Not the Credits

Everything is Gray, Part I: Everything Felt Wrong

This is an essay from my memoir Everything is Gray. If you'd like to start at the beginning, you can find the first post here. This is Essay # 5 in Part #1: Everything Felt Wrong. End of part 1!

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Not the Credits

If this were a movie, it would end here. I had a social life, a best friend, I had made the decision to move to New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology and I met the boy who would become my first love. Roll Credits.

But life is not a movie. The boy was sober when we met and even warned me about the dangers of drinking. He was very much one of the most kind, thoughtful and insightful people I have ever known. But he had a past I did not know about and even when he told me I was naive enough to believe he was past it. When the drugs started to creep back in I didn’t understand. He became a different person. All I could focus on the last year of high school and first year of college was him. Saving him, saving us, thinking we were still a team when he was fighting, and already losing, a battle. He was supposed to follow me to New York City but, of course, that didn’t happen.

We broke up a few months after I moved and even though New York City was everything I had dreamed of I had never dreamt of being there alone. My roommate at the FIT dorms was also struggling with the transition, her hometown boyfriend also broke up with her and she went to a pretty dark place. She slept most days. I did make a group friends but I realized quickly that…gasp…I hated fashion school. I didn’t really even like fashion that much. Not fashion in the high fashion Devil Wears Prada sense anyway. I liked fun outfits. Band like Paramore had hit me hard and was leaning back into my punk persona that I had dropped late in high school trying to fit in.

Full Hayley Williams

A few months after I got there I got a job as a nanny on the upper east side. The family could not have children of their own so they adopted two adorable girls with tragic stories that led to both of them being born addicted to drugs. The littlest, only 3 months, was still experiencing withdrawals when I started watching them. The oldest was 5 and picking her up from school and helping her with homework was part of my job. She had dyspraxia and it meant that school work, particularly learning to write, would be difficult for her. I didn’t think anything of it at first, I was there to earn money and focus on my fashion degree. But the minute I walked into her school I noticed something different. It was the first time since I moved to New York City that I felt at home, at peace, and like I was doing something right. Not only was I fascinated by her teacher’s explanations of how she was doing but I wanted to know more. I ended up being far more interested in researching how to help her with her homework than in doing my own.

I can’t emphasize enough that when I walk into any school, university, learning institution, library, I’m home. Even if it’s a place I’ve never been before. Something different inside me clicks into place. I understand what’s supposed to happen inside those walls in a way I’ve never understood anything else. Church, footballs games, parties, always felt like I was trying to decode a puzzle everyone else understood already.

Before my first semester of fashion school was over I knew I didn’t belong there. There was no reason to waste more time or money on it, it didn’t fit. But teaching did. I loved reading and I loved sharing that with these kids. I was nervous about telling my parents. But also very excited and proud. I felt like teaching was noble and stable and also such a logical path for me. Anyone who knew me would understand. Anyone who knew me would say, “Oh that makes total sense! Of course!” So on my next visit home filled with mostly excitement and only a little nervousness I sat them down to share my news.

Not only were they unhappy with this choice they were angry and disappointed in me. My mom said that teaching was something people did when you couldn’t do anything else and my dad said that it was like going from becoming a doctor to becoming a teacher, and here he held his hand above his head and lowered it when he said teacher to show how low his opinion of my new profession was. (To my parents’ credit their view of teaching has since changed and they do think teachers are the most amazing people ever, I take full credit for this transformation but it was exhausting to have to go through that same process of convincing.) I ran out of the house crying and drove around feeling lost and unmoored. Maybe I should have known better by then but they had been so supportive of fashion school that I had mistaken that for support of me as a person vs support of the “cool” career choice. That reaction led to the beginning of me pulling away. Afraid to ask for help or to tell them what was going on in my world for fear of disappointing them yet again. It also hurt, and made me want to look for reassurance elsewhere that I was making the right choices.

So I started trying to do more and more completely on my own. I chose my courses at FIT for the second semester to be all transferrable, finished the year and then transferred to Hunter College, which I loved. I had to get out of the FIT dorms because the combination of my roommate and not feeling welcome there either. I had fallen in love with the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. At the time, it was an artists neighborhood. Wild and bohemian and full of people right out of a Kerouac novel.

I had some amazing times there. Dancing on the roof with the guys from the band who lived in the apartment below me. We cut up watermelon up there and pregamed before going out all night and ending up right back there to watch the sunrise. A girlfriend of mine lived with me for a bit and we ate Reeses Puffs cereal for every meal and slept in the same bed and got through it together. But it’s an expensive city. I worked multiple jobs and was a full time student but I was in over my head. I moved back to Manhattan with a friend hoping we could help support each other. But she was more unstable than I could have known from our nights out. I was doing too much. Stretched too thin and fighting more and more with my new roommate. One visit home I met a boy back in South Carolina and we fell in love. We talked and texted nonstop and that was comforting but everything else was coming apart at the edges. I ended up calling my parents in tears asking for them to come get me, which they did immediately, in one of the worst snowstorms the city had seen in years.

If two southerners driving through snowmageddon doesn’t scream love I don’t know what does.

That is how I ended up moving back to South Carolina to attend the College of Charleston. I couldn’t process anything beyond the fact that I needed to be held. Not literally, not in a hug. But I needed the stability of a home that was safe and, yes, rent free, so I could have a break. But I found out pretty immediately that after being on my own in New York moving back in with my parents and having someone want to know where I was or when/if I was coming home was unfathomable. So I got an apartment. My mom had logged into my bank account while I was in New York and asked about purchases made at 3am, what they were, what I was doing. She had reached out concerned when I posted lyrics from popular songs when they played while we were out at night.

I was still being watched. I had forgotten that.

Even in my own apartment in South Carolina, if she saw pictures of parties with my friends she would ask questions as if we were doing something wrong. Even going so far as to call the apartment office to ask if I was having loud parties or the police had been called. They did not like that and called me to tell me that they were not babysitters and to ask her to stop. So I was back to that feeling of constant tension, shoulders up around your ears. I was a great student, doing really well in all of my classes and I worked full time to pay my bills. I was doing everything I could to continue being the responsible “good child” But I was always tense, walking on eggshells and looking over my shoulder. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.

Drinks by the pool. Always with V8 Splash. Then it’s healthy right?

But the apartment was beautiful, and had a pool, and I did end up making some pretty great memories there. The first summer was one of those exceptional summers that people make movies about. Waking up and immediately putting on a swimsuit. Reading by the pool until my friends got there. Entire days by the pool followed by pizza bites and a movie. The guys playing music on the balcony. My apartment was where we ended up when the bars closed. There was usually one or more people on the couch or living room floor. But beyond that summer this was a transition time. A time of balancing my education and career goals with the traumas of what my friends were going through along with my family. It was too much. I came home to be taken care of. Instead I was thrown directly into caretaker mode for everyone around me.

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Thank you so much for reading. This is the end of Part One! The next Everything is Gray essay, Everyone’s Safe Place Except Mine, is coming May 22nd. Come back next Friday for my other newsletter, Mess and Magic — a little lightness about the present day.

🎵 This issue's song: That’s What You Get — Paramore

I blamed myself for so many of these choices and this was my driving, singing, berating myself song.