mistakes were made
“Sorry,” I said to the cashier, “it’s my first day… outside. They finally let me out.”
“SHE’S KIDDING,” my best friend shouted.
“…I’m kidding,” I finally agreed. (Yes, I skeeted this.)
As we walked toward the parking lot, I handed Kid a kaleidoscope.
“What do you say,” Kid’s mother asked.
“Thanks!” Kid chirped at me.
“My pleasure,” I told Kid. “To be honest, I felt a little goofy buying just one for myself. So thank you for giving me the excuse.” Kid’s mom laughed. (“Are you buying that?” my best friend had asked me in line, horrified. “Yes,” I’d replied to her stiffly, “I’ve actually been meaning to buy myself a kaleidoscope.” This was an amazing true fact. “Because I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and ruminate. Sometimes I end up scrolling through social media. It’s not healthy. So I’ve been planning to buy one, so I can look at something else while I lie in bed and ruminate.”)
Kid professed that she could walk and look through “the microscope.”
“Uh,” I said. “Don’t, uh, do that.”
“She’s holding my hand,” her mom assured me.
“Oh, okay,” I said, uncertain.
I hopped into the car. “Thank you, by the way. I didn’t realize the cashier was scared until her face changed,” I said. I buckled myself in. “So thank you for intervening.”
She roared with laughter. “A little too straight-faced!” she said. “You can’t mess with people! That girl was very tense!” The cashier had broken into a broad grin after I told her I was kidding. Oh, how we laughed together. Yikes, I thought.
“I just wasn’t thinking. I did almost tell her, like Blast from the Past.” I put my face in my hands. Also, I have never seen the movie I’m referencing. “Like emerging from a bunker,” I said now, “not from… prison, or some other institutional setting.”
“She’s too young for Blast from the Past!” my best friend exclaimed. “Everyone is too young!”
“There are clips on TikTok,” I sniffed. “No excuses.”
“She’s not on TikTok,” my best friend said resolutely.
“Well, also, I wasn’t really kidding, was I? I kept apologizing at the DMV”—this was months ago now. “It’d peaked when I didn’t know how to use tap-to-pay. I could tell the lady was getting frustrated. Finally I was just like, listen. I haven’t been outside in a while, obviously.” A confluence of reasons, but ultimately, my bad. “Hence my being at the DMV, starting all over again.” I could see that the DMV lady was relieved. People need a reason, any reason, for why you’re so weird.
“And then in the store,” I said, sighing. “I was buying two kaleidoscopes. I apparently did not know my own phone number. And then tap-to-pay?” I groaned. The cashier could tell something was wrong with me, it was just impossible to say what. How to explain that I’d been so infantilized for so long, I was now reacquiring basic life skills: incredibly charming for thirty short seconds, and then a disaster baby.
Kid was delighting in the kaleidoscope in the back seat. She gave it a shake. “Wow!” she said. “How does it do that?”
“Yeah, the little beads move around,” I explained. “And then there are mirrors. Four mirrors. You know your grandma’s glasses that let her watch TV?” Periscope glasses, basically. “It’s like that, but if she had two pairs, and the mirrors were all facing one another.” I suddenly realized that prism glasses are not how to explain two periscopes put together, and anyway, a kaleidoscope has nothing to do with seeing around corners. “Wait. Hang on. I’m explaining this all wrong. Okay. Do you remember when we made paper snowflakes?” Kid did remember. “It’s like that. It’s like when you unfold them at the end. The patterns you’re looking at are like if you folded a paper into fourths and made a design, and then unfolded it to look at it. The cool design is exactly like a paper snowflake.”
“Ohhhh,” Kid said. Terrific! A few days earlier I’d explained electrical circuits. That explanation had gone a lot better. I’d run off and returned with a piece of string. I’d flipped the light switch and opened the string. Then I’d flipped it again, closing the string. (“And that’s why yesterday I said ‘let’s never lift the lid to this outlet again,’” I’d concluded. I was all set up to explain potential energy next—we’d been looking at her array of battery-operated toy turtles—but I’d paused because I couldn’t remember what the opposite of potential energy is called. At that moment her brother had entered the room and tackled her or whatever.)
Later in the day I’d faceplanted in bed when a journalist friend texted me, wanting me to look over and/or edit something.
“Call,” I replied. I waited impatiently. “No phone?” I texted a few minutes later.
He called. He told me about what was going on. When the moment of truth had arrived, I’d confessed: “I’m hungover,” I said to him. “For the first time in months. I’m in bed right now.” I stretched and groaned at the same time.
