Pretty Weird

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome and Other Oddly Empowering Lessons

Marissa Miller

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683584018
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

A series of true stories that are at once relatable, funny, and heart-wrenching, join lauded writer Marissa Miller on a journey of battling imposter syndrome and learning to be proud to stand out. Acclaimed writer and editor Marissa Miller was born into what you would call a nice Jewish family. But she somehow grew into anything but a Nice Jewish Girl. From openly discussing any and all bodily functions with whoever would listen, to encouraging her peers to join her in undressing in the hallways at school for no reason other than to fight the oppressive institution of modern academia, she was continuously scolded by members of the Jewish community for exploring her identity and pushing the boundaries of what a "nice girl" is allowed to do. To make sense of being the odd one out, she did what any confused teenager would do: she wrote. She wrote poems on MySpace, articles for her school newspaper, extra credit English assignments to compensate for her complete and utter lack of math skills, and eventually, reported pieces for many of the world's most prestigious media publications. But the transition to a lucrative journalism career didn't come without is growing pains. Getting anywhere past the school newspaper stage and being asked to provide journalism lectures around the city inspired a sense of panic, dread, and most notably, impostor syndrome—the sense that success is a product of coincidence and luck as opposed to hard work and talent. No fellow journalists she idolized growing up seemed to have had a history of behavior so crude it would make your Rabbi blush. Surely, the Universe was thisclose to taking everything away from her. And to some extent, it did. In Pretty Weird —a series of true stories that are at once relatable, funny, and heart-wrenching—you'll learn about why, like Miller, you're worthy of success by virtue of you thinking you're not, about why there's no such thing as being "not sick enough" to deserve help, and that living in that liminal space of being too normal to stand out, yet too weird to fit in, is truly where all the magic happens.

Chapter 1

PELVIC FLOORED

My left ribcage felt hard and cold on the linoleum floor. I read once in a women’s magazine with Jennifer Aniston on the cover that lying on your left side reduces pain. Women’s magazines are my rulebook, my dogma, my Sherpa up the hill when I am lost. I am always lost. My inner Siri is rarely activated.

“There is a scissor cutting its way through my insides and it won’t stop,” I told Noah, my boyfriend at the time, between hasty rhythmic breaths. “I feel it moving and it’s running around. I change my mind. It’s not scissors, it’s a dagger.”

He could tell, for once, that I was not being a neurotic princess.

The gluten-free pasta on the stove above me hardened around the sides of the metal pot. He rubbed my lower belly, each stroke an invitation to relax and find my “Zen” like the magazines promised.

“I’m begging you to just take a bite out of something. Please. I’m begging you,” he said, kneeling down on the floor beside me. “You need the energy for tomorrow. I don’t want to see another situation where I almost have to take you to the emergency room like that time you fucking passed out on the streets of Manhattan.”

I was now crouched on my kitchen floor with my head between my knees, just like I was six months before in 2015 on the sidewalk of 3rd Avenue and East 67th Street. It was late May, and I had just wrapped up a meeting with my editor at Cosmopolitan. I sauntered out of the Hearst building with the weightlessness of a tumbleweed down a dirt road.

I refused to eat before our meeting so as to not clog my thoughts with diner omelette grease. I always think better when I don’t eat, or so I think. When I left the Hearst building, I was running on the high of fair-trade iced coffee and a new story assignment, until cataracts—or what felt like them—clouded my eyes. My knees buckled, sending me to the ground. Noah pulled me up by the cold, damp wrist and dragged me into a nearby pizzeria.

“Quick, please, my girlfriend is fainting. She needs water now,” he’d pled into a crowded ether the year before. He sat me down onto a chair like a ventriloquist, propping my head up with his calloused hands. I felt the sweat droplets descend down each vertebrae of my spine, the cold chair against my tailbone. I belonged on the sidewalk, free from the confines of food and chairs and restaurants and calories and people who told me what to do.

Back on my linoleum kitchen floor, I knew I couldn’t pull that same shit.

