the ch!cktionary

    14 Jan 2011

    Freelance Friday: Revisiting Personal Essay Writing Pt. 3

    Before finish the final part of my ruminations on personal essay writing, check out Part 1 and Part 2.

    Beyond the distance I maintain from my professional writing, I’ve also become less and less proud of my non-paid endeavors over the years. And it’s not because I’m such a humble person. It’s because I can no longer see the point of writing simply for the sake of writing. I used to think, back in high school, when I was still angling for Northwestern admission and a serious journalism career, that words themselves mattered. Joan Didion makes me cry and Erica Jong makes me laugh. Isn’t there value in that? Maybe, but only if there’s a message you retain after you close the book. The more invested I’ve become in gender and economic equality, the more I’ve come to recognize that creating and appreciating pretty sentences is a frivolous, privileged pursuit that prioritizes style over substance. Of course, you can’t convey the latter effectively without seducing readers with the former. So when it comes to getting across an important message or earning a paycheck (the latter, a far less noble undertaking), writing is a means to an end. I don’t fool myself into thinking that there’s something incredibly brave or free-spirited about pursuing a creative career, when we live in an economy where most people are forced to make decisions based on money, not passion.

    Stylistically, my prose is nothing special, somewhat immature by high-brow standards. I read Threepenny Review and my cheeks burn crimson, because nothing I’ve written even compares. So I tell myself I should become one of those “well-read” people, since that’s what I’m supposed to be, a Harvard grad and everything. Or perhaps I should have majored in English after all. I don’t and didn’t, of course, because I’m not entirely convinced that a class or a book can make one a better writer, or at least, I don’t believe that it could make enough of a difference to justify the effort. But if I’m to be honest with myself, I hesitate to better my non-professional writing, because I’ve come to think of it as a vain, self-indulgent craft, one that is judged and appreciated solely by the standards of the educated and privileged, standards which I once accepted unquestioningly, even though I never actually enjoyed the works that comprise Western literary canon but was too ashamed to admit as much when I was in college. Because when you say something like that, aren’t you just confessing that you don’t think your work will ever be up to snuff? And maybe, I am, in the end, just bitter. Bitter for never having attended journalism school after all, for being too intimidated or lazy or depressed (depending on the semester) to ever get seriously involved in a campus publication at Harvard, for not giving MFA programs much of a thought because I wanted to stay in Boston with Patrick (but really, I never thought I would get into Iowa anyway so was it because I didn’t have the heart to try?) Now that I’ve written the above paragraph, I guess I’d be a hypocrite if I ever do apply.

    I won’t, though. I know now that any graduate degree I pursue will not be in creative writing. Because while I may very well be bitter and insecure and — as embarrassed as I am to say it — vain, I do believe what I wrote above, that there is no value in aspiring to membership in an elite literary society of Dead White Men, that nothing produced by a group of such people will ever bring about social change (and if anything, will only reinforce the existing order). The old markers of success — degrees and certificates and bylines — are no longer points of personal pride to me. Though I still intend on submitting work to literary journals this year (even if it means encountering rejection after rejection), my intentions are more instrumental than anything else. And that’s why I think I’m finally beginning to reach an uneasy peace with my writing nowadays. I used to believe that a writer unable to write was the most the most tragic figure in the world. But I lived that supposed tragedy for over two years (not entirely voluntarily, but still), and I’m no worse off for it. And when you find that you can live without what you previously thought was an integral part of your life, can you ever cherish it quite as much as you once did? I don’t think so. Because then you must realize that this passion, this craft, is really no more noble than filing paperwork as one’s day job.

    There was one thing I missed though, and it wasn’t the praise of strangers or the satisfaction of completion or the disciplined routine (perhaps the only discipline or routine I’ve ever successfully imposed on myself as an adult). When I think about the type of writing that has most resonated with me, it’s always been that which has captured something authentic in my own life. That’s what personal writing has always been for me: a mirror upon which the reality of life is reflected. When I started SexAndTheIvy.com, my goal (though I didn’t quite know it at the time) was to reproduce that ah-ha! feeling for others. And I did, however unintentionally, succeed. So that’s what I miss nowadays — the human connection that grew out of words shared, the ability to make others feel less flawed and alone by sharing my experiences, the intimate emails from people who sounded more like friends than readers.

