Real – by Heather Havrilesky

Levitasium (1950) by Leonora Carrington

The chipmunks have discovered the bird feeder. I didn’t know they could climb that high, or that they were light enough to eat seeds out of the half-closed windows of my weight-sensitive squirrel-proof bird feeder. The first chipmunk to realize it stuffed his cheeks so much he looked like the main character in CHiPMonk killers.

Oh, you don’t know CHiPMonk Killers Not yet? It’s this cool anime series that has teens all over the world screaming and making memes about it. The Chipmunks are fifteen-foot-tall teenage motorcycle cops who defend Southern California from a former detective turned criminal mastermind named Monk and his gang of drug-dealing thugs. Monk was once a civil servant, but under the stress of the pandemic lockdown, his 312 phobias have expanded to include infectious crowds, large rodents, small holes, Amazon packages, tattoos, foaming soap, and bachelor parties. Monk builds a maze of underground tunnels to hide from his phobias, and is then forced to rent it out to Mexican drug cartels to keep his underground refrigerator stocked with organic matcha and nut butters due to lack of paying work. But his criminal activities don’t attract the attention of the teenage motorcycle assassin, until he kills a gang of chipmunks living in his underground mansion.

You should really check it out, it’s a great show. In fact, the Screaming Meme-ies declared CHiPMonk Killers “more brat than a bratwurst” and “social media doesn’t exist” and “this is your man” and “aldjfaldkfjasdlfkjadlfkj.”

Oh, you don’t know about the Screaming Meme-ies? They’re a feminist art collective that’s reclaiming hysteria for the modern era by arguing that madness is a generative form of bodily protest against the limitations of post-industrial neoliberal hegemony. Teenagers around the world have been setting their stuffed animals on fire and throwing their bodies in front of public buses and commuter trains to demonstrate their allegiance to the Screaming Meme-ies’ agenda of “hysteria over history, anti-histo-memes over antihistamines.” Some have called them “willfully ignorant” and “willfully asthmatic,” while others insist that the SMs are simply “reclaiming genocide vibes” and repurposing them for a perfectly worthy cause. “Masochistic dedication to changing the world” is their slogan. Or is it “I am not the wound, you are the wound”?

Anyway, it’s weird that you don’t know this yet. Have you ever been on the internet?

***

It seems like a lot of people are back on social media after a few years of absence. Personally, I haven’t gotten out of my Divestment Era yet.

Now, keep in mind that I was very online for about, let’s think… starting in 1995… almost three decades. I wrote cartoons for Suck in 1995, reviewed TV for Salon in 2005, wrote advice for The Awl in 2010, wrote for The Cut in 2015, started this Substack in 2019, and wasted a good chunk of my life looking at Twitter from 2009-2020.

What did I get from so many large doses of the internet? I don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t matter because I’m allergic to it now. I think that happens to almost everyone eventually. Even when you try to go online, you can’t. Your body automatically expels those toxins, a bit like taking two puffs on a cigarette and then putting it out. I go online and that old familiar fear kicks in, and I remember the shame-driven fear that used to make me believe that I had to voice my opinion on everything that was happening in every corner of the world, otherwise I wasn’t real.

Oddly enough, I feel more real now than I did then. More tired, but more real.

***

Yesterday I was swimming very slowly, sharing a lap with my friend who is visiting from California this week. As we swam she told me her theories about five different things and I described what I think are the most debilitating and common forms of mental illness that you see every day in almost everyone you know and then we started making up songs for a musical. The songs weren’t great.

Then we emerged from the competition pool and stumbled through the family pool, pushing our way through some beautiful young lifeguards wearing red trunks and red swimsuits as extras from Bay watch. My friend said, “In college I looked like Ally Sheedy. Well, not exactly Ally Sheedy. A plump version of Ally Sheedy.”

“Yes,” I said. “And now you’re an overstuffed armchair doing your best Ally Sheedy imitation.”

This made us snort and laugh, just like Beavis and Butthead.

“Now I’m a big, cuddly version of Ally Sheedy.”

“Yes. You’re the Ally Sheedy furry at a “Breakfast Club” themed furry convention.”

We went to the really small gym next to the pool and I ran two miles on the treadmill and then I ran into my cousin and his friend who were lifting weights. He said he was going to college on Friday. He’s going to start cross country training right when he gets there. I asked him what distances he’s been running and he asked me how long I’ve been running on the treadmill and I said only two miles but I ran five miles two days ago and I broke my toe two months ago so I’m feeling good and looking better.

Then I felt guilty for talking too much and for looking like a sweaty orc’s best imitation of a Brentwood housewife. I was probably making him look like a fool. I gave him a fist bump instead of a hug so I wouldn’t gross him out and said, “See you at Thanksgiving.”

He looked at me like he was thinking, “Thanksgiving? I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving! Have you ever been to college?”

***

My first few weeks of college were perfect. I liked my roommate. I fell in love. I cut pictures out of magazines and made a huge collage on the sliding door of my dorm closet. Sometimes random people would come into my dorm room and ask me why I brought a teddy bear to college. “Because I like teddy bears,” I told them.

I didn’t understand how I came across to other people back then. When I told my roommate that we were wearing the exact same pants, one of her friends said, “Yeah, except yours is cheap and hers is expensive.”

I looked at our pants and said, “But they’re pretty much the same and I got mine for a lot less.”

“But look how the seam is all turned towards yours and not straight,” she said.

For some reason, I laughed out loud at this instead of punching her in the face. This moment was a precursor to the next four years of my life. My coping strategy was to keep laughing and avoid taking anything personally. I was so happy to be alone.

Somehow I got into college without knowing that almost all the students around me were very wealthy. How could I miss that fact? My father was a professor at the university, so my tuition was free. It wasn’t that we were poor, but my parents were divorced and my mother was often in debt. I knew the other kids would be rich, I just didn’t understand it How rich they would be, or that they only knew other rich people, or that for them it was almost the same as pointing out a personality flaw or some kind of moral failing when they saw that someone’s pants were cheap. Meanwhile, I saw buying things for less money as a kind of moral victory.

My new boyfriend was middle class, grew up in a small rural town in North Carolina, and went to my school on a large scholarship that he was terrified of losing. We found the people around us smart and fun, but we also found them a little strange in ways we had never experienced before. We didn’t come in knowing everything about everything, like kids do these days. We had never been on the Internet.

“Why is everyone trying to act so sophisticated?” I asked him one afternoon. “We’re just kids.”

“Yes,” he said. “They’re all trying to talk like adults.”

“Why not be as immature as possible for as long as possible?” I said.

No wonder we were so in love. What’s more romantic than celebrating what you don’t know? What’s more seductive than postponing knowing for as long as possible?

Ignorance offers the joy of an animal. Your vision is limited. You are unaware of what you are missing. You cannot remember a time when you were better than you are now. This is what I am most nostalgic for. This is where I strive to get to every day, if I can find the time and the space and the drive to try. Peeling back the layers of sophistication and world-weariness and preemptive, supposedly correct answers until:

You are naive. You are optimistic. You feel everything.

This is the most real you’ll ever be.

Thanks for reading Ask Molly!

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