Confession of a Newly Christened Party Girl
To begin this essay, I’ll include a poorly written attempt at an essay I wrote three years ago, when I was 23.
I am 22. No, sorry. I am 23, nearly 24. I misremember my age and lose track of my steps. My only reminder is the worn soles of 23–nearly 24– that have walked me down my road.
I’m sorry for waxing poetic; I’ve been listening to Lorde’s Melodrama a lot lately.
She was 21 when she wrote that album. When I was 21, I was teaching “Yoga for Seniors” at the Downton Richmond YMCA. I quit that job after having to drive there in a snowstorm for a 9 AM class. Green Light blared through my speakers as I eased into the iced-over parking lot. To my surprise, I was met with a full class. While I’d been cursing the whole morning over having to leave my bedroom in the middle of a blizzard, a coalition of arthritic elders had the willpower to get onto their mats.
I think I’ve done “young” wrong.
I’m 24–no, sorry–23, and I still work for an hourly wage, but I did avoid my hometown-isms.
It’s not like I’m a 19-year-old child-bride, sorry– I mean military wife, with a high school degree and three babies.
I’m not a personal trainer in Norfolk, Virginia, with an addiction to creatine and a shitty older boyfriend. I’m a personal trainer in New York City, with no social life. I mean–I have friends. I have a boyfriend. I do things. But when I was a tween in 2012, I expected my early 20s to be a lot louder, more vibrant.
I’m still waiting to wake up and brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack. I have yet to describe a night at the club as “the time of my life,” or “lighting the dance floor on fire.” PitBull is not a recurring melody in my evenings. 1…2…3…Uno…Dos…Tres…Nada.
I haven’t had any torrid love affairs or messy breakups, or will they/won't theys. I’ve never wondered if someone liked me for me or for who I am on weekends. My life has been a sober stream of consistency.
Maybe this is my seasonal depression self-destruction streak speaking: I love my life. I love my friends, my job, my boyfriend; I guess I thought by this point I’d have blown at least some shit up. Been a little bit messy. Made some homemade dynamite.
I fear I’m too normal, too often. My nights begin with a lock of my door. They end with the click of the light switch. The middle bits punctuated with the pad of my bare feet, the lull of my breath.
At my age, aren’t I supposed to feel lust, anger, hatred, and fear? Aren’t I meant to get into messy conversations, and drunkenly slip into cars with people who tonight are friends, and tomorrow strangers?
Am I a writer if my life is contained to the desk? Doesn’t anyone want to rip my heart out? Invite me out? Blow my phone up? Mess my life up!?
I hate the turn of phrase “write what you know.” Because if I were to only write what I know, the story would be rather bland. I write to escape into realities and rabbit holes I’ve yet to traverse. Most of my life so far has been scrambling in the dark for survival’s sake. My past’s memory, a murky brown wash of mixed emotions.
I fear the dark lures me to explore further. Make mistakes. Trip over barstools and dance with life’s risks. My future, the bottom of a liquor glass. Present danger, future misfortune.
If I run into the night, down avenues of pleasure and excitement–if I invite myself to parties, fall in love with strangers, debate my morals into bathroom mirrors–will life march on, my destiny laid out on an unchangeable, unaffected map? Or will I wake up with a mess to clean up, a splitting hangover headache?
I live next to a nightclub. Really, that’s what this is about. I live next to a nightclub. As I write this, it is 10:45 pm on a Saturday. Its percussive bass cuts through my living room. The music gently reverberates through the base of my slippered feet, up into my freshly brushed teeth.
My inhibitions are asleep. My ego tucked neatly between the sheets. I am a writer, at a desk, trying to write about a life I haven’t quite lived. I am a fitness instructor who taught five classes today, my body hoarse, my voice sore. Wait–reverse that. I am a girl sitting in front of a boy–sorry–laptop, asking it to love her. To write the pages for her.
But they’re not coming. But Miranda’s coming out! Miranda is the friend of the girls outside my window at the moment–and to the party’s surprise, she’s coming out! Yay, Miranda!
How fun was that?! I have merely a vague recollection of having written that essay, and boy howdy am I moderately embarrassed to publish it! But I think it’s vital to what I’ve got to say now.
Because shortly after writing this, after I’d turned 24, my life changed greatly. Not that someone outside my immediate circle would notice, I lived in the same apartment, kept the same boyfriend. I can still be found tethered to my writing desk today. But I’d like to point out the lie I was living at that time:
“Maybe this is my seasonal depression self-destruction streak speaking: I love my life. I love my friends, my job, my boyfriend; I guess I thought by this point I’d have blown at least some shit up.”
Now, some of that statement is true, I do suffer a bout of seasonal depression each winter, and I did love my boyfriend–now fiancé, thank you very much. But I DID NOT love my life!
I was pretty miserable, actually, and as it turns out, life will have a funny way of exposing all of your wrongdoings to you eventually, and my exposure came in May of that year.
I went through a friend breakup, fell out of love with New York, and had a moderate mental break. As a result, I changed jobs, I took a break from performing, and I got back into therapy.
Then, the funniest thing happened. Life got better. My new job was closer to my apartment, and actually treated me like a human being, so I had the energy at the end of the day to write the novel I’d been meaning to for years. With a newfound need for friends, I sought out social situations with renewed vigor. I met new people and made them into new friends.
And as a result, I got really into partying. First, I made friends with house party people, hostesses with a pension for staying in, and getting rowdy. We had each other’s addresses saved on Uber, and got used to opening the evening with Karaoke, using hairbrushes as our microphones.
Then the parties turned into raves in warehouses deep into Ridgewood. The only way to get there was to hold hands with two friends, one old and one brand-spanking-new, as we crossed the pedestrian bridge over the traintracks. We spent many nights like that, hands held as we navigated the crushing crowds, as we spun each other around the flashing lights.
Then there were the pre-games, where I got ready in my apartment, my friend’s makeup bags and clothes strewn on my couch, our drinks abandoned, and then lovingly remembered. Sometimes we’d go out and not return till the early hours of the morning. Other times, we’d decide to stay in, put on a show we’d all been meaning to watch. In both scenarios, my apartment had been transformed into what my friend Ashlon described as a “girl tornado.”
Overnight, I was a girl who went out, and I had the stories to prove it. Like how I once got into Joyface after a shift at work, despite still having my giant work tote on me. The security guy stored it behind the bar for me.
There was the time we convinced the DJ to stop playing at midnight so the bar could sing a friend “Happy Birthday.” (It was sa mall venue, the crowd was into it.)
There was the person I shared a cigarette and life stories with outside of Nowhere. A friend of a friend, whose name I now can’t remember.
Once, my brother surprised me by showing up at Rosie Pizza Bar at 3 AM, and I was so drunk, I thought I was having a mild hallucination. My brother is never in Bushwick after 9 PM. We shut down the place. The moon had set by the time I got home.
I’m by no means an authority on being a party girl. But I’m a practicing party girl. I care about the culture of clubbing. I follow newsletters that are solely focused on unearthing the best raves in Brooklyn. I follow promoters on Instagram. My second most listened to genre this year was EDM, knocking Indie off its pedestal.
Now, I’ve been to the club next to my apartment. It was the same night that Kendrick Lamar showed up at the venue. He gave a solemn nod to the crowd and hung in the corner surrounded by men much taller than him. In that moment, I was both writer-fangirling over a Pulitzer prize-winning poet in my midst–and a partygirl, jumping in time with the beat.
Now, I was living the life I was meant to write about. Now I’m the friend of the girls outside my window. I’m the person they cheer for when I decide to come out. Now, I love life.
