What's That Shit on Your Lips

On surviving being disliked.

This week I joined up with the PTA at my kid’s charter art school and helped prep tote bags for decoration by the students. I sat at a long table in the café (art schools don’t have cafeterias, they have cafes) placing long strips of masking tape on the fabric, so that kids could color in the blank space, then peel the tape off, revealing a graphic design. More than one kid, upon ripping off the tape, said, “That’s soooo satisfying.” My kid talks about things being soooo satisfying, too. Kids have been very influenced by ASMR culture. It must be all the Youtubing?

SoooooSatisfying

Anyways, a group of tween girls gathered at the end of the table to work on a tote, each decorating their own area with kittens and hearts and flowers, talking about what they were doing after school. One girl had plans to give another girl an anime makeover and do a photo shoot.

“What if I came over?” another girl asked.

The first girl hesitated. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You know she doesn’t like you.”

My heart seized and my hands halted and the masking tape swung in a current of air and tangled upon itself. I side-eyed the girls, awaiting a breakdown. But the disliked girl just sort of shrugged and kept working on her tote bag kitten.

“But, she doesn’t, like hate me,” she reasoned.

“She doesn’t hate you,” the first girl affirmed. “But she doesn’t like you, you know that.”

The girl offered another shrug to the situation, and let it go. Conversation moved elsewhere. The disliked girl seemed fine. But readers, I was devastated! Had I been that disliked girl. I would not have been able to recover so smoothly, so shruggingly! And I of course once was the disliked girl, and did not protect my dignity so admirably.

In the spring of 8^th Grade I briefly dated a boy who lived on my block, Jeff Tirado. I knew nothing about him, he knew nothing about me. Having lived in this particular part of Chelsea – Prattville, the nice part, snort, guffaw – for about nine months, I’d become friends with a group of kids my age who hung out on a bus stop bench on the corner, in front of a sub shop. If they weren’t there, they were usually behind the sub shop, smoking cigarettes in the half-paved empty lot. Jeff Tirado was part of this crew, and I have no memory of how we wound up ‘dating’ – like, someone probably said, “Jeff likes you,” and with no real thought as to if I liked Jeff, but certainly liking the idea of someone liking me, of a boyfriend, I said, I like him, too, and that is how I wound up fingerbanged in the abandoned house next to the sub shop. That is the only recollection I have of Jeff, being against a wall in the dark house, which felt very spooky which felt very exciting, like fooling around in a haunted house, a dream I hadn’t known I’d had. I was slightly anxious as to how far Jeff was going to push it, not really knowing what I wanted to do, if I wanted to do any or all of it, and aware that Jeff’s best friend and his girlfriend were also somewhere in the darkness hashing out their own nonverbal negotiations. Was it weird to be messing around in the same room as another couple? It felt precariously close to an orgy! Eventually I pushed Jeff’s hand away from my bush and tugged up my jeans and we left the haunted house, all of us feeling like we’d transgressed in multiple ways, which felt cool. Aside from walking home with Jeff one night and him standing on the curb to kiss me, as he was a Short King (my type?) that’s it. I can’t remember how I broke up with him but I know I did because shortly after, I learned that hos big sister was going to kick my ass. This always happened in Chelsea. Someone’s relation was always after you. I guess it’s better than Jeff wanting to kick my ass for breaking up with me, but I might’ve been able to kick Jeff’s ass. Not his sister.

The Corner, today.

I had other friends, and I scooted out of Prattville for a bit. It was summertime now and me and my other friends would sneak into Boston and try to see if we could spot punk rockers. It was incredibly thrilling when we were successful. At Woolworth’s I found a pearlescent blue lipstick, light blue and frosty, and it made my heart beat like when I spotted a punk. I bought it. It sat on my lips like a mask, sort of glowing. I don’t think it was my color, but I loved it anyways. One day, getting off the bus from Boston with my glowing, blue lips I came upon my Prattville friends. “Where have you been?” they demanded. Not so much happy to see me, more like I had run out on them, and they were pissed. “What’s that shit on your lips?”

I explained my pearlescent blue lipstick. I took it out of my pocket and unsheathed it from its golden cap, I twisted the base and watched it rise like the horn of a unicorn, a pale, metallic blue with flashes of silver, flashes of purple. “That’s so fucked up!” they laughed. I was already accustomed to having my aesthetic choices lampooned by the people of Chelsea. It was about to get way worse – wicked bad. So far, my black sweat suit with the diagonal neon pink stripes had been called ‘punk’ by my Catholic school classmates, as if that were an insult.

At the bus stop, I applied another layer of shimmering blue to my mouth and listened to the girls tell me that no one liked me anymore. Why? I asked, my entire body lightening-struck with fight-or-flight anxiety, oh no, someone didn’t like me, multiple people didn’t like me, this was the worst, I had to fix this, this was a big problem.