    Previously on Freelance Friday:

    How To Work From Home Without Going Insane
    Reader Question: “What is freelance writing?”
    Why Working At Home Is Both Awesome & Horrible
    Britt Julious on Life As A Young Arts & Culture Writer
    Women’s Lifestyle Editor, Diana Vilibert, On Surefire Pitching, Negotiating Rates, & Working At Marie Claire
    Aussie Rachel Hills on “Accessible Feminism” & Writing For Women’s Mags
    Susie Anderson, A Beantown Social Media Maven, Talks Blogging & The Freelance Life
    Reader Question: “Do you think being a freelance writer is a sustainable career?”
    Reader Question: “Aren’t you anxious/scared about life postgrad especially since you don’t want the normal 9-to-5?”

    4 Jan 2011

    You guys.

    I know I have to keep reading the archives of SexAndTheIvy.com if I’m ever going to finish this book proposal, but good god, I cannot believe I ever attempted to describe sex scenes. And that this is still up. I have encountered maybe three writers my entire life who have not embarrassed themselves in describing a sex scene. Absolutely nothing is sexy about any of this.

    Also, I made horrific romantic decisions. One commenter volunteered the following advice (originally given to their friend):

    “Based on your relationship history, you should treat the mere fact that you are attracted to someone as a huge red flag.”

    4 Jan 2011

    Get On and Get Lost By The Next Stop

    Originally published on SexAndTheIvy.com:

    I’m thinking that this is a season for flings and freedom. I have an ex-boyfriend in California I still love, an old hookup I lust for each morning in between states of sleep, and more than one boy in Boston to look forward to come fall. Relationships are too fatiguing for a late-riser.

    I want fluff off the tops of cake and nothing filling from the layers beneath. I’ll pass on your keen intellectuals, your marathon conversationalists, your waterside meanderers. I want boys with beautiful skin, firm hands, and knowing eyes. I want words mouthed, not spoken, and I want torsos sinking along with thoughts into my bedroom’s dark crevices. My feet demand a guide across foreign pavement but all my ears need are laughter to follow when the bright lights make the color bleed against my eyelids. I want to linger at the traffic light with fingers in coarse curls and palms against solid shoulder. I want to taste freckles because I’ve never had them. I want to prick my tongue on cayenne and tease out strange men’s names and tell you that mine is Jane. I want you, but just for a day. Or maybe a week, if you are lucky. And then I want your friend. If she is lucky.

    But this is not about sex, you see, because I can hold off on satiating the carnal. My lust is precipitated by “wander” and baby, the only burn I feel is my crisp skin beneath the sun. I am holding a one-way ticket to nowhere, with Kennedy on my mind, laptop on my thighs, and next to me, an empty seat.

    — June 23, 2007

    3 Jan 2011

    Anonymous asked: Please don't ever delete Sex and the Ivy. I know I speak for a lot of girls at Harvard besides myself when I say that reading it and the chicktionary provide a huge sense of solace and inspiration that we can find nowhere else on the Internet or in real life. So thank you, and please, never take it down.

    It’s been two years since I stopped regularly updating and I’m still paying the hosting fees, so I think it’s safe to say that I have no intention of taking it down. Thank you for the note (and thanks to everyone else who wrote in about my year-end entry).

    More notes, confessions, or burning questions? Submit them to Lena.

    31 Dec 2010

    Then & Now, Once Again

    I wanted to write an end-of-year round-up of my favorite posts, press mentions, published articles, but in the middle of going through my archives, I stopped seeing the point. Everything is on this website, if you want to read it. (My most interesting pieces, I found, were usually written in response to reader questions.) Anyhow, instead of reveling in the awesomeness that was my year, I took a little trip back in time to a less happy period of my life. I revisited a piece I posted to SexAndTheIvy.com in July 2007. That New York summer, I wrote the following:

    I’m incredibly scared of loss. And I know I shouldn’t feel like I lose something by sleeping with someone, but I do. I decided to stop having sex because I was sick of giving away all these pieces of myself and subsequently worrying about unintentional attachment, ill-advised yearning. It felt like I had no control.

