I’m torn on my approach. To regret, that is. It ambushed me this week as I approached my 30th birthday. I’m trying to be nicer to the younger versions of myself, but they did oh-so-many cringeworthy things. The Greatest Hits of Cringe seems to be my brain’s favorite album. And for some reason, my brain has been focusing especially on the college songs, reminding me of drunken and idiotic things from a literal decade ago.
I stretched myself thin in college trying to make up for all the experiences I felt that I had missed out on while growing up. I came in trying to be a Big Man on Campus while also confronting things in therapy that I had not been able to talk about for my entire childhood. Dr. T warned me that talking about these things would trigger my nervous system, and it sure did. It’s hard to be a Big Man on Campus when you have nightmares every night and panic attacks every day, but somehow, I managed to cobble together a full experience. On paper, at least. I did all the things. I kept my G.P.A. up, I participated in a slew of clubs and activities, I partied, I grew close to professors, I wrote a thesis, I worked on my novel, I did internships, I cultivated a widespread group of friends, I traveled, and somehow, some way, I dated.
I came into college with next to no dating experience. It showed. I was trying to be a Van Wilder type, while also trying to be a hopeless romantic, while also trying to be a chill nice guy, while also trying to hold my alcohol, while also trying to get over women that I had formed irrational attachments to, while also trying to hide the fact that I was damaged goods.
And that’s why I was tired all the time.
In just the last decade, I have seen such a change in how we all discuss mental health. I remember more stigma back in the undergrad days. I didn’t tell anybody I went to therapy. I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk about so many things. I hid my meds and took them in secret. I was forbidden from therapy by my father who had control of my college fund, and he had threatened to seize the fund for himself if I got counseling. Okay Boomer. The paranoia of being found out kept me in lockdown mode. My sessions with Matt and Dr. T were on a need-to-know basis. But I got a similar vibe from other students in the lobby of the mental health center. It was always dead quiet. We looked away from each other and waited for our respective therapists to summon us into the back rooms.
Dating blunders are most of my main regrets. The worst thing about maturing is having to see how much of a mess you’ve been. Dear God, I was ridiculous back then, especially when drinking. I needed liquid courage more than I cared to admit, but I often overestimated my tolerance and blacked out and would then do oh-so-cringey things. It’s hard to look back on, which I hope signifies growth.
My sisters are going to have a motherfucking field day with this, but growing older as a man also means realizing that the women weren’t bluffing when they said that they were ahead of us maturity-wise. Most of them, at least. As uncomfortable as it could be in the moment, I was always a little relieved when I encountered a sexually aggressive and/or irrationally angry woman. Some of them even got mad about being Friendzoned. Some of them even got violent, although their violence was usually limited to slapping.
But the two women I’m thinking of slapped me differently from the women at my high school. The post-high school women had never been in a fight. They hesitated, looking me over before and after to make sure that I was one of the men who followed social norms and would not hit back. Lucky for them, I had made a vow never to hit a woman or child (unless they turned into a zombie or something like that).
The women at my high school, however, were straight up scary. They did not have cat fights. They had mountain lion battles. Hair was ripped out of the scalp and students were sent to the hospital. When teachers intervened, they sometimes got the shit beat out of them as well. One of my principals was an ex-marine and I saw two girls half his size send him flying back when he tried to pull them apart.
Jessica (not her real name) was one of these women. She formed an irrational attachment to me right away. She told me she loved me right when she met me. After that she would walk me to my classes and say it as a goodbye. I never knew what to say back. Eventually, she asked me out and I said yes because my Dating Resume was almost bare. Also, everyone loved Jessica. She was elected homecoming princess one year. My classmates were so excited for us to get together.
Jessica walked me to my bus every day after school. One day she went for a kiss, and I said, “Don’t kiss me I have a cold.” Jessica proceeded to slap the shit out of my face. I called out for her to stop. She calmed down instantly and said goodbye.
The next day I tried to ask her about it. She looked at me wide-eyed:
“I don’t remember that” she said in a small, sweet voice.
