping the discussion? I didn’t know why he gave me less than I had expected, but maybe it was because he watched me go from a powerful female who fought everything out, a female with strong legs and arms from two-a-day workouts to a female that transformed almost overnight. As winter wore off and spring befriended the end of the semester, the layers were left in the closet and beneath the bed. Had he seen me before I saw myself? Had he been a man gazing at what was left of me. I hadn’t recognized it at the time, I hadn’t seen myself in less and lighter clothes, but others could. From April to May I had lost over 20 pounds, and in my spring clothes I was a 5’9 105 pound girl. Maybe I was less. It wouldn’t be until I lost 20 more pounds that I would have myself weighed. Perhaps it was the doctor's way to show me evidence of reality, since in a mirror I never saw myself, since in a mirror I looked beyond what was in view. Had he graded me down because he thought I was a contradiction to what my voice spoke out against? Maybe I had, maybe I had lost control of my self, but it never was for men. Even though, after my boyfriend told me that my arms looked bigger, that oatmeal after six pm didn't help loose weight and that I would never be Kate Moss, I cried while he was sleeping and feeling nothing. Did my professor want to effect a change in me? Or had he never really given me a thought and a ‘B’ seemed good enough? I’ll never know, and it no longer matters, I just hadn’t thought of it until now.

It wasn’t until a week before last summer in a small room with a professor did my opinion about feminism change. She told me she had read into the ambiguity and surrealistic quality of my writing; that she had translated my words and discovered my intention and the feelings I was shying away from. I admitted I had been recovering more than from an eating disorder but an eight year image disorder. Then she told me everything about her or at least what came to mind. She tried to persuade me into reading a feminist text, saying it had helped her recover from her lifetime disorder. I left shocked; again an affirmation that appearances are misleading, that the outside life is disenchanting. 

I was happy to have my back to the early morning crowd of coffee drinkers. I wasn’t sure if Bon Iver playing in the background or the Bitch article brought me closest to tears. But I felt scared, yes scared, about what was next after graduating. Perhaps I would be writing for Bitch one day, after stepping into the workforce and realizing my idea that women and men are almost equal partners was an overblown idealized ideation. I had already begun to see it on Monday when a professor compared me to James Joyce, only to end his critique by saying that Joyce had taught him something while I was senseless. The one other male in the class tried to give a metaphor using Bach. He went on to say that he wanted to know where my character was, “where was she, Chelsea tell me where she is, nothing says!” All the while I was staring, if possible, through the table only looking up once to say, “It’s in the first line and if that wasn’t early enough, it is in the title.” Title: Solitude in The Heart of Manhattan. Opening line: “To be there, I was told to write myself into Manhattan.” I told him he was senseless and that I had failed to hear him ever not contradict himself.

It was all so bizarre to me. Having a twin, I grew up desiring time with men more so than females. But this was the first time they wanted nothing to do with me. My professor had said that he was absolutely taken when male authors wrote outright their animal urges, to have sex, to use. And then I did it, I exposed the female urge, and he refused to read past page one. As much as it could discourage me completely, I knew there were always other minds, opinions and reactions. Two weeks ago, I received messages from about seven males honoring my writing. I also received a call from another professor, “Chelsea, the class and I think you are a star. In a month, you have changed everything around. What I love about you is that you will say anything in your writing. You will write the interior's truth.” What I feared most was that those that saw hope in me would not be the ones who read my applications. Whose hands would it touch? Would they get me at all?

I ordered an iced coffee and a red eye and walked home, thinking two things in the span of one street over and half a block up, thirty seconds waiting for the door to be opened and an elevator ride of seven floors. Had Gallatin been the wrong choice—had it been my dream that really brought me inside a dream? Had Manhattan and NYU been just that, had I been here too long and now no one could understand me because I speaking in my own language, dream words, have I been creating something I thought was more real but which became an illusion on paper? On Thursday, we smoked hookah, drank wine, talked in the corner for two and a half hours. She said that reading French changes your mind, perverts your thought. I told her had she told me this even a year and a half ago I would have thought and possibly told her she sounded crazy. But today, I knew exactly what she was saying. And perhaps this was the “problem”. I met Victoria at The Poetry Project to hear Rosmarie Waldrop read, she immediately asked how I was feeling and how it had gone. I told her, another professor I have been working independently with for three years, what my fiction professor had said, she immediately laughed and asked if he had ever read Roland Barthes. This was wear the rope that was pulling my audience in was cut. How many people have read the authors I am influenced by? They are rarely heard of in America, and when they are they are termed difficult and dense, yet geniuses who pioneered new developments on thought and logic. It seemed like Monday's critique of me: "We don't understand what you are saying, but we think your language is beautiful. You should be a poet." And then female authors I have been independently reading for the last semester, all wrote for a small audience, for an ideal reader. My fiction professor kept going over and over to me this claim that I didn’t know who my audience was; if only two people in the class took to my writing that meant there was something wrong, it wasn’t mainstream, one student said, “keep the thoughts in the diary.” Finally I had to tell him to stop belaboring the topic. I knew who my audience was, he didn’t. And it was, at least right now, for a select group of readers, thinkers, feelers. I have known this all along—it was the last thing I needed guidance on and had to come to sobering terms with. 

And I thought about these last years. Had I tried to be stronger than was realistic for what was taking place? Should I not have tried to be so brave on my own and sought help? Was I who I studied—an actor? Was my addiction not something to pass over, not something that would lessen in time and with thought, would it slowly eat away at me? Was academia distancing me from the world? Did I too often believe I needed to be what people have always expected and who I remember I was before I really used my eyes to see? Smiling when I needed to cry. Did things take longer because I had had a disorder that I was still trying to distance myself from? Could I ever just fall apart like many people, like so many authors, so many actresses I am compared to?

I have resisted making comparisons. But perhaps that is what is stealing the time, what is distancing me, what is holding me back.