Unqualified Read online

  It turned out I was having some crazy hemorrhaging where I lost about 50 percent of my blood in three days. I had a cyst on my right ovary—the particularly gnarly kind that has hair and teeth and is just incredibly gross. So I ended up staying in the hospital for about a week, which is, oddly enough, an incredibly happy memory for me, because I really hated high school.

  The doctor I saw during that ordeal became my gynecologist, and at some point I had the opportunity to tell her that I really wanted to have sex with my boyfriend and that (1) my mom couldn’t know and (2) I could not get pregnant. So she put me on birth control, which she told my mother was to better regulate my cycle.

  By January, I was a new, healthy woman—and a woman on birth control, no less.

  Senior year we were allowed to leave school during lunchtime, and Chad’s parents both worked, so on January 7 I told him I wanted to lose my virginity during lunch. So that’s what we did. And it was horrible.

  No, it wasn’t really horrible. It was a solid C. I certainly didn’t come, but nobody comes their first time. At that point in my life, I had never masturbated. I had never even explored, so I had no help to offer Chad in terms of getting me off. But I wasn’t really in it for the sexual pleasure. I was just head over heels for this guy, and at the time I thought if I was going to keep a man I had to give him my pussy over lunchtime at his parents’ house. In retrospect, his mother must have known. We were totally inconsiderate and never even thought about changing the sheets. Poor Mrs. Burke.

  After we had sex, Chad and I went back to school and I felt the weird illogical pride of having lost my virginity. That afternoon I went to my neighbor Kate’s house—she went to a rival high school and was incredibly hot and popular and was the head of the dance team and had a great laugh and stunning smile and was funny and charming and had lost her virginity long before me—and her mom looked at me and said, “Something looks different about you. You lost your virginity.” I know that sounds like something Amy Poehler said in Mean Girls but she really did say that, and I loved the confirmation that I suddenly seemed more adult.

  Of course, it took me many more years of sex before I felt any confidence or comfort when it came to doing it. If it hadn’t been for my massive insecurity about my body, I probably would have been incredibly promiscuous. I was totally intoxicated with the idea of feeling like a sexual being, and I wanted men to want me. But I was also completely ashamed of my body, especially my boobs (or lack thereof), and insecure about my abilities as a lover. I never felt like the hot girl, even though I so badly wanted to. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, and that I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to sex or going down on a guy. And when I did get intimate, I was so busy thinking about my own performance that I couldn’t appreciate the guy’s, and it’s really hard to have an orgasm when you can’t let that part of your brain go.

  I’ve grown out of that, thank God, but it took me a long time to get there. Today, I love being intimate with a partner, but I have a lot of trouble being intimate with myself. For a while in my late teens, on the other hand, I was just the opposite. Freshman year of college, I went through a crazy masturbation phase. We had this college newspaper with an advice column and one time a reader wrote in and said, “My roommate masturbates all the time, what am I supposed to do about it?” I read it and thought, Oh man, she’s talking about me. To this day, I’m pretty sure I’m right about that, and that the letter was indeed about me. My roommate, Melissa, had a boyfriend who would call our room while she was at work and ask me about masturbating, so I’m convinced she said to him: “Oh God, I’m rooming with this gross girl, Anna, and she gets herself off all the time.”

  Melissa didn’t like me very much. (Considering that last paragraph, maybe that’s not a huge surprise.) We had one of those communal shower situations in our dorm bathroom, and one time she came in and started throwing her shampoo and conditioner at me because she was mad that I didn’t wake her up for her exam. I was so confused (and still am!), because I didn’t know that was my responsibility.

  I ended up leaving that dorm—not because of my excessive masturbation but because Melissa and I clearly didn’t get along—and I moved into a different dorm with a sweet roommate who at one point asked me why they call it a blow job.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because you blow?”

  That’s totally incorrect, of course. It’s actually because a guy blows his load in your mouth and not about us at all. Big surprise.

  • • •

  I got it out of my system, and I have an irrational fear that someone is watching me whenever I’m intimate with myself. I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s hard to shut off all the insanity that’s going on in my brain at any given time. I feel like getting myself off would force me to confront the things that terrify me about myself, and to face sexual desires I don’t even know I have. Masturbation acknowledges your sexuality in a way that we never did in my household, and while it was easy to get stoned in college and block out those childhood messages, as an adult I find it surprisingly difficult. Which perhaps is why I still feel an incredible amount of shame when it comes to self-pleasure. Once, when Chris was traveling for work, Allison Janney and I were talking on the set of Mom. “Chris is gone and I haven’t masturbated in four months,” I told her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think I probably should, but I can’t.”

  Allison just looked at me and said, “Oh, honey, you’ve got to work on that.”

  Needless to say, I’ve got a complicated relationship with masturbation. I think we can all agree that men don’t find themselves in that predicament.

  • • •

  For a lot of women, the four years of college are a time of sexual experimentation and, in some ways, I definitely wanted that experience for myself. I loved going to frat parties and flirting with boys, but then I would get wasted and run away as fast as I could. I felt like the definition of a cocktease.

