Choose Your Own Disaster Read online

  Back when this all started, when you felt ambitious, you’d begin by eating a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos, but you could never, ever make yourself vomit enough to see the streaks of orange chemicals. One more retch, you would bargain with yourself. One more, and that’ll be enough. You thought vomiting would leave you cleansed—a shortcut to Gwyneth Paltrow-dom for those without willpower. Instead, you’re left nauseous and shaking on an unwashed bathroom floor, fantasizing about someone rescuing you but also terrified that someone will find you.

  You retreat back to your dorm room. At first, you were fastidious about cleaning the oatmeal-colored crust from beneath the semiprivate dorm toilet, paranoid that the next occupant would hear your retching, watch you exit, and then see your mess, but now you’ve stopped caring. Let someone confront you. What will another eighteen-year-old college freshman say to the girl down the hall that they barely know?

  Now that you’ve vomited whatever you could, you can finish the haul of junk food you purchased from CVS, floating, manic, down the aisles, not making eye contact with anyone. Now you can go to the dining hall and drink bowlfuls of cereal from your lonely perch in the corner behind your laptop, hoping that the cafeteria staff won’t notice how many bowls you’re going through.

  You haven’t lost weight yet. You’ve gained almost twenty pounds, and now you’re struggling to remember which pair of jeans in your closet fit and you avoid taking pictures so you can pretend you look like you do in your memory: your senior year of high school, when you were all elbows and teeth. You can’t stop eating—now that you’ve tasted non-baked potato chips and non-skinny ice cream, you can’t go back; you can’t stop yourself on lonely Friday nights when you need something to do with your hands and your mouth while you watch YouTube videos of stand-up comedy routines you’ve seen a hundred times before. And if you’re going to eat it, you’re going to have to throw it up. You’re trapped, but it’s only for now, because this time is the last time, you promise.

  It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and you have no assignments due tomorrow, no reading you want to do, no friends you want to see, no parties to go to tonight. You are sitting on your dorm room bed, bored of scrolling through dozens of reddit pages but there’s nothing else to do. You need a hit of dopamine, of attention, of something to contain the boredom that gnaws at you like rats.

  How do you self-soothe?

  A. Twitter. Let the endless scroll of meaningless content lull you into a stupor. Post a joke and hit notifications again and again to refresh, trying to get another rush of dopamine from the people hitting “like” and “retweet” on your observation that technically, it’s only ONE Star WAR, singular.

  Turn here.

  B. Food. Get another thin black plastic bag full of processed calories, let your eyes go glassy, and rewatch Gilmore Girls on Netflix while you devour it all in twenty-five minutes flat. Then you can pass out, wrappers shamefully tucked away in the black bag and pushed to the bottom of your trash can, as if you’re a child who hasn’t yet developed object permanence: If you can’t see the evidence, it never happened.

  Turn here.

  There’s no recovery. Of course there isn’t. This isn’t a chipper first-person sob story as told to a writer for a women’s magazine under the guise of female empowerment. You are trapped and trapped for life because you are a woman in the world in 2018 and your brain is already wired against you, polluted with expectations and temptations and dozens of versions of yourself following you like ghosts, dragging you into immobility: Are you the salad girl who cares about wholeness and wellness, who Instagrams green smoothies and glistening acai bowls? Are you the girl who gets skinny drinking only black coffee? Are you the girl who chows down burgers on dates and beers because you’re cool and always game? Or the relatable, self-deprecating girl who shares bottles of red wine with a friend while watching The Bachelorette ironically and eats ice cream straight from the pint?

  To you, food will always be a costume.

  You will never be a Thin Person who just eats whatever she wants and works out because she just loves the feeling. The type of person who sacrifices her sandwiches for salads for a few days with a shrug if her jeans get too tight before going back to eating whatever she wants.

  You will always be the girl who eats the extra slice of pizza at the party, frantically looking around for confirmation that someone is eating at least as much as you are and, if they aren’t, that at least no one is noticing how much you’re eating. You will weigh yourself every morning and fantasize about how much happier you’d be if you were thinner. (Nonsense, a practical voice in your brain says. But is it? whispers another voice. After all, can we really pretend as though the world doesn’t make existence infinitely easier for the skinny?)

