I’m Special (6 page)

Getting hit by a car gave me my first taste of the things that were worth valuing. It made me realize how badly I wanted to get better and live a fully functional life so I could love somebody and have them love me back and be with my friends and family and do work that I was proud of and get a dog and lay in warm sheets and watch a matinee by myself and try using a cock ring and watch my best friend get married. I was starting to understand that nothing in this life is owed to me and that it's quite possible to sabotage yourself if you don't pay attention.

Of course, all these moments of clarity were brief—I still had many years of being a fuckup ahead of me—but they were strong enough to lift me out of my post-accident fugue. While living in LA, I applied and got accepted to Eugene Lang, a college in New York that's like NYU but with cheaper tuition and more flannel and cocaine. I was terrified to start a whole new life with a hand that was permanently out to lunch, but moving to New York actually turned out to be the step I needed to take to realize my accident had actually been a blessing in disguise.

When I went to Lang, I majored in creative writing because all I knew how to do was have feelings. Have you had the unique pleasure of taking a writing workshop at a liberal arts college? If not, let me explain how it works. Twenty students sit in a room and jizz all over themselves for an hour and a half. Then at the end of class, the teacher hands everyone a towel so they can wipe the cum off.

Okay, that's not really what happens. Students read their stories aloud, which are usually about Brooklyn house parties or genocide, and then they get workshopped—that is, your peers tear your story apart under the guise of giving you constructive criticism. The author will get defensive and sometimes cry and scream, assuring us that we just don't understand her vision, and then class is over.

The girls in a writing workshop usually have weird names like Sandstorm and Aura, and the dudes are usually gay. If, for some strange reason, they're straight, they worship Charles Bukowski, are functional alcoholics, and will sleep with half the girls in the class before the semester is over. My favorite kind of person in a writing workshop is the shy girl in the corner who doesn't say a word until it comes time to read her story, and then shit gets psycho.

“Ahem,” she'll say, clearing her throat. Everyone looks over because they've never heard her speak.

“So this story is about a girl named Oxtail, and it's about rape. And molestation. Because I was raped and molested.”

Everyone's jaw drops. She starts to read.

“Lick my pussy, you asshole. I was in the woods and it was dark but you found me and you grabbed my tits and I sucked your cock and together we were fucking under the moonlight. And then you offered me heroin and I said yes. So then we did heroin. Oh yeah. I'm on heroin. Feel my pussy. Go inside it. Fuck yeah. That feels good. No, wait. It feels terrible. What the fuck? ARE YOU MY DAD?”

By the time she's finished reading, the entire class is silent. The girl looks up, and just like that, she's back to her usual quiet self. “Um, thanks,” she'll whisper before covering her face with a hoodie. Meanwhile, everyone is struggling to comprehend how something so dark could've come out of someone who wears Skechers.

You meet people with conflicting identities all the time in college. One half is the person they've always been and the other half is the person they're actively trying to become. It's exhausting. College kids aren't tired from staying up all night studying or partying. They're tired from not having the slightest idea who they are.

Going to Lang, I was prepared to give up on my quest to become another person and be honest about who I was: the cerebral palsy, the compartment syndrome—all of it. Then I went to a house party and realized I didn't have to.

“I don't mean to be rude, but . . . what happened to you?” a drunk girl asked me shortly after I moved to New York. In the background, kids were dancing to Jay Z and having heated discussions about white privilege.

“I got hit by a car,” I told her, sipping from a red cup filled with warm white wine.

Her eyes widened and she covered her mouth in horror. “OH. MY GOD. I AM SO SORRY. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?”

“I ran into oncoming traffic.”

She scrunched up her nose and scoffed. Suddenly she wasn't so sympathetic. “Why in the hell did you do that?”

“I'm not really sure . . .” I trailed off. This was a story I was going to have to tell for the rest of my life, and I had better get a script figured out quick.

“Okay,” she paused, waiting for me to proceed but when I didn't, she continued. “So, like, what actually happened?”

“I developed this thing called compartment syndrome and, um, well, it essentially fucked up my hand forever.”

“Wait—your hand? I didn't even notice that.”

For a brief moment, I was confused. How could she not have noticed my hand? What else was there to notice besides . . . oh. Right. There's that other thing I have.

“So did it crush your side, too, or . . . ?”

I thought about it for a second. Technically, the car did hit my right side. I even have a little scar on my ass from it. If I told her yes, I wouldn't really be lying. I'd just be neglecting to tell her the full story.

“Um, yeah. That's exactly what happened.” I sighed. “That's why I have a limp. That's why all of this”—I motioned to my entire body—“is happening.”

With that lie, I remade myself. I was no longer Ryan, the guy with cerebral palsy. I was Ryan, the accident victim.

After that night, I never spoke about my cerebral palsy to anyone. I chalked everything up to the accident and got the opportunity to live my life on the other side of the disabled coin. Can you blame me for doing some creative editing? For the first time in my life I was in possession of some confidence. Shortly after telling the drunk girl my little lie, I hooked up with a boy for the first time in two years. Ryan, the cerebral palsy sufferer, wasn't worthy of getting laid, but Ryan, the accident victim, was. I would walk up to cute boys, limp and all, and start chatting them up. If I had a crush on someone, I wouldn't hesitate to grab their face in the hallway of my apartment and start kissing them. I had officially thrown my disability into a garbage can on Third Avenue and exchanged it for clandestine make-outs, hazy sex, and a set of Cisco Adler balls. When you're twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, sex is constantly vibrating off your body and it doesn't matter if you're the hottest thing in the world. You're young, you're ripe, and you deserve to be picked. That attitude had infected all of my friends, but I had yet to experience it on my own. Now I wanted all the penis, all the love, all the experiences that came with being someone who likes himself.