  There were definitely a few times when it got a little scary, most notably during my sophomore year. I was talking with a guy at a party when I told him I had to pee. He said I could use one of the bathrooms upstairs. In fact, he had a private one in his room! How convenient! He said he’d show me the way and went into the bathroom with me, locked the door behind him and started trying to make out with me. “This is not fucking happening,” I said. Maybe I didn’t use those exact words, but close, so he left and locked the door from the outside. I was stuck in the bathroom and could hear him in the hallway talking to his friends, saying something like, “I got this; it’s all good.” I turned into that mother who can suddenly lift a car when her baby is trapped underneath—I heard this guy with his friends and just thought, I am a warrior and I’m getting the fuck out of here. So I picked the lock—which was not especially hard, it’s not like I’m a champion lock picker—and I made my escape. These days, there’s a lot of talk about college sexual assault, but that conversation was not happening in 1995, it was just “you get drunk at a frat house and it’s up to you.” So I channeled my inner ninja and dealt with it.

  • • •

  I have had one one-night stand in my life. After Chad Burke, I dated a guy named Dave on and off for most of my college career. During one of the off periods, I had a drunk night with some guys who lived on the floor above me in my dorm. We were all drinking and laughing about something stupid in their room, and I saw one of the guys look over to his roommate and give him a head jerk that clearly said, “Time to leave, wingman.” You know when you’re wasted but then something happens that jolts you back to reality? That head nod did the trick. The roommate understood the signal and left, and the other guy and I started kissing. Suddenly he was on top of me, and I said no, and he stopped, groaning, “Oh fuuuuuuck,” mostly to himself, in a clearly frustrated tone. I didn’t want to annoy him or be a tease, so I gave in. I was pretty resigned and unsure, but I said okay. I gave consent. Still, it’s not
a good memory. I was so disappointed in myself for conceding, and despite having spent plenty of time wishing I was more sexually daring, that wasn’t a great night.

  It wasn’t all sexual nightmares, of course. There were good times, too, though the best of those came later. About a decade later, but they came.

  Listener Advice: I Was the Short Girl. What Were You?

  I grew up in a tall family. My mom is five seven and my brother is six four and my dad’s side is all very tall, too. I even have a female cousin who is six one. But I was always the little one. At home, in school, in theater, everywhere. This is perhaps most apparent in elementary school class photos, where I am always relegated to the end of the front row, about a foot shorter than everyone else. I was young for my grade—I started kindergarten when I was four—so that may have contributed, but the height discrepancy was more than just an age thing. By fourth grade, my parents considered sending me to a growth specialist, where I would be injected with hormones. They decided against it, and around junior year of high school I finally started growing. Today, I’m five four. Not tall, certainly, but fairly average.

  Still, as a kid, being the short girl became my identity. It made me into a little Napoleon. I was insecure at school, and I covered that up by being loud and bossy at home. It didn’t help that I felt like I lived in the shadow of my older brother, Bob, who I couldn’t stand. Today, I adore him. He’s a professor of sociology at UC Davis who specializes in bullying and has worked with Anderson Cooper to raise awareness about what it’s like to be a teenager in today’s world. But back then, when the two of us were teenagers, we hated each other. He was a big tough guy, and I was a tiny short girl, and he generally overpowered me.

  I had all of two victories over Bob when we were kids. The first was during a snow day. We rarely got snow days in Edmonds, because the city is close to the water, so it doesn’t snow much. Always rain, never snow. One day when school actually did get canceled due to the weather, we were out in the driveway and he threw a snowball at me that landed smack in the middle of my face. So I reacted quickly and threw one right back at him . . . and nailed him right in the nose. I couldn’t believe it! It was the first time I showed any hand-eye coordination in my life. The shock on his face was priceless. Of course, then he ran at me and grabbed me by the neck and shoved my face in the snow, but I was still euphoric. What a victory! The short girl had won!

  My brother is three years older than I am. I spent a lot of my childhood running around the house yelling, “I hate Bob so much! I hate him, Mom!” And she would give me the classic “One day you guys will get along,” and I hated her, too, for saying that.

  I seriously couldn’t imagine us ever being friends. But now we are. Incredibly. Maybe, sometimes, Mom does know best.

  (There was one time—one time!—growing up when my brother was not the worst. I’ll never forget it. I was in eighth grade and Kate, my neighbor, was one of my best friends. Most of my guy friends at the time were only friends with me because they wanted to get close to her. You’d think I would have resented that fact or, at the very least, that it would have offended my proud fourteen-year-old sensibilities, but mostly I loved it because it was attention, and, even better, attention from boys. One day Kate found out that some lame dude we knew said I was “homely” behind my back. I told Bob, and he called this guy and said something to the effect of “I’m going to fucking kick your fucking ass; I’m going to kill you.” He scared the shit out of this guy, and Kate and I were listening in on the other phone—this was back in the days of landlines, when it was far easier to eavesdrop—and I couldn’t believe my brother came to my rescue like that. He loved me! It was very sweet, but apart from that we didn’t have much communication until I was older and we were both living in California. Now we’re very close.)