    When I reread this in March 2009, I said:

    I feel so far away from this girl, and yet, I think I finally understand what people mean when they tell me that my blog entries make them wish that they could give me a hug … Now, when I read myself, I feel sad. I feel sad that I was so utterly broken that I was incapable of experiencing any sort of emotion toward men. I had made up my mind at this point that this blog meant more to me than social acceptance, that what I stood for was more important than the existence of a love life, and that there was no possibility of love in any case since no man would willingly sign up for this.

    I used to drink to the point of blacking out three or four times a week as a freshman, because I was so depressed. So nothing that happened the year afterward seemed particularly distressing in comparison. My sophomore year of college was fairly disastrous as far as my love life was concerned. Seemingly against all odds, I passed my classes. At that point, I still vaguely cared about school, but I was already well on my way toward sleeping the days away in a haze of depression and/or inebriation. Until at some point, I found myself incapable of leaving my dorm room. But even then, I managed to rally. I took out-of-town trips on a bimonthly basis. That spring, I decided I wanted a clean slate and obtained a transfer to a different house for the following fall. I applied to as many New York City internships as possible and got two offers for the summer. I wanted badly to escape. Given that I was counting down the last days of the semester, I wasn’t what I’d describe as happy. But I yearned for the future, and when you’re used to hopelessness, yearning is a good sign.

    New York was a lot of things for me. Emotional independence in the absence of my college confidantes. New friends and coworkers. A new kind of thinking, a living in the moment, a ceasing of worry and anxiety about the future. New drugs and games, same old fakery, but at that point, the glitter of the City hadn’t yet worn off. I never wanted it to end. I wasn’t necessarily what I’d describe as “happy”, but there was something freeing about the experience, because I later noted:

    As closed off as I was, I was undeniably happy that summer and happy to go back to school and happy to be alone. I was finally free of seemingly endless heartbreaks and disappointments, because I had ceased to hope. And in a strange, satisfying way, I was incredibly at peace for the first time in a long time. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘I’m going to be alone forever, and this suits me just fine.’

    I dated an actor at the end of that summer for about a month. I slept next to him even though we were completely wrong for each other. I don’t know why I did it, because even then, I knew it didn’t work, that it was a waste of time, that it meant nothing. But maybe I needed to prove to myself that I could still go through the motions. I didn’t, in the end, learn to feel again, but he was the last person to see me when I left New York.

    I never admitted this publicly, but I wanted badly to take a gap year then. My summer internship led to a full-time job offer, one I didn’t take because my mother was unwilling to consent. (Despite the fact that, as an adult, I didn’t really need her consent, this was before I told her about my blog and rebelled against her authority by pulling shit like flying out of the continent without her knowledge.) I got my house transfer, alright, and the perpetrator of my sophomore year heartbreak had graduated, but I was not at all excited about the prospect of returning to school. I had never been happy at Harvard; I didn’t see how junior year would be different. I begged my mother to reconsider. I’d have a salary (a salary higher than anything I’ve since been offered and twice as much as any first-year editorial gig). And I already knew New York. She said no. She didn’t want me to take five years to graduate. As it would turn out, I’d take that long anyway.

    I don’t blame my mother. She’s not the reason my naked photos ended up on the Internet and not the reason people laughed at me and not the reason I failed school my junior spring. I did that all on my own, thankyouverymuch. But very occasionally, I do wonder how differently life would’ve turned out had I not come back to Harvard a year older and a tad more resentful, if I would’ve learned on my own in New York the independence and fearlessness that others assumed I’d already obtained.

    In any case, no regrets.

    At first, junior year really didn’t seem particularly special. I stopped pretending like I enjoyed the final club parties and recruiting events, but I was still hanging out with the same five people and still — as much as I loathe to admit it — sleeping with the same three completely off-limit dudes. There was astonishingly little progression in the arena of sex. But unlike sophomore year, something was different about me. I ceased to feel inadequate when I looked in the mirror. I spotted cracks in the arrogant facades of my classmates. I stopped waiting for boys to come around. I still dated. I still flirted. But there was this profound distrust, not because men were untrustworthy (though some of them certainly were), but because boys were unreliable. And most men were really just boys in grown-up clothes. That’s why, when I did meet Patrick, I didn’t write intimately about him:

    I never did put much of my relationship with Patrick down into words. In retrospect, it was because he meant more to me than anyone ever had, and transcribing my feelings to text suggested a permanence I wasn’t ready for. It’d be admitting that he meant something to me, and even if he didn’t know it and my readers didn’t know it, I would certainly know it.

