When you’re told enough times that you’re a worthless piece of shit, you unfortunately start to believe it — particularly when the person doing the telling is someone you love very deeply, who didn’t always treat you like garbage. By the end of my last relationship, I was used to having both insults and the occasional object hurled at me. And while I knew it was wrong, I also struggled to see how such criticisms could be entirely meritless.
More than once I was told that I was the reason my ex was becoming someone that neither of us recognized, which struck me as… unlikely. But I couldn’t find other explanations for dramatic behavioral changes and my suggestions of counseling, individually or together, were flatly dismissed with an “Absolutely not.” So I accepted responsibility for everything, whether I’d caused the issue or not, issuing apologies that were routinely dismissed as insincere. I would’ve confessed to being the second gunman on the grassy knoll if that was what it took to stay together.
On my former partner’s way out the door, and in the months leading up to her departure, she confidently asserted that I was a woman with few romantic options once she was gone. Not only did I know that to be untrue — it’s as baffling to me as anyone else, but like most women with a pulse, I’ve never had difficulty attracting interested parties (my problem was more that I rarely returned the interest) — I also knew that she knew, or had once known, that it was false.
That was why I’d been instructed to change my phone number and email address at the start of our relationship; why I was told to stay off social media; why I was asked to drop longstanding friendships she didn’t approve of; and why I’d been pressured to stop updating my blog and to refrain from writing elsewhere (at a time when I was offered writing gigs with some regularity). Those were just some of the requests I duly granted, confident that it wasn’t really who she was and that in time we’d move past it.
The first night I came home to an empty house after years of cohabitation, I registered a Facebook account so that I could look for my closest friend from high school. My hands shook as I hit ‘send’ on a brief “Hey, how have you been?” message. What if, as I hoped, my ex and I reconciled, or were on the cusp of reconciling, and she found out about it? Ashamed of my intransigence, I immediately deleted the account.
Once I came to accept that I was eminently single for the time being, I conducted a test. I put up a profile on a website, taking pains to specify that I was looking for friends, not dates. That was before everyone in the universe identified as a full or partial lesbian, and I received messages not only from local women but from women in other states and countries: “If you’re ever in Sydney, let’s get something to drink,” wrote an Australian PhD candidate.
I was asked out by a grandma in Texas (she’d been a teenage mother, she assured me), a professor in Seattle and an urban planner in Chicago, among others. And I chatted with quite a few fascinating, accomplished women. A brash single mother from Iowa, offended by my love of economics, told me “You sound like an asshole.” I took no offense and after we traded brutal breakup stories she offered me her phone number and benevolently sent me unsolicited provocative photos.
It wasn’t the most scientific experiment — had I dated any of them, perhaps they would’ve sensed something sinister about me and gotten the heck out of Dodge — but my intellectual curiosity was satisfied: I was still a viable product on the free market. Yet I didn’t feel like one later that year, when Crankenstein entered the picture. Outwardly, I probably looked normal. Inwardly, I sometimes wondered if I was still alive. Worried my ex had possibly been right, I volunteered the worst of her criticisms so Crankenstein could be on the lookout and judge for herself.
Then and for many years afterward, I was haunted by venomous insults I couldn’t forget, statements and observations that wouldn’t have meant anything coming from anyone else. The fewer and comparatively milder things I said in response had been greeted with a firm “There’s no moving on from what you said.” I never felt that way myself; there was nothing I wasn’t eager to forgive if extended the opportunity. But no chances for meaningful communication arose until I mentioned my new girlfriend, timing that made me uncomfortable even if it was only a coincidence.
“You’ve had a very strange year,” my best friend remarked at the end of 2014. I’d been a shell of myself in January, my self-worth reduced to ashes, and ended December on the arm of a multilingual physician with a bunch of fancy degrees and shampoo-commercial hair. On one of our final dates of the year we attended a chamber chorus performance, where I watched wealthy-looking elderly people enjoy a bunch of boring Jesus songs. At intermission, Crankenstein rose to check her calls and paused to smooth my hair on her way out. Behind me, one male septuagenarian said to another, “I wish she’d do that to me.”
Even as Crankenstein agonized over meeting my family and introduced me to her parents, colleagues and friends, I surveyed the tiny studio apartment she had furnished with curb finds and privately likened myself to her trash-picked furniture. How could I be worthless to one woman and priceless to another? To paraphrase the Beatles, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Carly Simon comes to me,” and this internal conflict was no different.
I sought wisdom, as I often had, in Coming Around Again, one of my mom’s most-played albums of the ’80s (the other being Whitney Houston’s Whitney). If you overlook the cloying “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” outro to the tune of the title track, it’s an almost perfect record, with Simon confidently guiding younger idiots like myself through domestic upheaval — and trying, unsuccessfully, to save a generation of women from divorce — much as her No Secrets had guided us through our turbulent teens and twenties.
In “Give Me All Night” and “All I Want Is You,” she captures the midlife longing that would later jump out from the bushes and clobber me over the head as the clock ran out on my thirties. But at age 31, it was “Coming Around Again” and her breezy cover of Joe Tex’s “Hold What You’ve Got” (right down to its hokey spoken-word lectures) that I really needed to hear, pertinent reminders that, yes, one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure, and second chances are yours for the taking.