“I’m begging you to just take a bite out of something. Please,” he continued. The desperation in his eyes the texture and color of a mahogany leather sofa pained me more than the emptiness did. “We have a post-marathon brunch we need to make it to. You need to get to that finish line.”

Everything was about food. Food this. Food that. Couldn’t I turn my body into a microcosmic cashless society where taking a bite of pasta doesn’t feel like a life or death decision?

Noah was always right but that didn’t say much because everyone is always a little more right than me, no matter how objectively right I am. The more he begged me to eat a spoonful of pasta hardening on the stove, the more it reinforced the idea that I really was doing it. This was thrilling. I was saying no to food again, just like I had done so well when I was fourteen years old. If I was going to think about how that one bite would affect me for the next twenty-four hours, I might as well eschew it altogether. But now, I wasn’t some kid posting “Stay strong!!” on pro-anorexia blogs. I had an alibi. I was in excruciating physical pain.

“I can’t do it. I will throw up and die,” I told him, pleading for something I wasn’t sure was even feasible. I imagined the words sounding pitiful as they exited my quivering Blue-Man-Group lips, because that’s what happens when you feel like a burden on people all the time. The pain was a pizza cutter soaring through my bodily diner grease.

I went to the bathroom to force out whatever monster made my body its home. I sat on the toilet with my head nesting in the palm of my hands and my shoulders hunched collapsing onto my lap. Nothing came out. Muscle spasms pinched my organs. Dead air whispered that I wasn’t worthy of a working system. Whether that was digestive or reproductive, I didn’t quite know.

I carefully peeled off my magenta Lululemon shorts and multiple sports bras I was wearing in anticipation for my half-marathon a meager four hours later (the key is to avoid clothes that chafe, unless you want to spend half the race jogging like a penguin with an inner thigh rash. I couldn’t afford any more discomfort). I had too much pride to rub coconut oil—or worse, deodorant—between my gapless thighs.

The pain had morphed into what felt like a colony of bees zooming around my insides, liberally erecting their stingers to mark their territory. Even though I hadn’t eaten anything in several hours, my stomach was now distended. There were boxing gloves mid-match in my abdomen, punching their way out. I was alone with my body. I was alone with the stabbing. Noah said some things about wanting to experience what I was feeling to make the pain go away.

I looked down to find a Hansel and Gretel trail of blood leading from my inner thighs down to my rough and flaky feet. Maraschino cherry-thick clumps stuck to my skin like leeches. Thick, red walls that should have been inside, it seemed, dangled like ornaments. What was more painful than the pain itself was the belief that I deserved it. My fingers were quivering too rapidly to Google what was happening to me, so I chalked it up to one of those horrifying periods women’s magazines warn you about when you get an IUD.

A half an hour of sleep later, I was stepping into those same magenta shorts in preparation for the day’s half-marathon.

* * *

I had an IUD inserted in 2012 because when you’re a spacey adolennial (if the adolescent/millennial portmanteau actually takes off as a thing I will be very surprised), you don’t trust yourself to take a birth control pill every day, let alone remember to turn off your hair straightening iron before you leave the house.

“Dr. Frontenac, on a scale from one to childbirth, how badly is this going to hurt?” I asked.

I was an open, spread-eagle wound with my feet in stirrups. But I was eager to finally rely on a method that’s been touted both by women’s service magazines and doctors alike to be fool- and fail-proof.

“I would give it a two,” he said in a voice as shaky as his hands under condom-textured rubber gloves. His volume lowered considerably once I fastened on my journalist hat and started asking the Hard Questions, like will my boyfriend be able to feel the metal wire poking him when he’s inside me; will I be able to rip it out with my own bare hands in a fit of rage; will airport security be able to pick it up on the metal detector; will this, like so many other things, make me feel sad and fat?

His answer to all of the above was a curt “No,” as if I had asked a difficult multiple-choice question on a college entrance exam and when in doubt, always circle “C.”

