Like Streams to the Ocean Read online

  I remember kissing a boy and experiencing all three parts. The sensation of touch and his weight on me. Of hands flying everywhere. I remember my ego paying close attention to how I was coming across. “Is my kiss right? Too much tongue? Not enough maybe? Is my hand okay here? Or does it seem like I’m swimming? Oh god. Okay, now every time I do something with my tongue, he does the exact same thing. Is he copying me? Maybe he’s nervous, too?” And then the soul awareness coming from above. “Look at yourself. Aren’t you funny, flailing on someone else as they flail on you. This is adorable. You’re doing great, sweetie.”

  * * *

  —

  I THINK MOST people live the majority of their lives in ego. Defined by what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, how they organize and categorize the world. I do what makes me comfortable, and avoid what makes me insecure. That pretty much sums up my life.

  I don’t like team sports. I have tragic hand-eye coordination and end up costing my team games. They laugh and say, “We’re just out here having fun! Doesn’t matter!” but I watch their eyes flare up in those moments of competitive adrenaline. They want to win. They love the animal thrill of victory, and I’m holding them back. So I avoid them. I tell them I don’t like getting dirty or that I have work to do. Inside, it brings up the shame I felt when I was soft and slow as a child. My ego chimes in: “This will embarrass you. Instead of trying, tell your friends sports are dumb. Call them ‘trite’ and ‘meaningless.’ Focus on other sources of esteem.”

  This is also why I don’t like going to clubs, the kind where single people go to look cute and dance. It’s very lookie-loo and sexy, and I don’t fit in. I’m not an Adonis, and I don’t have good hair. Some of my friends love going. Dancing, getting hit on by strangers—it’s a lighthearted thrill for them. They know I hate it, though, so they complain about it to make me feel included. “Ugh, another guy wouldn’t leave me alone. I was like, dude, I’m here with my friends.”

  And I’ll play along. “People are so desperate. I’m like, chill, let us live!” Of course, no one is ever hitting on me. But if I act annoyed, too, I can gather scraps of superiority.

  I do like parties, though. I am good at talking, and people like my jokes. I meet new people and they laugh loudly and ask where I’ve been hiding all these years. Some of my friends don’t like these parties. They feel clumsy and insecure when talking to new people. A party of strangers is exhausting for them. I’ll walk away from a cackling stranger and complain to my friend standing alone, “This random person thinks I’m going to save their number in my phone and hang out. That’s cute.” I say this to make my friend feel special. They laugh with me. “People are clueless,” they say.

  I wonder how much of who we are comes down to doing what we know we’re good at, and avoiding what makes us feel small. How far can we peel back the onion before our personalities are just equations and chemical reactions? Perhaps if we really knew what made us feel small, we would see that it had no business running our life.

  INTERVIEWER: “What do you dislike most about your appearance?”

  ZADIE SMITH: “I like it all. Self-hatred is for younger, prettier women.”

  —Vanity Fair

  I’m glad I’m not too young or too pretty. When I was young, I was an awkward blob. I had acne all over my face, to the point where I couldn’t rest my forehead on the desk at school without pain. (This is something I often wanted to do. Put my head down and shut out the world.) I ate BBQ chips and Rocky Road ice cream and drank a six-pack of Dr Pepper every day. Every day. By ninth grade, I weighed 190 pounds at five foot eight. And not in a cute teddy bear kind of way. I looked like I was inflated haphazardly. With a thin face and huge hips. It was almost like life decided to protect me from vanity during the years when my mind and identity were forming.

  I don’t like extremes. They’re a lonely, mutating force when entangled with the ego. Too pretty and you’ll feel like a product. Everyone will want you, which you’ll love at first, because youth wants attention and hormones want touch. But as you form into a whole person, you’ll begin to wonder if your ideas and heart are as valuable as your face and body.

  The same goes for other traits. Too clever, and you’ll wield your words to control other people and feed your baser needs. You’ll run the room and run your own head and let yourself off too easy when you’re due a proper rebuke. Too rich, and your friends will feel inadequate. Too silly and you’ll become a jester, a caricature. You won’t trust your own sadness or awe. Too serious and you’ll wrinkle and rust, unable to find the comedy in death and injustice. You’ll have no stamina for the fight.

  I want to be balanced like a year in Tennessee. A good winter that never gets too cold. A hot summer that drives me to the water. A neon-green spring and a crisp fall.

  I want to like how I look, but not too much. Catch myself in the mirror and say, “Hey, not too bad. I like your hat.”

  * * *

  —

  FEW THINGS ARE trickier for the ego than good looks, money, and fame. One of our basest desires is to belong, and these “gifts,” in abundance, complicate the search.

  If you have one or a few of these things, you probably know what I’m talking about. Someone approaches you for your beauty or wealth, and you recognize their motive straight away—or, worse, miss the motive until it’s too late. Some people envy you. And if you struggle, you do not receive sympathy, because our culture has convinced us that people with these things should not have problems.

