The Perfect Girl Next Door

Moral: Show yourself!

Merrillium trovatum (1997), Dorothea Tanning

Today I have an essay called The Perfect Girl Next Door in The New York Times. It’s about comparing yourself to beautiful, successful people and feeling so indignant about how relatively mediocre, soggy, and listless you are that you start to resent them in spite of your best intentions.

What was inspiring about the girl next door was that she was always incredibly nice to me. She was living a life that looked completely out of reach to me for reasons ranging from bad skin to shitty attitude to habit of avoiding challenging social and career scenarios in order to remain smug about my bad personality in private, yet she was consistently friendly and open.

When I met her, I was pretty isolated. I had just moved to LA with my boyfriend and I worked from home writing a cartoon for the website Suck.com. I enjoyed my shitty attitude at the time. It made me money, even as it prevented me from joining the real world and learning to get along with the ambitious people around me. My cartoon was very popular among computer programmers, IT guys, and early inhabitants of the internet, most of whom lived in San Francisco and New York, but it meant absolutely nothing to the people of Los Angeles. When the girl next door asked me what I did for a living — everyone in LA would ask this within a second of meeting you back then, generally in order to figure out if you were worth talking to or not — I told her about my internet cartoon and she said, “Oh, I don’t know anything about computers.”

“Computers are appliances now,” I said. “You just plug them in and read things.”

“I’m not good with that stuff.”

I had disdain for this attitude mostly because it meant that I wouldn’t matter to 99% of the people I met in LA until I turned my cartoon into an animated show on Comedy Central, and that would require flat-ironing my hair and then leaving the house to talk to other people with flat-ironed hair.

I have some regrets. I regret not learning to flat-iron my hair without overthinking what it meant — what I saw as all of the staggering negative implications of becoming someone who looked and sounded pretty and shiny and upbeat. I wanted to be my grumbly, disheveled self out in the world and I wanted people to love me for it.

Being stubborn about trivial things is sometimes a way of protecting yourself from acknowledging far more important things that you want but can’t admit to wanting. If I had more compassion for myself, I would’ve figured out that what I wanted very badly was to be understood, to be seen clearly, to be recognized as a loving person in spite of my resting bitch face. But I didn’t respect my own core needs — I was raised to ignore and ridicule my core needs, quite honestly; that’s just how my people do it — so I couldn’t stop inflating the importance of absolutely trivial irritations and superficial obstacles.

Shame was driving the bus. But that’s kind of the hipster virus, isn’t it? You take tiny pet peeves and minuscule verbal tics and minor style infractions and you add them up into big excuses as to why you can’t befriend someone, why you’d never fit in somewhere, why you should never have to try something that you truly WANT to try. You protect yourself from the world by telling yourself that the world is too uncool for you.

Of course, nothing is cooler than understanding that nothing is really cool at all. People’s hearts and actions are everything, and their minds and words often don’t add up to much by comparison. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual, I’m just talking about the struggle to form a real relationship with yourself that includes a deep respect for your own particular needs. Once you respect and understand and honor yourself, it’s far easier to show your true self, to ask for understanding from others, and to give it to others.

Shame is the enemy. As long as you’re locked in a bad habit of refusing to examine your core desires, you tend to tell dramatic stories about the corrupt desires of others. Understanding and respecting yourself is brave and makes you more compassionate toward others. The girl next door manifested this. Moreover, daring to create exactly what you want out in the real world takes guts. And when you can manage to do it while staying principled, kind, and open-minded? That’s rare.

I know I beat this drum often, but my central aim with this column is to give everyone who reads it the courage and determination to be yourselves out in the open and to create what you want out in the real world, which begins by respecting and honoring your principles and your core desires.

But that doesn’t mean I’m condemning the complainer on the couch I once was AND STILL AM. I would change a lot of things about how I approached the outside world back when I was in my twenties, but I wouldn’t change my flinty attitude, my grumbly, soft-pants lifestyle, or my conviction that my moody, half-growling, half-ebullient self was special and deserved to be embraced and loved for who she was. When I look back, I feel much less shame over who I was than I did at the time. I’m proud that I didn’t work hard to change who I was, just for the sake of mattering.

The real challenge — a lifelong challenge — is to care less about mattering. Mattering doesn’t bring you peace. Understanding what matters does.

What matters is the voice inside you that speaks to you when you’re relaxed, when you’re open, when you can love darkness as much as you love joy, when you feel grateful for everything the world brings you, including pain and frustration and heartache. That voice wants to say to you: Look at how funny this day is. Look at how ridiculous you are. Look at how hard you work, just to keep yourself afloat. You deserve to be honored. You deserve to be loved. Love yourself and spread that love to everyone around you. This world needs more love. Give yours freely.

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