Habit Creature 4: How to title an essay

AKA why I love to hate soccer

CW: this essay loosely discusses uncool sport coaches and specifically uncool crossing of young people’s boundaries. If that may be upsetting to you - first, I send you so much love and second, please feel empowered to protect your peace and skip this one.

I had an essay I wanted to write for this collection called “Things I Haven’t Told My Mom.” It started with a line about stories that would inevitably make my mother cry, and then over the past two years, I plucked them from my brow one by one and presented hairy little secrets as tribute.

When I was younger, mom told me not to pull the hair from my head the way I used to — specifically and with vengeance — reminding me of the yearbook photo where she points to a bald spot she had through elementary, because my hands still know the motions she learned from anxiety before we could talk about that, because most things haven’t changed, because momentary distraction pales in comparison to appearance, because like mother like daughter there is something surgical about the satisfaction of pulling yourself apart.

These hair-secrets still smell of the sweat from my brow — or whatever else they say about things that furrow. Botox is a beginner’s game in comparison to telling your mom a story. I compare my hurting moments to strands of dead cells rooted in my head because they’re the kind of things that stick to your foot unforgivingly on a damp bathroom floor, they’re the things we hide behind, the things we shed. Because moments are dead, and yet they cling and somehow remain a part of you, and yet they get tangled, and yet they can be neat or messy, depending on the day.

I had an essay I wanted to write for this collection called “Things I Haven’t Told My Mom,” and it was to be a tell-all of those too-wrong, too-icky moments that have left me in the dark, and thus her too, and it was to be healing.

Then I told her about the soccer coach from eight years ago, and that essay became null. Who wants to read the essay about the essay that would have been? It’s much more interesting to read the one about the pesky soccer coach, the one where pesky is a nicer way of saying pervy, and perv is an unpleasant word to read and worse to feel. It’s the one I am still figuring out how to write, which I feel a hankering to write, and which I still am unsure is one that is mine to tell. Oh, but if we don’t tell the stories of our lives then no one will. Oh, the projected necessity to be legitimized through storytelling, rather than the feeling of cold water on the skin or the taste of bitter jam or the sensation of turf stuck beneath your fingernails. Oh, I am overdoing it. Oh, I just want something specific enough to make you feel what I did. Oh, and nothing will. I wouldn’t ever ask for this to happen to you.

Now is where I rush to explain myself: soccer is about being clever, writing is about being clever. Generalizing, always; simplifying, always. What, when the coach is too clever and tricks 14 year olds into falling in love? What, when that is unpleasant to hear and worse to say? What, when I’ve become more concerned with the pleasantry of it all than the pervasive way it hurts and the persistent way I am still always slightly afraid of tall men, or always slightly aware of who exactly is in the room, or who will praise me when I run. What, when that means all love moving forward is fake and confusing and convoluted and wrong?

Generalized, simplified.

Love is the wrong word for a trick, and trick is the wrong word for something that is calculated and continuously executed — or maybe it is right, when sometimes you still wonder who was tricking who. When, years later, man says “I still have questions,” and child says “I had to answer all of mine on my own.”

. . .

Then: “Untitled” because I thought it could be symbolic for a story of these sorts to mirror the sensation of things you can’t predict.

Because I wanted to shock you with the things I have been through, with the badness of man, as if that would be any surprise at all.

Because I wanted to be less alone and I thought it would be fair and I thought fairness was what life was about rather than feeling as many things as possible in the longest amount of time. It was about time and feelings and how those can be measured, tangled, erased, indeterminate. How sometimes neither matter.

. . .

Next: “How To Forgive Your Parents” for the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs that you still remember and then the rush of blood in the ears when you stood in the bathroom and deleted all the things you knew you shouldn’t have said, the things you knew you shouldn’t have been sent. People talk about that sound — the one of bloody ears, the one of rivers abounding — and I always thought it a phony descriptor until I asked myself to remember that afternoon they came home and the castle came crumbling and the cleats spilled all their little turfy bits — but it wasn’t phony because this sounds like drowning, and that feels like an insensitive metaphor to make, for someone who is still living, and I didn’t have to ask to remember because I am reminded all the time and it is countless and it is conceited and it is rarely accounted for because why would life forgive the little girl who charmed her soccer coach? Why is the rushing in my ears the sound of fault, claimed and loud?

. . .

Followed by: “The Encyclopedia of Trauma Told by One Girl in Under 1000 Words And It Is, Of Course, Imperfect And Titles Can’t Be This Long And Neither, Possibly, Can Recovering, Because How Is It Possible That I Am Still Scared At Night? That I Still Think It’s All A Trick?”

. . .

Finally, “How To Title An Essay”.

I answered all my questions on my own.