An Unsolicited Commencement Address for Rejects
This is what no one tells you.
By the time you are thirty (and a bit) years old, and lines begin to creep around your eyes, and your butt is getting a little bit fat, you will have wasted a chunk of your twenties groping; around on the floor under bar stools looking for keys, bodies, jobs, apartments, lives you try on like disposable clothes until something fits. And then something does. You will write things. You will film these things. You will finally say out loud “I am” (that thing). It will feel like you are wearing a chicken costume at a black tie event.
You will make some things. You will pour your heart into them. You will embarrass yourself. You will rewatch some of these things and cringe. Others will play on the back of airline seats for tired businessmen to fast-forward through or for kind friends to take a picture of and send to you. It will amuse you, but you will feel so far from where you need to be.
Friends will call and tell you they are getting married and buying houses and having wonderful, perfect little humans grow inside them. You will be happy for them while you will look down at the hole in your shoe.
You will drive for thirty-nine hours to Los Angeles with a Person Who Loves You (and vice versa) and a codependent dog who may or may not return the feelings. You will sit in a garage for most of the day and keep writing things into a void while your debit card gets denied when you try to buy chips. The chips were supposed to console you after a recent rejection. You’ll read a list of names of people who you know continue to move forward. You will buy chips on credit.
You will eat the chips and lick your fingers.
You will read the email twice when you find out you have an interview for a Fancy Program for that Thing You Are because you can’t believe you have been given a sign you are a Legitimate Human Being Making Things That May Be of Value and not Sad Lady Who Buys Chips on Credit.
You will put on clothes, free of chip stains, and have an interview. You will do well.
You will have a spring in your step. Your words will come out faster and your brain will work through how you will put your old apartment (across the continent) in storage in order to make room for a new life in the sun.
You eat a lot of tacos. You will not hear anything for weeks, but in the meantime get rejected from something else you can’t remember. It’s starting to all become a blur.
You will have a five dollar “pour over” coffee with people you are “networking” with and mention that you are Maybe at a Fancy Program. Somehow you think this attributes to you having a right to be here. They may have achieved more impressive things than you, but you think that maybe success works like osmosis and maybe they are just lucky and shit rainbows. You will then question your own pompous presumption that it came to them easily. You remind yourself you are a bit of an entitled, privileged asshat.
You will run out of money and a sublet. You will pick up your happy dog from a grassy patch in the yard that you don’t have at home and put her in the car. The Person Who Loves You will have sad leaning eyes at the thought of driving back into winter, literally and metaphorically, but you tell them not to worry because you are a Maybe Person. This means you will be back here in no time and you will live in the sun and be successful and full of arrogance and no longer need everyone or everything that has failed you, or you it, at home.
You will drive for four days straight and live off of food that people make alarmist documentaries about and stay at hotels that have desktop computers from 1998 and call it a “business center” reminding you of your youth but also of death.
You will arrive at home, tired but giddy of the Maybe turning into a Yes so you can walk around for a few weeks and puff your chest and pack up and go back to the sun. You will walk up snowy steps because the cruelest month fools us into thinking it’s spring and your apartment will seem smaller than it did before. You will sort through catalogs and bills and find a letter from the Fancy Program. You will rip it open, but know by its gauntness that it is not a letter you want. You will only read less than 3% and you know you are in the 97% percent. You will see a handwritten note by a Fancy Person who interviewed you with an encouraging and kind message that you are too blinded by rage to read. You rip it up like you did when you were a child doing homework that confused your right leaning brain.
The Person Who Loves you will pour you a whiskey and touch your head in the kindest of ways, but you will rip yourself away and curl into a ball. You will want to scratch your skin off for being so stupid to think a Maybe would be Yes, that you uttered a word, that you tried to make anything in the first place, that you don’t have a job, that you came home to this, that you live in a body that houses such delusional, stupid dreams.
You will feel nothing.
You will tell the Person Who Loves you that you will smoke a cigarette but not to judge you this time. You will do that on the cold concrete steps to your apartment as a neighbor in dire straights yells something about her Internet bill at you from across the street.
You will look down at a year etched into the steps of the house and note that it is your mother’s. 1946. She is not alive, but you think of what you she would say.
You think that she would be kind and tilt her head and make you a cup of tea, but then you would slam doors because you are an asshole and she would tell you not to take it out on the people who love you *or the house.. You will know she is right, then she will tell you to keep doing the thing, because five children got in the way of her doing The Thing and how you are lucky it is your option.
You will lean your head on the Person Who Loves you and cry and imagine a bird’s eye view of yourself looking down on this sad, sorry image of yourself and just fucking be that for a minute. You will be fucking sad and that is necessary.
You will walk inside and shower and the urge to write this will hit you so hard that you will turn off the shower before the shampoo is out of your hair.
And you will write. You will do this because you are maybe a crazy, delusional person, but more so, you have an inkling that you can have to do something and you will risk money and homes and babies and shoes without holes in them because one day when you make The Thing that is better than all the Other Things you have done.
It will look like this:
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
Until,
Yes.
And you shall begin, as a Yes Person.
