Imagine your personality is actually a tumor, in that it is…a mistake. Imagine, just for an instant, that you don’t tingle when someone touches you unexpectedly, that you don’t fall a little in love with anyone who can make you giggle or make you think or looks you in the eyes just long enough, imagine that the quiver in your left cheek that happens when you don’t get enough potassium and the high-pitched falsetto you launch into, that reassuring, “No, it’s fine!” when you’re actually pissed off, that placating temperament, that inability to not stop talking, the endless pontification, the maniacal dance moves, the billions of neuroses and the hypochondria is all…really…a blight. Someone will find it, knotted together in the corner of your brain, the next time you go to the doctor for a check-up. “Oh, we’ll just nip this right now!” a nurse will chirrup, and you’ll go under a knife, and when you wake up you will not be you but you will be cured.
The lady is sad. The combination is deathly. Deciding I want to laugh tonight but deciding I want to do it alone, deciding not around anyone I know, I walk fifteen blocks North in a tutu on a Saturday night, alone, and I go into a movie theatre, and I see I Love You Man and then I wander the edges of Grammercy Park and sort of smile like this…
(Smile)
at the people who I am positive find me terribly enigmatic, this tragic young woman in her enormous beige tutu alone, at a movie theatre, in such a tutu, on such a Saturday night. I cannot tell a lie: I smoke a cigarette leaning against a fence. I am impossibly cool. And this is wrong this is wrong it is wrong to find validation from strangers but I am an actress, and whatever toxins I breathe in I breathe out with my most biting, nagging thoughts. I collect the good things about me with the air, count the blessings—blow the terror and the deep crushing loneliness and the eagerness to please and the image of all my friends having fun without me into Manhattan’s slim, quiet, snappy skin.
I sit through the movie and I laugh myself silly, not just because I’m alone, not just because I’m with others, but because I have finally decided that this is fine. I have done my part, drama school. I am going to rest now. I am going to ignore and embrace the minutiae of my soul, and most importantly not tell you about them and not talk about them, keep them secret. Just for a while. I eat a bag of popcorn big enough to fit my head in and think about the thirty dollars this evening will cost me, but I don’t think about ailing artistic pain.
I have a feeling watching this movie that Jason Segel and I would be madly in love if he were ever to meet me on the street. He’d definitely love me. Not because I’m an exotic tragic actress and we’d bond about the greats but because I wear a tutu, and I have a brain disease.
