Faults

After dropping the LT off at the ferry last night, I drove away and immediately said, out loud, “Man...I could really use a cigarette.”

I heard my own words and was surprised. I didn’t WANT one. I could have really USED one. For what? Why? What use can I possibly have for a cigarette? (Besides punctuating sentences, as an excuse to talk to boys, as an excuse to NOT talk to boys, an excuse for girl time, or really anything fun.)

But I digress. In this case, having a use for a cigarette reminds me of a sunny Pittsburgh morning, leaving the room of my boyfriend at the time, and lighting up. It was hot and sunny outside, not the right time for a cigarette, but it tasted great. Just a few steps away from his apartment, I heard him running after me. “Don’t you want me to walk you home?”

I looked at him, then looked around. It was a Saturday morning. It was sunny. The streets were fairly quiet. There wasn’t a reason in the world why I’d need to be walked home. I appreciated the thought, but sent him back to his room without much ceremony. “Besides,” I said apologetically, “I’m smoking.” He wasn’t a smoker and he didn’t like the taste—who does?—but he still wanted to come. I shoved my cigarette in his face and he eventually turned back.

It wasn’t about the cigarette, of course. It was about alone time. Sometimes a girl just needs to be alone.

(Note: This was not so much a “walk of shame”. I was wearing jeans and flip-flops—hardly left-over party gear. I was leaving my boyfriend’s room so that I could go back to MY dorm and work, do laundry, and get on with my day. There certainly HAVE been walk-of-shame times when I would have appreciated an escort. And the reasons for why you want to be escorted by the guy whom you just fooled around with and don’t want to be escorted home by your own boyfriend, not the least of which is validation, are myriad and varied even beyond the immediate surface and certainly not appropriate to describe here.)

The cigarette in this case was a barrier. A symbol of independence. It said, or at least I thought it did, “Yes. I am a young woman with faults. I smoke and party and deliberately poison myself. I enjoy the eff out of my faults and am not giving them up any time soon and especially not for you, Mr. Mormon Holier-Than-Thou Boyfriend, because you and I both know that my vices are what attract you to me, because I am NOT a nice Mormon girl, and therefore I revel in them and you do, too, and therefore yes I WILL use them to both draw you in and push you away when it is appropriate.”

And now that I have a) gotten older, quite a bit older, and b) let go of some of my need to be That Girl, the one in knee-high black leather boots that won’t be tied down, I find myself dropping my faults. I could go into some sort of long (even longer than this post is already!) drawn-out discussion about how young women are pressured to be “the good girl” and how cigarette smoking is on the rise in young women partly in response to this sort of pressure, and how young women especially are pressured to fit into social norms, and I might especially mention the Madonna/Whore syndrome and how girls are pressured to be one or the other, yada yada yada, and this would be true, but instead what I’ll say is this:

Especially today, with the genders being treated more and more equally—yay!—young people of both genders feel a deep-seated need to BE A BADASS. Smoking, drinking, drugs, lots of sex, fast driving, dropping out of school, getting pregnant, whatever it is, whatever form it takes, if you call it being a badass or “sowing your wild oats”, whatever, the point is that you develop and cultivate a collection of faults, and it becomes your barrier, your shield, between what you know the world expects of you and the inevitable crushing disappointment you know you will feel when you don’t live to the world’s standards, as you know you won’t.

And as you get older, you begin to come to terms with the kind of person you are, and you lose the need for this shield. In some circles, this may be called “maturing”--sadly not an actual requirement for growing older. You may keep some of your faults or you may not, but part of the maturing process is DROPPING YOUR SHIELD.

And in my case, cigarettes—in some small way, at least—were part of that shield. Leaving a parental unit or function, or a boyfriend that I suspected I would ruin because he was too good for me, or an event where I had to be on my best behavior, I looked forward to the time when I could get away into my car or behind the gas station and curse, smoke a cigarette, see girlfriends, and escape from the pressure to be perfect.

Now, at 25, I am dropping my shield slowly but surely. In some ways I feel raw, scraped out with a spoon raw, naked and exposed, without my barrier between myself and the world, without the self-delusion that I really am A BADASS WHO DOESN’T CARE ABOUT SOCIAL NORMS...but only if I'm not in the public eye. In other ways, I feel damn healthy. I know that I can act out and break rules when it’s appropriate—I can make a statement, and I certainly have in the past—but I also know that I can survive in social functions without looking at the clock, aching for my escape. I feel that I may have lost some of my social functionality—it’s hard to be perfect if you don’t have a ready escape—but I’m okay with that. Being an adult, after all, is not parading your faults around as if they are something to be proud of, but rather accepting them, and in the process, accepting the person you already are.