Already this year I’ve had bronchitis and now the doctor says I have pneumonia. Why does my body hate me? None of the other kids get sick. I must be weak. I am coughing so much my ribs and shoulders ache. “She should stay home from school for at least a week,” the doctor says. I can’t miss a day. I’ll be so far behind that I’ll never catch up. My mom tucks me into bed. Then she leaves for work. I feel terrible, and I don’t mean the coughing. I feel like I am letting everyone down. Plus, I may lose my spot in the play if I miss a practice. When I can’t take lying there any longer, I sneak out of the house. My mom comes home from work to find me gone. She searches everywhere, and calls Natasha and Jill. Then she comes to the high school auditorium to take me away. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want my mom to be here. This is embarrassing. I make myself as small as I can behind a fake rock on stage. But then I give myself away when I have a coughing fit. She walks on stage and drags me home.
“Why didn’t you stay in bed?” she asks, worried.
“Mr. P doesn’t like the kids who miss rehearsal.”
“I can’t stop you. Pneumonia can’t stop you. What is it going to take to slow you down?” My mom asks.
I don’t even understand the question.
#
I am sixteen. I love poetry and writing. When I write, I know what I think. I understand how I feel. It brings order to my chaotic mind. I fill pages and pages of my black, hardcover journal with my poems. I also have a crush on a boy. We are studying together at the library. I open my journal and decide to leave it open when I get up to go to the bathroom. Maybe he’ll read my poems and fall in love with my words. When I return, he is gone. In the margins of one of my poems, he has written, “If there is an original thought in here somewhere, I can’t find it.” I can’t breathe. It feels like someone dropped a bookcase on my chest. How could I be so stupid? I stop writing. I will never write again. He’s right. It has all been said before. I slide the journal in a box and seal the lid, then bring the box to Dad’s garage. I place all my other journals in cardboard boxes and stack them on top of one another. I will never share my personal writing again.
Then one night I stay awake past one in the morning while my family sleeps. I am working on an essay for history and I keep rewriting the first paragraph. I can’t get it right. I don’t have anything original to say. Even though I have an A in the class, it feels like I’m going to fail. So I sneak into my brother’s room while he is sleeping and open his bottom drawer. I pull out a stack of papers: math tests, science projects, English assignments, and a history essay on the civil rights era. I flip through it to the last page. A teacher has written in bold cursive, “Excellent! A.” I see a way to get the grade I need. You can’t do that! I immediately think. I wouldn’t have to if the teachers weren’t working me so hard, I counter. It’s their fault I’m so tired, I say to justify my actions. It’s their fault I can’t write my own essay. I have no choice.
I read through my brother’s work. It’s really good. My teacher will be impressed. And since my brother goes to a private school across town, my public-school teacher will never know.
I walk back upstairs to my room. I start copying the essay, word for word, onto a fresh sheet of paper. Weeks later, my teacher hands back the essay. He has written in all caps, “ORIGINAL! A+” I am elated. Then I remember it’s not my work at all. My mood caves. I am not an original. How do I tell the truth? I want to roll back the clock, do it over, confess to my teacher. But Fear says, “Then everyone will know the real truth: that you are a fraud.” I burn the essay. No one will know who I really am.
#
I am nineteen. I go to school at an elite college in the Northeast. On the outside, I am effortlessly cool. On the inside, I’m convinced that I don’t deserve to be here. I don’t have what it takes. I believe the college made a mistake, or maybe I got in only because I added geographic diversity. I miss my friends from home: Natasha, Teza, Alli, and Jill. We are scattered across North America at different schools, and my confidence feels scattered too. I learn to read others and assess quickly who they are and what they want. It helps me get into upper level classes and frat parties, but I haven’t learned to read myself. I don’t know who I am; I am too busy trying to impress others.
The voice of Fear says to me constantly, “You’re not enough. Someone else is smarter, faster, prettier, more motivated.” I hear it in class, in the hallway of my dormitory, in the locker room. I try to drown out Fear’s voice with more accomplishments. I get As. I set records on the track.
I lead several clubs.
But I can’t seem to write a ten-page paper for a literature class on a subject I love. It’s three days overdue. My professor calls me to his office and says, “Everyone has turned theirs in, except you. Have you started?”
“How can I start if I don’t know what I’m going to say?”
“Oh, I see. You want it to be perfect even before you begin. Let’s try something. Give me the worst five pages you’ve ever written by Friday.”
He can’t mean that. But he looks serious.
“I’m serious,” he says, reading my mind.
Friday comes and goes. I don’t know how to turn in something terrible. My professor calls me back in.
“How about you give me whatever you have by Tuesday.”
“All I have are crummy sentences and quotations.”
“Great. I’ll take those.”
I know what my professor is trying to do, but I can’t turn in something average. I think, It’s so late, it needs to be extraordinary. So, I stay up all night and write a paper that is ten pages longer than the assignment, with a dozen extra references. I turn it in, finally, ten days late. Then I’m sick for a week. I assume that everyone’s college experience is like this: all-nighters, followed by sickness, followed by all-nighters, followed by sickness. In my world, it is.
On the upside, I have a boyfriend. He is older than me. I look up to him and want to please him. The first time we have sex, I leave my shirt on. I’m ashamed of my flat chest. He’ll be disappointed. I move like a gymnast to dazzle him with my flexibility. I don’t notice that he is trying to slow me down. I am so busy trying to entertain him, I feel like I’ve got a top hat and cane. He doesn’t ask what I like and don’t like, but it doesn’t matter. I have no idea. I feel empty inside.
When things aren’t working between us, I can’t bring myself to break up with him. Fear says, “How can you end it? You started it. You are selfish and cruel.” Instead of telling him that my feelings have changed, I avoid him. Then I cheat on him. The relationship ends. I am devastated. But I am also relieved. Then I feel bad for feeling relieved. I move so fast into the next relationship I don’t take the time to think about who I am and what I want. I just want someone to hold me. I just want the emptiness I feel to go away.
#
I am twenty-one. It’s a sticky, hot afternoon, and I have one more sales call to go. I graduated from college and I am selling knives so I can go hike the Pacific Coast Trail. Yesterday, I drove one-hundred miles to sell a bagel spreader. Today, I knock on the heavy door of a three-storied, red-bricked home to sell a carving set. This address was given to me by a friend of a friend. A woman dressed in a tailored gray blazer and skirt lets me in. She is short, but towers over me with her suspicious stare and firm handshake. I ask for a tomato and a penny. I dice the tomato then decoratively coil the penny into a pig’s tail with our best-selling