blending & self love. reflections on a night out, jimmy fallon’s hands, and a new york pizza parlor
TW: sexual assault
There’s nothing like the blind faith of a college freshman who’s just moved to New York. She romanticizes the city with the maddening insistence of a black and white Woody Allen flick. The trains are conduits that carry her toward an unclear, but certainly glimmering, future; $8 lattes are nothing (tell that to the Chase College checking account she just opened last Tuesday) but a price of admission into a dense urban incubator teeming with people who’ve found themselves here from all over — just a city for strays who’d packed their dreams in the suitcase taking up most of the floor space in their shoebox bedroom.
I was on the cusp of eighteen when I first moved to the Upper West Side. Over the years, a series of encounters would push me to confront the consequences of my school’s relocation to (i.e. gentrification of) Morningside Heights in the late 19th century and subsequent changes to the neighborhood. I wasn’t quite aware of this history when I made way to Manhattan via the fishing town where I had grown up. I wasn’t aware of a lot of things. I was armed with little more than a hunger for the hustle and bustle, a deluded set of street smarts from having only navigated cities in Japan, and a tinge of fear.
Our first semester of college was a brief but densely colored Intro to New York. Scared, enamored, and financially illiterate, my friends and I found shows to go to every other week. I surrounded myself with people who, like me, were into live music, meandering walks through the park, museum outings, bookstore dates, sampling the ambience of different libraries, making protest signs for causes we cared about, attending miscellaneous talks and events, and scouring the city for the best cup of coffee. These were generic interests at a liberal arts college, but they tied us close. My friend, Karen, texted me one week.
Karen: are u free this thursday
Me: ?
Karen: i have two tickets to the tonight show
Me: i’m there
We entered show lotteries all the time. We already had tickets to see Amy Klobuchar and King Princess at the Late Show the week after, and now we were going to see Joaquin Phoenix, Taylor Swift, and Angel Olsen at the Tonight Show. Some days I had to pinch myself. This was the life in New York I had envisioned. To see the makers of culture that I had only ever seen over a screen from halfway around the world in the flesh was staggering to me at eighteen.
The show was great.
They prerecorded the Friday show on the same day as ours so Karen and I got to sit front row through two days’ worth of interviews and performances. We clapped until our hands turned red and Karen hollered every time the CHEER signal lit up. Jimmy Fallon walked through and talked to individual people in the audience a few times throughout the night. He shook my hand at the very end and said something to my face, but I couldn’t make out what he’d said over The Roots and the applause exploding around us. Karen and I made our way out of the studio hypothesizing what he could have said that the sound drowned out. To this day, I don’t think I’ve shaken a softer hand than Jimmy’s.
Stepping out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Karen and I were starving. We made a brisk walk to the Ichiran we’d eyed on our walk from the station and a brisk walk right back out upon realizing it was $30 a bowl. We spotted a pizza parlor across the street and stepped inside.
We stood in a line of about ten people waiting to order. I scanned the menu on the sign above the counter. Cheese it is, I decided. One thing I miss about being a vegetarian how easy it made deciding what to order.
As we’re standing in line, something grazes my backside. I try not to think about it too much. It’s New York, we’re all packed in here like a can of sardines, I remind myself. Part of me wants to cry, but I tell myself to stop being a baby. When it happens a couple more times it’s more than a graze, so I turn around, and the man behind me swiftly bends down to tie his shoelaces which are already taut in a butterfly knot. I look around with my eyes glossed over, desperately looking for someone to be looking back at me with an expression that says “I saw that.” It could have been an honest mistake. I want to know I wasn’t building this up in my head.
Of course, no one is looking back at me. I think about saying something to one of the employees, but people keep pouring into the pizza parlor and they can’t catch a break. I pull out my phone and type on my notes app to show to Karen, who’s standing in front of me.
i think the guy behind me is groping me
She shoots me a look and we nonchalantly glance at the man bent over his shoes on the floor. He’s a white man with a sharp nose, but it’s hard to make out his face because he has a reflective pair of round glasses on. He’s wearing a beanie and a long trench coat. Oh, and of course, a pair of Nikes with the laces neatly double-knotted despite him swinging to his feet to adjust them several times already.