But I don’t want to throw Jessica under the bus because Jessica definitely had PTSD. Her father had left, her mother beat her, and for a while, she and her family had to live in a motel. Life was not kind to Jessica. I was terrified when I broke up with her, but she took it well. Good for her. I hope she ended up getting therapy.
The women who slapped me with hesitation came from money and privilege. Jessica, who did not hold back, was poor and abused. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
The relief I feel when encountering scary women is like my relief when a person of color says something bigoted, or when queer people say something transphobic. It’s one of those everybody is a little bit racist moments where I can exhale for a little bit and take a break from white male guilt. I’m especially relieved when women of color admit to having a “white fetish.” The women who said this to me confessed it like they didn’t want the other women of color to hear, their voices tinged with mischief and worry. They were a little problematic too. Hehe. It was a pillow talk secret.
I didn’t realize how much I’ve calmed down over the years until this week. The main reason I don’t want to throw College Boz under the bus is because I remember how hard it was back then. I was so overstimulated. My nervous system blared its alarm over the intercom all day. Mean voices (the stream of consciousness kind, not hallucinations) kept singing siren songs of suicide, especially after I did cringeworthy things. I was trying to be oh-so-nice and oh-so-charming and oh-so-woke because I knew what dark things were festering inside of me, and I was trying to break the cycle, but it was turning out to be so goddamn hard, especially when women left me. I was so tit-for-tat back then. I had to show everybody, one day they would see. But UVA was weirdly competitive like that, at least among a certain percentage of the population. UVA had a work hard/play hard culture to it. The students put themselves under immense pressure in both those arenas. People would brag about how busy and stressed they were. Everybody had to start their own club at some point, even though there were already way too many clubs. Certain clubs were hard to get into, and the members got snooty about that. Etc., etc., etc.
Students also bragged about how drunk they got. They would try to one-up each other with shots or solo cups full of either beer or jungle juice. Drinking begot drinking. If you got caught nursing a drink, you would get a light scolding and be encouraged to drink more. Sex was also a competition. Men counted up how many women they had hooked up with and compared numbers. We measured our dicks with rulers and reported the results to the hall. It was surprisingly civil. No one accused anyone else of fudging the numbers.
First year of college, everything seemed to come back to the motherfucking Friend Zone. I’m as horny and resentful as the next guy, but even I got sick of hearing about it. The menfolk strategized like generals in the War Room trying to prevent the spread of communism. They issued warnings and accusations like McCarthy during the Red Scare. The more sexually experienced men would give advice to the virgins. I was one of the virgins. The consensus was that something sexual had to happen by the second or third date. Otherwise, you were on the fast track to Eunuch Status. Having something sexual happen was akin to grabbing the tree and calling “Safe!” in a game of tag, and this game of tag was played in teams separated by gender. I got interrogated after dates by the men on my hall. What happened? Did you get laid? Are you no longer a virgin?
I made a private plan to gerrymander the Friend Zone in my favor. I had a skill the other men on my hall didn’t have. I grew up in a house of women, so I knew how to be friends with them. I created four distinct zones in my mind: the friends who I could never be with (sister stand-ins), the friendly acquaintances who I would be polite to but also entertain the idea of having sex with if the opportunity ever arose, the women I was not friends with but who I was also not attracted to, and the women I was irrationally attracted to who made me feel the best and worst of emotions.
The menfolk were very confounded when I tried to explain the difference between my actual dates and the platonic dates with female friends who I could talk about other girls with. My female friends saved me during breakups and blow-offs. Whenever I felt irredeemable, defective, and pathetic, they brought me back from the edge by saying nice things and continuing to be friends with me. Sometimes they even got mad on my behalf, which I found heartwarming. They also noticed things I didn’t, like weird things that some of the women had done/said that were a little bit problematic, things Matt also pointed out in therapy.
