I don’t make a lot of goals because it’s hard to do things that are different from what you are currently doing. It’s also embarrassing when you fall short, especially when that shit is easy.
Drink more water? Can’t do it. Go to bed earlier? But what about my shows? Give up sugar? Not possible. Save more money? But what about buying stuff? Learn a new skill? Where and also how and also with what brain? Get organized? But I love mess. Lose weight? Is there a pill for that, and if so can I take it in cheese like a dog? Eliminate bad habits? Who would I be without them? Have compassion for myself? But I’m a dumbass who sucks at everything and is unworthy of love.
I don’t have a lot of coping mechanisms that aren’t wholly self-destructive, but here is one good one that I will recommend: saying I like things that I like.
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One of the tools that people who are shitheads use to make people who are not feel like shit is the casual dismissal of things those people like. They say things in a way that makes you feel like you have to apologize for liking them, that puts you on the defensive, that sends you down an internal spiral, thinking, “Why do I like the dumb shit I like?” and questioning your entire life’s history of tastes and choices, all because you had the nerve to … express enjoyment of something mundane.
Or the interaction can go something like this:
Me: I thought [name of innocuous movie] was good!
Them (feigning shock): You did? I thought it was sophomoric garbage with no character development and an implausible ending.
This is where they stop—a satisfied smugness spreading across their slimy face—and wait expectantly for you to conjure a defense for a movie you didn’t make and have no emotional attachment to. Whenever this happens to me, my automatic reaction is to feel stupid and ashamed, like I should apologize for not understanding that a thing I enjoyed was poorly made or offensive to people who actually know what quality is.
I get embarrassed for being a person with basic tastes who doesn’t interrogate things very deeply, a person who needs to be smacked in the face with the subliminal message because I will not suss it out for myself. Can someone explain Parasite to me, please?
The embarrassment usually leads to my second-guessing both myself and my interpretation of whatever it is we’re talking about: “Oh, so what you’re trying to say is that I’m not supposed to think Mission: Impossible—Fallout is intellectually stimulating and the greatest film of all time?” This then devolves into an even more embarrassing apology: “I’m so sorry for not understanding what ‘good acting’ is!” And that continues until I shrivel into a husk and die, vowing to never again publicly express joy or excitement.
Some friend of my wife’s said to me—who am I, a balding stand-up comic in 1987?—after using the dry cleaner I’d recommended a week before, “That strip mall where you told me to get my pants hemmed is so depressing. I can’t believe you go there.”
I leaned against my open front door, in a fraying hoodie and soiled pajama bottoms, blinking at her over my first Diet Coke of the day. What did she want from me? What was I supposed to say?
“I can’t believe you go there!” she repeated, and it became clear to me that she wanted … an explanation. An apology.
Wanting to keep this early-morning interaction as brief as possible, my brain cycled through the possibilities of how to respond.
Imagine me saying, “I’m sorry that the home of Bill’s Greeting Card Hut and Lucy’s Luxury Lashes wasn’t up to your exacting standards.” But I didn’t say anything, and she chuckled again, saying, “It’s so ugly!” followed by an anticipative pause.
And I dunno, man, the smoothie spot is pretty good and the out-of-business DVD store is oddly comforting to me, so I arranged my face into something resembling cheerfulness and said, in my highest octave, “I like it!”
Gotcha, bitch.
I watched as she searched for something to say next, since I’d dodged the trap she’d set and whatever further insults she had prepared to hit me with. “I like it!” I chirped again.
“I like it! I like it a lot!”
I don’t remember if I slammed the door in her face or kicked her backward down my cement steps, but what I do know is, that day a new person was born, an upgraded version of myself that no longer felt shamed by some smarty-pants making fun of the John Grisham novel poking out of my backpack.
I can’t live in hell and make excuses for ravenously consuming a shitty reality show produced by a person I don’t know personally on a network I am unaffiliated with. You can use “I like it!” (the exclamation point is necessary) any time freaks question a regular-
ass thing you enjoy, and it’ll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.
Deploy it whenever you want, then sit back and watch judgmental friends splutter and try to choke out a response, because what people like that really want is to show off how much more cultured and evolved they are than you, and saying “I like it!” robs them of that opportunity.
From the book QUIETLY HOSTILE: Essays by Samantha Irby, to be published on May 16, 2023 by Vintage Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Samantha Irby.