I never subscribed to the notion that all male gynecologists perceive their practice or their patients neutrally anyway. On a pathological level, there’s something fascinating—terrifying even—about a heterosexual cisgender male who chooses to dedicate his livelihood toward treating an organ he will never fully understand no matter how many textbooks he reads. It’s an organ that comes with a lot of emotional baggage: either multiple people attached to vaginas have rejected him, or he has derived so much satisfaction from a vagina that even the sight of a crying twenty-one-year-old patient bound to a gurney can’t stop him from harkening back to that one time in his Camaro overlooking the sunset in 1987 with his first live-in girlfriend.

Dr. Frontenac was overcompensating. I imagined what sort of techniques he’d picked up in med school to optimize his bedside manner. I’m not sure where in the syllabus it suggested he ask me about my feelings toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while elbow-deep into my birth canal, but there we were. He poked around at my ovaries while looking at the ceiling like he was focusing on comparing grapefruit textures at the grocery store.

“Um, it’s complicated, I guess?” I managed to squeeze out. “I mean, I have family in Israel so naturally I’m a little biased.”

“On the count of three, I’m going to insert . . . ” Dr. Frontenac trailed off.

If his language had been any more evocative of my mashed pumpkin-carrot “airplane zoom zoom” days as a baby, I’d have had to call airport security. I get that the countdown is intended to prepare the patient, but way to both infantilize and completely trigger me at the same time.

I buried my face in a series of panicked BlackBerry messages to my friend Liz. She’s best described as a Greek goddess version of Aubrey Plaza with perfect eyebrows, every hair in place, and almond-shaped nails from those YouTube tutorials. Had I not known the intimate details of her digestive system, I would be too intimidated to talk to her in writing and reporting class. Liz had just bought a house with her fiancé, so I figured she wouldn’t want to reenact their first vacation together in Cuba. After hitting up the resort buffet too hard, they engaged in an hour-long painful game of Battleshits. I mean, he proposed a day later, instilling hope in bloated women like me everywhere. Along with some crockpot-like device, I gave her potpourri marketed literally as “shit spray” for her bridal shower, which she opened in front of her entire Greek Orthodox family. She proceeded to read the instructions over the microphone. My cheeks turned rectal-polyp red. Had it just been Liz and I, the moment would have been perfect. Kind of like the digital moment I was having with her now.

Assuming cunnilingus position—my least favorite of them all—I felt very connected to Liz through my screen. I wasn’t quite oozing liquid shit all over my gynecologist like she had on her betrothed, but it sure felt like I was about to. And she would be the only one to understand.

“its going in. 10/10 worst pain of my life freaking out help this pain is not even a little bit tolerable,” I typed with haste.

The pressure of the IUD insertion made me light-headed as I sunk deeper into a lucid night terror. I was partially conscious, yet completely unable to control what happened next.

“Deep breaths babygirl u got this!!!” she typed with what I can only imagine were her signature baby pink almond-shaped acrylic nails tapping against tiny keys.

Her words were cooling, like the blue jelly sonographers slather across your stomach before an ultrasound. Specifically, the ultrasound that Dr. Frontenac would never end up using on me to detect the correct placement of said IUD.

I let out a guttural scream. I could no longer read the series of messages through what felt like the Niagara Falls streaming down my flushed cheeks. The IUD tore through my cervix and latched its claws onto my uterus. I could feel every millimeter of the procedure. In what world is that kind of pain a “two”?

With no more than a flash card reading the date of insertion (December 12, 2012, will forever be etched in my brain—and cervix), Dr. Frontenac shuffled me out the door to make room for the next passenger on his conveyer belt.

“Should be good for up to five years. Bye, bye, now,” he said, waving me off like I had just held up the security line searching for my fucking passport again.

That wasn’t a metaphor because I misplace it so often I’m convinced The Universe is beckoning me to stay in one place lest I do something stupid like ask for a birth control method that was, at that point, far more traumatizing an option than delivering and raising a child on a freelance journalist’s salary.