My first year of college I disappointed the menfolk on my hall. I did sexual things, but I did not get laid. However, I moved out with some of my hallmates second year, during which I did get laid, and they were so proud of me. I was more touched than I care to admit. It felt like having brothers, which I had always wanted growing up.
I do not want to throw those hallmates under the bus either. It would be easy to call them toxic and say that they taught me bad lessons and try to make myself look like a Misled Nice Guy, but these men were not toxic. They were good, decent, intelligent guys who could be surprisingly tender when they got the chance. I confused and often annoyed them because I seemed too gay to be straight and too straight to be gay, but they still included me and made me feel like part of the hall. And I could see how relieved they were to quit the sexcapade rat race once they found a woman they liked enough to wifey it up with. They had also felt the pressure to be Big Men on Campus. And when I had some of my cringiest moments, say a drunken panic attack, moments that indicated I was not just quirky but straight-up damaged goods, they were surprisingly kind and caring about it.
I tried to wifey it up also, but I was bad at relationships (obligatory reference to Attachment Theory). Women who once looked at me with keen interest transitioned into concerned and scrutinizing stares, trying to figure out just what exactly was wrong with me, especially when I dissociated. I kept missing things that I should have been doing as a partner. I tried to be a chill suave guy about rejections/breakups with mixed results. I was far too prone to drunk texts in those days.
Shameless plug: I’m releasing a music video for a song called Drunk Texts soon. Stay tuned, as they say.
I am not a Nice Guy. I think that term is stupid. I often get typecast as a Nice Guy because I am polite and I have the face of a Mormon missionary, but I am not a Nice Guy. I am a man at war with himself. I think most humans are at war with themselves, to some extent. Humanity is an animal domesticating itself. I have a Nice Guy faction within me, but it is akin to Ukraine versus Russia. The Nice Guy faction has done better than I expected, but it is always outmanned, at risk of extinction, and in need of emergency supplies.
But sometimes, when the smoke clears and I see my situation with fresh eyes, especially when I reread these essays, I wonder if the underdogs might be winning after all.
The problem with regret is that it aligns too easily with my self-loathing, which was taught to me growing up. I have trouble distinguishing between neurosis and what I should feel remorse for. My therapists must always console me that I am not as bad as I think I am. I was raised by people who hated themselves because they were also abused, and I internalized some very mean things they said to me, things that were probably said to them growing up as well.
My greatest regret is over something that I never had control over. My greatest regret is that I cannot go back in time and give my parents, and in that way give myself, a safe environment to grow up in.
I do not think you should tell your child that you hate him. I do not think that you should call him a monster. I do not think that you should call him an idiot, especially not on his birthday. I do not think you should say that you regret having him, nor that having him ruined your life. And I especially do not think you should say in front of him that you want to kill yourself and take all the kids with you. These are things that will stay inside the child for years to come. These are the things that will grow into the voice blaring on the brain’s intercom telling the child that he has no recourse but to kill himself. That child will eventually become a man and he will be afraid that every woman will turn on him like his mother did, and then he will be far too defensive, he will withhold parts of himself because that was what he had to do in order to survive back then. The women will grow frustrated and disturbed and leave him, and that will make the man who was once a child see his failure as destiny, and since that man who was once a child vowed that he would not make the same mistakes as his parents, he will wonder if the voice on the intercom is right, that it is time to self-destruct.
No pressure, ladies. No pressure.
My hall first year was a STEM-heavy group, and there was a bit of condescension towards liberal arts majors. One student was obsessed with chemistry. He thought it was the pinnacle of the sciences and made disparaging comments about literally every other discipline. But the liberal arts he could not abide at all, especially the performing arts, even though he was an accomplished cellist. At one point, another liberal arts major and I started discussing political theory in front of him. The Chemistry Fundamentalist held up his hand.
“I don’t talk about that,” he said. And then he walked out.