There was, to be fair, very practical disadvantages to being disliked in Chelsea. People were monsters, and to be disliked made you the target of basically anyone’s simmering rage. People in Chelsea beat up the people they didn’t like, so if this went unrepaired there would be more than Jeff Tirado’s big sister after me. This whole gang of corner-hangers could want to kick my ass, and, living as I did on a dead-end street, there was only way to my home, and that was past the corner. I suppose I could walk all along the parkway into the neighboring town of Everett, cut through the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot and turn down a little street that butted up against my dead end, slip through the gap in a fence into my own back yard and be home, but that was like fifteen minutes of undignified skulking and hiding. I wasn’t above it, but it wasn’t ideal. Plus, the corner kids were bored out of their gourd and teeming with bad vibes; even if they didn’t spot me and trail me and perhaps kick my ass, they knew where I lived and I could imagine them livening up their dreary existence by vandalizing my front door or straight-up coming for me at home.

I learned the name of the main girl who had turned against me and went home to phone her on my baby blue telephone, same color as my lips minus the unicorn jazz. Why don’t you like me? I asked her. “I don’t know, I just don’t like you.” Yeah, but why? I asked. Did I do something? I was atremble with the idea that I had done something, maybe I’d said something offensive or stupid I could apologize for, or maybe there was a misunderstanding I could clear up. “I just don’t like you.” the girl maintained. I asked her who else didn’t like me and she rattled off some names. Do you have their phone numbers? I asked. She snorted. “Are you going to call everyone and ask them to like you again?” she scoffed. Yeah, I said stupidly. It seemed like a good plan? What else was I supposed to do? Just accept that I was disliked and wait around to see if it escalated into an ass-kicking. The girl made a sound with her mouth that meant you are stupid. “Don’t bother,” she said, and hung up.

My phone. Now going for $300 on eBay

Nobody from this crew ever kicked my ass, not even Jeff Tirado’s big sister. I did endure passing them by on my walks home, and hearing them burst into pointed laughter at my passing, occasionally calling me names, basic names like freak, bitch, whore. I passed them by with my blood rushing super-fast through my body, my legs Jell-O-ing, waiting to hear the sounds of footsteps behind me or the proximity of the hurled insults growing closer, but they never did.

At my kid’s school I marveled at this girl at the end of the table’s apparent acceptance of some other girl not liking her. I mean, who knows, maybe she was dying inside, maybe she eventually locked herself in a bathroom stall and sobbed, who knows. But she seemed fine, and she and the other girl made plans for later. The clock struck 1:30m and I left to read books about astrology and drag queens to my son’s class. But I kept thinking about that little interaction all day.

I wonder, if I’d grown up in a place with animosity did not so frequently erupt into violence, if the notion of being disliked would have felt like such an unbearable crisis. Was it the real danger of being cast out of such a tribal, townie people that cultivated this fear in me? But then, lots of folks, adults as well as young people, can’t handle the thought of someone not liking them. One of the first slogans my first recovery sponsor imparted to me back in 2003 was, What other people think of me is none of my business. Newly sober, I was an emotional wreck, of course, and some of my problems were social. My immediate friend group had devolved to prioritize whoever would do drugs with me, and these negative nellies were dedicated underdogs who problematized anything that was popular, which, through a very narrow definition of the word popular, included my writing. I’d found myself enmeshed in a group of people who didn’t really like me; the anxiety this gave me kept me glued to them, as if I was being electrocuted and helpless to let go of the wires that were shocking me. I had to prove to them that I was likeable – a good person! – by maintaining my friendship with them. I’d show them! They had me all wrong! It never occurred to me to ask myself if I liked them. I mean, I didn’t. They made me profoundly uncomfortable, judged everyone, stole purses from unsuspecting women at bars. They lied about being gaybashed and, legendarily, peed in someone’s beer at a party. They were, basically, monsters. And I couldn’t handle the thought that they might not like me.

What other people think of you is none of your business. I repeated this to countless sponsees over the years, addled folks on the oath to getting better, wracked with social anxiety they’d never dealt with, just self-medicated for a decade or so. It’s such a counter-intuitive phrase to so many, that hearing it is a real jolt, a shock that issues laughter, and then – oh my god! A revelation. What if it were true? Imagine the freedom! The liberation! The dignity!

I haven’t sponsored anyone in a few years, ever since sort-of leaving official recovery to experiment with mushrooms (an experiment that, I’ve mentioned, is going poorly due to the inhibiting effects of my psych meds, but I still haven’t given up!) But, I work with writers a lot, and the phrase is equally powerful and revelatory when applied to your creative output: What other people think of my writing is none of my business. What?! Could such a radical statement be true? Mustn’t we write to impress the faceless masses, readers with their fingers poised on a Like button, not to mention agents and editors, publishers and granters, retreat and award-givers and all the gatekeepers of the universe who stand in between us and our life being perfect???!!!??? But these are magic words, and if truly ingested, metabolized and believed, have the power to release us from so much anxious bullshit! As this is my mantra, so will that oh well/who cares girl at my kid’s school be my icon. I wish you all the psyche of a lovingly raised young art school student with excellent self-esteem. Good day.

The GOAT, Lynda Barry, from What It Is