Context Statement: I wrote this for a short-essay contest in the Spring of 2023. Reading it now, when I have been diagnosed with OCD, I am shocked at how writing this didn’t make anything click for me. But the mind ignores things that we don’t want to be true. I did not win the contest, but I did get a very nice letter from the editor in response to this essay about how much it spoke to them.
I am trying to romanticize my life at the moment. Mostly to combat my impending sense of doom in the current political climate, but also just because I’ve always kind of romanticized things. I blame John Green. My first favorite book was The Fault in Our Stars, and after reading that, I dove headfirst into his other books. My favorite of his books, and the reason I bring him up, is Turtles All the Way Down. I relate the most to the main character in that book, Aza. She has these though spirals, as she calls them, and I have never felt more seen or real than when I read that book for the first time.
Later in my life, as a freshman in college, I went through a time very similar to the plot of that book. My friend, who later would become my roommate and best friend, was seeing a Davis Pickett (read the book, please, for context; many of the references I make in this will be to this book), and I kind of watched her romanticize him, who was not actually Davis Pickett at all, but a serial narcissist who happened to have a similar family dynamic. In the book, Davis Pickett’s father is on the run from the FBI for fraud. This person also had a dad on the run from the FBI for fraud. There were a few minor differences, like he still had his mom, but he didn’t have any of his father’s money. Davis still had his father’s money, but didn’t have his mother. They both had to take care of their younger brothers, but neither of them knew how. Davis was also a wonderful and kind person, and this person was neither of those things. But my best friend ignored all of his red flags because she romanticized the situation, and we all did. I mention this time in my life because I never want the act of romanticizing to ruin it. Which leads me back to my main point: I am trying to romanticize my life.
Today, I read my book, coincidentally (or maybe not coincidentally) Turtles All the Way Down, on the grass at my university. It was the most “real” I’ve felt in a while. I relate to Aza’s feeling of thinking I’m fiction. I have always kind of felt like I wasn’t real. When I was a kid, I had an obsession with touching different textures to prove that I was awake. The most common thing I did to prove I was real was to run my finger along the groove where the “key” would go on a toilet paper holder in the school bathroom. I had no reason to start doing it, but feeling the empty space on the plastic convinced me that I was conscious. I knew it didn’t make sense, but I did it anyway, because it made sense to me.
Romanticizing my life is helping me feel real. I don’t know how, but it is. Thinking about each individual aspect of my life is kind of proving that I exist. If I can change my life, I have one. Today, sitting and reading my book on the grass at my university, my shoulders got sunburnt. It was a beautiful day, one of the first beautiful days I’ve seen in a long time. The sun was out and shining, but I didn’t think about the fact that I could get sunburnt by wearing a tank top and sitting outside for an hour and a half. The fact that a star that lives millions of miles away could burn me is terrifying. But it’s also beautiful. This thing that keeps us alive can hurt us. That’s true for everything that keeps us alive. Too much of something can be bad, obviously. Having too much of something that keeps us alive shouldn’t hurt us, at least that makes sense to me. But it does. It always does. The sun keeps us warm, but sometimes it gets too warm. Which burns us. The sun burned my shoulders today.
It almost makes me feel special. The thing that we would all die without burned me. More than that, it makes me feel real. The sun, which everyone knows about and sees every day, is the most basic thing that we know exists, and it burned me. There is a “me” for it to burn. I have always enjoyed media that has a character who romanticizes things. Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother, Michael Scott from The Office, Augustus Waters from The Fault in Our Stars, Ben Boykewich from The Secret Life of the American Teenager, etc. They might not be the reason I am who I am, but they fueled it for sure. What’s funny about this list is that it is all men. I don’t know if that is the reason for my type in men, but it’s a definite possibility.