Even though I was a politics major, it was clear that I was such a theater kid. That’s another reason I was odd to my hallmates (besides the whole damaged goods thing). I just couldn’t stop performing. In groups, at least. My one-on-one conversations tended to be surprisingly sincere. I relied a lot on heart-to-hearts with peers I trusted, men and women. Times were tough back then, that’s why I don’t want to take the easy way out and call College Boz an idiot. I remember what it was like. I don’t think I could relive those years if it meant going back to that frazzled state. It all feels like a four-year fever dream now.
I was twenty-five when I first got a taste of life without panic attacks. I was trying this new thing called CBD that was like weed but wouldn’t get you high. After three weeks, the alarm system turned off. I couldn’t believe it. Was this how normal people felt? Were their brains quiet like this? I still had anxiety, but there was a layer between like two-paned glass. I could watch the storm from inside. I felt a good portion less crazy, less like I might lose control at any moment. My anger turned from a boil to a simmer.
I am having such American customer service thoughts about this whole neurodiversity thing. I’m feeling like that guy at the counter of a restaurant who makes a complaint and then asks: “So, what do I get?” I’ve even tried to think of how it could get me laid. Are there women out there with a kink for tics? Is that a thing? I hope so because I can twitch all night. In fact, I often have to. I have a neurological disorder, apparently. Maybe I can tap into a niche like those white women who pat themselves on the back for dating black men.
I’m also hoping my asshole moments will be stricken from the record, or even better, that my more off-putting failures will be rebranded into one of those inspirational movies like A Beautiful Mind. See? It’s inspiring now that he stopped being crazy.
But that’s not fair to College Boz. He wasn’t crazy. He was sick, with PTSD, to be specific, and he was trying so hard to get better, but it was taking so long. That was my weekly complaint in therapy. Why was I still such a mess? Why wasn’t I making more progress? Why did I keep doing such cringeworthy things?
“My emotions are out of proportion to the situation.”
That’s what I wrote on the preliminary form to request counseling at UVA’s mental health center. It wasn’t the worst summary, but it was a little misleading. My emotions were out of proportion to my situation at UVA. They were not out of proportion to the previous years.
I had dinner last night with some good friends. My birthday dinner was quieter this year because half the invited group couldn’t make it, and it turned out to be quite nice with a smaller group. In the same way that I realize how much I’ve calmed down since college, I also heard myself saying things that I would only have been able to present in joke form before. I was taking the compliments instead of self-deprecating through all of them to show how humble I was. Keep in mind I was a good Christian boy before I became a Golden Jew.
This is going to offend a lot of people, but in terms of cultural mythmaking, I think Christianity is very dangerous. It relies so much on self-hate and the concept of the Other. I feel that way about all religions which require conversion, that divide the world into the saved and the damned. That’s why I’m trying to embrace Judaism. Judaism felt like forbidden magic growing up in my father’s Southern Baptist kingdom. It was a whole other way of life my father did not want us to think about. But I did think about it. A lot. I liked it for some reason I couldn’t quite place, especially the symbols. The Star of David was more aesthetically pleasing and calmer than the guilt-inducing cross. Also, Jews got to wear fun little hats. Also, the women on my mom’s side of the family got excited when I asked questions about it, which meant they gave me the attention I craved. My aunts tried to smuggle me print outs explaining what the Star of David represented. My father seized these documents at the border and got upset. This only made Judaism more intriguing.
I met lots of Jews in college, but their experiences were different from mine. Most of them came from the Northern Virginia area, a section of high-income neighborhoods which provided most of the in-state students at UVA. NOVA, as we called it, has some of the best school systems in the country. I did not meet another Jew who could relate to my stories from middle and high school. From what I could tell, they did not have to hide their Jewishness. Their schools did not have swastikas scribbled on every bathroom wall. Students at their schools did not say “That’s so Jewish” when they meant something was bad in a similar way to how students also said, “That’s so gay.” And unless they were also withholding some anecdotes, none of them had been called kikes and/or pet Jews while redneck types tried to strangle them.
