crushing

The first summer I lived in New York, I kept falling sickeningly in love. Everything else was terrible. I was 22, it was a really hot summer and I had no air conditioning, the trains kept breaking. There was a trash fire on the 2 train. I got stuck on the Q train between DeKalb and the bridge for nearly 45 minutes. I thought the nuclear strike had come.

I was living off the money I had saved au pairing in Moscow and off of occasional odd jobs. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do until the start of my graduate school program in August. I was subletting a tiny room from a sullen photo assistant who had gone to Bennington with my sister and who never spoke to me. He would sit on the couch and read Karl Ove in his spare time.

I couldn’t figure out how to dress and my body felt all out of joint. I had terrible jaw pain. I had been in Europe for five years and New York felt grimy and unfamiliar. My hair was all one length and I wore this one sundress I had bought the year before every single day. I couldn’t get into indie rock or drink beer and DSA felt ideologically incoherent to me. Mostly, I went for long walks or went to the public library or went to Brighton Beach to see the Russians and drink tea. I tried not to hang out with anyone.

The first man I became obsessed with worked at an independent movie theater and lived in Bushwick. I had to take two buses to get there. He was really into dumpster diving which both disgusted and allured me, and he wore really oversized pants hiked up and belted like a little boy’s. He gaged that I was kind of bookish and took me on a date to Molasses Books, a used bookstore on Hart Street where they played music and had little candles on the tables at night. I was charmed, more by the bookstore than by him but they became all blended up in my mind. I couldn’t buy any books because I had no permanent address and all my stuff was in piles on the floor in my sublet. But when my date left the city to go road tripping around America, he gave me some of his books anyway. I got a copy of Being and Nothingness, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Early Works of John McCracken.

My grandmother had just died and I would wake up in the night sometimes and think she was there. Every apartment I lived in that year felt haunted. A man I had had a wild crush on had also died in the spring unexpectedly. He had texted me the day before he died, asking me for a favor. Then he suffered an aneurysm in his sleep and I never found out what the favor was. He was really into coke and he used to say he thought there was something wrong with his brain. When I heard he had died, I felt hollow like my stomach had been scooped out, or like all the potential had gone from the world. I tried to console the girl he was dating, who was my friend, who had a right to be sadder than me. But his sudden death, the unanswered text, the nature of my unrequited crush calcified in me into something else. A kind of extreme longing, a sense of deprivation like I woke up and I couldn’t feel or see or speak anymore.

I met a man at a party who looked like Adam Brody and became infatuated. He was handsome and so disgruntled that I couldn’t speak to him at all and he thought I was young and stupid. I was wearing an ugly green Zara dress with these elaborate sleeves and I could never bring myself to wear it again after that night. I went out with an Austrian communist who was at the New School and who had a girlfriend back in Austria. He claimed he was being stalked by the far right. I went out with a guy who worked for the city and whose parents were in the IRA. He would say my name every time he spoke to me, over and over, like it was something he was learning how to pronounce. I found it profoundly grating.

I tried, like Solange, to drink it away. I ran my credit card up. I slept, I worked, I sexed, I indulged patterns of transference. But it was hard to fix my core obsession with absence, derived from a childhood marked by loss. I became morbidly fixated on signs and symbols. All of my feelings seemed to lead to a void. I needed something to put all my yearning into and that summer it felt like there weren’t a lot of options.

What is the point of all of this? Although being 22 and very sad and living in New York seemed extraordinary to me at the time, it is actually not particularly interesting. You grow up, you fall in love less (ideally), or at least you feel less crushed by it. You work, you keep on. But there’s a kind of intensity to the world when you’re very young, everything feels faster and sharper. And even if that experience is really a very ordinary one, it still *feels* exceptional. You’ll probably never live that way again.

Maybe because so many people meticulously chronicle their lives on the internet, it can feel like there is an extreme lack of grace for being young and impulsive and obsessive. In a Dazed article, provocatively titled “Everyone Needs to Grow up”, which lumps together obsessive consumption, some dubious Freudian analysis, and “narrativising your life like it’s a John Green novel or an episode of Euphoria” as examples of self-infantilization. Although the notion, the author concedes, that you have to grow up and pull yourself up, emotionally or materially, by the bootstraps, may have a conservative flavor, there is also a leftwing case for it. Hitler was a Disney adult, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism is a silly cop out slogan, trying to evade responsibility for your own actions is making the world a worse place.

