This is What it Feels Like by Tess Lovell

My friend Liam asked to see my mutilated index finger while we waited for our teacher to collect our worksheets. I told him no, I wasn’t supposed to take it out of the splint. I sensed his disappointment. But I’ll draw you a picture, I said.

So I scrawled a vaguely phallic shape onto a sheet of copy paper and colored it in with red, blue, purple, and green, and then I slid the whole grotesque patchwork across the desk. I held my finger up next to it in its metal enclosure for reference. He looked at the drawing, then at the finger, then at me. He uttered a breathless, “wow,” and I ceased to be myself. I became somebody else – someone strong, complicated, and powerful. Someone who had suffered, and was therefore important. The center of the universe.

That evening, after the sun had set but before my parents had returned from work, I retreated to our bathroom and locked the door behind me. I coaxed open the medicine cabinet, slipped off the silver cast, and exposed my naked finger to the light – a little pruny, but pink as always and perfectly healthy. A classic, unremarkable ten-year-old digit. I dropped the silver tube back into my father’s mug on the top shelf where I’d found it days before, a relic from years past, when he jammed his finger in a basketball game. The next morning, I would walk to school with the splint hidden deep in my backpack and my right hand clenched in my pocket, only pulling it out to wriggle my finger back into the shell before crossing the threshold and facing my peers.

Months earlier, I had begged my mother to take me to the eye doctor on the grounds that I was struggling to read the chalkboard in class. After the exam, I sat in the waiting room while she and the optometrist exchanged hushed chuckles. We left without a prescription. 

Before that, I’d tripped and fallen on the front steps leading to our apartment. I gritted my teeth as my father cajoled my ankle round and round in its socket. “I think it’s sprained,” I whimpered. “I think I need crutches.” He knowingly replied, “Let’s see how it feels in a day.” I spent the next week hobbling to school on an upside down umbrella. 

Earlier still, I convinced almost everyone in my second grade class – aside from Isaac, one rogue non-believer – that I was a vampire. It was a delightfully easy sell, considering the fact that only a few months prior, I had been cornered into confessing that I could not, in fact, transform into a cat, as I had once claimed I could. 

The list goes on. I’m moving to Pittsburgh for my dad’s job (lie). I have a rare neurological condition that allows me to see numbers and letters in color (lie). I’m a lesbian (half true). I can predict the future (technically a lie, but I let it slide because I was just trying to figure out déjà vu). The claims varied, but the delicious feelings they engendered in me were always the same. My blood pumping at the moment of confession, my cheeks burning at the intensity of another person’s awe, the follow up questions falling one by one, like gentle drops of rain, spreading the sweet glow of sympathy throughout my chest. To be the object of somebody’s undivided concern and endless fascination. Euphoria.

But, like all other euphorias, after the high, there was the comedown, which struck its own chords. The desolation in my soul – the feeling that there was nothing inside me but a vast, barren plain. I lay in bed at night under a crushing blanket of shame, beside the understanding that nobody really knew me. Every day, I walked through the constant, nagging dread that someday soon, everyone would find out who I really was. It became clear that this kind of lying was not sustainable. So I found a different way to lie. One that did not keep me up at night, which prompted no suspicion from others, and from which no shame was awoken: acting.

I auditioned for my middle school’s drama department on a rainy evening in October. The classroom was washed in white from the industrial overhead, and the upside down chairs sprung out from the desks like dead trees. I and 25 other fifth graders filed into the room in silence. The teacher began to describe a scene: we were home alone in our bedrooms. It’s drizzling outside. We hear a scratch at our window, then the creaking of wood and the rush of wind as it slowly opens. We stand to face what’s coming in: a monster. Manifest it, he said. Make it specific. As it slithered deeper into our bedroom and advanced toward our faces, we were to say one line: “Stay away from me, and stay away from my mother.”