The man stands back upright before he slowly begins to bend down yet again. Karen sees him trace my skirt and reach under this time, and she raises her voice with me. “What the fuck?” Keeping his head down, the man does not retie his shoelaces but instead smoothly slides out of line and into the back of the parlor. He takes a seat at one of the tables with a seasoned swiftness, resting his elbows on the surface and staring daggers at me and Karen. I wonder what could possibly be in the pockets of his massive trench coat and decide not to say anything more. Karen snaps a picture of us with our pizzas in the mirror on the wall and I plaster a smile on my face. We finish our slices standing up and make our way back uptown.
I think about this night often, and I remember it in fragments. The rise and fall of a night out. A milestone. The comedown. The welcome touch of one warm pair of hands and the cold invasion of another. A new feeling. An old feeling. The freedom of young adulthood coupled with a childlike helplessness. So many of us crave freedom, but when it comes down to it, we often aren’t ready to shoulder the responsibility it portends.
Instances similar to this one would happen on occasion in the time I spent in New York, as they had growing up in Japan and when I moved to L.A. for my first job out of college. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the pizza parlor incident, but it was dog-eared in my mind as an instance that made me so acutely aware of the interstitial place I occupied. I was treading a fine line in the dichotomy of grown and not grown. When I’d experienced groping in the past, I was a kid. I didn’t have the tools to name the experience or to do anything about it. The most painful part of this realization is that I felt little responsibility to. Here I was, bright-eyed and more independent than I’d ever felt with nothing standing between me, my Doc Martens, and my quest to explore the loud, glimmering city. And yet, as my eyes darted the room desperately looking for someone to acknowledge what was happening, in my heart I was a ten-year-old girl. If I could give my past self anything, it would be the revelation that at eighteen, I wasn’t going to find the grownup to stand up for me in Abetino’s Pizzeria. But I could be that person.
I learned in therapy and from reading about trauma that when a child doesn’t get what they need, they begin to blend into you, i.e. the adult in the present. I suppose some part of me hoped that once I moved to a bigger city, the hypervigilance I internalized as a child would wane. And truthfully, it did. Teenagers are painfully self-conscious; most of us eventually grow out of it. Since moving to New York, exposure to more of the world gave me the perspective to reframe myself and take agency in articulating a more grounded sense of place and self. But sometimes — and it’s usually in instances like these — something familiar wells up inside of me. It’s harder to pinpoint why it’s coming up, but the what is unmistakable. Old Feelings creep up and wash over you. When you spend years feeling subjected to this unknowable wave, it can be incredibly empowering to cultivate the vocabulary to finally name it. But naming it isn’t enough.
The overwhelming feeling we get in these situations is a result of blending, which conflates various Parts of ourselves with our present-day identity and reality. The ability to divorce these Parts allows us to see that we’re safe in our current environment while maintaining empathy for the Part’s perspective of the need for hypervigilance toward omnipresent danger.
No one has a non-variegated personality. The social animal conducts themselves differently in different circumstances. The work of reintegrating our fragmented selves paves the way for healing that is sustainable and fulfilling. Understanding what produces dissociative symptoms allows us to reframe fragmentation as not a byproduct of damage, but as one of a process.
For years, I scoffed at self help books, the preponderance of (well-intentioned, but) misused “therapy talk,” and capitalistically-driven notions of new age self care. Individualistic “self care” models conflated with treat yourself! still make me want to vomit, but I now see my own prior disillusionment with the concept of self care as a reflection of the safeguards and privileges that scaffolded my life. There is no sustainable way to live and to continue to show up for the people and causes we care about without practicing self care in the form of commitments to self-reflection, restraint, and responsibility. I’ve been revisiting Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light as I process my own grief over recent illness and death in my family. While the line on self-care has become somewhat ubiquitous, I still think it is anything but banal:
I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
All this to say… I’ve come to see my own capacity to love as only as large as how connected I feel to the world. I think a genuine interest in and compassion for the different facets of our personality, as well as the forces that have shaped and sustained them, is the bedrock to cultivating a self love that is grounded and lasting. Only then can we access the security and connectedness that allow us to be present for both ourselves and for others. For most of us, our negative experiences aren’t the result of some choice that we’ve made, but the decision to engage and process them is ours. We can fixate on or dissociate from our seeds of hurt until we turn ourselves numb. But maybe there just isn’t as much depth in those experiences as there is in the possibility of knowing ourselves.