The article left me cold in a lot of ways. It feels very focused on aesthetic or subculture trends and uninterested in engaging with the deeper question of what it means to be a child. It has a very dark view of children. Like adults, children are capable of discernment, of accountability, of caring for other people. If children really are just passive consumers of the worst that capitalism has to peddle, it is only because adults have made them that way. There is nothing inherently degrading about childhood. Sophie Lewis, arguing for the liberation of children in Tank Magazine, points out this requires taking children’s self-knowledge seriously. “To borrow words from feminist organiser, writer, mother and Marxist feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, “‘innocent’ is code for powerless – a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human”.”

Even if notions of self-infantilization are related, as the Dazed article insists, to fascism, perhaps the correct response is to dignify childhood rather than to demean it. Our broad cultural project, after all, is to inculcate children with propaganda, with the most basic kind of traditional narratives about beauty, love, subservience. It is less that Disney and Marvel movies bring adults down to the intellectual level of children in their violent simplicity, and more that they force children into the rigid worldview of adults.

Who does it serve to suggest that fascism is childish? That the memes of white nationalists are an indication of babyishness? In my most generous reading, there’s a kind of insidious liberal ideal to this, one in which ignorance is the main source of oppression or intolerance. This idea appears pervasively in discussions around sexual consent. People who feel unable to communicate their boundaries and needs or who feel that their consent has been violated (often women) maybe just aren’t mature enough to be having sex. Affirmative consent has been introduced, notably on college campuses, to combat this problem. But as Amia Srinivasan argues in The Right to Sex, it is hard to formulate scripts for communication or legislation that will go against deep external and internalized gender norms. “How do we formulate a regulation that prohibits the sort of sex that is produced by patriarchy?” asks Srinivasan.

I’ve already written about my intense dislike for neo-Freudianism and for notions of lingering psychosexual immaturity. I’m doubtful of the real resurgence of analysis, given that analysts are in fairly short supply in the US and that most of them don’t take insurance. Instead, I think there’s a very basic appeal to transference (the phenomenon of displacing feelings I described above) and a more insidious fascination with a static idea of adulthood. As other markers of adulthood have become increasingly more elusive or less compulsory – marriage, parenthood, a career, a home – it is easy to fixate on the aesthetics of adulthood.

One of my favorite movies when I was a teenager was La Faute à Fidel, which is directed by Julie Gavras (the daughter of Costa Gavras) and based on the eponymous novel by Domitilla Calamai. In the movie, a young girl’s parents experience a political awakening during the 1960s. Trying to reject their stultified Parisian bourgeois environment, they go to Chile to agitate for Salvador Allende, take their children to a protest which turns rapidly violent, and make them sit out their religion classes at their Catholic school. The parents are by turns confused, inconsistent, passionate, performative. The protagonist, Ana, is first ashamed and then later proud of being different from other children.

In one scene, Ana, the young protagonist, finds her parents’ apartment full of Chilean activists, smoking cigarettes and talking about revolutionary theory. One of them tries to explain the redistribution of wealth to her using an orange. Imagine, he says, that all the wealth in the world is contained in an orange. Some people want to keep the whole orange. Others, like Ana’s parents, want to start sharing it around. He then cuts up the orange and gives her a wedge of it. Although Ana scoffs at the metaphor, this marks a turning point for her in the film. Later, she starts an argument with her Catholic school teacher over the meaning of a story about a beloved pet goat that chooses to leave captivity and is promptly eaten by a wolf. Her teacher describes it as a story about obedience. Ana, progressing towards political awakening, describes it as a story about looking for freedom.

In her essay about duration and growing up, Rishika writes, “When you’re twenty, ‘you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance.’ That summer I was self-consciously bright-eyed, and extraordinary. Self-conscious because I wanted to skip through it all, I felt like I was teetering around self-annihilation.”

Ways to grow up are: you learn how to belong to a city, rather than just moving through it. You can be obliterated by feeling and then come back up whole again. You look out for friends and lovers and strangers. Maybe you learn how to make soup. You learn to look inwards for your own liberation, to turn your insides out. It’s so embarrassing, like SZA says, all of the love I seek living inside of me.