  I have an acquaintance who is a billionaire. One of those tech guys who made ghastly amounts of money in his twenties on servers, computer storage, or something like that. He’s my age—that is, still pretty young—with a lovely wife and a beautiful, healthy child. And yet the money has deformed him. He is as insecure as his bank account is large.

  A few years ago, he was getting eviscerated in the press for a lavish birthday party he’d thrown. The comment section of one article was a bloodbath. People called him tone-deaf and disgusting and opulent. He was devastated. He had been a nerd his whole life, and his brilliance and hard work and luck had made him one of the richest people on the planet. Before he was rich, his friends had admired him for his mind. Now he was being mocked. I’ll never forget him saying, “No one feels sorry for a billionaire.” That one sentence had so much in it. Deep down, we believe money must solve our problems. As if we all think, “If I had that money, I’d be set. All my shitty problems would be gone. Why should that idiot have it?”

  Since that party, the billionaire has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to an environmental charitable foundation that bears his name. He wants to solve the climate crisis. He wants to be remembered well. Perhaps one day his foundation will invent the clean energy source that saves this planet. All because an insecure kid was made fun of, and he tried to buy the love of the world by saving it.

  We think we know what we want. But we’re fooling ourselves. We do not understand the true nature of things.

  * * *

  —

  I GOT B’S in high school and a handful of A’s. I was lazy as hell; smart enough to do the bare minimum and friendly enough with the teachers to get graded on a curve.

  I always used to say, “If I tried, I could get all A’s.” In truth, I was afraid of failure. Of trying harder and ending up with the same grade, and knowing without a doubt that I couldn’t do it. It was so much safer believing in the “maybe” than knowing the “no.” That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like sports. I didn’t like how it quantified things. The runner in the next lane is faster than you, by a lot. The numbers don’t lie. Being a silly weirdo wasn’t like that. No one sat around with a whistle, grading jokes and declaring winners of wit. To this day, I fear quantification. I would hate to know my IQ.

  Zelda Fitzgerald said it like this: “I hope I’ll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It’s s
o much nicer to be damned sure I could do it better than other people.” As you get older, though, you look around the world and see that avoidance doesn’t do much. Sure, it keeps you from a little embarrassment here and there. But all the people I look up to, the artists and the athletes, the chefs and the CEOs, they risked embarrassment….There was a moment when each of them stepped toward the fright. They applied for the job even if they knew it was a stretch. They told people of their coming glory. They asked the boy out. They sat down and wrote the book.

  I keep learning these lessons, however reluctantly. However embarrassingly. Each day, I peel away a piece of armor that I built in eighth grade. I must have put a lot on.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I WAS a kid, someone asked me why I talked like a girl. I hated my voice for the next decade.

  Later, when I was a teenager, a random kid walked up to me at school and asked why my acne was so bad. I said I didn’t know why. “You need a dermatologist,” he said. “Okay,” I replied, with the awkwardness of a thousand puberties. But I never followed his advice. Seeing a doctor would have forced me to admit it was real. I had wished so badly to be invisible, I convinced myself that people couldn’t see my face. But they could.

  There are moments, especially in those early years, that become the structural support beams for our lives. We aren’t born into a self. It is created without our consent. We build ourselves on top of comments, offhanded insults, inadequacies. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are a Jenga stack of experiences that we spend the rest of our lives deconstructing. Sometimes I wonder what happened to God when he was young, to make him jealous enough to give us death. Perhaps it was the apple, the rejection. Maybe he was hurt.

  This is happening to the young people in your life right now. Your kids. Your nephews and nieces. Your little siblings. We should be careful with the young people in our lives. Say kind things. Aspirational things. But also, go back and talk to yourself, unpack those moments. The thing someone said in eighth grade, that shook you forever? They probably didn’t mean it. Maybe they don’t even remember it.

  Every time I’ve had the thrill of epiphany, it always comes as a new way of seeing what was already there. The knot in my stomach untangles. The experiences of life, which fell on me like chaos, reveal themselves to be lumber. Building materials for the life I was made to live.

  I think we can forgive ourselves. We can forgive our parents. We can forgive God. We can say thank you for pain, because on top of it rests other blocks of companionship, of triumph and joy. We can say thank you because we don’t really understand anything, and yet here we are.

  We wake up atop the dirt of our childhoods with a shovel in our hands. In our pockets is a crumpled note with conspicuously familiar handwriting. It says, “Good luck.”

  * * *

  —

  I’VE BEEN THINKING about the hundreds of traits that affect how we move through the world. Beauty. Ethnicity. Charisma. Family. Economic privilege. Zip code. Physical abilities. You know those huge mixing boards in recording studios, with sliders and knobs to turn this sound up, that one down, to find the perfect mix? That’s how I see all of us.

  I think of my own mix: a gay, white, Christian boy from Tennessee. A kid with a soft body and acne. Teenage hotness? That knob is turned down. But a nice smile? Tick up the hotness just a little. Throw in a quick mind that adjusted to rejection by learning how to be funny, and a natural optimism that colors my humor playful instead of cold and cutting. A feminine voice? I had it, but got mocked for it, so I turned that knob down myself. I grew up with divorced parents and a family constantly in flux. Stability—middle position. Adaptability—turned up. But my parents loved me unconditionally and supported me in absolutely every way. Self-worth—turned up.

