Confessions of a Former Pick-Me

I wrote this for a Moth Story event in 2017. The theme was ‘culture shock’, but it definitely fits my status as a recovered pick-me:

When I was younger, I had a lot of male friends. After many conversations with them, I just knew I was right up their alley when they said ‘I wish women would say what they want.’ ‘I wish women weren’t so shallow.’ ‘Where’s my ride or die?’

In my endeavors to answer this cry for help, I got the rude awakening reminiscent of Choose Your Own Adventure, where you could have turned to page 117 but you chose page 50 and fell off a cliff. It turned out that when people say they want a logical and direct woman, THEY DON’T MEAN IT. When my crushes and friends made fun of ‘chick’ stuff, I did a Lady Macbeth and unsexed myself in the name of solidarity. I got into football, spoke my mind, drank the darkest beer in the loudest sports bars. Girl stuff is dumb! I’ll never watch Sleepless in Seattle again! And the love poem you asked me to critique because you wanted my ‘honest feedback’ has been marked in all the places that didn’t work.

My crushes seemed to want a guy’s girl, but it turned out they didn’t. I believed them when they said they were fed up with manipulative women. I hated games too, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny, feigning helplessness. Then to my shock, those guys married the fussiest, glossiest, most helplessest girls. In dismay I watched the replays, yelled into my headset at that guy behind the glass and any other sports reference that means I gave my situation a lot of thought. I couldn’t see where I went wrong since I had thoroughly logical reasons for my actions. Actions I believed to be heroic made me the villain of the piece. I found out, sometimes humiliatingly, that the clamor for logic is nothing but noise. Those fussy girls were waaay smarter than me. They had mastered the art of attraction while I wasted brain cells on ‘building character’. One of my crushes actually remarked that character was overrated, and I laughed since he was kidding. He’s the one who asked me to critique his poem so OF COURSE he was kidding.

One by one, these guys woke me up—they chose the opposite of what they claimed to want, which left me to feel as only Shakespeare can express it – ‘Nay now I see, she is your treasure. I must dance barefoot on HER wedding day.’ Good ol’ Joye, one of the guys.

I remember psyching myself up to move to New York, preparing my raised-in-the-suburbs self for the culture shock of city life. I told myself I was going to hate the first 6 months, that I’d be homesick and lonely and want to go home. After catty roommates and getting my wallet stolen and going from repugnance to envy at the sight of men peeing, I found out what I was made of and spent 3 life-changing years there. But there was another shock I hadn’t prepared for—the illogical outcome of trying to please people, especially men. I thought I was being the cool chick, but it was actually submersion of my true self. I discovered that I do like beer, but I will no longer hide my love for Sleepless in Seattle. I don’t have to explain why I have five short-sleeved black dresses and am buying a sixth because even if I got a man to see the logic, men don’t like it when women are logical. But since no one’s ready to say that out loud, we will continue to hear the ‘protests’ and ‘complaints’. My mistakes taught me to filter out the wa-wa and focus on actions. They taught me not only to be myself, but to believe in myself. Without that lesson, I would have bought high and sold low, given my best to people who not only hadn’t asked for it, but would never reciprocate.

Don’t get me wrong—I can see the need for a little bend and snap in one’s life. It’s like when you buy a present. Nobody wants to be handed a coffee maker and told ‘It makes coffee’. We like a little tinsel, and the suspense as we tear off the wrapping paper is a gift in itself. Some feminine mystique won’t go amiss, but now I don’t care who’s watching. And it feels so good to get out of the race with my womanhood intact.