Loving yourself is Shrexy as hell
I love meaningful conversations while dressed like a maniac
I started the first full night of 2024 at a “Shrexy New Year’s Party” where the costume theme of the evening was a combination of “Sexy” and “Shrek”. This was the first time in my life that those two words had been anywhere near each other and I found their intersection to be challenging. A brief but illuminating Google search revealed that a lot of people find the Shrek universe to be bursting at the seams with erotic possibilities, and that people apparently dedicate their lives to depicting those possibilities with varying levels of artistry. Informed but uninspired, I decided to just dress up in some standard kink dungeon attire and call myself Thelonious the Dungeon Oaf. My partner whipped up some dragon-inspired drag makeup for herself and so I showed up at the party door having dragged in a drag dragon.
Nobody else at the party had dressed as overtly sexy as we had. People either went for out-of-the-box fantasy attire (non-sexual) or dressed up in everyday clothes with some vague wink in the Shrek direction like green eye makeup or hand-knitted ogre ears which were unattached to the head and just held in the hand like some kind of horrible trophy. One Shrek-shaped person showed up in a full Shrek costume complete with an authentic Shrek mask, which he kept pulled up on his head for most of the party making him look to me like a Pez dispenser. Guests were invited to bring Shrek-themed foods for a medieval-style banquet, so we brought pesto linguini (green) and braced for an onslaught of onions, which are directly referenced in the movie but which sadly make me sick.
It was over a plate of linguini, dressed with a slice of pizza that was in no way Shrek themed, that I got to have a wonderful heart to heart conversation while dressed like a maniac. I love heart to heart conversations and I love people who dress like maniacs, so the intersection of the two is always a treat. I wind down by watching drag competition TV shows, mostly for the moments after everyone performs where the contestants are lined up in full costume and several pounds of makeup and have to receive difficult feedback from the judges with dignity and grace.
There wasn’t any difficult feedback in my conversation, between me and someone over ten years younger than me, discussing their ongoing inner conflict about a difficult direction-of-life decision to make. They were having a difficult time with college and wanted to drop out with a year left to go, which is not something any authority figure would ever endorse them doing, but they were suffering enough such that the idea of being immediately out of college seemed like appealing relief.
I could relate! I’d limped through college and then sleepwalked into grad school because that is What One Does, and then I’d drank my way out of it. I didn’t want to be there, but I also didn’t really know what I wanted, and rather than express this vulnerably I hid and self-medicated. I crashed and burned enough to be convinced that getting sober was a good idea, and have spent the intervening years doing a lot of hard work in cultivating emotional intelligence and inner peace. I can’t claim to be anywhere near perfect at those things, but I can certainly claim to be a hell of a lot more stable and happy than I ever was before.
The damage to my career, though, was substantial. I’m just never going to be as appealing on paper as someone who has a bunch of credentials, and there are a lot of doors in this world that will never be open to me. I’ve cobbled together a comfortable career for myself largely through learning how to live with that voice in my head that tells me I’m an embarrassing failure for not doing a better job earlier in my life, listening to it without endorsing it and then continuing to move forward.
That said, what I wish I’d done a better job at wasn’t the pursuit of credentials but the achievement of self-love. I wish I’d known that whatever I chose to do with my life would be amazing no matter what, just because I was doing it. I wish I’d known that I didn’t owe it to anybody to try and be someone else, to look like someone else when people are paying attention to me, that the right people for me are going to love me exactly as I am. I wish I’d known that all of my torment was ultimately imaginary, that I was winding myself up with nightmare scenarios that didn’t exist and then drinking until my brain shut off because I thought that was the only thing that would work. My ‘productive’ life has only had the chance to exist AFTER I’ve worked very hard to actually like who I am, after I’ve learned the hard way that there’s an awful lot I can survive.
Feeling sad and afraid isn’t a sign of a failed life - it’s just what it means to be human. None of us are gods, none of us have perfect knowledge and power, none of us get life right on the first try, and being sad and afraid is just part of being aware of that. There’s no point in avoiding it or trying to turn it off, since sadness and fear are part of the human package deal. All we can really do is feel it, share it, and laugh at it - none of us are alone in feeling that way, and it feels so much better to feel it together, and it feels so much better to laugh at how seriously we take ourselves. None of us are getting out of life alive! None of us are taking any of this with us when we leave this world! Life is infinitely precious and infinitely ridiculous, all that exists and also right next to nothing in the shadow of eternity.
I conveyed this in a dungeon outfit over Shrek-themed linguini, and I think it was well-received. I felt more fed by the hug at the end of the chat than I did by the linguini, delicious though it was. Whether or not any of the above made a long-term difference for the person who listened, it made a difference for me - the conversation was one that helped me change the meaning of my past, changing it from ‘pointless loss and chaos’ into ‘something that makes another human being feel a little less alone and afraid’. The point of my suffering is that it helps alleviate the suffering of others. Living with that power, the ability to transmute suffering into connection through conversation, is my favorite part of being alive, even if I don’t have a Master’s degree. I certainly paid my dues to get it.
I also certainly paid for the Master’s degree that I never earned, and have student loans to pay. We left the party relatively early, before the on-theme green absinthe got people too sloppy to talk to, to get a reasonable night of sleep and wake up for work in the morning. It was New Years’ Day, and also it was a Monday, and making some concession to the boring bullshit of society is something that everyone has to do. I went to bed grateful, grateful for the possibilities of the new year, grateful for the feeling of getting to be who I am. Grateful for gratitude, grateful for the possibility of seeing my past as something I can be grateful for, grateful for being able to share about it, grateful for people who listen, forever grateful for you.