    I met Patrick during what was probably the most emotionally tumultuous period of my life. I was so utterly terrified of loss, of losing Kennedy, of losing my family’s support (if they found out about this blog), of losing him, and honestly, of losing myself in him. I was so afraid of losing the ability to be alone and happy at the cusp of 20. And while I desperately wanted this to work out, I simply couldn’t envision a future with him. I couldn’t envision a future with anyone, because I had become so fully cynical in my views about love.

    In my head, I still think of Patrick as that thing that changed everything, not because our relationship is my most significant, but because he offered an escape from this place that I hated, from this place that made me hate myself. But really, if you look at my junior year of college and everything that happened and the things that preceded it, I’m not sure that Patrick’s presence made much of a difference either way. I hadn’t gotten kicked out yet, but I was mentally checked out, so ready to leave Harvard, to be anywhere but Cambridge, to be anyone but a sex blogger who lived among people who looked down on her for stating what they were too well-bred to admit out loud. So maybe, if it hadn’t been Patrick, it would’ve been something else.

    Sometimes, I think that I willed myself into getting out of there, but of course, that isn’t the truth either. Unlike the unhappy semesters before, junior spring was different because I was, for the first time, optimistic. And I remember thinking that I really ought to finish my papers and I remember that I really didn’t quite care. Perhaps because I could no longer fake it. As long as I believed in the allure of Harvard, then I’d have a reason to work toward my degree, but I was so fully disgusted with everything that had happened, so disappointed by how petty and cruel my classmates could be, that I literally could not muster up the simple desire to keep on going on. I got kicked out of school over a 20-page paper I was perfectly capable of writing. It’s easier to chalk it up to laziness, but I don’t think it could’ve been that. I had to deal with huge amounts of fall-out, not just from the administration, but from my parents. It’s what made me decide to tell them the truth about my blog. Was I really just not interested in writing that paper? Or was my desire to leave Harvard so strong that I opted for self-sabotage? How much of that did I choose? I still don’t know.

    In any case, it was that gap year and not Patrick, not any feminist awakening, that saved my sanity. SexAndTheIvy.com ended for a lot of reasons, but the one I don’t often mention (and didn’t quite admit to until March 2009) is the following:

    The unstated goal of blogging was always to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become. Now that I know … well, this blog will never be what it once was, because I’m not who I once was. To be honest, I hope I never feel compelled to write here again. It’s an artifact from a time when I was unsure about many things, most of all my worthiness of being loved.

    Yet as significant as that year was, most of it went unrecorded. I said then that I didn’t want to turn Patrick into a character, that this version of him will seem like such a distant representation of who he later becomes. This is how I feel about most of the characters on my blog today. This is how I feel even about my closest friends, who I wrote about and whose desire for privacy ultimately contributed to my decision to stop blogging.

    When I say “characters”, I do not mean that I purposely fictionalized anyone, but I do admit that it is extremely difficult for me today to differentiate between what I wrote and what I lived. In part, it’s because I don’t really remember a lot of early college. And it’s not because I was drunk for most of it (despite all the tongue-in-cheek references to drug/alcohol misuse).  The strange truth is that after I met Patrick, left school, and moved to Boston, I forgot a lot of what happened. Quite literally. I have worked on enough book proposals in the time since to realize that there are some serious gaps in my memory for which there are no explanations. I don’t recall significant experiences during which I was undoubtedly sober and for which the rest of my friends were present. Until I started rereading SexAndTheIvy.com for the purpose of completing this book proposal, I’d completely forgotten the fact that I flung a hard object (my Motorola RAZR, I believe) at my sophomore fall fling and punched my sophomore spring hook-up (albeit with his consent) after I found out he had a girlfriend. In the back of my head, I knew that these events had occurred. I must’ve, right? But if I never could’ve reconstructed them on my own, without the help of an online diary or an old friend’s hints, do they count as memories?

