Ophelia

I was trying to write before about why I am a manic pixie dream girl, but I couldn’t get it right so I gave up. Then, a couple of weeks ago I was talking to Rachel, who was preparing to audition for Ophelia in Hamlet. The audition scene was the one where Ophelia is walking around unhinged to everyone giving them flowers and singing nonsense words. Rachel was trying to figure out why Ophelia does this, because she is not the sort of actress who goes “So she’s crazy? Got it.”

Rachel walked me through the fact that throughout the play, Ophelia is a good girl. She obeys every man in her life. Her boyfriend, her father, her brother. She has been sneaking around with Hamlet when he suddenly turns cold and tells her to get to a nunnery. Then even though she wants to be real with him, she betrays Hamlet out of loyalty to Polonius. Her brother sees her not so much as a breathing human as a point of honor.

Ophelia: "Better make sure I drown sexily"

Rachel concluded that what we see Ophelia doing in this final “mad” scene is acting like a child. She’s saying rhymes and tugging hems and behaving like a little girl. And Rachel said that that was probably the last time someone treated Ophelia like a person.

And this is the thing about being Zooey Deschanel. That girl does what the fuck she wants to do. People criticize her for acting like a little girl, and I’ve been criticized for that, too. But when I was a little girl is the only working model I have for not second guessing my every word and action, or seeing it through the lense of an omnipresent other’s sexual desire. So.

I had to do a performance review of myself at work the other day, where I had to rate myself from one to five in a bunch of areas. And I saw myself undercutting myself. But I couldn’t bring myself to choose higher numbers. What if someone thought I thought too highly of myself? What if I seemed less than modest? I handed the review over to my boss and he asked me what the hell I was doing. He said he wanted to recommend me for a raise, but he was worried about what it would look like if I gave myself all 3’s and he gave me 5’s. I told him that that’s what women do. We systematically underestimate ourselves. I know it, but I can’t stop it.  The conditioning is stronger than the knowledge.

There was a time when I wasn’t like this, and that time was when I was six. When I was six I didn’t give myself all fives, but I sure as hell gave myself all the fives I deserved.

When I was six, Santa Claus was supposed to come to our school party, but he was late. The teachers were running out of things to do, and they asked us kids for suggestions of time-passing activities. I don’t remember exactly what my suggestions were, but I know that I earnestly gave so many that my mom had to pull me away from the party and tell me to “give someone else a turn to have ideas.”

Had this book. Not ironic. 

Now, I totally give someone else a turn to have ideas. Like that lady in the Joy Luck Club, I spend most of my creative energy encouraging people with inferior ideas, editing their work, nudging them along. I don’t even remember how to take all the turns. I barely remember how to take one turn.

When I was eight, I wrote a fan letter to Oprah Winfrey, in which I told her that I was in the gifted program. My teacher suggested that it wasn’t humble to tell Oprah this, and that I should let her *see* that I was gifted through my writing.

I didn’t care that I always got called bossy until I was eleven. Then I cared a lot. That’s when I started calling myself bossy.

When I was twelve, I practiced being shy. I thought shy was a very romantic, princess-in-a-tower thing to be. I would test myself to see how long I could stay out of the discussion, mess up, and then start back again at zero, challenging myself to stay quiet for longer and longer periods of time until I eventually got the hang of it somewhere in my 20’s.

But when I was six I unrepentantly bossed everything and everyone at the top of my very lungs. When I was six I didn’t care what I looked like, I didn’t care if I didn’t sound humble, I didn’t care about romantic, I didn’t care if I was taking too many turns. And at that time also I made conversations between toys, and I built shit out of paper and I didn’t distinguish between clothes and costumes.

I don’t know how to get my turns back, but I can play with paper, and toys and jump and skip and get on the floor and wear my bat wings around. I assume this is how Ophelia feels before she jumps in the lake. She’s not nuts, she’s giving a try to the last thing that worked.