“Good hangover or bad hangover?” he asked me.
“What an interesting question!” I exclaimed. “Thank you for asking it. Good hangover,” I said appreciatively. Granted, I never wanted to work hard at anything ever again—I’m baby— but I was a baby in bed being baby.
A short while earlier, I’d approached the young zillennial nurse. “You’ve never had a hangover…!” I’d said to her suspiciously. “Nope,” she’d agreed. Then she’d asked me what it was like. “Ahhhh,” I’d said, stretching my arms behind my back. “You know how, when you have a migraine, the sunlight is too bright, the sounds are too loud?” My toes curled. “I actually love it,” I said to her. I don’t love an actual migraine, but I do love being hungover. I’d missed it. Now I put a grown-adult chewstick in my mouth and began to gnaw on it.
“Because you typically avoid the sunlight and loud sounds?” she asked me. I balked. She quickly hustled to add: “Or because you like to feel—”
“I like to feel,” I agreed, laughing and nodding. I chewed on my stick thoughtfully. “But now I’m thinking about what you just said.” She’d accidentally made a very pointed observation: I do avoid bright lights and loud sounds. She was so right. And now I was trapped with them, forced to feel.
“So I’m working on this,” I said to my friend now. My best friend had been reorienting me, onboarding me, on how to be in the world, how to run my own errands. “I have been DoorDashing and Instacarting since Covid,” I whispered now. Absent in my own life. Trying to learn how to do my own groceries, how to show up, to grow up. I’m like that SNL sketch parodying the reality TV show where Japanese children go to the store alone for the first time, except it’s women sending their grown boyfriends out to “pick up a couple things.”
My best friend had apologized for scheduling our shopping day so early in the morning. “Don’t you dare,” I snapped at her. “I’m owning my choices,” I said, “especially when they’re bad. I knew what today was about. I even set my alarm. You said we could shop Tuesday or Thursday. I knew what Wednesday was gonna bring, and I picked Thursday.” I crossed my arms, defiant. Don’t you take this from me.
I have got to be able to make my own mistakes, I told my journalist friend now. I’m very into my Human Design chart, and it’s right there: FAFO. That’s how I learn, by FAFO’ing off. “Growing up, I was never allowed to make my own mistakes. My mother said everything reflected on her. So I had to wait until she died. Making my own mistakes when there are way higher stakes, way more to lose.”
“Oof,” my journalist friend said. “As a former goody-two-shoes, I can relate.”
“Yes!” I said now. “A goody-two-shoes!” Over 50% of my body is committed to failure, I noted, of my own chart.
“And the other part?” he asked.
“The other part,” I said, describing the split in me, “is being right and no one caring. The Cassandra Complex is baked right into the design.” I sighed. “Many consider it the most traumatizing design a person can have, actually.”
“Traumatizing,” he asked, “or traumatized?”
“Uh, well, the idea is that your design is established a few months before you’re born,” I said. “So it’s a traumatizing potential life path that you’re perhaps destined to take. Because it’s just a lifetime of failures, plus no one ever believes you.” I laughed.
“Would you say that it’s very lonely,” my journalist friend wondered aloud, “or would you say the opposite?”
“Hey, that’s a great question,” I said, ebullient. “That’s a terrific interview question.” I went silent for a spell. “I am very blessed by my friendships,” I said to him now, quietly. “And I’m very fortunate that I haven’t been ditched a lot more often.” I rubbed my chin. “But I have to be alone a lot,” I continued—ruminating on my many failures, processing, learning—“and there can be a lot of shame there. Sometimes I become desperate to get away from my own thoughts in a vacuum, and that’s when I become desperate for human connection, and undiscerning.”
“Hahhhh,” my friend said. “Undiscerning,” he repeated.
“Yes. Like Britney Spears, or a husky.”
He laughed. “That’s a very interesting combination of things to put together,” he mused.
“Well, Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder,” I said. “That’s what the two have in common. These are great questions!”
He explained that the questions are because he is trying to learn empathy. He’s looking for an anchor for his own emotions, he explained: a hook to hang his own emotional hat on.
“Mm,” I said, as if I’d just eaten a bite of something delicious and was now swallowing it, very impressed, “I think that’s great actually. Empathy does not just occur all by itself. A lot of my empathy is from FAFO, from finding out. And here you are, interviewing me. Because you’re staying curious. Empathy is a product of curiosity”—relational curiosity, I meant, but maybe other types, too—“the outcome. It isn’t the very first step. It happens afterward.” I nodded approvingly, although my journalist friend could not see it.