I couldn’t get up on his command. Had anyone walked in, they would have assumed I was the subject of an autopsy. Everything from my waist down felt numb, so I opened my eyes to ensure it was all there. I could see my pelvis. It was definitely there in the literal sense. But the area was a phantom limb. The only thing confirming my existence was blood.

* * *

It was the summer of 2010. I spent the weeks between my job as a camp counselor and dance instructor and the beginning of university singing karaoke in bars with the same group of people I may have as well discovered in the lost and found bin.

Some were core friends, the kind of who have coached me through everything from a tampon insertion to an unrequited obsession with a boy who I assumed harbored profoundly negative thoughts about my arm fat. The other friends were girls whose last names I did not know but we still felt each other up in an attempt to experiment with our fluid sexualities but mostly to compare bodies because I’ve always been worried about the shape of my breasts (“Girl, I read in Cosmo there are seven types of breasts, and you’re just bell-shaped, you’re not saggy I swear!!”). I soothed others in an attempt to soothe myself, as one does.

My friends were often low on cash, so I pretended I was, too. I was embarrassed by my suburban privilege. No one wants to hear about how much your parents love you. My seemingly ideal upbringing made me as exciting as filing taxes on time.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be young and lost and uncertain about my five-year plan. Misery loves company, and I thought that couldn’t be truer for The Interesting. I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep these friends around if I couldn’t find anything troubling to talk about. It’s always hard for someone to confide in you about their pain—which they inevitably had—when I was raised by housekeepers and got a yearly birthday shopping spree—which I did, and still do.

We’d go to house parties in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) along Sherbrooke Street West, a predominantly English-speaking residential borough in a French-speaking city that feels like one big living room with traffic lights. I hesitate to call anything a party unless I’ve dragged several women to the bathroom with me. I’ve convinced myself that we are biologically unable to expel urine without the presence of another vagina owner, and that is beautiful on every level. Bathrooms are a dangerous place to venture alone. Often there is no toilet paper left. Often someone creepy follows me in. Often there is no bathroom altogether, and I need someone to stand guard while I squat in an alley.

In the space between the toilet where I sat once I broke the seal and the bathroom door stood Megan, Jill, Ella, Sabrina, Jenna, and Carly (all who have last names) and Sarah, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Melissa (all who don’t). Sam, Oliver, Brett, and Tom were the boys I could rely on to pretend I was dating when a creep approached me. It certainly didn’t hurt that they were my de facto designated drivers in case we needed to make a swift escape to another living room in NDG.

The ecosystem operated the same way every Saturday night, and Friday night, too, if I wasn’t too lethargic from a heavy Shabbat dinner. Boys playing Pink Floyd on acoustic guitar were looking for love and affection, and we were ready to give that to them in the quest for love and affection of our own. Montreal house parties meant kissing boys because they were playing acoustic guitar and kissing girls because said boys with acoustic guitars were watching.

Usually, the weed-induced paranoia kicked in so hard I had to go to the bathroom and touch my face to ensure it was still there, but the way each living room was organized the same way provided comfort: there was a coffee table littered with green weed shake rich in THC crystals illuminating the dim room like fairy lights. There were Société de transport de Montréal bus transfers rolled into filters. They topped off burrito-sized joints so smokey the night looked like you’d just woken up with crust in your eyes. But you could always smoke it Jamaican-style if you didn’t care. You could lock yourself in a bathroom with the shower running on hot, hot heat,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Pelvic Floored
• Chapter 2: Mission Impostor Syndrome
• Chapter 3: Coming Out Party
• Chapter 4: Jew Camp
• Chapter 5: Selling Myself Short
• Chapter 6: Something’s Weighing on Me
• Chapter 7: The F-Word
• Chapter 8: A Dick Pic Says a Thousand Words
• Chapter 9: Crime and Punishment
• Chapter 10: Open Carry
• Chapter 11: Bad Bride
• Chapter 12: Pussy Power
• Chapter 13: The Morning After
• Acknowledgments