9
My first official boyfriend was a junior in highschool, when I was a sophomore. I met him during our school’s rendition of Oliver! I played a drunken wench, sitting on the lap of my life-worn john, singing about the struggles of living a life of survival. The irony of this scene being played by two weird prep school kids with half a day’s life experience between them escaped me at the time. I’d always consciously had very complex goals and high expectations for myself. My parents are individually very successful, and I’ve always been surrounded by successful people, so I always assumed that, as I hit each milestone age, the accomplishments expected to go with each passing year would all but fall into my lap. I was not surprised when I got into college, and I was not surprised to find that it was easy, to the point of being dull for me. I claimed these entitlements so strongly, that I never thought to acquire the skills needed to claim what was mine.
The one thing that did remain consistent in my life, from far too early for it to have been appropriate to present day, was the fact that, for some reason, men liked me. I knew I could go into a store with no money and, if the man at the register admired me, it wouldn’t matter. I knew that if needed something, and a man who found me attractive had it, I wouldn’t need that thing anymore. It’s something that no one taught me. I’m not even sure that in my youth I’d entirely noticed it as an actuality. I remember playing with this gift like a game. My best friend in highschool and I flirting our way behind the scenes with major sports teams, my good friend in college and I never paying cover to a club- my skills mattered less as I acquired everything I’d thought I needed.