  Anyway, being the short girl totally infiltrated my psyche, not just because everyone in my life was tall, but because being small led me to feel like I wasn’t respected or heard, and those feelings were a huge part of my life as a kid. They defined a lot about me in terms of how I related to friends and boys, and I think that sentiment was one of the main contributors to what I call my “proud and angry” phase, which I think was an attempt to overcompensate for my small stature.

  Since all that, I’ve become a little bit obsessed with that one-word adjective that people use to describe you when you’re young. You’ve had that experience, haven’t you, dear reader? It’s not just me, is it? I’ve always wanted to explore that question—can other people relate to that simple identifying adjective, or am I crazy? Have you been described as the rebel or the Asian or the goody-goody?

  One of the biggest rewards of doing a podcast has been learning that all the weird shit we go through, other people have been there, too. More often than not, those defining experiences that can make us feel weird or lonely or embarrassed are actually universal. So I decided to poll my listeners, to hear their stories but also to find out if other people have let these childhood labels define them like I did, and to learn how they overcame it. What resulted was an overwhelming chorus of stories that reminded me that we’re all in this together and that being a kid can be fucking hard.

  Here’s a sampling of the amazing responses, all of which gave me comfort in the knowledge that we’ve all been there.

  Growing up, I never knew what to do in awkward or sad situations, so I’d just make a goofy face or tell a bad joke to ease the tension. Everyone would laugh and things would go back to normal, which made me happy. But whenever I was introduced to people, my friends would say, “This is Christina, she’s the goofy one of the group.” Being labeled “goofy” as you’re growing up and trying to figure out who you are as a woman and how you relate to men was like climbing a mountain. I didn’t want guys to see me as “goofy.” I wanted them to see me as sexy or intelligent or able to lift heavy boxes. ANYTHING except “the goofy girl.” For a long time, it made me believe that I didn’t deserve love and I would be forever relegated to the best-friend role, the main character’s sidekick who helped set up everyone except herself. As I got older, though, I realized that I want to enjoy life as much as possible with as much humor as I can. And that means I want to find someone who is just as goofy as me to laugh my way through life with. Now I shout off the rooftops, “I am goofy, and I’m damn proud of it!”

  —Christina

  I was the weird cat girl. At my first boy-girl party, a gaggle of us went for a moonlit walk. One of the boys brought a BB gun and was going to shoot a cat with it. Just for fun. Horrified, I picked up the cat and refused to put it down until we got back to the house, where the gun would be put away. That night was the end of any hope I had for being popular ever again. That, and I accidentally wore a sweater to school (the same year) that my cat had peed on.

  —Catherine

  I was definitely the goody-goody growing up. Some of that was based on my actions, but most of it was that I was quiet and shy and studious, and people perceived that as being a Goody Two-shoes. Even now, at twenty-five, I have a hard time shaking that image. Anytime I do anything that doesn’t fit that image, people claim it’s so not like me, even though it’s who I’ve been the whole time. I’m studying human sexuality, I have two tattoos, and I started occasionally doing live storytelling events; all of these choices have been met with shock and awe from the people who claim to know me best but who can’t see past that label from my childhood.

  —Tara

  I was the only female redhead in my grade in elementary school, and to make matters worse, my hair was approximately five times the size of my head. So I was known as “the redhead” or “puffball” because of my puffy hair. As I got older, the names got worse. In first grade, kids said I couldn’t sit with them because I had red hair. In sixth grade, a kindergartener told me my hair made me scary. By the time I got to high school, I was “ginger” and “fire crotch.” People couldn’t see past the hair. I begged my parents to let me
dye it, but they wouldn’t. I never had a real relationship in high school or college. People would tell me that I was too different to ever find love or that I was “pretty . . . for a redhead.” Today, I’m extremely grateful my parents didn’t let me change my hair color. I still tend to straighten it, out of the fear that it will look too thick and “puffy” if I don’t. But, I like being different now.

  —Jenny

  I was always known as “the oldest.” I’m older than my brother, so I always took care of him. To this day I feel the need to treat him like a baby, and we are in our thirties! I’m also the oldest grandchild, so that left me always having to babysit my cousins, always being the “responsible” one, always having to set the example. It’s still hard for me to cry or show any type of vulnerability because I always have to be the strong one.

  —Vanessa

  I was the quiet one. I actually became increasingly shy as I grew up because that’s what I was told I was. It was difficult to get over it, but now I’m able to talk to strangers and make eye contact without turning bright red. I was always quiet, but a lot of the time I was just observing what was going on around me. I’m still observant, but I no longer see it as a bad thing. I learn things about people, and I actually listen to what they have to say.

  —Siobhan

  “The best friend.” As in, the person all the dudes confide in about wanting to date your friends, but never you. It has persisted through adult life and stopped only in the last few years (I’m twenty-eight). After a while it’s hard not to see yourself as the one people confide in rather than the object of their affection. It’s a ridiculous trope that unfortunately was so true for me from ages thirteen to twenty-five.