All the old pleasures came rushing back. Heart racing, cheeks burning, tears rising from deep inside my belly. The sting of thirty pairs of eyes on me; the all-encompassing pleasure of being seen. There was no monster. But I believed I was really facing one, and everyone treated me like I was, too. It wasn’t real, but I wasn’t lying, because when it was over, I felt no shame. That sensation was replaced by something new, mysterious, and delightful – relief. 

I spent the next three years of my young life chasing that high. I didn’t give a shit about craft; I wanted to pretend I was a child soldier or a sickly Medieval mother or a bereaved teenage survivor of a school shooting. In reality, I was a knock-kneed and poorly dressed 13 year old from Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was constantly drooling at the feet of the prettier, more popular girls. But I learned that if I stood onstage and emoted, people would pay attention to me. I emoted through 7th and 8th grade. I emoted all the way into the drama program at LaGuardia High School. The alma mater of Al Pacino, Jennifer Aniston, and Nicki Minaj. The Fame School. And then shit started to get real.

When we arrived, they divided us up into three acting classes of about 30 students each: Drama A, B, and C. Those of us in Drama B had a refrain for ourselves: “We Drama B, in G17, better than A, better than C, I know you agree.” Our teacher was the matriarch of the department, a woman of nearly 70 with tight blonde pin curls and a french manicure. We never saw her wearing anything other than a black turtleneck and sweatpants, except on the day of our final scene showing, when she added a string of pearls. She’d taught Ansel Elgort and Timothée Chalamet in the very same classroom where we traded glances, silently asking each other who among us would be next. When we got to perform, it was in an old black box theater before a line of elders who sat cross-legged in the front risers, scribbling into their programs. I began to watch the upperclassmen drop out of school one by one, only to see their faces on the Netflix home page months later. The relief I used to enjoy while acting transfigured once again. When I felt that I had acted badly, all my old friends – shame, fear, emptiness – came to visit. But sometimes, after a performance, a gray-haired man would cross me in the hallway and flicker me a nod of approval and a knowing thumbs-up, or a friend in the second row would tell me that a teacher had drawn a star next to my name, or a classmate would approach me, squeeze my arm, and whisper into my ear, “you were the best.” Then, only then, would relief come.

The other week, as I agonized over a scene in one of my MFA acting classes, my teacher remarked, “you know, acting is supposed to be fun.” It’s true that in my darker moments, I stare into my reflection in the mirror at the gym and ask myself, “do I even like doing this?” The first time I stepped onstage to work in graduate school, my teacher interrupted me mid-monologue, planted herself beside my chair, and, beaming, asked an audience of my peers, “isn’t this good acting, everyone?” Sparse chuckles floated up from the risers. “What good acting, right? If she’s lucky, she’s gonna get to go to Playwrights Horizons and star in a play about young women!” I swallowed my humiliation with a laugh. Other memorable comments included, “you move your head around so much when you act, it’s kind of like a tic,” and, “clearly it’s too hard for you to truthfully say the word ‘no,’ so let’s move on to the next line.”

It carried on like that for 90 minutes. She pried me open and reached around inside me, searching for something personal, something honest. I spoke a line with a slight upward inflection at the end. “Nope. Again.” I said the next few words, but I shook my head and raised my eyebrows. “Stop acting so much.” After every sentence, she demanded: “What does that mean? What does that mean to you?” I fumbled for the right answers until finally, an hour into the struggle, a secret came to mind. “What does that make you think of?” She asked me. It was not, perhaps, aligned with the circumstances of the play, but it was struck awake when I spoke a certain phrase. “Do I have to say it?” Blood pumping, face hot, eyes watery. It was an ugly admission. If I told them, I thought, I would cease to be the person I was pretending to be, and I would become something else: myself. “Only if you want to,” she replied. 

I waded through my own words, then the script. “Don’t act. It’s you. It’s you.” Dozens of eyes blinked at me from the risers, and I stared right back. “Look at them. Just like that. In all your shame and pain and fear.” She turned to address the class. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Their heads bobbed up and down in tender nods. Ah, I thought. This is what it feels like.