  You will live for the next eight years somewhere on a sliding scale across seventy pounds.

  Here is what recovery means: You have landed somewhere in the middle. You don’t throw up anymore. You allow yourself to eat most everything you want, even if you hate yourself afterward. You tell yourself to eat more fruits and vegetables. You try and fail to get into a habit of working out “just to be healthy.” The best thing you can say about recovery is you think about calories less often. The math in your brain is no longer constantly ticking away like a metronome, siphoning your attention away from the rest of the world. The best thing about this recovery is that sometimes you allow yourself to forget you have a body at all. That is the best you’ll get.

  Turn here.

  There isn’t enough to do on the Internet. It’s 11:00 p.m. and you’ve already seen all of the Aziz Ansari stand-up specials that are freely available on YouTube. You’ve refreshed BuzzFeed and refreshed BuzzFeed again and scrolled so far down their site the quizzes have become nonsensical (“Which 90210 Character Are You Based on Your Favorite Kinds of Sandwich?”).

  Twitter would be a welcome distraction if you had more followers. You generally hover around 400, which is impressive enough for your friends, all wannabe comedians who write for the Brown Noser and send you endless Facebook invitations to improv shows. But at 11:00 on a Tuesday night, there just aren’t enough people online for you to interact with. Your tweets get five favorites, maybe six, before they stall and drift farther down the feed and into obscurity, casualties in the Internet’s endless advance for immediacy. You could write something but you have no good ideas. So, out of options and nearly comatose with boredom, it appears as though you’ll just have to do your homework.

  There are five stories that you’re supposed to read before workshop tomorrow. You’ll go over them with a blue pen you dig from the bottom of your backpack with comments like “great line here!” and “maybe add more detail?”

  The first story is about a man who thinks his wife might be having an affair but isn’t sure. The man is considering boarding a plane but can’t remember if his ticket is refundable. “Maybe add more detail?” you write in the empty space after the final paragraph. “Like, so the main character feels like a human being?”

  The second story is about a man who sleeps with the girl who works at the local coffee shop and then decides he doesn’t want to sleep with her anymore.

  The third is about a man leaving his wife and then sleeping with the girl who works at the local record store.

  You realize all three stories are by boys in your class, the type who come in black T-shirts with holes at the collar and take notes in Moleskine notebooks and roll their eyes if a girl compares something to Jane Austen. They’re that boy you’ve seen smoking outside the Rock—the main library at Brown. (There’s a story they tell about it on tours for prospective students and their eager parents, how John D. Rockefeller was upset that students were calling his namesake library “the Rock”—until they started calling it “the John” instead.) Those boys are always on the stairs of the Rock, each reclining back with one foot kicked up behind him so his body is straight and flat as a board, forming the hypotenuse of a right triangle between the ground a
nd the building.

  The stories were pretentious, but their worst crime, you realized, was that they were boring. You don’t care about the lonely white man who rides a train and wonders what more the country owes him. You don’t care about these men who have sex with women and feel sorry for themselves because the girls (the women become girls after they’ve been fucked) don’t understand how complicated they are. Terrible writing so often bejewels itself in the trappings of J. D. Salinger and Hemingway and Updike and Cheever and shouts, “Me too!” as it glides into any room. There is nothing profound about not deciding to name a main character. “It’s meant to represent every man,” you can imagine one of the boys explaining tomorrow, rolling his eyes behind his Warby Parkers and massaging the bridge of his nose as if he’s so much better than all of this because he’s convinced himself he understood Ulysses. No, you think, you just wrote a bad story and hid it behind a cardboard cutout of what you think a good story would look like.