    Maybe I partied too hard in college after all and now I’ve permanently compromised my ability to recall the past. I think the more likely explanation is repression. There were a lot of things at the time that I never wanted to forget, because I knew, even then, that these would become formative lessons in my life. So I wrote them down. I wanted to remember the heartbreaks, the never-ending unhappiness, my sexual coming-of-age. And I knew, despite what anyone said about me, despite my purported hurt at criticism and slurs, that there was nothing wrong with being genuine, even if my honesty came at the price of my pride. Still, once I broke free of Harvard, not only did I never look back, but I apparently made an unconscious effort to forget what life was like.

    I never read SexAndTheIvy.com. Since I stopped the daily updates in 2008, the only time I browse backward is when I’m writing a book proposal or doing fact-checking. When I take the time to reread full entries, it makes me nostalgic, sometimes sad. Mostly, it makes me frightened, frightened that someone can simultaneously be so profoundly impacted by experiences of trauma and yet not even remember how they came to be who they are. The fact that I can’t remember without the help of an online chronicle bothers me more than the fact that I once felt hurt. The latter happens to everyone, doesn’t it? But the former … that only happens to those who aren’t quite at peace with the past, those who maybe still blame or hate themselves — even just a little bit — for what happened then, those who found that forgetting is easier than forgiving.

    Reblogged: lenachen

    7 Jul 2010

    Musings From A Reformed Attention Whore

    I graduated a little over a month ago and since then, I’ve managed to turn in a few writing assignments and two episodes of my Sex Really web series while traveling sans wifi. Not too shabby, but I haven’t had much time to think or much time to do substantive first-person writing, the sort of stuff that could potentially help me craft a memoir. In other words, I am well on my way to not starving (thanks to a few regular freelance checks in the mail) but my energy should really be focused on trying to write the bajillionth draft of the book proposal I’ve been ignoring for the entire length of my relationship with Patrick.

    I am not blaming the Roomie for my lack of creative output. But due to the various controversies that have ensued since we met, I prefer to keep him and our relationship off my blog and unconnected to my online identity. In general, that’s been a good policy when it comes to my friends as well. You know all those gals with whom I partied and puked throughout all of college? Yeah, they grew up, got jobs, and would really appreciate it if I could refrain from broadcasting their walk-of-shames to thousands of people. Which I can understand, despite my employer-less status. Of course, this wasn’t always the case, not when I was regularly blogging about boys and booze. (Remind me some time to tell the story of the Reality Television Show That Never Was. We were young, impressionable, and terribly misguided, but there are really no excuses.) And because this wasn’t the case, Sex and the Ivy got a brilliant two-year run, in which all sorts of embarrassing and endearing anecdotes about my friends and crushes were relayed with gory details intact. But none of us are 19 anymore, and honestly, I don’t even have any gory details to share (unless you count menstruation stories, which I really think you could do without).

    And due to this combination of Growing The Fuck Up and Keeping A Low Profile, the previous two years has gone unchronicled and my blogging has evolved to detached commentary on gender and sexuality. These are subjects which are certainly worthy of attention, but I used to approach them from a much more personal perspective and revealed too much about myself in the process. I really don’t do that very often anymore. In fact, I actively try to avoid doing that. The problem is that you can’t really expect to write anything that’s even mildly close to “memoir” when you have no idea how to end a sentence that starts with the word “I”. As so many of my detractors like to remind me, I used to be a self-obsessed attention whore. I like to think that I still am, but perhaps, I’ve been letting myself go.

    It’s time for a change, don’t you think? In the next few weeks, I will try to write (more) honestly about my life, which includes all these lovely insecurities which I’m sure will make you feel better about yours. I’ll post snippets from my old blog entries that are going into my book proposal and reference all those cringe-inducing drunken escapades that made my college years simultaneously memorable and hard to remember. I’ll also try to make a regular habit of keeping an off-line journal, perhaps my best chance at preserving thoughts without sacrificing privacy. The entire point of getting a Moleskine is to stimulate all those literary impulses that have been repressed for fear of having my privacy invaded and my personal life dissected. Sure, I could have tried (and did try) to keep secret online journals. But it’s hard to get myself to type up thoughts and send them into the blackhole of cyberspace when I could type up thoughts and send them into Google history. With a paper journal, there’s pretty much only the former option unless I die famous and worthy of posthumous publication. Let’s hope for the latter.

