This post was originally published on March 4, 2014.
In college, there was a knot in my hair so large I lovingly gave it the name “Blanche” after my favorite Golden Girl. My boyfriend at the time sweetly asked me to brush-out Blanche before meeting his father, a prominent Dallas attorney and Presbyterian deacon. I reluctantly obliged. My time was scarce in those days. I was busy attending music festivals, bingeing on Cartoon Network, reading friends’ zines instead of the assigned Joseph Stiglitz, attending impromptu dance parties and taking popping-and-locking classes to kill at said dance parties.
After I graduated from college, I moved to New York without a job. At night, I drank martinis I could not afford with the few friends I had. During the day, for the first few months, I kept myself busy attempting to walk off my hangovers. Then, once I got hired by Credit Suisse, I attempted to work them off. I made up stories about the swarms I passed on the street, somehow convincing myself that the entire borough of Manhattan had attended Harvard, summered in East Hampton and inherited millions if not billions. Somehow I decided, as I walked around New York, that my college slacking had ruined my chances of ever becoming a successful, grown-up New Yorker.
I also got sober at this time and because I thought quitting drinking meant embarking upon a monastic lifestyle, I also meditated, did Bikram yoga and subsisted on edamame and Coke Zero whenever I wasn’t in meetings. In lieu of Adult Swim and dating drummers, I spent my weekends at a Starbucks in Murray Hill studying for the GMAT. I even slept on my bedroom floor—a lame homage to my newly formulated faith: a half-assed, self-serving Hindu/Buddhism, primarily founded on conveniently selected readings of Siddhartha and The Bhagavad Gita.
I thought my sponsor Tanya would be impressed with me when I told her of my airtight schedule consisting only of working at my new job, meetings and studying. But instead she warned me about burning out and becoming a workaholic. I shuddered every time she reminded me of the slogan “Easy Does It” but was able to brush it aside in the hope that Tanya would stop bringing it up once I became a huge success.
I’m sure there had been colder days while I lived in New York but I remember the morning after I received my GMAT score as being one the coldest. I had sacrificed thousands of dollars on tutors and classes and spent countless hours over the course of six months studying to earn a score high enough to guarantee admission to a top-tiered B-school. And yet I got a 580—a number so low I figured I had a competitive edge over only ITT tech alums or the nearly dead. When I read my score, I disintegrated into what a mental health professional would most likely diagnose as a full-on existential freak-out by repeatedly kicking a trash can.
The next morning, as I walked from the train to work, the weather was appropriately apocalyptic. As the ice defied gravity and slammed sideways into my eyeballs, I hid my face and looked down to find a large mustard stain where a crease should have been on my business casual dress-slacks. It was all too much. I had had it. I decided right then that I didn’t belong in the frigid wormhole known as Manhattan, where no matter how much force I exerted, nothing ever seemed to move in the right direction. I needed to stop and sit down and this ice storm wasn’t going to stop me. I sat on a park bench, not caring that I was going to be late to work.
Although a feather of relief flitted around my mind, my bloodied and bruised ego wouldn’t allow me to acknowledge it, nor to listen to the low whisper saying, “Thank God that’s over.”
I went home that night and had no idea what to do with myself. I considered researching ADHD medications or going to yoga. Instead, I called Tanya for the 15th time that day.
“I have idle hands,” I said. She asked me what I liked to do for fun.
“What? Like knitting, you mean?” I asked, thinking of the hipster yarn shops I’d started to spot downtown. “Look, I’m not knitting.”
“When’s the last time you went on vacation?” she asked.
“What? Like follow some guru to India or go to Italy and not weigh myself, ha! I’m not doing that,” I replied. Eat, Pray, Love was popular at the time. “Look, I don’t want to go to India! I just want to read a novel and watch Futurama. I like Futurama a lot!” Strangely, at that admission, a weight inside lifted.
“Great!” she responded. “When’s the last time you read a novel or watched Futurama?”
“Not since college.”
I hung up the phone, dusted off my velour sweatpants and made a decision to stay in for the weekend. Occasionally, while in my Futurama fog, I’d glance over to my GMAT books, telling myself I was a quitter of epic proportions. But later in the week, in spite of my guilt and shame, I signed up for a writing class instead of another test-prep class. It was months before I told anyone that I’d taken the test and scored poorly and a solid year before I admitted to myself and a few friends that I didn’t want to go to business school—let alone that I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do with my life.
Aristotle said that to enjoy pleasure, you have to live a life grounded in virtuous activity, which is just about the most un-fun way to describe having a good time. But the point is that he described fun not only as sensory gratification or a reprieve from labor but also as a way of living. In college, I’d veered too far in the fun direction because, as it turns out, it’s not just about knowing how to have a good time but also about being grounded in something greater than yourself: family, politics, a community, a moral code or faith. In college, I’d lost the ability to enjoy myself, perhaps because fun is hard to identify when you’re having it all the time. I hadn’t been grounded in anything beyond myself. My whims, addictions and impulses called the shots and I didn’t know who I was so I had no way of knowing what I truly enjoyed.
Since landing in New York, a stopwatch had started ticking away in my subconscious, a perpetual reminder that I’d showed up late to my own life. I somehow had gotten it into my head that I couldn’t rest until I was accepted into business school and the Junior League and married off to an investment banker. I vilified my adolescent self and hit the ground sprinting as I unknowingly entered the rat race. I was chasing what I thought were the requisite trappings of a happy adult life—money, power and prestige—and told myself that I wouldn’t stop until I had them. In retrospect, it’s obvious that my self-imposed urban monasticism was a reaction to my terror that my former self would pull me back into that muddy river. I think that’s why I attached so much importance to getting a high score on the GMAT without really asking myself if I even wanted to go to business school in the first place.
When I quit drinking, I’d discovered that I had a belief system. But I’d gotten confused when I decided that getting serious about life meant sacrificing pleasure and becoming the polar opposite of my former self. So here’s how I see it now: I’ll never not think breakdancers are the coolest, I don’t see myself ever giving up on watching cartoons and I’ll surely always opt to read about any of the The Golden Girls over Goldman Sachs. And it’s only when I give myself the space and permission to enjoy the things I like that I’m actually able to start becoming the grown up I’ve long wanted to be.
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