  You shove the stack of stapled packets off your bed and pull your laptop open again. Creating a new Twitter account is easy—all you need is a username and a new email address to register it with. You give the system your Brown.edu email this time, and where it asks you for your name, you type ThatGuyInYourWritingWorkshop. Too many characters. You get rid of the “That.” GuyInYourWritingWorkshop. Still too long. GuyInYourWorkshop? But a workshop could be anything. If this is going to work, it needs to be specific. GuyInYourMFA. The next logical step to the self-aggrandizing literary genius in his own mind in an undergraduate writing workshop: graduate school. This Twitter account would be the voice of That Guy in every MFA program, the one who nitpicks and wheedles and willfully misunderstands, who believes himself to be smarter than the professor and uncompromised in his artistic principles because no one has ever asked him to sell out. He would be the type to write novels halfway between poetry and prose, published by tiny presses and praised by the three people who read them. He would be That Guy in Your MFA. And he would be you.

  The first tweet erupts from your fingertips. “You should really use quotation marks, my professor said. Clearly, I replied, you aren’t familiar with the work of Cormac McCarthy.” You hit TWEET and begin writing another. “Perhaps add a dream sequence?” and then a third. (“When my protagonist suffocates the prostitute, he’s really suffocating the American Dream”) and a fourth and a fifth, and before midnight you’ve tweeted forty-four times.

  You’ve gained a few dozen followers, more from luck than anything, but somehow even that number is enough to keep your phone dinging nearly continuously. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding, ding, di—di—di—ding. One ding won’t end before it’s superseded by another. You decide to accelerate the follower count. First you post the account on Facebook, all faux-modesty (“Hey, this is a thing I made. Please follow it so I don’t feel like a complete loser lol!”) and then by retweeting @GuyInYourMFA on your primary account. You screenshot your forty-four tweets and upload the pictures to Tumblr, and then to reddit. You go to sleep and wake up to so many notifications on your phone that it takes five full minutes to scroll through them.

  People tweet at you, calling you a genius. Your Tumblr post has 10,000 notes (you had no idea a Tumblr post could even get that many notes), and your post on reddit has 500, plus about a hundred more comments, mostly from more people also calling you a genius. You turn the dinging notifications off on your phone. By your afternoon history class, @GuyInYourMFA has more followers than your primary account. By the end of the week, it has 3,000. Two weeks and 10,000 followers later, you’ll see an angry tweet from someone who looks vaguely familiar. “Hey! You’re using my picture for this account, WTF!”

  You are definitely, and almost assuredly illegally, using his picture (you had done a Google image search for “guy in hat” and gone with the best candidate). You apologize, profusely, and that afternoon you bring a slouchy hat you own to meet your friend Simon in the library, the same library where you took your Introduction to Fiction class, and you ask him to stand there, against the shelves, and you take a hundred pictures of him with your cell phone and replace the picture of the stranger by that afternoon.

  You tweet as many times a day as your brain allows. You gorge yourself on praise and the constant, steady companion of the “new notification” marker. You become the pop phenomenon of the week, a digestible trendy token of Internet culture for the in-the-know to consume and share.

  “Maybe this girl with the tattoos can save me,” reads one tweet.

  “Every Friday is Black Friday when you’re a nihilist like me.” (Of course he would be a nihilist—of course he would love calling himself a nihilist, using the word as often as possible.)

  “I wrote this poem for you on a cocktail napkin. Did you read it already? So fast? No no, really READ it.”

  You type the tweets as fast as you can think of them. Like an actor using a certain anchor phrase to practice a foreign accent, once you had certain anchor concepts about this character—a love of black coffee and cigarettes, an obsession with David Foster Wallace, general misogyny—you can find a way to riff on any topic. It is effortless. And if the attention you had been getting from your normal Twitter account is akin to a buzz like caffeine, this account is heroin. You can’t look away from the way the notifications endlessly compile at the top of your screen.

  But the best day comes two months later, before your acting class (you’re a senior; seniors get to take acting classes), while you’re sitting in the hallway balancing your laptop on your knees, staring at your account and rereading the tweets you’ve already done, trying to mine them for new inspiration. “Oh shit,” comes a voice above your shoulder. “Are you reading Guy In Your MFA?”

