Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 475

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons," by Tim Kreider.

My friend Lauren once told me that she could totally understand—which is not the same as sympathize with—those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living their life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler—it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I—or you—would ever do any such thing ourselves. But I sometimes wonder whether the line between those of us who don’t do such things and the few who do is as impermeable as we like to think. Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.

Memory is also how we learn anything. Even flatworms figure out, after a few bad experiences, to avoid the pathway with the electric shock. By contrast, it took me about four thousand trials to realize that drinking ultimately makes you feel worse. I was scandalized to learn that alcohol is technically a depressant. And once you’ve quit wiping your memory every night and having to reboot your whole personality every morning, your experience becomes cumulative instead of simply repetitive; you can start to see your life as something resembling a linear narrative, with an intelligible shape and possibly some meaning, instead of just a bunch of funny stories. 

We couldn’t go on living like that forever; as the traditional last call has it: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” One by one my old drinking buddies succumbed to the usual tragedies: careers, marriages, mortgages, children. And as my own metabolism started to slow, the fun:hangover ratio became increasingly unacceptable. Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face. The hangovers also acquired a dreadful new symptom of existential anxiety in addition to their more traditional attributes. Self-inflicted brain damage no longer seems so cool and defiant, nor wasting time so liberating. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you’re running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells. 

I don’t miss passing out sitting up with a drink in my hand, or having to be told how much fun I had, or feeling enervated and depressed for days. Being clearheaded is such a peculiar novelty it feels like some subtle, intriguing new designer drug. I don’t know if it’s one I’d want to get addicted to, though. After a week or so of feeling optimistic and silly, my energy level back up near 100 percent, I start getting antsy and bored. Apparently I’m not content to be happy. Sooner or later you want to celebrate your improved disposition with a cocktail.

Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ’em all fooled! 

What’s so ironic and sad about this is that the very parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed of and eager to conceal are not only obvious to everyone but are also, quite often, the parts of us they love best.

Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before moving back to the suburbs to become their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your twenties make different decisions about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension. You’re like two seeds that looked identical, one of which turned into a kiwi and the other into a banyan.

I probably don’t have to tell you that getting mad at your own mother for being old and sick does not make you feel like a model son or exemplary human being. Getting irritated at my own irritability did not improve matters. It made me only a little more forgiving of myself to understand that my anger was mostly fear. 

I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing. 

I'd always known I was adopted; it was part of the answer to the Where-did-I-come-from question. The parental talking point was that I had been chosen by people who loved and wanted me, unlike all those other kids who’d just come down the chute by chance. I never felt like I’d been abandoned, or suffered any loss or trauma, or yearned to be reunited with my original parents, imagining that finding them would be some sort of answer to the question of Me. I felt as if I’d won some sort of lottery when I was adopted; a lot of my friends and cousins envied me my parents, who seemed so open-minded and supportive compared to their own. I always imagined that people for whom being adopted was a major issue must have had deficient or abusive upbringings, been damaged or deprived in some way. Having common genes seemed to me almost as arbitrary as sharing a home state or zodiac sign, and anyone who fixated on such a flimsy bond must’ve been groping for any connection at all. 

Years ago one of my adopted friends and I agreed over beers that we secretly thought being adopted made us cooler than other people, more American—less encumbered by all the dreary baggage of heritage and history, freer to invent ourselves, like young Jimmy Gatz or Bruce Wayne. This has since proven to be not entirely true. You learn that your personality has a certain shape, with definite, inflexible bounds—bounds you find out about because you keep bonking into them headfirst when you try to change. (An acquaintance who used to grate on me won me over when I overheard her sigh, “D’ya ever wish you could just . . . trade in your whole personality for a new one?”) We are not infinitely malleable. Like it or not, you are a certain kind of person. Life is, in this respect, like that game in which you’re assigned an identity scrawled on a piece of paper that everyone else can see but you can’t, and you have to try to deduce from other people’s hints and snickers who you are. It doesn’t matter if you want to be Pierre Bonnard or Vasco da Gama if what’s written on your card is Barney Rubble. Eventually you give up and ask, Okay: so who am I?

Around the time I turned forty, the age at which physicians recommend you start lying awake worrying about your health, I decided I’d be well advised to request whatever medical history I could get from the adoption agency. This, at least, was my ostensible reason for contacting them, although practicality and self-maintenance are qualities so unlike me that there must have been other, less conscious motives at work. Forty is also an age when our life spans start to look alarmingly finite, and it had occurred to me that my biological mother would be sixty-one by now, which wasn’t old but wasn’t young, either. I didn’t even know for certain that she was still alive. 

I applied to the adoption agency for what’s called “nonidentifying information” about my biological mother—medical and family history, everything but names and places. Unexpectedly, the agency sent me an entire file of information garnered from my mother’s in-take interview, about not only herself and her family but the circumstances of my birth and adoption—the whole nativity story of me. It was certainly more than most people ever get to hear about their own conceptions. I’d hesitated before opening this file, a little reluctant to surrender the privilege of ignorance. After I read it, however unique or interesting my story might prove to be, it would be forever fixed as one thing and not another; the mystery of myself would be solved, limitless possibility replaced with plain old facts. 

It was, of course, an ordinary human story, messy and painful and typical of millions that took place around that time. This is not wholly my own story to tell, so I’ll suffice it to say that my existence turns out to have been contingent on a number of people behaving with extraordinary decency in difficult circumstances. It was also, I feel obliged to mention, contingent on the fact that I was born six years before Roe v. Wade. This hasn’t changed my position on abortion, but it does make me feel like the beneficiary of some unfair historical loophole, like having missed out on the draft. It all made my life seem even more undeserved than it already did, as though the world were a private party I’d gotten to crash.