  The traits play off one another and become something greater than their sum. Beauty is nice, but if you lack social skills, are depressed, or have been abused, life can still be hell. Or perhaps you could have a lot of societal dials turned against you—female, poor, black in the Deep South, a survivor of rape (for example, Oprah)—but have your discernment, intuition, charisma, smarts, ambition, and mastery of language turned all the way up. In an individualistic society like the United States, those qualities are practically religious virtues. Add to that our love for rags-to-riches stories, and that poor girl grows up to become a god.

  A gay man like me, who was able to hide by changing his voice and body language pretty early on, is different from another who couldn’t do that. We are both gay, and therefore share internal scripts that others don’t…but there is not a perfect overlap. This is true for any person who finds themselves part of a group. They fit with their peers in one way, but the unique position of various sliders in their life prevents perfect matching. In every category you’re put in, you can feel tremendous solidarity and isolating uniqueness at the very same time.

  * * *

  —

  I SURPRISE MYSELF all the time. I’ll be in a mood and want to go home, without knowing why. I’ll drive home dreaming of a restful afternoon, but when I get there, I’ll feel restless and hollow, somehow both tired and anxious to be doing something else. The same thing happens in my relationships. I’ll adore someone, and then for no reason start finding them frustrating. Something in me is watching that and saying, “Jed, why are you being a little bitch? Quit that.” But I can’t.

  Which voice is the real me? The watcher or the actor?

  Sometime last year, I was walking down the street with my friend Jordan, whistling. I said, “Jordan, think about whistling. I have no idea how my lips are making these tiny movements to hit the exact next note of the Mario theme song. The movement is so tiny I can’t even imagine it, and yet my lip muscles know what to do.” We spent the rest of the walk making observations like this. “I have no idea how I’m walking right now. I don’t know how my legs are moving. They just are.” We laughed at our ignorance. At the marvel of being alive and able to move and do things.

  I feel my best when I forget myself, my body, my existence. When my self-conscious drive to name and label falls asleep. I am just a weed in the field, loving the breeze and eating the sun. I don’t know what I am.

  * * *

  —

  I’VE HAD PEOPLE see me driving alone—maybe they’d stopped in town at a red light, and noticed me in the car next to them—and say, “Jed! You looked so sad. What was wrong?” I wasn’t sad; I was just alone in my car and thinking. Or maybe not thinking. Just driving and being simple. Should I be grinning to myself in the car? No.

  Those encounters made me realize how communicative our faces are, how we expect that they be “on” whenever we’re around people. Alone and in a neutral state, our faces take a stillness that would be interpreted as sadness or anger in the company of another. Makes me wonder how much personality is put on. How different we’d act if alone too long.

  * * *

  —

  YOU KNOW WHEN it’s dark outside, and the lights are on in a house across the street? You can see in the kitchen, and the mom is there and she’s doing dishes or something. Or maybe it’s not the mom. It could be the mistress, and the mom is away on a work trip. Maybe it’s a roommate. How can I know? But I do this all the time. I’ll notice a neighbor doing things in the window, and make up an entire story about who they are.

  Somehow, the more people crammed together in a place, the easier it is to be alone. To not know who’s across the way, living their life. I’m never more alone than when I’m on an airplane, touching knees with a stranger, headphones on.

  You may meet me and then think that you know me. I am an open book, so your guesses will often be right. But the lights are on at night, and your guesses are only guesses. There are rooms inside of me that don’t face the street. There are kids playing in the basement. There are cars in the driveway. At best, we’re all guessing.

>   I once asked a friend, as a kind of test: “When you meet someone new, do you automatically trust them until they prove they shouldn’t be trusted? Or do you treat everyone as suspect, and make them prove that they are worthy?”

  He said, “I assume they’re annoying and terrible, and they have to prove to me that I’m wrong.”

  I laughed. “I am the opposite. I assume they’re great and a future friend. They have to prove to me that they’re terrible.”

  “This is why you suffer so many fools,” he said.

  “Or why I have so many friends.”

  What do you see in the window? What do you assume?

  * * *

  —

  “IN TEN YEARS, none of this is going to matter.” Older people would tell me that in high school, when I was all torn up about a friendship. They would say it when I was stressed beyond belief in college, embroiled in roommate drama or writhing in unrequited love.

  People in their thirties, fresh out of the madness of adolescence, love to say things like that. To pat the youngsters on the head and say, “I remember when I was all hormones and no chill; it’ll pass.” Often, these thirtysomethings are saying it to themselves more than anyone else. They’re congratulating themselves for surviving.

  But to the high schooler, the college sophomore, it matters now. It is life or death.

  And really, it does matter. The drama is testing our social skills. Teaching us to read the signals of jealousy, hurt, sarcasm, and betrayal. Our fights and crushes and gossip are the emotional muscles flexing, in the same way a baby flails her arms and legs in the crib to see how far they stretch. To build those baby muscles. Soon enough, to stand.

  We feel too much in those years. We jam our hearts into every glass slipper.