  “Hah,” you say, “yeah.” Technically, the account is anonymous, but your identity is an open secret. All of your friends, anyone you’ve talked to at a party, and anyone who read your profile in the Brown Daily Herald knows it’s you. And now this boy, with shaggy hair that comes down to the top of his ears and a knit cardigan, knows you too. You know him—you’ve seen him at parties and in plays. You know him and now he knows you.

  “I love that account. It’s so dead on.” He lets his backpack droop onto one shoulder and you smile. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know it’s you. This must be why celebrities wear baseball caps and sunglasses in public—not to avoid paparazzi or attention, but to control attention. For this feeling, the power to reveal.

  “Hah, yeah,” you say.

  “But I feel like you kind of have to be a guy to understand all of the humor,” the acquaintance continues. “Like, it’s mocking this super-masculine experience, this thing that we’re supposed to embody.”

  Whatever words you’d planned on saying, the metaphorical cape you had been about to sweep back, revealing your genius self, all disappear in a poof. Your eyes widen and you grin. “Yeah,” you say. “Guess I will never get it.”

  And you close your laptop and walk as quick as you can down the hallway and into your classroom even though you’re fifteen minutes early, because if you’d stayed there even a second longer you would have succumbed to temptation and ruined the whole, perfect, delicious thing.

  You look at the floor when you enter the minimart and focus only on the shelves, loading your arms as heavily as you can without embarrassing yourself by scattering everything on the floor—no one wants to be the fat girl in stained sweatpants who sent peanut M&M’s scuttling across the linoleum.

  Your eyes jump rapidly between labels the way a close-up of a drug addict’s eyes would in a movie. Prepacked peanut butter cookies, Cheez-Its, peach-flavored gummy rings, Ho Hos, family-sized bags of Doritos, pistachio nuts, a pint of ice cream, a Kit Kat bar—foods you forgot were edible when you were fastidiously logging your calories. You try to purchase enough variations so that you can order your consumption sweet-savory-sweet-savory. In addition to this rule, a “sweet” peanut-based product—say, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—shouldn’t be neighbors with a savory nut prod
uct, like the bags of unshelled pistachios you would pour into a mug and then unhinge, one by one, with fingernails made so thin and brittle that they sometimes cracked and peeled from the exercise. The idea is to introduce as much variety into your binge as possible so that you won’t be fatigued twenty minutes in.

  Avoid eye contact with the checkout girl—it’s always the same one, with her thick, cheap blond streaks and the piercing through her eyebrow and the hint of mockery (isn’t that a hint of mockery?) in her voice when she asks, “Will there be anything else?” Maybe she thinks you’re buying all of this for a party, you think limply. The family-size bag of chips, the sleeves of Milanos, those could be for a party. The same one you’ve been throwing every night this week.

  “Uh, yeah,” you say, and reach down below the counter to supplement your bounty with whatever candy bar is most appealing for you to unwrap on your way back to your dorm room, something to chew on for three blocks.

  You hand over your debit card, still avoiding eye contact, and, yes, you’ll need a bag, thank you, sign the receipt still looking down, and then you’re gone, your shameful goods safely hidden behind opaque black plastic. Those are the worst moments, while you’re in the store, when the binge is on the counter, when anybody could walk in and see you and you try your hardest to be invisible.

  The concept of being addicted to something has always been elusive to you. Why couldn’t they just, you know, stop? Sure it’s hard, but just…do it. Don’t do the thing that you know is bad for you. And then you let yourself eat after slowly starving for eighteen months, and you understand.

  It’s a chemical calling, a wiring in your brain that nags and tingles until you can only think about how good it would be, at that moment, if you could have a pint of ice cream in your lap, an entire pint, and an endless amount of food, never running out, for you to put in your face while you watch videos on the Internet. The world is so boring, and it’s better if tonight you can eat whatever you want in an endless amount, isn’t it? Everything you want. As much as you want. Just this once. It’s a desperate, skin-tingling itch. A melody one note short of completion. Your mind keeps going back to wanting it so bad like water swirling a drain.