    Otherwise, let’s hope the subjects of these Moleskine musings aren’t particularly litigious.

    9 Feb 2010

    Woo-hoo, it's my sexist German debut!

    Der Spiegel hat einen Artikel über mich veröffentlicht! Aber nicht so schnell …

    Der Spiegel, one of the largest European newsmagazines, published an article about the American abstinence movement and feminist reaction to it. I’m pretty excited that I scored a mention/photo in a German publication, because all things German have become awesome since I’ve begun learning the language.

    Unfortunately, my German abilities remain pretty rudimentary, so I’ve had a hard time translating … but they’re not so rudimentary that I didn’t realize that the piece is actually somewhat reactionary. Yeah, what a disappointment.

    I was reading along happily until I got to the paragraph about me, which includes a reference to my “ultrakurzen Minirock” that excites the boys on campus. That means “ultra-short miniskirt”. Wait … why are they talking about my clothing choices? And where are these ultra-short miniskirts, because Cambridge, Massachusetts is sure as hell not the ideal place to wear them. (I may have been deluded about this my freshman year, but I — and my hemlines — have long since grown up.)

    This is kind of like that time when The New York Times wrote a piece that featured me alongside the then-president of Harvard’s abstinence club. While the writer refrained from physically describing the other girl, the main subject of the article, this was what he wrote about me:

    Chen was a small Asian woman in a miniskirt and stilettos…

    This is after I already corrected the fact-checker prior to publication, telling him specifically that I was not actually wearing a miniskirt and stilettos. But whatever, I have sex so naturally, I also walk around naked in impractical footwear! Let’s just gloss over the fact that I was actually wearing a dress and shoes with a wide heel. The truth would detract from reinforcing the image of the sexually available woman. And while we’re at it, why not exoticize me a bit? I’m small! I’m compact! I fit in your handbag! It doesn’t matter what the other girl looks like; let’s check out the chick who’ll let dudes bang her.

    Anyway, it gets better:

    [Chen] ate every crumb of everything, including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote. Fredell, when the dessert menu came, paused at the prospect of a “chocolate explosion,” said, “I may as well — I mean, carpe diem, right?” And then reconsidered — she really wasn’t that hungry.

    I’m amazed at what passes for news. The fact that this food-sex analogy is so contrived is a testament to how stupid the virgin-whore dichotomy really is.

    But I guess the German liberal media is just like the American liberal media: not incredibly progressive after all. While articles like the ones above approach sex more positively than Fox News, they still can’t help but think of female sexuality as a binary, something that can be neatly categorized in boxes labeled “virgin” and “whore”. I may have sex and openly write and talk about it, but that doesn’t make me representative of all sexually active women any more than it makes me conform to some tired vixen trope. And while I do hope that these types of stereotypical depictions decrease, I’m not terribly optimistic. After all, this is the explanation I received from the writer when I complained to The New York Times:

    Lena is right that i described her outfit to draw a distinction from [the other girl], and it is also true that her outfit was distinct from [the other girl’s]. Whether her dress was short or not is subject to interpretation, she is right, but I think almost everyone would agree that indeed it was very short and that her high heels were very high.

    Which is why I’m not even going to bother fact-checking Der Spiegel.

    7 Jan 2010

    When I Was 20

    My friends have a tendency to categorize my college experience as pre- and post-Patrick (or pre- and post-domestication-of-formerly-unruly-sex-blogger), but I think the split really occurs not when I met the current roomie, but two Christmases ago. I’m referring to those infamous nude photos, whose surfacing and aftermath have been neatly summarized in a recent piece in a Canadian paper. It felt strange to comment on the incident for the article, given how much time has passed and how young I was then (not that I’m much older now). But though many things have changed since, I don’t know if I’d handle it any differently today, which is probably why I seemed “remarkably blase” in the interview. I think I did the best I could at the time.