But I don’t want to throw all rednecks under the bus either. I knew some good and decent rednecks as well. If you’re somehow reading this Brian H., I always thought you were a swell guy. You too, Travis, but I don’t remember your last name.
A lot of my cringeworthy stories also involve dumb things I said to people of color at UVA. UVA has an incredible tension with its students of color. Something about how the university idealizes its slave-owning founder seems to really rub them the wrong way, which is fair. But it was confusing for me interacting with the students of color as well. A lot of them also could not relate to my Tales of Rural Hate Crimes. They kept telling me about privilege and microaggressions and a world structured in my favor, but a good portion of them, particularly the international students, came from money, and part of me resented them for lecturing me while having certain rich kid experiences that I had only seen in movies. Some of the international students even had servants back home. I also felt a little resentful being lectured by the people of color who seemed to come from happy families. The people of color at UVA were very different from the black and Hispanic people I grew up around. But I also knew then that I looked like a country club that wished to become a real boy, so I did not tell them my Tales of Rural Hate Crimes. I did not think anyone would believe me. And to be fair, I have never been pulled out of the line at an airport. A cop has never stopped me when I am walking alone at night. And I did have an option that the students of color didn’t. If I did it right, I could hide my Jewishness and pass.
I confuse people of color because even though I have plenty of dumb white guy moments, it seems they can tell on some level that I idealize them, especially the women of color who confess to having white fetishes. I keep trying to be the token white guy in groups. You don’t have to look that hard in my Psychological Orchard for some low-hanging childhood fruit. I grew up respecting black people because they ran my school. I was hoping they would form an alliance with me against the rednecks. It didn’t quite work. But I still felt safer with them than the rednecks. Some of the black kids did traumatizing things to me, some of them even said things that were anti-Semitic, but it was not as personal. They did not have a commitment to anti-Semitism like the rednecks did. The black kids’ violence was targeted to keep the white students in line when they got too big for their britches, and when one of the rednecks who also called me kike slipped up and got jumped for saying the N word, I relished it.
The redneck I am thinking of had epilepsy. I have Tourette’s. When he threatened to kick my ass, it was neurodiverse on neurodiverse violence. We were ahead of our time.
But it was a black friend who outed me as a Jew to the redneck kids. And I know he was having a hard time, probably a harder time than me since he was not only abused/bullied but also poor and black, but still, it was not fair to turn me in like that. That was cruel.
I think I’m getting a bit lost. It’s hard not to. The Greatest Hits of Cringe is a multi-genre, double-sided album. The runtime is long. And I’m not even past college yet. Oy vey. Where does the cringe end? Every time I think I’ve compiled my greatest hits, I come out with more songs.
But that’s why I wanted to out myself as a Master of Cringe. It’s the same thing I’m trying to do by outing myself as a Golden Jew, even though I know people think it’s silly and are sick of hearing about it. They don’t understand how much metaphors mean to me. I can get lost in them for hours. That’s why I fell in love with anthropology, especially the structural study of myth. It was a way of discerning deeper truths through things that were once thought to be primitive, but that actually turned out to be quite nuanced and essential.
Here’s a bonus cringe track: I used to be a little snooty on the inside about women and their fixation with astrology/witchcraft/goddess stuff/etc. I would act supportive but rolled my eyes in private. How pseudoscientific these women were being, how silly, how childish. It took me a while to realize that this was just their version of personal mythmaking. They were doing what I am also trying to do with my metaphors, songs, jokes, stories, and yes, Judaism. They were also trying to get well by making the exploration of trauma fun.
Did I mention that I am trying to break the cycle? Did I mention that I feel most whole when I call myself a Golden Jew? Did I mention that I want to be Boz full-time? Did I mention that I am tired of trying to suppress my Tourette’s in public? Did I mention that I am tired of being a scared/sad secret-keeper, that I don’t want to pretend anymore? That I want to stop living halfway? That I don’t want to dissociate my way through life? That I want to finally stop being sick and learn what it’s like to be well?
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed The Greatest Hits of Cringe. Thank you for listening.