graduation
You would think that writing books about adolescence would mean I would think about high school a lot, but I really don't. Or I don't consciously think about my high school experience, anyway, except to sometimes recall certain indelible images: fifteen year old Harley Viera-Newton and her friends walking into school wearing ponchos that looked like shock blankets, or the day all the boys in my grade got pissed they had taken away the senior lounge and bought a bunch of tents, which they set up in the middle of the quad. Microwaving bagels in the chilly mornings, which we would eat with huge pats of butter melting onto their gooey insides. The number of girls' thongs I saw while marching up and down stairs to and from class; Harvard-Westlake's upper school campus is built into the side of a hill, which made short skirts perilous business, but you have to remember we were sixteen and seventeen and we didn't really care.
Anyway, I'm doing an event for HW's alumni association, a digital book club, tomorrow, so I've been remembering the other stuff this week. Specifically, the time I was talking about college admissions with my dean, and I was exhausted and worn-out enough to say what I really meant out loud: "I just don't want to go anywhere else but Yale."
He shrugged. "The thing is, all of our best students apply to Yale," he said. "And you need to accept that you might not measure up to them."
He was not wrong. I had gone to the right school but had not played the right game; I was not on a sports team and I hadn't started a charity and my grades were nearly perfect but I hadn't won any competitions (would, in fact, go on to lose out on the senior English award to a classmate who's now a professional scientist) and so I did not, by the school's standards, deserve that kind of prize. He was trying to get me to be realistic.
I got it anyway, and they were so surprised that they called the admissions office to ask what, exactly, had made me a worthy candidate. It turned out to be my interview; I had charmed the student I spoke to, and she had advocated strongly enough on my behalf that they'd decided to take me on. This was particularly noteworthy because they had also rejected someone the school thought much more highly of, and it was rumored that, in the same phone call, a threat had been made on his behalf: if, in the future, Yale continued to reject students of his caliber, then Harvard-Westlake would encourage its best and brightest to apply elsewhere.
Here I have to pause and scream into the void briefly: The fucking war games of it all! MY GOD. My god! What the fuck!!!!!! What the whole actual entire fucking fuck was this experience!!!!!!!!!!! How on this melting planet did getting rich teenagers into varyingly prestigious institutions feel like such a high-stakes activity?????? WHAT KIND OF TOXIC STEW WAS I BRAISING MY DELICATE, DEVELOPING BRAIN IN, ANYWAY?
Anyway. I definitely couldn't have articulated it at the time, but that experience broke something in me, and it was for the better, I think, ultimately. Getting out of Harvard-Westlake had been so difficult and draining that when I arrived in New Haven the following autumn, I was simply unavailable to be impressed or intimidated by a college, no matter how famous its name. I had played my own game against the best to do this kind of thing, and I had beaten them at it, and now I trusted myself over and above any kind of prestigious academic brand. I was not going to subject myself to anyone else's idea of success ever the fuck again.
I mean, it wasn't that simple. Of course it wasn't. I was eighteen and noodle-brained, and I'm still working on all of it. But I do feel like I can draw a direct line between that experience-- the way putting Yale next to my name bought me respect I had been unable to earn through actual hard work and accomplishment, by trying to live a life I enjoyed and was proud of-- and everything that comes after. The ability to quit a job with no plan, to pursue a very undefined writing path, to do all of whatever this is. (And as ever, the specifics of my financial situation also had an enormous impact on all of the above!)
And yet. And yet part of me is still eighteen and noodle-brained and angry at them, and feeling vicious and vindictive about the fact that they finally came to ask me for something. That they're proud to have me as an alumni not just because I upped their Ivy admission stats, but because in the years since, I've done something I care about, and I've done it well enough that we both agree I'm impressive at last.
I will not be discussing any of this at the event, of course, but I will be talking to my favorite English teacher, an actual gem of a human with whom I remain close all these years later. You can come even if you aren't an alumni, and I would love to see you there.
-
Let's just go whole-hog on making this rich people problems week here at Zanopticon HQ. It's not like there's, uh, anything else urgent going on, right? (No but I just... I just really don't feel like I have anything useful or informative to say about it. Fuck white supremacy; gun control now. Donate call vote act etc. if you don't know the drill by now I don't know, dude, that's on you.)
Keeping Up With the Kardashians is airing its final season; I wrote about the show over the years and why it needed to end for BuzzFeed. I also appeared on their podcast to discuss the piece, and I was on Wondery's Even the Rich to discuss the Kimye divorce. I have made a zillion Nature is Healing jokes about the Kardashian beat opening up again but it really does feel like a cultural shift to me: for almost exactly a year, no one, including myself, gave one real fuck about 'em, but we're back, baby. Is that a good thing? Probably not! Here we are anyway though!