    In the winter of 2007, I was single and living alone in Currier House, still blogging primarily on Sex and the Ivy, and seriously considering writing a memoir (which has long been shelved in favor of my senior thesis). At 20 years old, I was completely unprepared to deal with such a deep invasion of privacy, though I wonder if that’s the sort of thing one is ever prepared to handle gracefully. It wasn’t about the fact that I was naked on the Internet nor was it about the sociopathic ex who I’d long written off. I was never ashamed of my body or of people seeing it, but rather, I felt victimized because I had been exposed without consent and doubly victimized by those who wrote salaciously about the incident. The initial IvyGate post was how most of my classmates found out about the photos, and the subsequent coverage on Fleshbot, Bostonist, who knows where else, informed the world beyond Cambridge.

    In the weeks after, I encountered little sympathy and plenty of mockery. It was easy for strangers online to say that I was “asking for it” when they weren’t in my shoes, freaking the fuck out (quite literally, in the form of panic attacks), and very much certain that I didn’t ask for this shit. However, I was mostly appalled by the way I was treated by other Harvard students, who had no moral qualms about Googling the photos and sending them to one another. It wasn’t the first or last time I felt totally alienated, isolated, and violated by the campus at large, but it was easily the worst time because I was going at it alone. Unlike romantic troubles or an uncalled-for rude encounter, this was a situation that literally no one in my life could understand or empathize with.

    So how did I get over it? By leaving Harvard. I made the best of finals and submitted multiple late papers thanks to a note from my therapist. I got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication I never ended up taking. I went to Switzerland for nine days with two girlfriends, hiked uphill in snow to reach the peak of the world’s longest sled run, and had a lot of sex with someone who was not a sociopath. Thankfully, I emerged from my depressive haze without the least bit of generalized hatred toward men, since I met Patrick, a.k.a. “the Guy”, shortly thereafter. In the subsequent months of my junior year, I transitioned slowly away from my old blog and into this one. Mid-semester, sleuthing e-stalkers unmasked and defamed “the Guy”, pretty much cementing my belief that I could never return to writing openly about my own sex life. I also moved, for all intents and purposes, into Patrick’s then-apartment and never once looked back at the option of living on campus. By the time I got Ad Boarded for not turning in two final papers, I was just completely done with Harvard. Everyone was telling me to finish the damn papers — which were completely doable — and I was thinking, “What’s so bad about having to take a year off, anyway? I freaking hate this place.” When I left Harvard at the end of May, I had already long checked out emotionally. I hadn’t even slept in Currier for months and only showed up to move-out in order to shove things into boxes. Two months later, I turned 21 halfway around the world from Cambridge. I went back to Boston a few weeks later and moved in with Patrick, with whom I lived during my year off. Harvard has never felt like home again, not even after I returned as a student this fall.

    This is all to say that even if I appeared “remarkably blase about the incident” in my interview for the aforementioned article, it was hardly an insignificant event in my life. I’ve said most, though not all, of the above before, and often, it feels like I’m repeating myself when I discuss this topic. Maybe that’s because I’m still grappling with what happened. The reaction to those photos simultaneously defined and epitomized my college experience, which often felt like a circus act performed before sadistic spectators. Someday, I’ll have to post the “reflective” essay I submitted to get readmitted to Harvard. It was more a condemnation of my classmates than it was an expression of remorse, and if the administration ever had doubts about how cruel Ivy League students can be … well, now they know. Back then, I was also very much of the mindset that the bloggers and reporters who wrote about the photos were simply doing their job: writing about the news. Only in the year afterward did I realize that having a sex blog hardly makes one newsworthy and that furthermore, gossip is not news. It would have saved my sanity had a few individuals simply thought twice about clicking “Post Entry”. In retrospect, I regret that I wasn’t more critical of the writers who exploited the source of my personal anguish for page views.