This confidence continued to stick with me all throughout college, but eventually I found myself slowly regressing back into the insecure person I was before. As wonderful as it was to be able to leave my disability in the dust, it was just a Band-Aid solution to a much larger problem. Lies can boost your confidence, they can get you accepted by a group of friends and get you laid, but anything that's not the truth is going to fade.

When I look back at college, I think of people like Emma, who wanted me to believe she was a professional tennis player, and I think of Evan, who was so heavily invested in this idea of being cool that he forgot to be a decent person, and I think of Stephanie, who went from an academic to a cokehead in six months. Most of all, I think of me—denying my disability so I could live what I thought would be a happier life. I can't help but feel so sad for us. We were all under the impression that these reinventions would change us into something better, but they just made everyone more miserable and confused. You can try on different personalities like they're clothing for as long as you want, but I guarantee that the outfit you were originally wearing will always be the one that fits best.

The more distance I have from my college years, the more I realize that it was like a four-year summer camp where your only assignment is to read Judith Butler and feel emotions. I thought it was real, but it was actually just a very expensive dreamworld. And you know what else is a poor imitation of real life? A diet adult world that's meant to give the impression that we're people who are going places. Internships.

The Devil Wears Urban Outfitters

Official Definition of an Internship (According to
Dictionary.com
)

in·tern·ship, [in-turn-ship] noun

Any official or formal program to provide practical experience for beginners in an occupation or profession

My Definition of an Internship

A period of time in which a twentysomething works for free with no promise of it ever turning into a paid position. Duties include working for someone who is only a year older than you and bringing them coffee, Luna bars, and the occasional Valium. Must know how to photocopy and organize large piles of paper while giving the impression to your boss that you are living the dream!

I first became familiar with the concept of internships from watching
The Hills
—a life-altering reality TV show that followed Lauren Conrad, a beautiful and wealthy high school graduate, as she left behind the sandy cocaine beaches of Laguna Beach for Los Angeles to work a very prestigious internship at
Teen Vogue
. When Lauren found out she got the gig, she acted so excited you would think she had landed a paid position. It was going to be amazing! Her life would never be the same! Move over Diane von Furstenberg. LC's putting on one of her funky headbands and taking over!

When Lauren first came into the
Teen Vogue
offices, the employees prepared her as if she were meeting the pope when she was really just meeting Lisa Love, the West Coast editor in chief. In one truly bizarre scene, they even restyled her outfit so she could look more chic and “
Teen Vogue
appropriate.” All this effort proved to be for naught, because Lauren ended up doing jack shit at the magazine. She just sat around a room that looked like a set and gossiped about boys with her fellow intern, Whitney “Just Say No to Having Emotions” Port. Occasionally Lisa Love would make her do something pressing like fly to New York to drop off a dress, but other than that, the whole thing looked like a fake snoozefest. By the end of the series, Lauren had moved on to selling her own cocktail dresses and developing a fashion line for Kohl's while still pretending to live the life of a struggling intern on TV. It was so rude! You can't expect viewers to believe your job is fetching coffee when you're selling a $300 dress called the Audrina.

Even though Lauren Conrad's experience was inauthentic, I was hooked on the idea of interning myself. In the late 2000s, interning had morphed into its own strangely elitist culture, thanks to movies like
The Devil Wears Prada
, which glamorized working for a sadist on a nonexistent salary. College students everywhere were eager to be abused by some bossy bitch in Isabel Marant because it made us feel accomplished and deluded us into thinking that after putting up with someone's bullshit for an entire summer, we would be guaranteed a job.

This turned out to be laughably untrue. Despite the occasional exception, internships are primarily used by employers to get free labor—especially by the cash-strapped industries I was interested in working in, like publishing. If you do decide to intern (and let's be honest: there isn't much of a choice), you must go into it with no expectations. Just try to get as much experience as you can, make a connection with one of your employers so you can use them as a future reference, and get the fuck out. You are there simply to give your résumé some padding and hope/pray that another company with a bigger budget will be impressed enough to give you an entry-level position.

The summer after my accident, I got my first internship with a website called
Popsense
, which was a tiny pop culture blog run by two twenty-year-old juniors at NYU. I was older than my bosses—a reality that isn't that uncommon in blogging jobs—but I didn't care. I was so desperate to beef up my anorexic résumé I would've picked up dog shit for Suri Cruise. Eugene Lang placed such an importance on internships that I feared I was already falling behind in the rat race. I felt so unaccomplished next to sophomores who would casually rattle off all their internships in class. “Yeah, so I first started interning at sixteen for
Harper's
and then I landed at
McSweeney's
and now I'm at
Vogue
. So I'm, like, on a really good track right now.” What the hell? When I was a freshman in college, I was watching
Six Feet Under
in my dorm room with the covers over my head and pretending I had a coke problem. Once, at a party in Los Angeles, I met an intern who was only fourteen years old. I wanted to say to her, “Honey, just go home, pick your zits in the mirror, and call some boys on the telephone. You don't need to do this yet.”