a dream and the idiot

Two nights ago I had a really vivid dream that I barely remember now. I know that it involved some kind of a party in an open space, like a field, at night, with those bright white football field lights that make everything look photographic. The partygoers were people from high school, like Sam, the guy I had a crush on between from Year 8 to Year 10, who in the dream was asked if he had ever liked me back and said "for about three weeks, yeah." There was also Burke, Sam's closest friend who moved to the US after Year 10 and with whom I lost touch even though he visited often and partied with other people from the year (I never went. It wasn't my thing so I wasn't really invited). Now he has really long hair and is some kind of frat boy at UVA who hangs out with a lot of white Christian-looking people. I mainly just remember entering this sort of shed with Burke, and the interior was really this massive warehouse space. We were on the balcony and we took the metal grid stairs down, and on the ground floor there was an elevator. It was completely empty and then I think some security guard appeared and asked us to leave.

I'm reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman, whose protagonist is a Turkish-American girl in her first year studying at Harvard in the 90s, just like Batuman. Emily recommended it to me back in April, and I made a mental note to get to it at some point, but I only remembered it again after I was binge-reading Jia Tolentino articles on The New Yorker a few weeks ago and she wrote about reading the book, and about love. Suddenly I was consumed by this urgent, almost life-or-death desire to read The Idiot. I made my mom bring it to me from Geneva (my family arrived yesterday and I'm already 40% through with the book.. going way too fast as usual) and meanwhile I trawled through Batuman's New Yorker bibliography, too, hungry for anything at all from that author.

Anyway, so I'm reading The Idiot and so far I absolutely love it. I think it's going to be one of my favorite books. I love Selin's voice, this wry, bored voice that registers details and arranges thoughts in the most interesting way. She's so sharply observant, and sees through things immediately. The writing style is sparse and not that descriptive. It only and always notes the most peculiar things that make the whole story seem absurdist, like the implication that Selin got into her freshman film seminar because both she and the professor had a cold, and that she was rejected from the literature seminar because she had a cold and the professor didn't. I loved all the references to the places around Cambridge and Boston, because it reminds me of the summer I spent there in 2016. In many ways I had a very similar Harvard experience to Selin: I had about two friends, spent a lot of the time by myself doing work and thinking about things, and I took classes purely out of interest that turned out to be quite anecdotal. Now I could write about the Hungarian middle-aged man in my Advanced Narrative Non-Fiction evening class who introduced himself as Gabe but whose real name was Gabor, which is Gabriel in Hungarian, apparently, or the kid from Tokyo named Tokio, and it would be quite Selin, I think. Usually when I read books about kids my age they're leading really cool and interesting lives and have lots of friends and lots of adventures, and it makes me feel sad because I'm not having all these adventures and my life seems mundane. Selin's life is pretty dead too, and only novelisable because we're able to see into her head and read her thoughts, but I somehow find a way to be jealous of all the exercise she does (running every day, not being completely, mortifyingly incompetent at tae kwon do). And of course how easy it is for her to write a story.

I'm completely preoccupied with this idea of what my life should be like (a text: a film, a book), which is this exciting thing full of shenanigans and inside jokes, but, like Emily said, The Idiot "gives visibility to all the sad pretentious teen girls out there." I'd personally probably replace 'sad' with 'lonely', but both adjectives probably fit. The book is helping me realise that it's all really about perspective, that even the most boring events can be interesting to read if the right person is writing about them. I don't know if Batuman was like Selin in college, but if she was, I'm sure it was satisfying to go back to those monotonous, depressing days and make them into a story –– make all that nothingness that she experienced actually matter because it becomes a contribution to a wider, transcendent narrative. It's a completely different thing to people like John Green, who write these fantastical YA novels where a ton of really cool stuff happens to the self-insert protagonist, so that he can relive his nerdy youth and pretend that it was full of manic pixie dream girls.

I've become a lot more confident and accepting of myself these past few years, but something that's always remained a dark cloud has been my teen years, the ages between 12 and 15 or 16 when I kind of just hung around wearing ugly clothes, reading books, having a loud and boisterous personality, and feeling like white noise. I'm really ashamed and embarrassed about those years, partly because I was really uncool and lame (this partly had to do with my desperate crush on Sam) and partly because I resent past me for being so completely unashamed and unembarrassed and not self-conscious. I may have hated myself at the time, but I had the courage to carry around an A3 sketchbook with me all day, every day and sketch in the British Museum and explain to strangers my family tree that displayed all the relationships between the dozens of characters in the story I was writing. I can't imagine doing that now. I've pushed out most of my memories of the past by actively avoiding thinking about them and reliving them, to the point where I really don't remember much from those years. I was the kind of kid who recommended stuff to the teachers to show to the rest of the class and who sang alone in public. I wasn't afraid of anyone and I genuinely thought everybody liked me to some extent.

For a while (between the ages of 16 and 18), looking back, I could only project my own current unhappiness onto the past version of myself. I was unhappy, I did cry a lot, and I did constantly feel like there was a hand pressing against my throat making it hard for me to breathe and making my heart feel heavy –– I still feel these things –– but I was also such an interesting kid. I used to resent the fact that I'd wasted my teenage years, those wonderful years of complete lack of responsibility, when I could've loafed around, not studied, and taken drugs, but that I instead spent on Tumblr and bossing around my so-called friends. But first of all I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been who I was, and second of all my years were only wasted if you have a very narrow view of what teenage girlhood is supposed to be, no thanks to film and TV and literature. (Although, to note, my usual response to "What would you do differently if you woke up tomorrow back in Year 7 with all of your memories?" is actually "Read all the classic literature that I haven't read yet, like Goethe and Virginia Woolf and Hegel".)

The Idiot helped me realise that things that you may feel anguished about can actually be looked at with a perspective that makes the experience productive. I can't believe that I'm posting on my very public blog on the Internet about how pathetically infatuated I was with Sam (I recently found a long poem that I wrote recording all of our significant interactions and analysing them, lamenting my unrequited love, that is so cringeworthy it made me want to kill myself when I skimmed it) but it's been a long enough time that I can view it with amusement and endearment rather than soul-crushing, agonising humiliation. My philosophy up until pretty much this very evening has been "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be." (The Last Jedi (2017) dir. Rian Johnson) but that's not really a way to live healthily. So here's to writing funny fiction based on my very lame teenage experience in the future. I wonder how Princeton's treating my old crush these days.