    In a few short months, I’ll have a Harvard degree in addition to hundreds of unfavorable Google search results to show for all this trouble, yet I’ve never quite forgiven or forgotten the on- and off-line masses who judged, dissected, and mocked my younger self. In a coming-of-age film, the above drama might be characterized as the experience necessary for eventual personal growth or finding Mr. Right or whatever. Winding up with a bulldog-owning Yalie is kind of the perfect happy ending to the Ivy League version of Sex And The City. But outside of HBO world, no one needs to nearly get their life ruined in order to emerge triumphant. The reality is that people are often mean without justification, you may or may not learn from this stuff, and the guy you end up with in the aftermath is not necessarily the pay-off for putting up with bullshit. Though I survived my ordeal more or less intact, with a boyfriend and a puppy dog to boot, I have never regained my former faith in others’ inherent goodness. Which is good, because I was really just being naive. The crazy ex who posted those photos could have easily been written off as a psychotic exception to the generally sane population at large, but what happened in the aftermath demonstrated to me how thoughtless, judgmental, and unkind normal individuals can be and that this tends to be the rule, not the exception, and that Harvard kids with all their privilege are not exempt from moral failings despite being in a position where they should theoretically “know better”.

    And that realization, not Patrick, is what really prompted some rather radical changes in my life. Harvard has a knack for fooling its students into becoming incredibly invested in their peers. The cult of the Ivy and all that. The belief that your success is mine and vice versa. Even at its rawest, my blog up until that point reflected a painful desire to be liked. I was well-aware that my subject matter was slightly edgy and my reputation slightly soiled, but hardly unsalvageable, nothing a book deal couldn’t fix. It wasn’t until the ugly aftermath of the photos that I started to question what I was trying to prove and who I was trying to prove it to. It was then that I stopped participating in superficial social interactions, ceased going to anonymous parties, and completely disengaged from communal college life. In other words, I no longer viewed my classmates as flawless individuals who I should be grateful to know.

    Up until then, my go-to future plan had always been Move To New York, Write A Memoir, Become Carrie 2.0. Now that graduation is actually on the horizon, I don’t find any of the above particularly appealing. I will almost certainly stay in Boston, at least in the short-term, and perhaps I will still publish a book, but not because I feel the need to apologize for my sordid past by seeking redemption via commercial literary success. As for Carrie 2.0, I’d rather aspire to be Jessica Valenti. But the truth is that I don’t even have New Year’s resolutions, not to speak of a multi-year life plan. I don’t have any idea how 2010 will turn out, since I didn’t do corporate recruiting in the fall, haven’t looked for a job, failed to apply to grad schools or take the GRE, and have no real intention to think about post-graduation life until I actually graduate (or at least until I finish my thesis). Two years ago, this would’ve struck me as terribly complacent, perhaps even boring, but right now,it just feels liberating.

    6 Oct 2009

    “Are you going to blog about me?”

    In Sex and the Ivy’s heyday (2006-7?), I rarely ever went out or hooked up with a guy who didn’t ask, “Are you going to blog about me?” Those who didn’t bother to ask were people with whom I had very specific arrangements (i.e. regular friends-with-benefits, which in my case, almost always refers to an actual friend, believe it or not) or people who I just didn’t care to inform about my blog (which includes some pretty strange flings like the three-week romance with the actor I met one summer in New York). Yet despite the frequency with which I heard it, I never ceased to be surprised when a guy asked the inevitable question.

    “Why in the world would you think this is noteworthy enough an experience to write about?” I used to think out loud.

    Most of the time, the accounts on my blog were of regular fucks, reliable fellows in my arsenal of men, “friends” I suppose you could call them. The qualifier “regular” really doesn’t mean much here. Sometimes, I didn’t see a guy for a series of weeks, and if I pined after them at all, it was never for very long (at least not after getting burned my sophomore year). In any case, I wasn’t exactly making editorial decisions based on the quality of the fuck or the level of my romantic interest in a guy. I was way more interested in figuring people out, which is why I preferred to stick to dissecting my boring, bland, and romantically-going-nowhere fuck buddies. They, at least, I could relate to in a semi-pleasant manner. I realize only in retrospect that my inability to sustain interest in most men outside the bedroom then was probably the first sign of my now full-blown misanthropy. Whoops.

    And nowadays, the only thing I blog is my dog’s bowel movements.

    24 Jul 2009

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