It started with a crush. We met at a book launch and drank martinisps88, our knees touching under the table in the corner of a dim bar. They were charming. “You’re charming,” I told them. They were also tall, with beautiful hair, eyes that seemed to collect everything and an impassive face that gave nothing away. This attitude of reserve made me crave their attention. I read their horoscope, jabbered about them to my friends and wrote bad, moony poetry. If I sound obsessed, I was.
Obsession made me a little careless. One afternoon, I wrote a text to my friend Stewart, a complaint that ran on for many chat bubbles. “[My crush] is treating me the way I treat men and I want to go on the record that it’s annoying,” I wrote. I explained that they seemed flattered by my adoration, but didn’t make much of an effort to reciprocate it. I ended with a boast I would swiftly regret: “Like, what about me? I am still super hot.”
Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.
Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.
But I hadn’t texted Stewart — and by the time I noticed my mistake, it was too late. I had sent the messages to my crush instead. That’s when my cheeks started to burn; mortification saturated my body. I was in my living room, alone, but I hid my face behind my hands. I wondered if I was going to throw up.
If embarrassment were a sport, I would have a shot at the majors. At 10, I wept in gymnastics class after falling off the balance beam. Whenever I cried, which was often, my coach would ask, “Is everything all right at home?” Things at home were fine, but the conditions inside my head were not. I had an excoriating sense of perfectionism and took every failure as evidence that I was an inferior sort of person. I compensated by becoming an anxious overachiever, insulating myself against embarrassment and failure.
In my final year of college, I enrolled in a workshop taught by one of my idols, a celebrated poet and classicist. That semester I wrote with unaccustomed vulnerability. I wrote about trying to decipher my own sexuality and feeling embarrassed about the things I liked. By the end of the term, however, I convinced myself that my professor would dismiss my writing as confessional and unserious. I was so anxious about imaginary judgment that I sacrificed the chance to learn. She may have offered encouragement or even freed me from my self-critical rut. I’ll never know. I never picked up my essays, along with her notes, from her office mailbox. For the next decade I wrote almost nothing at all.
Writing felt fraught, risky even, like touching a hot stove. I avoided it, and anything else that required self-exposure. Instead I worked as a graphic designer, beautifying other people’s words in magazine layouts. I kept my feelings to myself and my friends at arm’s length. Then a few years ago, as New York emerged from Covid lockdown, something shifted. Perhaps those long months of fear and isolation altered my perception of risk, or getting older had earned me a little more grit. What if I didn’t have to be good? I wondered. What did I really have to lose?
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